Caryn James spends more than 1,000 words picking at Jennifer Aniston in the Times. It's a seriously weird sort of tirade, kind of catty (and I hate that word) disguised as critical:

The relationship with Mr. Vaughn itself may have cost Ms. Aniston sympathy. In terms of her image it doesn't even matter if that relationship exists; the public believes it does. And while replacing Mr. Pitt with a new trophy guy would have seemed like vindication for the wounded princess, instead she has reached beneath her on the celebrity food chain. Mr. Vaughn seems smarter than his on-screen persona, and his mega-hit "Wedding Crashers" gave him some Hollywood clout. Still, nobody says, How did she get him? Just the opposite.

Speaking of Jennifer Aniston, I love what the av club has to say about The Break Up:

It's like watching the "we were on a break" episode of Friends stretched to feature length, and without the blessed relief of commercial breaks or the promise of Seinfeld around the corner.

Gwynne Watkins has a cool take on that movie Hard Candy, which looked like it could be good, if not for... well, some of what she points out.

Recently, a Dateline special got parents up in arms about the dangers of MySpace. The fear: those suggestive photos teenage girls may be noticed by, well, men looking for suggestive photos of teenage girls. Yet considering how badly they want to protect these girls, neither the MySpace protestors nor the producers of Dateline nor the makers of Hard Candy seem interested in what the teenage girls are thinking. And that seems to me to be a crucial oversight. Why is a fourteen-year-old girl's totally normal sexuality more frightening to look at than the stunted deviance of a pedophile?

The fancy new issue of Bookslut has interviews with Anthony Bourdain, Hal Niedzviecki, Hillary Carlip, Salvador Plascencia, Charles De Lint and George Saunders, and the column I wrote wherein I help prolong the debate about that stupid "best work of fiction in the last 25 years" list (Mike Schaub calls it "the New York Times' most regrettable decision since hiring Judy Miller").