A lot of people seem to be linking to the discussion of Mary Magdalene in this week's New Yorker, but for me the money is in the characteristically excellent Haruki Murakami story "A Shinagawa Monkey" that J.T. linked to on Monday.

Nancy Franklin's overall positive look at 24 is also worth checking out, if you're a fan. As a somewhat embarrassed long-time viewer of the show, my favorite bits were her more barbed comments:

At the start of several episodes in the first season, Bauer tells us, “Today is the longest day of my life.” In late January, I set about watching a hundred and two episodes of “24.” It was the longest week of my life...

Watching the series the way I did, I tended to notice annoying repetitions; it seemed to me that Jack whispered “We’ll get through this” to his daughter, Kim (Elisha Cuthbert), at least five times in every episode she was in, and that almost every bit of Jack’s dialogue was rendered first in an intense whisper and then in an angry shout, as in “Where is the bomb? I said, ‘WHERE IS THE BOMB’!” (The second line is always said with Jack’s gun thrusting closer to the other guy’s head.) Also, just in case you didn’t pick up the tip in season one about cutting off a dead person’s thumb so that you can use it on the electronic-identification pad at his office, you see it again in season four.