You may be deeply tired of hearing about Mad Men, it may not be your thing, but it was MY thing, and Kate Aurthur’s beautiful and epic ranking of every single episode brought me to tears several times. This is part of what she had to say about “The Suitcase,” which is very special:

For some of us, Mad Men is the tandem stories of Don Draper and Peggy Olson, as well as their relationship together. Their ease around each other, their resentments toward each other, the way they can take resentments against other people out on each other — it’s a living thing, their dynamic. “The Suitcase” is a two-hander for Hamm and Olson in which they both get to show their best. They go from laughing at the discoveries of Roger’s recordings for his book (Don: “Ida was a hellcat? Cooper lost his balls? Roger’s writing a book?”) to peacefully sleeping on Don’s couch together.

Don finally does call Stephanie. And after she tells him that yes, Anna is dead (which he knew, because he saw her ghost holding a Samsonite suitcase), he hangs up and sees Peggy looking at him. The look on Moss’ face — wholly sympathetic, and full of anticipatory worry on Don’s behalf — is a Peggy we’ve never seen, and Don knows it’s OK for him to break down in front of her. “Somebody very important to me died,” he says. “Who?” Peggy asks. “The only person in the world who really knew me,” he says. “That’s not true,” Peggy says simply.

And it’s not. There are a few times in Mad Men’s many years when we see a glimmer of the person Don could have been if his early life had been different and — well, if everything else had been different too. In this one night, Peggy and Don scream at each other, eat and drink together, cuddle, and talk about their fathers’ deaths. Don vomits in front of her; Duck humiliates Peggy in front of Don by showing up at the office, revealing their past affair and intending to shit on Roger’s chair. Weiner’s script, Getzinger’s intimate direction, Hamm’s and Moss’ performances — “The Suitcase” is a transformative episode of television.

At the end, when the workday has begun and Peggy looks like hell and Don looks great, he sends her home to shower. She points at his door: “Open or closed?” she asks. “Open,” he says. In Don and Peggy, Mad Men shows a certain sort of man on his way down, and a certain kind of woman on her way up: They meet in the middle, and they hash it all out. And we got to watch them.

This first-person account of the Amtrak crash is chilling and remarkable.

I missed “Chinese Whisperers” at The Awl the first time around (it’s about Orientalism and the Met Ball):

Pastiche is the operative word here. The exhibition was originally named “Chinese Whispers,” after the British parlor game in which a message is whispered around a circle until it is completely distorted. It was renamed, presumably because a sharp-witted event planner realized its potential to ignite a public relations firestorm and propel the intended pastiche into graceless parody. But the best brand manager could hardly have been expected to anticipate the outfits in attendance, which resembled nothing so much as visual rounds of Chinese Whispers gone awry: Chloe Sevigny arrived in an off-the-shoulder grotesquerie of sapphires, chokers, and over-embroidered pagodas; Carolina Kornikova wore a confused Hanfu that looked like it was missing a skirt; and Emma Roberts, who brought a dragon clutch, seemed to have been left off the memo to avoid chopsticks in the hair. Cherry blossoms, cheongams, and dubious headdresses, of course, were on ample display. Amal Clooney braved the mob by fortifying herself with breastplates that evoked the bloodied cuirass of a fashion-forward terracotta warrior. Rihanna looked like she had invaded the closet of an obese, obdurately cold emperor; Sarah Jessica Parker seemed to have raided the same gilded chiffoniers, with only the empress’s flaming headdress in tow.

I can no longer enjoy anything bc of feminism WHAT does this sexy librarian-y description add to a Silk Road piece? pic.twitter.com/Fi4Je0aCdt

— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) May 17, 2015

THE FAILED COMMUNE ARTICLE THO (can’t breathe bc laughter, I will buy their “tragicomic” memoir instantly as soon as it’s out):

They toyed with creating a gay Scottish clan (Johannes is from Texas and Zephram from Maine, and both have Scottish forebears) or starting their own version of the Radical Faeries, a vaguely pagan, spiritually based queer counterculture movement from the mid-1970s.

They moved to Bethlehem, Pa., that hotbed of Moravian culture (crafts and agriculture, mostly), where Zephram worked as a teacher and Johannes as a reporter. There they learned of a curious local offshoot of a brotherhood started in Europe in the 18th century.

Its leader was the charismatic son of a patron of the Moravian Church, who believed in a spiritual communion through sex and agricultural practice. It was not a wildly popular concept 300 years ago, and contemporary rural Pennsylvania was perhaps not the best place to resurrect its tenets, even with the sex part edited out.

Also, as Johannes pointed out: “Neither one of us is very charismatic. That was a problem.”

Did you read “The Last Day of Her Life”?

At the gathering, Daryl ­talked about a lawsuit that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed in 1972 against AT&T for sex discrimination in its recruitment practices, in which he and Sandy took the stand together to testify as a team.

“Did I really do that?” Sandy asked, pleased.

He talked about her expert testimony in another lawsuit, filed by the National Organization for Women against The Pittsburgh Press, that went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1973 and made it illegal to categorize classified job listings by gender.

“Did I really do that?” Sandy asked again.

A psychologist ranks the nine worst parents on TV:

1. Scandal: Rowan Pope
Cold-blooded covert-ops expert who treats his daughter Olivia like an enemy combatant.

“You’re never really sure whether this man loves his daughter or he doesn’t. You don’t know even if he would kill her or not! If he wouldn’t kill her, that’s an indication that he loves her — but that’s pretty sick, if the only way you can tell that a parent loves you is that he wouldn’t kill you. [Laughs.] The way that role is [written], if it wasn’t his daughter, she’d be dead. I think that it’s trying to indicate that he does have love for her. But even in the most unhealthy, the most abusive, the most damaging relationships, typically, at the core of it, a parent loves their child. It’s not healthy love, but I would just say there’s something that we’ll call love that stops him from killing her. But Olivia never feels it. She never knows that she’s loved. She can never be sure. As bad as Norma Bates is, at least Norman feels it.”

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