Sarah Palin is a pawn.

McCain tapping the first-term Alaska governor for the Vice President slot is so utterly transparent, such a condescending and craven move to seduce the jilted Hilllary supporters we keep hearing about. To suggest that women wanted to vote for Hillary solely because she’s a woman (and surely there were some who did), will therefore vote for any woman, even a conservative woman with practically no experience? It’s reductive and belittling.

Time was, I used to go to the B-Side every Monday night for drinks and dinner, a weekly ritual with my roommate. We’d sit at the bar and eat and get drunk and chat with the bartenders. Dave, Rob, Joe, owner Patrick — consummate bartenders all: warm, charming, and highly skilled cocktail concoctors. The food — the pizzas of the day, the salad with blue cheese and pears and walnuts, the steak tips, those heaping plates of blue cheese fries — was awesome, always.

Watchmen fans are apparently going beserk over the potential - but, we feel the need to emphasize, highly unlikely - ramifications of Fox's lawsuit against Warner Bros. regarding the massively humongous and hotly anticipated Watchmen movie. The lawsuit alleges that Fox, who had purchased the rights to the celebrated graphic novel back in the early 90s, is still the owner of those distribution rights, and that Warner Bros.

TROUBLE IN PARADISE

5 Years Ago

August 22, 2003 | Michael Bronki explored Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville’s "complex, sexually fraught relationship," which, he says, bloomed one summer while the former was caring for his son in the family home in Lenox.

"But lurking within this family romance of nature walks and berry picking is a darker story — possible material for another version of The Scarlet Letter — which critics seem to want to avoid: the complex, sexually fraught relationship that summer between Hawthorne and Herman Melville.

Prince Edward Island is about the nicest place I’ve ever visited. There, I’ve said it.

Unfortunately, when I’ve traveled there (in 2006 and 2008), I have also discovered that, despite the fact that it looks like paradise, it has problems just like other places. In particular, the provincial newspapers have had quite a few stories about local pot growers.

THE UNSEEN

5 Years Ago

August 15, 2003 | Chris Millis took note of a photography exhibit at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts called "Harvard Works Because We Do."

"Halpern has set out to capture both the dignity and the oppression of Harvard’s underclass; he’s partly succeeded. His best work shows these people at work: the barely contained scowl of a young black woman in her wait-staff garments; the hand and arm of a custodian wiping a urinal; a powerful triptych of the two tables of union and university contract negotiators separated by a reproduction of the university’s tax form for that year (it took in just under a billion dollars).

Although we love to brag about the Pulitzer that our classical editor LLOYD SCHWARTZ won a few years back for his music criticism, we've always had to share Lloyd's prodigious talents with his first love, poetry. Over the summer, another Pulitzer Prize-winner -- the Israeli composer Shulamit Ran -- chose to have her students at the Tanglewood Music Center set some of Lloyd's verse set to music.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this post, we mistakenly identified the cable provider whose users NBC is blocking from accessing its full online content. The correct provider, now accurately identified below, is Cablevision. We apologize to Comcast for the error: Comcast's Olympic coverage can be accessed online here

That's really the first page of it.

About a month ago, there was a leak of Quentin Tarantino's script for his World War II opus, Inglorious Bastards. We have it, but we haven't read it yet or anything. From what we hear, though, it does sound like the usual Tarantino fare - references to the history of filmmaking, violence, conversation, strong women, and, apparently, the spelling and grammar of an ADD middle-schooler.

Feeling emboldened, perhaps, by Mad Men's weeklong success (not surprising, we suppose, but that's a different story for a different time,) AMC is now working on its third original television series, a TV version of Francis Ford Coppola's amazing film The Conversation. According to the report, the show would follow Harry Caul (played on film by Gene Hackman) on surveillance assignments that are self-contained - meaning one per show - but also with a longer plot arc tying them together about the people who are following Caul because he's hearing things he shouldn't be hearing (those of you who've seen the film will recognize this and how it ties in to the photo above.