Pauline Kael (1919-2001) was a notable American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine for many years. She is the godmother of movie reviewing as an art form in itself.
From the ridiculous to the sublime, David Roth buried the lede. Roth — not the Van Halen guy, not the musician, it’s the other David Roth — is an annoyingly young and irritatingly good writer, and even his Tweets are clever, though sometimes bitterly sarcastic. He made me and many another Twit laugh out loud with repeat video postings of a llama, bounding happily along in time with a rap sample. (It didn’t even have to be late at night for me to grin egregiously.) Later, he argued that a similarly goofy, arresting video about otters was a sports thing, because he likes sports and he likes otters, I guessed. Then I read the piece, which was very short, though long on otter love, in the midst of which he suddenly he broke out this wonderful definition. Sport, wrote young Mr. Roth, is this:
