• A nice piece on the 10th-anniversary release of Takashi Miike’s “Audition.” Don’t read the story if you haven’t seen the film. But do see the film, and try to be utterly unprepared.
• A somewhat useless overview of Joel and Ethan Coen’s oeuvre. The online headline:  “Just accept the mystery.” (In the print version:  “Mystery in the making.”) To headline a piece “Just accept the mystery” is to say, “I don’t know what to make of this.” Which begs the question:  then why write about it? (And yes, before you email me, I realize that an editor headlined it.)
• Douglas Brinkley reviews the new Clinton presidency book, Taylor Branch’s “The Clinton Tapes,” and decides that “our country benefited from his robust leadership.” Which makes me pause to wonder if he hasn’t slid from book reviewer to partisan advocate. An interview with the author by NPR’s Terry Gross coincided more closely with my own remembrance:  some real accomplishments, matched with a dogged determination to filter everything through the prism of personal crisis — the president’s own. If Clinton was, to use Brinkley’s assertion, a “political genius and a dazzling player with cunning pragmatism and spot-on observations,” why didn’t his mirror ever tell him how Monica Lewinsky and Jennifer Flowers and Whitewater and Lincoln Bedroom donations and lying under oath and on and on would be used against him to the detriment of us all? This doesn’t sound like “robust leadership.” It sounds like Shakespearean tragedy.
• Finally, the California section — now slimmed down and appearing only once a week like a diminished doppelganger of its namesake — carries a story about the success of San Francisco’s city-run universal health care effort. This is typical of the smart effective program’s the city has seen under Mayor Gavin Newsom, and reflect why I’m supporting him for governor.

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