1. “When Mad Men returns for the first half of its seventh and final season on April 13, it will be as much Peggy’s story as Don’s,” Willa Paskin wrote in a profile of Elisabeth Moss (“Sterling Cooper Draper Olson,” March 10–23). “But as Mad Men’s fans continue to produce both Peggy Olson scholarship and Peggy Olson mash notes, Moss herself has a much less heady relationship to the character.” “Moss comes off as a Cool Girl,” wrote Ariana Bacle at Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch blog. “She watches a lot of TV! She loves iPhone games!” “She seems wonderful and had the good sense to flip off [E!’s red-carpet] Mani-Cam,” gushed a reader on nymag.com. “That is a winner in my book.” Others were more interested in Moss’s comments on her eight-month marriage to Fred Armisen, which she described to Paskin as “traumatic.” “Moss remains likable and the internet seems to mostly be on her side,” wrote Joanna Rafael at the Gloss. “She’s in control of her own story and doesn’t come across like she’s throwing Armisen under the bus. Typically when someone bad-mouths an ex, they seem bitter, but not Moss. I suppose it’s because she and her ex-husband agree that he sucked.” Daniel D’Addario at Salon focused on Moss’s ties to Scientology. “Moss is a great actress. She also gives off every indication of being a fun and normal human being. She is also a member of a religion many believe to be little better than a cult,” he wrote. “Moss doesn’t owe the public any explanation; membership in a religion is no crime. But it makes it that much harder to root for her success given the matter of her Scientology membership, and her unwillingness to get into specifics about how the media has gotten her experience wrong.”
2. “New York Magazine Officially Bitter It’s Not in San Francisco,” wrote Jay Barmann of SFist about our collection of postcards from the rapidly wealthifying Bay Area (“Is San Francisco New York?,” March 10–23). In it, Kevin Roose wrote that “whatever the Silicon Valley gold rush has done or will do, it’s already given us an entirely new species of yuppie mogul: the one who stockpiles bitcoin and speaks in hacker pidgin, the one who wears Uniqlo on a Gulfstream and obsesses over single-origin coffee. The kind, in other words, who plays the underdog even while sitting on top of the world.” “It’s true, we are less inclined to embrace asshole behavior and the giddy capitalist fervor that has made Manhattan a bohemia-free retail Disneyland where no one ever thought twice about bulldozing a building to build something newer and bigger,” Barmann wrote. “And while many a trapped New Yorker … has visited dreams of an easier life in the West, they usually resign themselves to the fact that, economically and career-wise, there isn’t enough happening here. At least they’ll have New York Magazine to join them in looking down their noses. While they freeze. And eat inferior vegetables.” Our fellow city-eponymous magazine was a little kinder. “They called us their ‘future overlords,’ which sounds about right to us,” wrote Scott Lucas at San Francisco magazine’s City Life. “But as for the title question: Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. We’re the new Paris, Rome, and Tokyo all rolled into one. New York City? Never heard of it.”
3. “ Football prospect Michael Sam’s coming out was a watershed event for gay athletes, as was Jason Collins’s signing a contract with the Brooklyn Nets, Will Leitch wrote in a column on the state of the closet in the major sports, but we’ll know we’ve truly conquered prejudice only when a gay athlete’s sexuality plays no role in his becoming a superstar (“The Joshua Generation,” March 10–23). Readers on nymag.com were almost unanimous in disagreeing with Leitch, though they disagreed in a variety of contradictory ways. “If this were 1963 instead of 2014, maybe [Sam and Collins could be seen as heroes]. Being gay is as mainstream as light beer,” argued one commenter. “What a callous dismissal of all the millions of men and women who fought for their rights in the last 50 years,” argued another. And a third: “Sports is such a trivial and childish aspect of our society. It’s no wonder they are the last to come out.”
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