Has the media feeding frenzy ever destroyed anyone as fast as it destroyed poor Susan Boyle?

Sunday misc.

* Calling bullshit on the feel-good story of the week, Britain's Susan Boyle.

* Why can't clowns and cops learn to get along?

* The Sunday Herald has your brief history of manga.

* Joss Whedon on the future of Dollhouse.

So how far of an arc have you planned for the series already?

When I pitched it, I gave them a six-year plan with a lot of leeway for change. But what I really mapped out was the first 13, and even though we start in a different place than I had originally intended, we end up exactly where I'd intended in the 12th episode. Then, in the 13th episode, things just get stranger. There's some twisted sh-- coming.

Can you give us an idea of what to expect from the second half of the season?

The second half of the season, especially starting with episode six, "Man on the Street," just kicks the entire franchise up a huge notch. It's where we start to pay off on everything we've been setting up for five episodes in terms of the relationships and the progression that Echo's going through. And then I just start twisting the knife and I don't stop. Hopefully it's still accessible to people; we're still doing standalones and every episode has its own resolution, so it's not just a rabbit's hole. The first half was definitely, "This is the world and here's how it works." And then the second half just takes that up to an intense level and then we really start to mess with the audience.

Stick around for some creepy and unprofessional comments about his coworker Eliza Dushku.

If artists depend on angst and unrest to fuel their creative fire, then at least in one sense the 43rd presidency has been a blessing. Eight years is an eternity in the life of a culture, and when we look back on an era, we do it through pinholes: a movie here, a book there. What will stand out, decades from now, as the singular emblems of this moment in history? Newsweek asked its cultural critics to pick the one work in their field that they believe exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.

Battlestar Galactica
American Idol
Jeff Koons’s Hanging Heart
The Corrections
Black Hawk Down
Cohen’s Borat
Green Day’s American Idiot
Far Away
Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life

Battlestar is a decent if limited pick, and Idol a fairly inspired one, though not for the reasons given—but the exclusion of The Wire is simply criminal, not to mention Sopranos and Deadwood, and (yes) 24. For film, it might actually be The Dark Knight, or else There Will Be Blood. (Maybe Children of Men?) For books—surely the hardest category—it's probably The Road, for a few reasons. I'm too illiterate in music to even begin to answer: the best I could manage would be a half-serious suggestion of Gnarls Barkley, or else just name a Springsteen album because that's how I roll.

Via The Chutry Experiment, who points (among other things) to the unforgivable omission of viral video.