It's "not about what you love -- it's about how you love it" and "finding other people who love it the way you do" is the defining characteristic of "why being a nerd is awesome," said Wheaton.

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Like the fairy-tale forest that turns out to be something more akin to a Hieronymous Bosch painting, Amy Schumer is far less virtuous than she appears. The comedian, whose series "Inside Amy Schumer" premieres on Comedy Central April 30, boasts one of the most subversive voices in comedy, imbuing riffs on porn, abortion and below-the-belt grooming (she refers to bikini waxing as “getting my vagina ready for its first quinceañera”) with a sly, oddly poignant sensibility. A bit from "Mostly Sex Stuff," on hooking up with a man without testicles, is particularly illustrative: “Girls don’t care about balls, but when they’re not there we miss them. You know, they’re like grandparents.”

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Sylvia films her "Super-Awesome Maker Show" with help from her parents, but she is the driving force behind the series, as the Times reports:

The seeds for the show were planted when Sylvia was 5, and she and her father attended the Maker Faire in San Mateo, Calif., an annual event organized by Maker Magazine that celebrates makers and their projects. Two summers ago, Mr. Todd began videotaping Sylvia’s demonstrations, as a summer project. “We just wanted to do something fun,” Sylvia said.

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"This has been a weird week," says Poehler. "I love you, Boston."

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Yorke and Godrich fielded questions on breakups, overcoming shyness, and insecurity.

On shyness:

Yorke: “If you have a crush on him, if you're really, really, really, really shy, which is what I was at that age -- also, I was at a boys' school so it was impossible to meet girls anyway -- how about just write him a note? Or if you can’t bear it just throw him against a wall sometime.”

On breaking up with someone boring:

Godrich: “Yeah, of course it’s okay to break up with them. But maybe you can not just say ‘Hey you’re boring me so I’m going to break up with you.’ You can be a lot more politic about it.”

Yorke: “I’d go with that, actually.”

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Abbott, who played Charlie, Marnie's (Allison Williams) on-again (and now off, permanently) boyfriend, "didn’t like the direction things are going in," a source told the Post. He's also apparently "at odds with" series creator Lena Dunham, so much so that he's walking away from the show that first "put him on the map."

Abbott's rep confirmed the news to the Post, saying:

“[Chris] is grateful for the experience of collaborating with Lena, Judd [Apatow], and the entire ‘Girls’ cast and crew, but right now he’s working on numerous other projects and has decided not to return to the show.”

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Laura Miller, a Yankee, was enlightened by former newspaper reporter Tracy Thompson's deeply personal account of the transformation of Georgia, titled "The New Mind of the South":

Thompson gives "The New Mind of the South" a muscular tension that a merely nostalgic memoir or a self-effacing work of reportage could never achieve. She vividly recalls the embracing evangelical church life of her 1960s youth, when the religion was "otherworldly and apolitical" and therefore a marked contrast to the activist fundamentalism that arose in the 1970s or the show-bizzy extravaganza of a megachurch she visits in suburban Atlanta. Yet the latter, an outpost of the "prosperity gospel," turns out to be more multiracial and feminist than she expected. Such churches can’t provide her with the comfort she once found in the small church where her family used to worship, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t doing some good.

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Two weeks after we had sex for the first time, he and I and his best friend got drunk — me for the first time in my life — and I ended up having sex in a park with both of them. It was somewhat miserable for me to have sex consecutively with two young men, ages 17 and 19, and to hear the second one ask, in the midst of intercourse, “Are you using birth control?” and quickly add, “Oh, who cares — if you get pregnant, it’s your fault,” and to have my bra and panties left behind on the grass when they drove me home. I was shaken both by the degrading nature of the incident and by the fact that I had allowed it. But allow it, I did.  Was I raped? No. Did I ever for one second think that maybe I had been raped? No.

Many would disagree.

* * *

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These roles include "caucasian heavy set ages 18-25 patient," "chainsmoking nurse," and "African American patient ages 37-40 well dressed business man with high end suits and/or business casual." Looks like Hannah might be making another trip to the hospital!

The casting breakdown also includes "Latin maintenance worker type" and "Latin social worker type." The series was subject to criticisms, particularly in its first season, that minorities were invisible or relegated to service-worker positions like nannies or, well, maintenance workers; in the second season, Dunham cast the actor Donald Glover, who is black, as a love interest.

Actors who can pull off any of these parts -- or "alcoholic with teased hair," or "Caucasian slovenly, beer gut, balding male" -- should move quickly; Dunham has previously said that season 3 will begin shooting this month.

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So how can we make peace with this Hannah, who, after finally getting what she wants — a good (enough) job and a nice(ish) boy — is overcome by OCD, a terribly crippling condition in real life, and possibly so in drama. A very smart commenter on Facebook recently noted that the ear-poking seems almost an act of desperation, as if Hannah were trying to dig out her neurosis with a Q-tip. It certainly does, but what about losing Adam has caused this syndrome? Is it stopping her from writing the book? Is the book stopping her from writing Adam? Was the plot stopping Dunham from writing an explanation for either of these? Hannah is poking around for answers, lost and alone. As are we.

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Since it still needs to be said, not being "in any state to make a decision for herself" meets the legal definition for rape across the U.S. So here's a question for that guy: What did he do to try to stop it?

According to the prosecutor's opening statement Wednesday, these witnesses saw one of the defendants, Trent Mays, try to force oral sex on the girl, but her mouth wouldn't open. They saw the other defendant, Ma'Lik Richmond, digitally penetrate the girl while she was passed out on a couch. Though the girls' friends apparently tried to prevent her from continuing on with the boys, so far there's been no indication the witnesses intervened with the boys who no one has disputed were capable of decision-making. And preliminary research shows that the intervention of such bystanders could make the difference in preventing rape.

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BUT NOT QUITE YET.

As we begin this season's penultimate episode, we slide up into what I have begun to think of as a Dunhamian shot: the bed and bedroom seen from the side, like Freud's ideal diorama. In this bedroom are the yet-more-encoupled Nat (Natalia) and Adam, about to make love. We know this because Natalia says, “I'm ready to have sex now,” telling Adam “You've been really nice all week,” then laying out information and prohibitions, including “no soft touching” (takes her out of the moment) and coming outside (“I'm on the pill”). Though his expression is briefly inscrutable, Adam reacts to these proscriptions with relief. “I will do all of those things ... I like how clear you are with me.” How, responds Natalia beatifically, could a person do anything any other way?

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The "Asssscat" show, which runs every Sunday at UCB for $10, is organized into improvised comedy and monologues. The way the show works is that initially, someone in the audience will raise a one-word suggestion, which becomes a prompt for a monologue. After the monologist riffs (for about two minutes), her monologue then becomes the inspiration for a series of scenes improved by UCB performers. Together, they perform three to four sets during the night.

As last night's monologist, Dunham shared intimate stories about her experiences in college, a video game-addicted ex-boyfriend and her wild cousin, excerpts below:

On cousins, Dunham explains that she has a cousin who loves to party and used to live with her parents. He also worked on the set of "Girls":

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The author of books including "Bel Canto" and "State of Wonder," who also runs a Nashville bookstore, couldn't seem farther removed from the world of HBO's "Girls" -- a show whose characters seem likely to read Sheila Heti or Vice magazine. Besides, as Patchett told Salon, she doesn't watch TV.

And yet, last night's episode name-checked the author, when the mother of Lena Dunham's character announces that she's having a wonderful time at an academic conference in New York.

"It has been such an awesome conference," says Becky Ann Baker's character, a prim middle-aged, upper-middle-class woman. "I never thought I'd meet so many other women who feel the same way I do about Ann Patchett." The joke here, perhaps, is that Patchett is the sort of tasteful, excellent, high-mid-brow author for whom women like Hannah's mother would, near-universally, feel a strong affinity.

Patchett is flattered. "I heard about the reference this morning from an old boyfriend who called me a 'meme,' and then I had to ask him what a 'meme' was," Patchett told Salon via email. "It's very nice to think that someone at the show would take the trouble to put me in the cultural loop when clearly I am so far out of it."

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Adam! Adam Adam Adam! There's Adam! Thank God! I am always terrified we will lose Adam! There he is, lying on his customary bed. And even though it's the same apartment where he and Hannah first had their unbearable and bizarre couplings, it now look like an entirely different, even warm, apartment — what Freud (there is a therapist!) might term heimlich. It's a common but surprising shift: the one that occurs between when you first see a place and you know it.

Speaking of the changing spaces, Hannah, now one month out from Adam (we learn) and still not finished with the book, appears to be counting everything she does — literally. She eats a certain number of chips, counts a certain number of taps at her own door. Is she practicing being OCD for a piece? Is this actually the episode's first dream sequence? Or has Hannah crumpled before she’s even begun?

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