Comparisons between Davis and just about every popular female television character of the last few years have sprung up across the Internet -- most commonly, to Emilia Clarke's Daenerys Targaryen from "Game of Thrones," Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope from "Parks and Recreation," and Connie Britton's Tami Taylor from "Friday Night Lights."

The last one makes sense, sort of -- Davis and Taylor both are Texan women with teased heads of blond hair. It was little wonder that fans of "Friday Night Lights" started comparing the two even as the filibuster was going on.

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For "We Think Alone," July asked friends to choose an email from their "sent" folders; the email must cohere to one of 10 themes. The first of 10 aggregations of stars' private thoughts went out today -- organized around the theme of "money" -- and readers found that "Girls" creator Lena Dunham is just parsimonious enough to turn down a $24,000 sofa, but spendthrift enough to consider it.

According to the sent email forwarded to "We Think Alone" subscribers, Dunham's assistant wrote her with the specs on a custom Swedish sofa:

TOTAL PRICE (estimate) INCLUDING SHIPPING $24,035.24

TOTAL TIMEFRAME: 10 Weeks to make it, 6-10 weeks to ship it from Sweden.16-20 weeks

The price to make the Liljevalch Sofa is $14,878.93 plus the fabric which is $283.56 per meter and we would need 20 meters of fabric. So the entire cost of the couch would be $20,554.39.

Shipping the sofa:  It will take between 16 and 20 weeks to make and ship the sofa to us (from Sweden and will cost $3,080.85, plus $400.00 in customs charges.

whenever you pick the fabric I can order for you! :) xox

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It wasn’t her -- it was me. I’d grown tired of a new manner of speaking on Twitter of which Retta was merely a popular example. Particularly when talking about an episode of Sunday television, it seemed, everyone I followed on Twitter spoke in a language that I just couldn’t get into; a patois of oblique references (so as to prevent spoilers) and gleeful, headlong description of whatever was happening in front of them. If you weren’t watching live, as I generally was not, you were missing all the fun, not merely because you didn’t get the reference, but because the reference was the entire substance of a sort of half-joke.

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Her first novel, "Prep," broke out in a huge way upon its 2005 release, ending up on the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year list; the very next year, Sittenfeld moved from high school to adult life with "The Man of My Dreams," tracking a far more depressed protagonist's lifelong quest for love. And at the very end of the Bush presidency, Sittenfeld dropped "American Wife," a novel lightly fictionalizing the life of Laura Bush as dutiful spouse to a wayward but upwardly mobile scion. The only common threads these books share are a certain sensitivity to the way in which relationships -- with friends, relatives, lovers -- change over time, and well-drawn female protagonists who are unafraid to confess their less admirable actions and impulses.

Sittenfeld has done it again, marrying her sensibility to an entirely new subject matter in "Sisterland" (out now). The sisters of the title are the twins Violet and Kate -- née Daisy -- who are born with psychic abilities. As they grow older, Violet leans into her sixth sense, building a somewhat rudimentary career out of performing readings and séances. Daisy, on the other hand, changes her name and her life, becoming the attentive mother her family never had and finding a way to abandon her extrasensory abilities.

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Even as he acknowledges to Salon that speaking out might get him fired from his job as a punter for the Oakland Raiders (his new team, after his dismissal last year from the Minnesota Vikings), he's still gleefully promoting his book, "Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies." The book is a multifarious combination of free-association poetry, descriptions of life as a football player, and calls for equal rights for gay men and women. There's room both for a disavowal of Ayn Rand and for many expressions of sympathy with core libertarian beliefs.

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The "30 Rock" actor, known for taking on American Airlines and an "uptight queen" working at Starbucks, posted a series of homophobic tweets tonight about a writer for the U.K.'s Daily Mail newspaper. That writer had noted that tweets went out from Baldwin's wife's Twitter account during the actor James Gandolfini's funeral service, at which both Baldwin and his wife had been in attendance. Though the Daily Mail article noted that the tweets may well have been posted by an assistant or after Baldwin's wife, Hilaria Baldwin, left the service early, it didn't stop Baldwin from calling the reporter "little bitch" and "toxic little queen" and stating that the reporter would enjoy Baldwin forcibly sodomizing him.

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"Tampa," by Alissa Nutting, is a tale of lust that draws out the dynamic between a predatory teacher and her lascivious students. The twist -- if indeed it is a twist -- is that the predator here is a woman, and that her crime is hardly one of opportunity. Celeste Price, the novel's protagonist, takes a job as a teacher specifically to seduce young boys, those untouched by incipient manhood. She's calculating in a manner that's utterly compelling, because she explains every step of her reasoning -- and every pulse of her body -- to the transfixed reader. Nutting has described the book, in other interviews, as inspired in part by studying in high school with a woman who went on to teach and to have sex with her students.

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But once the confetti is swept off Christopher Street, gay men, women and advocacy organizations will be forced to face a question they haven't considered in more than a decade: What next?

After a fight for legal same-sex marriage that began with Hawaii's surprise legalization in 1993, gay advocacy groups have pursued marriage equality uber alles, eventually gaining not merely marriage rights in 13 states (as of this morning, when California rejoined the list) and an overturn of a restrictive Clinton-era policy.

And as the tide seems to have turned yet more decisively in favor of same-sex marriage across America, the question of what's next, after gay rights groups have effectively succeeded, is finally real -- as is the question of whether those groups were successful in large part because they were fighting for an issue that directly affected a vast proportion of the gay community.

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The star of raunchy comedies including "21 Jump Street," "The Sitter" and "The Watch" (and an Oscar nominee for 2011's "Moneyball") is flying high on his Oscar nomination and his role in the upcoming film "The Wolf of Wall Street," directed by Martin Scorsese. He's not shy about expressing that, well, things are different post-Oscar-nomination. In a series of quotes cut from an upcoming profile in Bullett magazine and provided exclusively to Salon, Hill opens up about his newly heightened profile -- in a way that makes it clear that he thinks of himself not merely as a funny actor but as an insider and, ahem, artist.

On the subject of his work with Scorsese, Hill said:

You can dis me all you want on a blog, or write whatever you want in this magazine and I’ll just be like, ‘Whatever, man. Scorsese thinks I’m awesome.’ [Laughs.] He hired me and didn’t fire me, so I can kind of not care now. It really did give me personal assurance that I’m doing the right thing and that I’m talented in certain ways because he’s so important to me.

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The celebrity cook, whose butter-laden recipes have come in for much critique over the years (not least when she admitted to Type II diabetes right before promoting a pharmaceutical product), is particularly open to criticism now that she's been fired from the Food Network for her racist comments.

But a New York Times photo of Deen's supporters, private citizens who disagreed with her firing and were visiting her Georgia restaurant, prompted plenty of commentary online about how those supporters looked. One example, from the New York Times's media critic, is below:

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While journalists cool their heels somewhere tens of thousands of feet above the earth (they nabbed a shot of Snowden's empty chair) and WikiLeaks omnipotent being Julian Assange claims Snowden is safe, somewhere, the pop journalists who traveled on the "Rihanna plane" last fall are likely shuddering with recognition. The pop singer Rihanna commissioned a jet in 2012 to launch a seven-day world tour of seven cities, with some 150 music writers on board.

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But it's that song's video that really represents both Cyrus' most decisive attempt to position herself as a rebel and just how far she has to go to really be one. In the recently released clip, Cyrus clips a grill over her teeth and poses with three black women as she imitates the dance move "twerking" -- a fast-paced, sexually charged move that's been the subject of much recent hip-hop music and that's sometimes associated with strippers. Dodai Stewart, at Jezebel, described the clip:

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If Kanye West's latter career and the trailer for the forthcoming film "The Wolf of Wall Street" have anything in common, it's an uncanny sense that America is more or less over the class resentment generated by the 2008 Wall Street crash. In 2011, Americans occupied Wall Street; in 2013, they're buying "Yeezus," the album of a rapper who's gone from bragging he was a millionaire (on "Watch the Throne") to calling himself a god. And they're preparing to see the second film in six months in which DiCaprio plays a charming, roguish financial swindler with a taste for excess.

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The specialized news service for the financial industries, named for its anti-big-soda, anti-trans-fats, anti-salt parent company founder who's currently the mayor of New York, is undergoing internal strife over a snack pantry installed for employees' use. "Unfortunately, over the past few months there have been several instances where employees have been observed filling bags with sodas, snacks, fruit, and in some cases cartons of milk, to take home with them," the vice-president of human resources told employees in an internal email leaked to Romenesko. "Employees who worked later in the day, or over the weekend, found there were essentially no snacks or drinks available."

Naturally, the problem of snacks not being available to some employees means the issue can be solved by taking away snacks for all: The email passive-aggressively notes that, "If this type of behavior continues we will have no other option than to consider closing down the pantry. That would be a shame." But that shameful decision would be the last resort: BBNA has threatened to terminate employees "observed taking any amount of soda, juice, milk, fruit or snacks home" and plans to install cameras in the snack pantry, a step a representative of the office's union says would require bargaining.

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But as the news broke last night, the sadness and shock fans expressed online began to feel, well, a little like a contest, both to be first and to feel the most.

Celebrity deaths have always been, for lack of a better word, weird, merging the abstract sadness of lost potential with the directness of having "known" the departed in some way into an uncanny feeling of the loss of a friend. But the memories you share of the deceased aren't personal -- other than the circumstances of where each viewer watched, say, Gandolfini's performances in "The Sopranos" or "Zero Dark Thirty" or "True Romance," the memories are exactly the same as everyone else's.

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In a roundtable discussion of television actresses convened by the Hollywood Reporter, Walter, a star of "Arrested Development," described recent experiences on the job at a single-camera sitcom that goes unnamed:

Walter: What bugs me about the business is a lack of respect for actors doing their work. Giving someone five pages of dialogue five minutes before they're supposed to shoot the scene? It never was like this! In the old days, you'd get a script two weeks ahead. You just have to adjust.

Mayim Bialik of "The Big Bang Theory": Our stuff changes in front of a live audience.

Walter: Yeah, I think on a multicam, having done several [including the recent series "Retired at 35"], it's that way. But to me, on a single-camera when they do that, and it's five pages -- no audience, you know, but five pages, here you go. I'm not happy with it. Can you tell?

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The Washington Post reported that Obama was relying on "dial testing" of his State of the Union address, which sharply pivoted downward once he declared he would act decisively on the issue. Ameliorating the effects of global warming isn't a popular issue, and one that would cost a great deal of political capital! Or so Obama has convinced himself on the basis of a method of testing that is "all but meaningless," per ThinkProgress.

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Clearly, the organization is aiming to open the tent to broadly famous individuals; Cindy McCain, who's posed for a "NO H8" photo and spoken publicly about her support of gay rights, may not exactly have done as much as the writer of "Angels in America" on behalf of gays, but the parallel-universe-first lady may be more of a marquee name.

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Kaidence Donda West is the name of the new baby, according to Media Take Out, a reliable source for scurrilous gossip (the site claims to have been tipped by a Cedars-Sinai nurse). While first reports of baby names are often dubious -- just ask baby girls Amelie Jane and Isla Marcheline Jolie-Pitt -- Donda is a believable middle name. It's the name of West's late mother, whose premature death has inspired much of his latter-day work. And Kaidence isn't entirely preposterous -- it's not made up by reporters or by West and Kardashian.

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