The Week in Reviews: Schulz on Winterson, Carr on Minaj, Real Mad Men, Community, and More

“It’s 2012 and it’s Minaj’s world to make, but this album is not going to make it.” – Daphne Carr on Nicki Minaj at Capital.

“Oranges was part of a de facto lesbian curriculum, word of which filtered down to my generation of gay girls through the low-tech distribution mechanisms of the nineties: pseudo-samizdat literary zines, published at the ubiquitous campus Kinkos; fringy lit seminars taught by hot young grad students; the cool upperclassmen whom we definitely did not call upperclassmen but did call, unironically, BDOCs: Big Dykes on Campus.” – Kathryn Schulz on books by Jeanette Winterson and Alison Bechdel at New York Magazine.

“I don’t know about evil, but it had certainly become boring by the ’50s, dominated by sober, patrician types who would have been just as comfortable filling legal briefs as writing ads.” -Alexander Nazaryan on The Real Mad Men: The Renegades of Madison Avenue and the Golden Age of Advertising at The New Republic.

“The jokes flew fast in “Pillows and Blankets,” much quicker than in most regular episodes, but the underlying thrust was Troy and Abed’s friendship and its faux dissolution.” – Steve Heisler at New York on this week’s Ken Burns inspired episode of Community.