Monkey See 10:40 am Tue July 10, 2012  How Should You Watch And
Read And Listen? However You Want  Credit Marcelo Poleze /
However you want to watch Breaking Bad is fine with me.  I just
want to clarify that, because yesterday in Slate, Jim Pagels
took the position — or perhaps, more correctly, struck the pose
— that you shouldn't "binge-watch" television, as many people do
with serialized shows like Breaking Bad and Homeland. He argued
that to do so deprives you of personal relationships with
characters, denies you suspense and episodic structure, and
disrupts timelines by getting you out of sync with real seasons
and holidays and so forth.  All of these arguments are patently
silly, and I cannot imagine that even Pagels takes them
seriously. Nobody really thinks you need to spend time with
fictional characters the way you do with real people (otherwise
it would be equally wrong to read a book in a weekend instead of
over the course of a year). The idea that suspense can't work in
a single burst would be ne