When we weren’t busy watching sports contests, we did some reading. Here are the best things we read this year. The Three-Body Problem I do not read much science fiction, but a year in which the real world felt increasingly dystopian seemed like a good time to start. I’m very glad I did, and that I chose Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy—more often referred to simply by the name of the first book, The Three-Body Problem—to do so. It feels like an understatement to say that the scope of the novels is astounding. The ways in which their scope is astounding is itself astounding: the time and physical space that the books span, the creativity of their essential concepts, literally the dimensions in which the story takes place. It’s all fundamentally more interestin…

Yes, most people have already written their Top 10 movie lists for 2014. We're saving ours for the last week of the year, but while we wait for this full, rich, and weird movie year to end, we're going to start looking back at certain highlights. Today, it's our favorite individual scenes. Tomorrow: the year's best overlooked performances. Leitch
Philip Seymour Hoffman's last scene in A Most Wanted Man
Whenever a great actor dies, particularly at a younger-than-expected age under particularly tragic circumstances, there is an inevitable rush to watch his or her final film, often released posthumously. The idea, however elusive, is that maybe you can see something, something even the tragic figure didn't realize at the time. Every minute that person i…