Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I’m in the process of watching my first full season of “The Bachelor,” after having made it through Andi Dorfman’s season of “The Bachelorette.” I’m finding it — as I assume I’m supposed to — simultaneously delightful and horrifying. But for those of you who are regulars, I was hoping you could help me out: What are the best things you’ve read (other than the recent Chris Harrison profile) on the franchise?  • “The epic uncool of Philip Seymour Hoffman,” by Nathan Rabin: It’s always so delightful when Rabin does a deep dive, and I’m thrilled he has done one on the late actor. The whole thing is worth reading, but I just picked one bit of analysis as representation.  “Hoffman was one of those prematurely wizened types who appeared never to have been young,” Rabin writes. “Even with shaggy hair and a prep-school uniform, Hoffman exudes a distinct worldliness as George Willis Jr., an oily child of privilege who tries to pressure an scholarship underdog Chris O’Donnell into not snitching on Willis’ equally caddish buddies in 1992’s’ Scent Of A Woman.’ Alternating between faux-innocence and oily pragmatism, Hoffman gives the character the wise-beyond-his-years caginess of a man who thinks he understands how the world works, even if that knowledge really only extends to knowing just how protected he is by his daddy’s wealth and privilege.”  • “In hindsight, Bill Cosby’s old books on love, sex and family are incredibly creepy,” by Carlos Lozada: If you’re not reading my colleague and pal Carlos Lozada’s Book Party blog, please rectify that immediately. You’ll be happy you started. And if you need inducement other than my word, start with this piece, where Lozada goes back and reads Cosby’s old books in light of recent allegations.  “As a boy, Cosby liked to hurt little girls, because they deserved it,” Lozada explains. ” ‘If a girl wandered on to a football field where I was playing,’ he writes of his sports-obsessed childhood, ‘I might make knocking her down part of my fly pattern, for a girl was only an honorary human being; and if my roller skating assumed a certain grand sweep, a girl or two might hit the cement, not an unfitting position for such a lesser part of humanity.’ Cosby makes no apology for this violence. Girls were a ‘kind of dopey enemy,’ he explains, and boys like him simply ‘practiced the violence that was so essential to their becoming men.’ ”  • “Exploitation Blues,” by Wesley Morris: Grantland’s wonderful movie critic is not having such a wonderful time at Sundance. But as is so often the case, his displeasure is to our benefit.  “Fifteen years of attending this festival allows you to notice that some narratives here are impossible to expand. This is an event that prefers its black men criminal, imprisoned (wrongly and otherwise), or tragically dead. There’s a chilling, rigorously assembled documentary here, ‘3 and 1/2 Minutes,’ about the murder of 17-year-old Jordan Davis and the Florida trial of the man who, in 2012, shot him repeatedly at a gas station for playing his music too loud,” Morris writes. “Davis is black; the assailant, Michael Dunn, is white. I admired the craftsmanship, and my blood boiled whenever director Marc Silver furnished yet another deluded outtake of Dunn’s jailhouse phone calls to his grieving fiancée. Silver makes an unwieldy legal case easily digestible. The movie works on its own terms. Yet, at Sundance it’s another reminder of the limited occasions one can see black people at the center of a film. Really, what we’re talking about is a matter of exploitation. That sometimes is the issue with all kinds of storytelling, and it often rears its head at this festival. Who should profit from, say, the proliferation of the same tired ideas of black urban life?”  Alyssa Rosenberg blogs about pop culture for The Washington Post's Opinions section.
Wesley Morris at Sundance, Carlos Lozada looks back at Bill Cosby's books, and Nathan Rabin goes deep on Phillip Seymour Hoffman.