It’s hard to believe that it’s been two years since LOST ended, on a note that disappointed and confused many viewers. Mostly, that’s because the discussion around the show never ended, with showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse defending their ending against the fan backlash. Indeed, of everyone involved in LOST, Lindelof has had the most to say on this topic, but we’ve never seen him address it as calmly and candidly as he does in a new episode of The Verge’s tech news show, On the Verge.

“As obnoxious and entitled as this sounds, I also have no regrets about it,” Lindelof tells host Joshua Topolsky, who confesses he didn’t like the finale. “I take responsibility and authorship for LOST in terms of my own feelings about the ending, and I make no apologies for it. I do feel like that was the ending that I wanted to do, and I was always comfortable with the ambiguity of the show.” Although he does wish he hadn’t made so many promises early on that LOST‘s big questions would be answered, Lindelof maintains that by the time the series’ trajectory had been entirely sketched out, in Season 3, he had begun telling fans, ”If you are watching the show for the answers to your mysteries, you are not gonna like the ending.”

Lindelof also corrects Topolsky’s misapprehension that none of what we see on the island really happened. “At the end of the show, the last frame of the show, Matthew Fox closes his eye and dies — that happened, in our context of ‘happening.’ That’s all real. From the moment he closed his eye, all that other stuff we did in the sixth season of the show, the flash sideways, where nobody knows each other and the plane never crashed — that is… what you would define as not having happened. But everything that we ever showed you, anything that takes place on the island in LOST, happened.” Watch the entire 25-minute interview — and learn what Hurley, Ben, and Walt are all up to now — here. [via Collider]

What would you ask Tina Fey if you happened to get her alone — perhaps in a closet? Well, newly mustachioed 7 Minutes in Heaven host Mike O’Brien has managed to score just such an opportunity in the latest episode of the Yahoo! series, and he sure takes advantage of it. We get a 1.5-second Sarah Palin impression, learn some of Fey’s innermost thoughts about The Cosby Show, and discover what it might look like if Liz Lemon were to appear on Breaking Bad. We only wish that 7 Minutes in Heaven were actually long enough to live up to its title, because we could watch Fey do improv amid clothing for hours.

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It’s been an intense week for Community fans, between the show’s stellar three-episode season finale on Thursday and the next day’s news that creator and showrunner Dan Harmon had been replaced for Season 4. Since then, we’ve seen Harmon weigh in on his dismissal, and read several thoughtful reactions from writers and industry insiders. Along with the entirely apt hand-wringing, critics have been taking stock of Harmon’s tenure on the show, and some have responded to anger about his firing by pointing out that while he may be a genius, he isn’t a great manager. As the discussion continues, Letters of Note has directed us to an absolutely fantastic email Harmon sent to Salinger, the seven-year-old daughter of fellow screenwriter Kelly Oxford, after the girl was scared by a film that he co-wrote, Monster House.

According to Harmon, the director and producers (including Steven Spielberg, who he calls a “moron”) of Monster House changed the movie significantly, and didn’t listen to him when he protested. In his note to Salinger, Harmon thoughtfully and eloquently explains what he thinks a good story should do, without ever condescending to his young reader. “I think a good story, even if it is sad or scary while you’re watching it, should always make you a little less scared after you’ve seen it. Because even a scary story, if it’s a good scary story, takes us into strange, dark places that don’t make sense at first, and helps us see that they do make sense, and are therefore not so scary,” Harmon wrote. Visit Oxford’s Tumblr to read the rest of the letter, which will do absolutely nothing to allay your depression about how Community will fare without him.

As she’s spent the past several years demonstrating, Liz Phair basically does whatever she wants these days. (And even if Exile in Guyville is the only album of hers you appreciate, we’d argue that she’s still earned that right.) So, this week she feels like releasing a video for “And He Slayed Her,” from her two-year-old novelty album/attack on the music industry, Funstyle. And you know what? Despite all the abuse that she took for that record, this is a very good thing. “And He Slayed Her” is probably the best song on the album, and the video is unspeakably badass. Phair is equal parts sexy and deadly, tearing through the desert in a vintage car, bent on exacting some unexpectedly brutal (but also pretty funny) revenge. Although the video seems to be about a romance gone bad, we’d be remiss not to point out, as Stereogum did, that the song’s title famously sounds a whole lot like “Andy Slater,” the name of a Capitol executive who refused to release Phair from a contract.

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Last week, a photo appeared on the Internet of Lena Dunham and Donald Glover sitting on a stoop in Brooklyn, apparently shooting an episode of Girls Season 2. (Groan-worthy NY Post sub-headline: “Dunham films with black actor first week back on set.”) As exciting as it was to see two of our favorite young creative polymaths working together, we were curious: Did Glover really have a role in the HBO series, and if so, who would he be playing? Well, TVline pinned down Dunham, and while she confirmed that the Community co-star/rapper really has joined the cast, she wouldn’t reveal anything about his role. “[W]e really want Season 2 to be a surprise to viewers, because there’s a lot of fun stuff planned, a lot of fun guest stars. I really think with Season 2, we sort of hit new heights of delirium and of fantastically lewd behavior,” she said, joking that she’s adopted the spoiler-protecting secrecy of Lost. No matter what he’s doing on Girls, though, the news that we’ll have an additional way to get our Donal Glover fix is welcome — especially when Sony’s abrupt dismissal of Dan Harmon means we don’t have high hopes for Community next year.

Rupert Everett clearly has a thing for Oscar Wilde. He’s starred in two movies adapted from the fin-de-siècle author’s works, The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband, and has been active in the restoration of his tomb. Now, Variety is reporting the news from Cannes that he’s directing and starring in a Wilde biopic. Titled The Happy Prince, after the writer’s children’s story of the same name, it will follow Wilde’s dark final days, with a tone more comic than tragic. The film, which will be Everett’s directorial debut, will shoot next summer, with a cast that also includes Emma Watson, Colin Firth, Tom Wilkinson, and Edward Fox.

Kitty Pryde is an apparently teenage white-girl rapper with a Tumblr and YouTube presence, who took her name from an X-Men character. Her songs are mostly about boys, and she sells them on a Bandcamp page alongside Mediafire links with notes like, “U CAN DOWNLOAD IT 4 FREEC UZ IM NOT GAY AND I HATE MONEY I GOT ENOUGH HAH.” Pryde is cagey about her age, leading fans and detractors to speculate that she’s either a frighteningly precocious 13-year-old or a 20-something impersonating a high schooler. The extent of her self-deprecation rivals that of Tyler, the Creator. So there’s no mystery to why her name is suddenly all over the Internet, often in the same sentence as Kreayshawn’s (as in, “Kitty Pryde is just another no-talent Kreayshawn” or “Kitty Pryde has come to save us all from no-talent girl rappers like Kreayshawn”).

The only thing that’s shocking about her sudden rise to fame is that her newest song, “Okay Cupid,” actually justifies the hype.

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When you get beyond the cocktails and the costumes and the showy emotional breakdowns, what makes any given episode of Mad Men memorable is the dialogue. Matthew Weiner and his staff are particularly wonderful at crafting one-liners — funny quips, penetrating realizations, earth-shattering statements that cause time to stop and personalities to crumble. This season, we’re keeping track of which characters get each episode’s five best lines, assigning points to winners, and posting a cumulative leader board to determine Season 5′s pithiest mad man (or woman). The results of last night’s episode — which featured the long-awaited and thoroughly bizarre return of Paul Kinsey, as well as some excellent Don/Joan bonding — are after the jump.

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If you’re lucky enough to buy one of Sharon Moody‘s comic book paintings, make sure you keep it out of reach of your superhero-obsessed friends — considering that her trompe l’oeil works actually are realistic enough to fool the eye, they might well try to reach into the piece and grab the open Spider-Man or Batman serial out of it. But it isn’t just photo-quality accuracy Moody is seeking. She writes that the playful subjects she chooses “reflect the universal human desire for amusement, diversion, and stimulation. These seem a proper subject for trompe l’oeil paintings, which by their very nature are intended to divert and entrance us with their illusionism and by the questions they raise — in a playful way — about perception and reality.” Click through to see a selection of Moody’s comic book paintings, which we spotted via Beautiful/Decay, and visit her gallery if you’re interested in purchasing her work.

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While we haven’t suffered from a lack of Greg Dulli’s voice over the past few years — he’s put out tons of material with The Twilight Singers and The Gutter Twins, along with solo work and other collaborations — it’s been quite a while since we’ve heard any new Afghan Whigs material. Well, friends, the wait is over. The recently reunited band has released its first song since 2006, when new tracks “I’m a Soldier” and “Magazine” appeared on their album Unbreakable: A Retrospective 1990–2006. A minimalist cover of mysterious Southern soul singer Marie “Queenie” Lyons’ 1970 song “See and Don’t See,” it’s The Afghan Whigs in all their slow, dark, plush glory, Dulli’s grasping vocals contrasting with simple, almost soothing strumming. If you’re willing to give the band your email address, you can download it for free here, and commence fantasizing about a new album. [via Rolling Stone]