Weekend To-Do List: Humanity Edition

It’s April 21, 2006, and humanity’s robot servants still haven’t rebelled against us and put us to work in their cruel data mines. The good news is: I get to bring you a weekend to-do list. The bad news: It will not include an all-out Robot War. I will celebrate humanity’s persistence by making this the most thoroughly humanized list in recent memory.

-Our critics give high marks to United 93 and American Dreamz — both of which humanize terrorists, though with vastly different degrees of seriousness.

-If you want all of humanity, unfiltered, you might find 24 Hours on Craigslist almost as good as the real thing.

-On the printed page, Sebastian Junger (pictured), author of The Perfect Storm, spins another great human drama — part fact, part what-if — out of seemingly random events, with A Death in Belmont.

-I may have spoken too soon about the robot takeover: The Miss USA pageant airs on NBC tonight. But it’s robot vs. robot as Tom Cruise breaks his silence (wait, when was he silent?) during tonight’s special Mission: Impossible 3-themed 20/20.

-Oh, and in case you haven’t gotten enough TomKat this week, read baby Suri’s first statement to the press here. (No, it’s not real. Yes, it is hilarious.)

-For everyone who’s already OD’d on these earthbound, all-too-human, all-too-real aliens, get back to the wonderfully cheesy-fake kind on tonight’s Dr. Who, featuring the wonderfully batty Christopher Eccleston as the new (to Yanks) Ninth Doctor.

The critics are sweet on Matthew Sweet, or, at least, his duets album with Susanna Hoffs. And you don’t have to be a humanity-enslaving robot to love The Secret Machines’ new album, Ten Silver Drops.

We here at EW are in the habit of defending comics as a legitimate art form, capable of handling great human stories of complexity and depth. And then… there are these and these. Which are sort of arguments for the robots taking over.

addCredit(“Sebastian Junger Photograph by Jesse Chehak”)