Tag: pop culture

“The Wall Street Journal recently used the headline ‘We All Need OCD Now’ for an article on COVID-19 … Finally, my debilitating mental illness has a timely hook!”

‘The music went away slowly and then all at once. So what if it never comes back? “I haven’t allowed myself to go there yet,” Huey says, worry in his voice.’

As a teen, Laura Bond went all out to meet Depeche Mode — and to hang onto her best friend.

The muted response to Todd Haynes’s “Dark Waters” is depressingly similar to our culture’s muted response to climate change

Late capitalism gets an antihero show.

Sara Fredman talks to author Lindy West on women and likability, the evolution of pop culture, and navigating conversations in a complex, messy world. 

Should white critics cover black culture? Only if they’re able to own their whiteness.

My best friend and the New Kids on the Block, 30 years later.

Media and entertainment grounded in empathy are a critical part of a saner culture — and we can all help by actively producing, seeking, and supporting it.

Pamela Adlon’s Better Things is not a riff on the antihero show so much as it is an antidote to it.

The Americans shows us one way to write a female antihero.

Golden Age antiheroes and the nasty women who humanized them.

Maybe with Creed II, a black actor will get the Oscar nod instead of the one white guy.

The owners of the real-life Amityville Horror house had to have the street address changed to avoid the real terror: tourists.

This was the year ‘The Bachelorette’ tried to take on race. Things did not go well.

Liz Smith looks back at her role in the Trump divorce.

Goodbye, Wench Market; the Disney-Industrial Complex has no place for decay.

Over six seasons, Girls has not been even remotely realistic about the earnings of a freelance writer.

I don’t remember consciously watching Buffy—it feels like I absorbed it by osmosis. It’s not perfect, but it is wonderful.

In Vulture, Frank Guan, an avid gamer himself, digs deep into the appeal and addictive qualities of video games in an effort to understand the psychology that undergirds hard-core gaming — and whether it has an impact on or can predict our politics.

Christopher Orr, film critic for The Atlantic, watched Fifty Shades Darker — the second film in the series based on the super popular Fifty Shades of Gray books — so that you don’t have to.

With a recent slew of documentary films and books, punk’s forty year old body has been repeatedly repackaged, sweetened and sold to the masses at the mall, mystifying and irritating many people in the process. In The Baffler, Eugenia Williamson analyzes punk’s history, evolution, literature and commodifycation and addresses the lingering question: what does being ‘punk’ even mean anymore more? Besides, anyone who’s seen […]

In the newest issue of The New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh wrote about Grimes, real name Claire Boucher, whose history in underground experimental music led her to making homemade electronic bedroom pop. Last year, Pitchfork named her song “Oblivion” the best song of the decade to date, and as she’s preparing to release her second proper album, […]

NPR’s Linda Holmes, on whether pooh-poohing television makes any sense in a changing digital media landscape.

Kris and her children didn’t do much press for Season 10, unheard-of for this family or anyone promoting a TV show, really. Call it an educated guess to say that perhaps they didn’t want to be asked about Bruce’s transition. But not because they were shielding Bruce, whom they love. It was not because he […]

“Yes, I’ve heard every horrible event in almost everyone’s life I’ve met,” confesses Arturo Interian, the network’s vice president of original movies who started at Lifetime in 2001 and still gets idea pitches from strangers. “I’ll put it this way: People will tell you about some physical ailment they’ve had and it’s very awkward to say, ‘Well, you know, I’m sorry about your terrible limp. But it’s not really a movie.’ ”

Dawson suggests these shows are more closely related to sporting events than scripted dramas. In the case of Survivor, viewers get an experience similar to televised sports, Papacharissi explains: “You can root for your favorite castaway like you do for your favorite team, and vicariously experience her triumphs and setbacks from episode to episode.”

In 2013, for the first time in the 55-year-history of the Billboard Hot 100, not one black artist lodged a number-one single. (Of the eleven songs that held the spot for some portion of the year, four were hip-hop, and four featured black singers or rappers in guest roles.) There’s been round, sustained clamor over Macklemore’s […]

“What the fuck is a selfie?” said Miss Sheryl. “When a stupid person with a smartphone flicks themselves and looks at it,” I said to the room. She replied with a raised eyebrow, “Oh?” It’s amazing how the news seems so instant to most from my generation with our iPhones, Wi-Fi, tablets and iPads, but […]