They aren't motivated by religion to commit violence. They're motivated by violence to get religion.

Haha, well, I was mostly using the Summer of Love for shorthand that we'll eventually have a decade or so where everybody will do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex and like each other for a while. Eventually I'm sure the economy will bottom out and ruin it like it does everything, though.

Before we had nuclear bombs, God played pretty much the same role in the popular imagination, in that He could end the world at any time (and there were many points where people legitimately thought that He was trying!). Stuff like the black plague or smallpox killed so many times more people than nuclear technology…

I talked to my sociology prof about this a while back, and she said it's a pretty common reaction to rapid change in society demographics—basically straight/white/rich/etc. dudes feel like the power they've always taken for granted is disappearing, panic, and then double-down and try to protect their elevated status…

Is it simply because we are so self involved that we think we have it worse than any other generation on earth?

Emilio Estevez.

Hey, Marah loves Taylor.

"Blank Space" isn't intended to be taken seriously, but yeah, most of the rest of 1989 makes it clear that, despite recognizing the relationship is bad, she keeps coming back to it anyway.

Now, yes, but when this song was written, not so much.

She said she wrote it because she specifically wanted to write the kind of song that's the last one played at the wedding and that gets everybody on the dance floor. I don't think she wrote it ironically or anything, but I don't think she really empathizes with the song's narrator all that much. (She specifically said…

Nah, they're still together, and the massage parlor incident was media-inflated bullshit. (Media reported it as him going to a massage parlor that allegedly gave the best happy endings in the city when, in reality, if you googled it, the only results for its name and "happy ending" were Yelp complaints from…

Also blonde.

Yeah, I hate when people say things like, "But she's good-looking, she couldn't have been bullied!" Not even getting into the fact that even attractive people generally go through a middle school-era awkward stage . . . everyone gets bullied in middle school. It has nothing to do with looks. Sure, the popular kids…

I know several women who are Swift fans in their '30s, and inevitably it's because she's so good at capturing and articulating the experience of being a teenage girl/young woman—an experience that these women have no interest in reliving but might like to revisit for an hour or so at a time.

Yeah, the entire point of Swift's music from this era is that it's written by a teenage girl about being a teenage girl and aimed at teenage girls. It's intended to capture the very real and shitty feelings of being a teenage girl. Obviously it's not a positive message, it's not something that should be set up as…

The funny part is that, in the short term, Animal House was pretty single-handedly responsible for making the Greek system relevant again. Membership started declining steeply at the end of the '60s and was super-low throughout the '70s, since they were seen as conservative organizations in a…

I watched Animal House for the first time this summer and was legitimately shocked at that moment. I know, I know—the '70s were a different time, age of consent-wise, so I wouldn't have blinked if they'd revealed her to be 15- or 16-year old. But how was a 13-year-old ever not horrifying? It was such a shock that…

(That was kinda the point I was making above. The majority of Cubans consider themselves white. Chances are that even if you were 100 percent Cuban, you'd still be white.)

So you do understand, then? Great!

You do understand that Hispanics can be either white or non-white, right? "Hispanic" doesn't indicate anything racially.