Option 3: A bunch of seemingly woke agnostic dudes take the class as a display of tolerance and turn it into a woke-off, because they’re really just there because they heard Christian girls are secretly DTF.

10th grade World History class, 1992. Teacher asks “Is anybody in class an atheist?” I was just about to the point where I was like “F trying to be one of the cool kids—the nerds are having more fun,” so I raised my hand. The kid in front of me, one of the cool kids, turns around, saw my hand raised, and says “No…

Unless the religion is taught in the historical context as a mythology that defined and motivated a people like classes do when discussing Ancient Egypt. Greece, or the Puritans settling in North America and establishing the foundation for a society that still uses a book of magic stories to justify its gross…

This is the thing I don’t get: You want your kid indoctrinated into your specific cult, why send them to a generalist when you have a specialist right there at your chosen church? If people are so set on pumping their kids full of their brand of Jesus, why risk putting them in a situation where they might learn to be,…

And, ya know, as much as I’ve maybe been making my parents and grandparents out to be “Real Americans” who just happen to have lived on the coast, even perpetuating that monolithic concept of what constitutes legitimacy is bullshit. It still suggests that you have to be some kind of working class cliche to deserve a…

Sorry if that sounded directed at you. It was more of a blanket statement to people who think there’s only one way to be American. I once had a FoxNews pollster (Frank Luntz) tell me he wished he could put me in a bus and drive me out to the middle of the country to see how “Real Americans live,” and I was like,…

Considering she’s 30 and looking at more than $400/month for the next 30 years, I think she’ll still come out ahead if her taxes go up a few hundred or even a thousand dollars a year until she reaches retirement age.

Dammit! In my rush to make a joke, I failed to do a thorough job. This is (partly) why I am no longer a production editor.

I respect your pedantry. However, it was also Starlin who later reworked Thanos for Infinity Gauntlet to be more of a Darkseid type. So we’re both right . . . and the Internet was saved!!!

I got into this with a coworker the other day. She hates Warren for . . . I don’t know—reasons? I jokingly said, “You’ll like her if she gets your student loan erased.” To which she replied, “Not if it makes my taxes go up.” So I tried to explain, “But if your taxes go up less than your monthly loan payment, don’t you…

I hate this idea that Real America is only in the Midwest. As if there aren’t working class people everywhere. I grew up in Massachusetts, 20 miles north of Boston. My parents owned a gas station; my grandparents worked in factories and on farms and as an operator for New England Telephone and they all voted for…

I’m hoping CW’s Crisis is like when IDW rebooted TMNT and it was like Kevin Eastman got a mulligan to correct some mistakes and retell the primitive originals in a more modern and expert way. Because, let’s not forget, as iconic as the original Crisis on Infinite Earths is, it’s also kind of a mess as a story. But…

Let’s hope we don’t get an homage to Smallville and they wait until the last shot of the last scene of Arrow to show Diggle putting on a Green Lantern ring.

Because we’re seeing the story from the perspective of the heroes who saved the day, not the ones who failed. 

It’s sorta one of those Darkseid/Thanos situations: Anti-Monitor debuted in comics a year before Apocalypse, but Apocalypse made it to live action first, so some will see Anti-Monitor as the derivative one. Although, in the case of Thanos, Starlin was specifically looking to create a Darkseid analogue at Marvel,…

The Jewish Community Alliance where my daughter went to daycare had a Sparkle Havdalah last year. I’m not even sure how many kids realized it was a man in the dress. It was really just a fabulous community dinner with a reading from a book about a boy who likes to wear dresses and how that’s ok. No in-depth discussion…

Same thing happened here in South Portland, Maine. Raging online cries of deviants attempting to indoctrinate/diddle kids—day of, big crowds . . . of support and a good time was had by all.

As I get older, I find that I like my superheroes somewhere in the middle between naive, Might Makes Right, Good v Evil fantasies and Comics Aren’t for Kids Anymore, Life is Pain broodfests. I think there’s a way to tell action-driven optimistic yet realist (not realistic) stories about heroes with feet of clay that…

In the manuscript it was one man. “He divvied up to the bar.” Based on the conversation I had with the author, it was clear he meant “sidle up to the bar” but refused to be proven wrong because he was an old big shot and I was some kid in his twenties. Hey, I was just trying to save him some embarrassment.