I’m not saying it’s impossible that pleasant cultural exchanges, friendly sporting events, and consensual affairs took place within a colonial system that was also filled with horrors and injustice. But to solely depict the good without depicting the bad is to tell a lie of omission. And if you think I’m making a…

So, the most powerful men in the world get together every year to pee on trees, cut them down, sing in musicals, and make sexist comments to the female servants they’re forced to have. What a disappointing conspiracy.

I can believe it. Hannity in full makeup looks like a vaudeville performer. His lips especially are so over defined. All he’s missing is the two perfect rouge circles on his cheeks.

Pretty hilarious, because my thought was that they gave him the most flattering makeup and lighting possible. A nice orange glow to attempt to make him like human and not a bloated sea-slug. I think they did their very best to make him look good as far as that was possible, actually. So of course right-wingers are…

Throughout The Wire, the War On Drugs becomes a stand-in for the War On Terror: an endless, winless battle with a multi-headed hydra that’s always ready to crown a new king the second the old one disappears, and whose only potential advances would come through huge, unorthodox policy changes (like the junkie Eden of…

In our Empire’s glorious criminal justice system, offenses against the Emperor are considered especially heinous. In Rome, the dedicated centurions who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Praetorian Guard.

All hail the Emperor.

*chung chung*

And Deadwood managed to pull off that message of interdependence in a Western genre more generally associated with the myths of rugged individualism, the lone gunslinger, the up-by-their-bootstraps settler etc. It’s simultaneously a hymn to the attractiveness of those ideas and a working-out of how you can’t actually…

In general, those shows (and movies, comics, etc.) that dealt with 9/11 issues in a more abstract way were able to have much more nuanced and intelligent discussions about it. The first wave of 9/11-centric art (like that issue of Amazing Spider-Man or that episode of the West Wing) was rushed and misguided. The…

Sounds great. Just make sure to re-post this in two months when people who aren’t NYC critics can actually go watch it.

I actually feel the inability to treat the Af-Am family’s arrival with cod-Coen “darkly comic” sensibilities signals some kind of deeper anxiety around race altogether. Like, just enough awareness to know race is a dangerous topic for a privileged white man director to attempt, but not enough awareness to realize the…

“To the Commenters of the AV Club Region, I Have an Idea Concerning Your Kinja Predicament”

“The last Jedi at the end of ‘The Last Jedi’? You guessed it.”

The movie adaptation of this is going to suck so much

I’ve been spending more time with my friends and loved ones.

I mean at this point most of the writers here are just people paid to summarize viral videos

This website fucking sucks now and I rarely visit anymore. That’s my two cents.

Nothing fires up a discussion more than having no idea who anybody is responding to.

It’s interesting how that might align — in the book, we go from the conservatism of the 50s to the conservatism of the 80s while skipping over the looser 60s and 70s and now we’re starting in the conservatism of the 80s and skipping to, well, now.

So I can give you my experience of a precocious King reader, I’d definitely check with a librarian or YA expert (we used to have quite a few around here) for more expert opinion, especially on appropriateness.

It’s not dumb to be in a youth group. It’s just a fact of life for a lot of people, and even if you’re not a super churchy person it’s nice to have peer groups. (Signed, pastor’s kid who is definitely not dumb.)