It’s always a good sign for your fledgling media project when your target audience’s first response is, “Wait, I’m confused: what is this, and why does it exist?” And your answer to that question is, “Your pathetic smear campaign will never stop our movement!”

It’s a very strange way to pose the argument: Anyone who argues that the original Star Wars trilogy should be retroactively ejected from the culture because it was largely written and directed by white men would be an idiot. And the prequel trilogy was a thoroughly auteurist project, all written and directed by the…

I genuinely felt guilty while watching Villeneuve’s Blade Runner, because I LOVE slow, deliberate genre films that take their time and don’t give the audience easy answers or distract them with constant action. I want to see MORE glacially-paced sci-fi movies. I want Bela Tarr to make a Star Wars movie. But aside from…

Whenever I want to feel better about myself, I read the comments threads on Hypebeast. I recommend it — those guys make Star Wars fans look stable and well-adjusted.

Agreed — these guys had some deceptively clever Dadaist ideas sometimes, but it was like they knew that letting racehorses kick them in the nuts was where their bread was buttered. Two favorites: Kayaking in Downtown LA fountains, and Chris Pontius dressed as the devil, protesting outside churches — “I’m not such a…

For me, there was a weird gap between the first and second Jackass movies. I kinda loved the first one, and the show before that, exactly for the reasons mentioned – they reminded me of much dumber versions of my old friends, they seemed to actually be enjoying doing this to themselves, and they seemed to exist in…

Further proving that every single thing Timberlake does these days will anger someone somewhere, the sneaker-enthusiast community was up in arms about that putting-on-shoes photo above — by taking a knee like that, he’s creased the toe box of his custom Jordan 3s, a big faux pas.

This feels like a fair review, maybe even a little bit over-generous. (Album is interesting, and has its moments, but doesn’t really work.) It’s also one of the first reviews of this record I’ve read that seems to primarily concern itself with the music. I am never one to claim critics are chomping at the bit to hate…

There’s a long, loooong history in this country of killing off/exiling a native tribe from their land, then adding insult to injury by using a cartoonish image of that tribe for high school and college mascots, etc. It’s often an ugly history, but I guess the question is what do you do with that history? Changing the…

Note: Anyone who says anything to this effect is either operating in bad faith or just very dumb.

The thing about the Grammys is that when they were first started, a big motivating factor was trying to elevate classy, “adult” music over all this rock and roll noise that the kids liked. That’s why your big early Grammy darlings were guys like Henry Mancini, Stan Getz, Herb Albert, Frank Sinatra, etc. Then…

Happy to see No Age still kicking, and making increasingly interesting music.

My roommate went to the big one in Vegas. He came back weirdly shaken. “This is the first time I’ve ever been embarrassed to be a straight man. They gave me all these free porn DVDs...and I don’t even want to watch ‘em.”

Since having a kid, I haven’t gotten out to too many shows over the last couple years, but I went to see Jay-Z last month, and it honestly seemed like people had mellowed out substantially with the phones. Three years ago, I would often feel like the only guy watching the show with my actual eyes, like some sort…

The fact that Hinton feels no need to apologize for killing off a character — that she created, in her own novel — really does mark her as part of a much older generation.

I honestly don’t mean this as a critique of this post in particular, since it’s an internet-wide phenomenon, but there’s something so strange about the way we build whole articles out of tweets. In this case, the tweet itself is hilarious precisely because it’s so succinct – some random dude provided her with…

I’d actually heard not-terrible things about Araya too back in the day. Dave Lombardo always seemed like a perfectly normal dude who got into metal just because he liked drumming really, really fast.

So happy I managed to catch Slayer on their last original-lineup tour. And even then, Araya seemed like he was getting a bit old for this shit.

Back when I was a vegetarian, I kind of just decided to take it on faith that dishes that weren’t explicitly carnivorous and/or French were probably veggie. This almost certainly meant that I ate a good deal of fish sauce and stealth bacon, but I was very see-no-evil about it.

Son of a preacher man here, raised in a very laissez-faire Episcopal household. I still remember taking my Catholic-raised wife to my dad’s church for the first time, and the stunned look on her face as someone passed her a plate of Trader Joe’s ciabatta and a shot glass of Manischewitz like we were trading snacks in…