Noah Berlatsky

Conservative fetishization of the past is myopic, simplistic, and mean-spirited—but progressives can be too quick to cede tradition.

Can a popular author also be celebrated for literary quality? Not if that author is a woman like Austen.

Their sexuality traps and destroys male innocence, as they grad hold, by the penis- the better to lead him to castration. Make no mistake that castration is greeted with fear, terror, and disgust—but also with glee. Women as super villains allow their characters to be super powerful; a force for evil is at least a force. In a media landscape where women are often rendered secondary, invisible, and passive, the femme fatale, in her icy violence, seizes female agency along with the phallus that she so efficiently cuts off.

Genre boundaries are conscious of race—and, in the case of rock, conscious of gender too.

At first, this looks like sexism. And then you realize, hey, this is sexism. Hope isn't allowed to do the dangerous job because Pym has put her on a pedestal, and won't let her off it.

"I believe that, in order to address these problems, we need to first understand how we got here."

While Atwood's feminist dystopia remains our favorite nightmarish future, Marge Piercy's Woman On The Edge Of Time is far superior.

Who is memorialized in death has everything to do with race, class . . . and who you were in life.

Action movies don't usually bother much with romance. The trailer for The Transporter: Refueled certainly doesn't. The hero is cool — sexy women, plural, throw themselves at him, or at least stand near him and things blow up; there are fights and revenge and high production values. Romance is, at best, a secondary concern.

With the prospect of another Bush/Clinton presidential contest looming as ominously as Donald Trump's hairpiece, the word "dynasty" seems to be frothing off of many a pundit's keyboard. "Clinton, Bush struggle to shed dynasty labels," a Washington Post headline declared.