Noah Berlatsky

The cover for A-Force is a combination of tired trope and deodorant ad. Female empowerment can do so much better.

"The look on Miley's face during Nicki Minaj's savage, expletive-laden rant says it all," Salon tweeted the day after the VMAs. Less than 140 characters, but still enough to link a black woman to a longstanding racial slur.

As a white woman, Swift can afford to celebrate carelessness. Beyoncé, though, knows that even her casualness has to be perfect.

It's hard to deny the appeal of the masculine ideal, especially when embodied in Jude Law. And yet, it's also a depressing vision.

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

Irritation is the way of all flesh. The question is, if you're going to be annoyed for all of eternity, who do you want to be doing the annoying?

A recent controversy at the Calgary Expo suggests MRAs care more about making opponents look bad than they do about discrimination.

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.

Scientists are hotly debating whether we should send messages into space. Perhaps they should consult Octavia Butler for some wisdom...

Art without politics actually results in a sweeping Puritanism. For art to have power, it needs to engage with power, with politics.