Noah Berlatsky

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

Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Edith Piaf: they're all still practically household names.

Let's not ignore the fact that the original James Bonds wasn't just white. He was a white supremacist.

Iin a passionate Facebook thread last week, children's author Meg Rosoff rejected the idea that there are "too few books for marginalized young people," as librarian Edith Edi Campbell had suggested.

With the death of Leonard Nimoy, it's a good moment to pay tribute to (and question) his most famous character.

A new Facebook post calls into question cover depictions of hyper-sexualized men and women.

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.

This doesn't mean that the outcomes of domestic violence are always equal; men tend to be bigger and stronger than women, and therefore are more likely to cause serious harm, even in situations where violence is reciprocal. Still, the fact that women are frequently perpetrators of violence in domestic situations substantially undermines the typical story of domestic abuse—and helps to show just how harmful that story is.

The founder of the brilliant fyeahblackrockmusic Tumblr talks racial politics, Kelis, and . . . the Doobie Brothers?

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