Noah Berlatsky

The history of pop music, and of black pop music in particular, has always been gay history.

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

Banks' "Ice Princess" video shows that it's not only white people who can pick up someone else's culture.

The first graphic novel to win a Caldeott gives children the chance to be adults, and adults the chance to be kids.

Female masturbation is sexy in part because it flirts with lesbianism. For male masturbation, it's a different story.

Bus ads comparing Muslims to Hitler have been replaced with images of a superhero. And not just any superhero.

english lit academic. wish fulfiller. thwarted world-changer.

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.

Writing can be hard and uncomfortable and precarious—but it's hard and uncomfortable and precarious in the way that any job can be.

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.