Noah Berlatsky

"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.

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.

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

The surface text of the film is that you can't trust some guys. The (barely) subtext is that you can't trust any guys.

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

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

Fifth Harmony is nobody's idea of a roots band.

In the U.S., anti-Semitism is universally condemned. This means that, effectively, anti-Semitism doesn't exist.

Last year there was much excitement at the announcement that Lupita Nyong'o was going to play a major role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens — the first Black woman to star in the franchise.

To understand this debate, it's important to consider historical context.