Noah Berlatsky

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

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

Country music is an overwhelmingly heterosexual endeavor. The LGBTQ community certainly listen to, and perform, country, but in terms of lyrical content and themes, country has been focused on male-female romantic love.

A Ghostbusters with a female cast is a thorough violation of the spirit of the original. And that's a good thing.

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.

The loss of gospel history has meant forgetting how important black women have been to American performance styles.

Rather than seeing Beyoncé's sexual performance as linked to destruction, we can consider whether eroticism might be an alternative to violence.

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

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

Is the gender of the philosopher a marginal curiosity—or is it more central?