Noah Berlatsky

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

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.

If my wife and son had thought bubbles above their heads, like in the comics, you would be able to read them saying, "dog dog dog dog dog dog dog."

So, if there are so many ways to sing this song, and if it's meant different things at different points, why complain about Beyoncé's version?

"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.

Rodriguez is confused when she says that people want her to steal white people's superheroes. But she also has a point.

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

Sex and bodies don't clarify gender; they confuse the issue.

I am on my knees in 15-degree weather scrubbing poop from the sidewalk, and I have an epiphany of sorts—I do not want this dog.