Noah Berlatsky

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

Some love stories don't end happily. So why do so many romance novels insist they do?

"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.

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?

"I believe that, in order to address these problems, we need to first understand how we got here."

As a white woman, Swift can afford to celebrate carelessness. Beyoncé, though, knows that even her casualness has to be perfect.

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

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.

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.

Critics say call-out culture is mean-spirited and bullying. Not so fast.