Noah Berlatsky

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.

Fans of Batgirl are fans of Batgirl. They buy her comic to see her being heroic, not to see her being a slasher movie victim.

Hating sex workers—and treating them as things—can get you money.

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

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

The founder of the brilliant fyeahblackrockmusic Tumblr talks racial politics, Kelis, and . . . the Doobie Brothers?

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

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

According to an Academy Awards voter, the right sort of people, with the right sort of education and connections, can't be racist.