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.

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.

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

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

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."

The cover for A-Force is a combination of tired trope and deodorant ad. Female empowerment can do so much better.

Genre boundaries are conscious of race—and, in the case of rock, conscious of gender too.

A recent controversy at the Calgary Expo suggests MRAs care more about making opponents look bad than they do about discrimination.

"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.

For a second, it looked like the rabid hordes of gamergaters would be joined by metalheads. But #metalgate was never meant to be.