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.

As a parent, you tend to assume that you have some say in forming your child's mental landscape. Then Santa comes along.

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 surface text of the film is that you can't trust some guys. The (barely) subtext is that you can't trust any guys.

"Childbearing [is] barbaric and pregnancy should be abolished," wrote radical feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex.

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

Is it insulting to ask about the greatest female comics creator?

There's a good argument to be made that the earliest, and the best, rockabilly performers were women. Slicked-back, hiccuping, hopped up cool.

"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.

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