Noah Berlatsky

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

Katniss is the voice of conscience and morality in the film, and in The Hunger Games series as a whole. In the just released last film in the series, she tries repeatedly to avoid unnecessary deaths. She insists that refugees from an attacked base be given an escape route, for example, and exposes herself in an effort to help them.

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

Female masturbation is sexy in part because it flirts with lesbianism. For male masturbation, it's a different story.

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.

Last year there was much excitement at the announcement that Lupita Nyong'o was going to play a major role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens — the first Black woman to star in the franchise.

Iin a passionate Facebook thread last week, children's author Meg Rosoff rejected the idea that there are "too few books for marginalized young people," as librarian Edith Edi Campbell had suggested.

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

If you want America to relearn how to hate white Jews, the quickest way to do that is to associate them with black people.

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.