A quick New Year’s kudos to NPR for bringing more depth to our discussions of modern pop culture. Their new series In Character explores how authors develop indelible characters and, more significantly, how those characters reflect our broader cultural values. While the series is appearing on “All Things Considered,” NPR is also maintaining [...]

I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought it rather weird that in between two of the usual thumbs-up reviews in a recent newspaper ad for the “Golden Compass” was a glowing review from … the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops: “The Golden Compass” Is An Exciting Adventure Story, Entirely In Harmony With Catholic Teaching. This [...]

Adults don’t get it. As I look at all the hullaballoo over the new “The Golden Compass” movie (based on the first novel in Philip Pullman’s fantasy trilogy “His Dark Materials“), I am reminded of the Ursula Le Guin pro-fantasy manifesto: “Why Are Americans So Afraid of Dragons?” In that 1974 essay, Le Guin indicts a general [...]

“24″ — the “real-time” TV series featuring Jack Bauer saving the world against all odds (and those pesky terrorists) — has been strangely addictive through its six seasons … and counting. It’s not a love affair. It’s more like being a voyeur on the Bush administration’s rugged individualist fantasy. In any case, I thought I had [...]

My, how time flies. It was seven months ago that Don Imus made his remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team and found himself on the receiving end of a considerable amount of heat from a wide range of critics. Now Don Imus is returning to the airwaves in New York City, and he is [...]

We’ve posted a new article in the PopPolitics magazine: “Fall Out Boy’s Biggest Faggot Fan” by Sam J. Miller, who has previously written about the political and economic subtext of haunted house films. In his latest piece, Miller writes: Fall Out Boy just wants to be your boy. Everybody’s boy. While most of the band’s career has [...]

We’ve got a couple of new articles up today. The first is a new poetry review, “The Whitman (Walt not Slim) of Popular Culture” by Richard C. Crepeau, who is also a regular blog contributor. Poetry and pop culture often seem diametrically opposed in modern American culture. Crepeau’s review, however, reveals a potentially much more [...]

We’ve posted a new article in our online magazine: “Brewing Globalization With a Local Flavor” by Allen McDuffee. McDuffee writes, It would seem like a real blunder, maybe even cultural insensitivity, for Starbucks to market a new food product just for the month of Ramadan — the month Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset. But Starbucks executives [...]

“The Kite Runner” is easy to love. It’s a story written in elegantly simple prose that simultaneously humanizes and complicates a people and a region that, amazingly, Americans never — since their attention got quickly diverted to another place, another set of conflicts — had a chance to get to know, even if only in that [...]

I’m with most people, I think, when I say that Radiohead’s move to sell their latest CD online at pay-what-you-want pricing is possibly the coolest musical moment since … well, in Radiohead’s anarchic spirit, whatever you thought was a previously cool moment. For some perspective, check out Melena Ryzik’s insightful analysis in the New York Times: In [...]

If I were asked to discuss the inspirations for PopPolitics, I could talk about all the great cultural critics who teach us to take pop culture seriously. But the deepest inspirations, I believe, are the great artists, the producers of pop culture, who never allow us to see their writing, directing, etc as simply [...]

Here’s an easy riddle. What can bore you and scare the hell out of you at the same time? That would be an American news broadcast. Whether it’s the nightly news on network TV or the 24-hour news channels on cable, I am amazed how many times I can get through a half hour without learning [...]

We’ve posted a ground-breaking article today in the magazine: “Haunting Our Homes: Nightmares of Gentrification” by Sam J. Miller. The article discusses the ways in which the modern horror film — and specifically, the subgenre of the haunted house film — acts as an allegory of gentrification and all the class and racial, public and private [...]

We are minutes away from the first of many Sunday afternoons brought to you by the National Football League. To put the American obsession with their own particularly violent and brutal version of football in context, keep in mind the words of Jonathan Yardley in his review of Michael Oriard’s “Brand NFL: Making and [...]

We’ve posted a new article in our online magazine: “Virtual Victories: Hezbollah’s “Special Force 2” by Allen McDuffee. The article discusses the controversial new video game, which recreates — from Hezbollah’s perspective — last year’s July War between Israel and the Lebanese Shia militia group. It also compares Hezbollah’s efforts to the U.S. Army’s efforts [...]