Health bill Waterloo for the Republicans
The truth is that the passage of the health reform bill is a huge defeat for Republicans, and no victories in 2010 will compensate for that, says David Frum in Frum Forum. The victors, besides the...
View Article‘Politainment’ is bad for democracy
Sarah Palin’s Alaska reveals a convergence of “reality” entertainment media and politics, and it’s a dangerous one, says Nick Jans in USA Today. The end result, Jans says, is an electoral system where...
View ArticleThere were no ‘good old days’
There’s no such thing as a pop monoculture, says Steve Hyden in Salon. Whatever popular monoculture there ever was seems to exist “safely in the past, where it can live on in our imaginations as a...
View ArticleSecondhand market hurting companies
Buying used video games hurts the developers, says Jameson Durall in Gamasutra. Companies have sold downloadable content and online passes to try and offset deficits, but more must be done before the...
View ArticleOlder, edgier Eddie Murphy is gone
“Eddie Murphy was a brilliant comic mastermind,” says Tim Grierson in Gawker. “But he’s also the guy who’s done a lot of dreck for a long time.” It’s time for fans to accept that the earlier and edgier...
View ArticleLust for barbarity drives Hollywood
In the wake of the Aurora shooting, a Telegraph piece from 2008 seems eerily prophetic. Jenny McCartney decries the sadistic violence of contemporary cinema, with particular attention to The Dark...
View ArticleOnce upon a time, there were narrators
The rise of visual mass media is altering how we consume information, changing us from readers to viewers in “frantic pursuit of wonder,” says Steve Almond in The New York Times, and we’re losing our...
View ArticlePop songs cater to male desire
Female pop stars such as Madonna and Miley Cyrus aren’t as sexually liberated as their songs would suggest, considering a majority of their songwriters are men expressing their own “wishful thinking”...
View ArticleSociety is cruder, but it’s also kinder
“We may well be an increasingly ill-mannered society, one that’s soaking in violent video games, instantly available online porn, and ‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’ like our mothers used to soak in...
View ArticleVoters mistake lies for truth
In “Don Quixote,” author Miguel de Cervantes trains his readers “in the subtle art of believing something while knowing it not to be true,” an art that appears lost on the public today as politicians...
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