Why, you ask? I lay it out in this week’s Atlantic column. Y’all getting me addicted has probably been the best pop cultural thing to happen to me this year.  Read More »

So, I was browsing through YouTube the other night,  clicking, as one will, on random things that pop up as recommendations. And if No Greater Love actually is, as advertised, the Christian Movie Event of the Year, all I can say is that Christians deserve better written, better acted, better-produced, and more deeply-felt movies than this: I enjoyed Saved, but I understand how people would... 

Oh, man you guys. I have tickets to see Robyn and Kelis next week. I am so excited. The chances of me weeping copiously at the 9:30 Club are perilously high, particularly if Robyn performs any of her new stuff. I’ve gushed over “Dancing On My Own” and “Dancehall Queen”, but I love “Hang With Me” as an entry in the loneliness soundtrack that so many of the best... 

Emily had some good thoughts on how people with HIV should be usefully portrayed in pop culture: The best way to incorporate HIV-positive people or people with AIDS in storylines is to have them blend into the fabric of the plot, I think. It’s a real-life issue that people grapple with, and there are all sorts of ways to use the daily struggle of AIDS to introduce plot drama (I lost my job; will... 

One thing I’ve enjoyed about the big music profiles that have come out this summer, whether it’s been the stuff about Diplo in the New York Times Magazine and now GQ profiles of M.I.A. or the smaller but still interesting profile of Dr. Luke in New York this week is that they keep bumping up against a great and mysterious truth of pop music. Music can be engineered to be... 

So, over the weekend, I kind of decided that my initial reaction to Lynn Hirschberg’s M.I.A. profile had maybe been a little lazy. And so I wrote a column about it for The Atlantic, situating it in a larger argument about about celebrities as reliable narrators: Some celebrity personae, of course, are so patently false that there’s nothing to do but enjoy them. No investigative journalists... 

If they can make Ke$ha seem sort of appealing, and wholesome, and communitarian, they can sell anything: A project I’d really like to take on at some point is to watch all of The Simpsons, from the beginning.  Of all the things things I regret missing from a childhood spent largely isolated from pop culture, The Simpsons is probably the thing I’m saddest about.  I think my mother... 

Some of you may remember the friendly tiff Noah Berlatsky and I had about Twilight last fall.  Since then, we’ve become email pals, and he was nice enough to ask me to contribute to a series he’s publishing on criticism.  I wrote a personal history for him, with some thoughts about why I do what I do.  An excerpt is here: And after watching policy bloggers slug it out... 

Image of a minor Lord of Darkness used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of OtterFreak. I laughed a lot reading Michael Jones’ meditation on pop cultural dealbreakers in relationships.  Steely Dan is his: And the world, in all of its once promising glory, crashes down around you. How could you have ever ever ever in a million years spent time with this person? All those thousand... 

So, a couple of days ago, I was sitting at my computer, when this fairly intense memory of listening to a performance of a mournful pop song with the word “Snowbird” in middle school flitted across my mind.  I googled, and turns out it’s a country song by Anne Murray.  I’m sure it was a cover and a pop arrangement I remember, but it’s funny how it’s stuck...