We lost so many beloved cultural figures in 2016 that the year might go down in history as the Year of Celebrity Death. The losses hit my generation hard. The...
Culture in Context
Oh, to live in Stars Hollow, where crabby but hunky Luke runs the diner, quirky Kirk holds a long string of peculiar jobs, and a single mother and her daughter...
The tradition of fly-on-the-wall documentaries about American political campaigns is a long and mostly honorable one. It starts in 1960 with Primary, which...
I used to wonder when I’d finally feel grown up. I thought it would be a more cataclysmic rite of passage—like getting married, having a baby, or going to your...
Childbirth on television is not, shall we say, precisely accurate. Hollywood seems to consider a new human being’s arrival on the planet to be utterly lacking...
What’s old is new again, and in entertainment we’ve come full circle, back to where we started, gathered round the hearth to listen to old...
Audiences like Sally Field. They really, really like her. And in her new film, Hello, My Name Is Doris (Roadside Attractions, 2016), she is poignantly human...
The statute of limitations has long since expired on the crimes that caused the global economic collapse of 2008, and there never was any public accounting...
The first Star Wars film came out when I was just a year old. I have a sentimental attachment to the franchise, but my 10-year-old daughter is the real deal: a...
“If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.” In the movie Spotlight, those words, spoken almost in passing by a victims’...
