In ancient Greece, heroes were half god, half human. Comic superheroes followed that mold—unlikely people with exceptional abilities to leap tall buildings or...
Culture in Context
This is the year when America seems to be experiencing the 50th anniversary of everything—the Tet Offensive, the 1968 riots, the assassinations of Martin...
On election night 2016, hands full of dirty dinner dishes, I tripped over a slightly ajar cabinet door and fell hard on my left knee, my right leg overextended...
The #MeToo movement, launched by activist Tarana Burke 10 years ago, went viral in October after actress Alyssa Milano and other prominent women publicized it...
Audiences that saw Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House in theaters this past autumn must have felt a little disoriented. There on the screen...
Religious horror is a film genre in its own right, and Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist are among my all-time favorites. But even horror movies that aren’t...
Judging by the stories media tell us, boys are the only humans perplexed by puberty. Film and television tales of moving from adolescence to adulthood focus...
Entirely too much attention has been paid this year to the 50th anniversary of the 1967 “Summer of Love.” That’s when a small fraction of America’s white youth...
Even the Old Testament writers—not generally thought of as a funny lot—knew the healing power of humor: “A cheerful heart is a good medicine,” says the...
In Wonder Woman, there are moments so uncommonly witnessed in film that the audience can almost hear paradigms shifting, like giant tectonic plates of cultural...
