popular culture

Why the current cultural fetish for zombies? In 2014’s Hooked, Nir Eyal ventures a guess: “Perhaps technology’s unstoppable progress—ever more pervasive and persuasive—has grabbed us in a fearful…

What more important natural resource could there be than the air we breathe every minute of every day? And yet, air pollution remains rampant throughout the world. The World Health Organization has…

On a historic trip to Cuba this week, and in the wake of a terrorist attack in Brussels, President Obama sat in a Havana stadium extolling the sacred power of baseball to a trio of ESPN commentators…

Last month, the Broadway cast of Hamilton dazzled with a live Grammy performance, and last week they made it to the White House. Hamilton is a game changer, but not just for theater—I believe that the…

From Blood Eagle to Blood Libel to “Wilding,” myths of the violent Other have underwritten violence across centuries.

And it came to pass after the captivity of Israel and the desolation of Jerusalem that Jeremiah sat mourning and he lamented this lament . Kendrick Lamar’s Untitled Unmastered ( UU), surprise-released…

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan stated: “Religion and politics are necessarily related. We need religion as a guide. We need it because we are imperfect, and our government needs the church because…

With this week’s big Oscar win for Spotlight, an unsparing look at the Catholic Church’s cover-up of clerical sex abuse, it’s hard to fathom that Hollywood once lived in fear of the Catholic Church…

Could we be living in a simulation created by an advanced civilization? Philosopher Nick Bostrom argues that it’s possible, at least in theory, to create a program in which artificially conscious…

Naz & Maalik is a groundbreaking film. Featuring two black, gay Muslim teenage boys, the film, written and directed by Jack Dockendorf, is based on interviews with youth living at the intersections of…