popular culture

Will they have gluten-free treats? Is white chocolate structurally racist? Are brown M&M’s offensive? Isn’t Halloween a pagan occasion? Why does that costume look pornographic? These weren’t big…

After Kathryn Schulz’s eviscerating portrait of Thoreau in the New Yorker, the nineteenth-century nature boy has had no shortage of apologists. Jonathan Malesic salvages Thoreau’s political vision…

When you get down to it, neuroscience is just brains studying brains. One upshot of this reflexivity is a funny kind of loop: studying the brain tells you about being a self; being a self offers up…

Ridley Scott’s The Martian just had a massive $55 million opening weekend. Matt Damon stars as Mark Watney, a stranded astronaut whose limited supplies are made up for by an abundance of wit and…

After leading his team to victory over the Seattle Seahawks last Sunday, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers told reporters that God “was a Packers fan tonight”—a retort to Russell Wilson’s…

In the first season of Adult Swim’s Black Jesus, the titular hero discovers that the tomatoes he and his friends are growing in the community garden seem to mysteriously and magically have the same…

Is there a prize for most offensive conversion narrative?

In “ Federer, Both Flesh and Not,” his essay about the 2006 Wimbledon Men’s final, David Foster Wallace suggests that one reason we watch sports is to experience a specific kind of beauty: The human…

Earlier this week, ESPN commentator and world religions expert Curt Schilling got suspended for a missive that compared Muslims to Nazis. Unfavorably. Though Schilling had tried to delete the image…

The following essay contains some minor spoilers. – eds. Imagine a world where robots look, act, and function like human beings, minus consciousness or free will. They’ve been programmed to take over…