popular culture

If the critique of our reliance on technology is the obvious takeaway from Her, the less obvious but perhaps more interesting critique seems to be of our culture’s attitude toward romantic love.

Hannibal has “beautiful” crime scenes, but it does not really romanticize suffering. Its version of Hannibal Lecter is a great aesthete, but the beautiful tableaux he creates are polluted, just as the elaborate dinners he prepares for his friends and acquaintances secretly involve the cooked organs of his victims.

The news has hit most of the major papers in India and the United States. Under threat from a small group called Shiksha Bachao Andolan, Penguin Press has withdrawn Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History.

We—especially those in academia and the media—have written off religion as divisive, outmoded and irrelevant just as we have trivialized spirituality as frivolous self-indulgence. As a result, our politics are soulless and our candidates’ calls for hope fail to translate into change.

Pete Seeger had mixed feelings about organized religion, but he had strong feelings about organizing. He knew the power of joining people together in song. Just don’t call him a saint.

“We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to co-operate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.”

While Jewish foodies frequently use “traditional cultures” to critique everything from the cruelty and impact of modern agribusiness, to the lack of pleasure and meaning we derive from our food, they flout their own tradition when it comes to eating pig meat to the detriment of their greater goals.

“I’d be lying if I didn’t have the occasional moment of shock and shyness, or wondering what on earth I was thinking when I decided to put my boobs on the internet, but aside from worrying that my mother-in-law or my boss is going to find out some day, I don’t fear what anyone thinks about it.”

The choices and consequences on “Nashville”—ABC’s popular drama, returning on January 15—are shaped not by evangelical faith, but by redemptive crusades to achieve an awkward, messy, and ambiguous sense of moral and musical purity. By exchanging the role of traditional southern Christianity for postmodern Bible Belt spirituality, the show brings the South into conformity with the shifting demographics of the rest of the country.

“I was quite shocked upon learning of the relic’s loss,” said former prime minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh in a rare public statement released days after the disappearance. “As a Buddhist and the one who listed Buddhism as the state religion in the 1993 constitution, I am extremely sad, completely grievous for the loss of the Buddha relics which were a happy, peaceful, prosperous, and holy thing for our respectful country.”