popular culture

Filmmakers Joe Fox and James Nubile, granted “fly on the wall” access during the 2009 initiative to repeal Maine’s marriage equality law, expose the myths promoted by its opponents.

Like any pilgrimage site, Burning Man is less a destination than a pretext for the journey. These days, of course, flying into Reno isn’t so hard—but actually opening up to whatever Black Rock City has to offer… that journey can be arduous. If you go looking for a festival with sex and drugs and dance music, that is all you will find. But if you pause to wonder why there’s a temple in the middle of it, why people come back year after year even if they don’t do drugs, or, for that matter, how it is that the art, community, and culture of Black Rock City is constructed without a Them putting on entertainments for Us, much more can be received.

I will not go to see the movie The Help because already I have encountered and regularly encounter enough messages suggesting history is made only by white agency. I will not go to see the movie The Help because I do not wish to view yet another production that tells me, a black woman, it is all about whiteness.

Walking down the street in my neighborhood a few years ago I was warmly greeted by the president of my synagogue, who cheerily introduced me to her new male companion. “You’ll like Rebecca,” she said. “She’s the one who gives those baseball sermons on Yom Kippur…”

The street bordering Winehouse’s apartment has become a shrine that includes vodka and beer. While it may sound unseemly, some see it as a natural expression of our imagined relationship with the supernatural.

After treating the Vietnam War and the torture images of Abu Ghraib in his most recent films, Oscar-winning documentary maker Errol Morris turns to a 1977 scandal involving North Carolina beauty queen Joyce McKinney in his new documentary Tabloid.

After three years of waiting, an Austrian atheist has won the right to wear a colander on his head for a driver’s license photo. But are Flying Spaghetti Monster communities themselves religious?

Harry Potter’s world would be more familiar to a scientist than to a mystic. Yes, it includes goblins, charms, and curses; but these are all basically explicable according to their own internal logic. Yet there isn’t anything that transcends human knowledge.

The film is disingenuous—or rather the marketing for it is—as it suggests that we make a choice between nature and grace. One reviewer suggests that it’s about the middle way, about the redemption of siblings.

More personal and less archetypical than her previous records, Welch’s new album tells stories of American religious realism and spiritual strivings both anonymously mythical and personally individual.