popular culture

The positive reception of Budrus in the U.S. says a lot about the political climate today. The right-wing “pro-Israel” movement is going through a tough time. It has always built its public appeal on one simple narrative: Israel wants peace, but it must fight to ward off implacable violence from its enemies. Anything Israel does is justified because it’s in self-defense.

There’s a scene in Martin Preib’s recent and remarkable collection of essays where he describes pulling over to the side of the road to scribble down a note, deep in conversation about the work of Walt Whitman, about what that work accomplished and how. “My terms are useless:…

The ancients were wise to life’s tragedies too. Some things do, apparently, go badly. (They could hardly think otherwise, living during that long period of history in which death was associated with the young, not the old.) So, their instruction was to ‘go with the flow’ even when that is hard to stomach. Theirs is not a relentless optimism, expecting everything, like Byrne’s. Rather, the Stoics advocated expecting nothing, but working at everything.

An interview with Sarah Zerina Usmen, of Outsourced: “I’ve noticed that in casting calls women are still cast according to descriptions like ‘hot surfer chick.’ For one of my films I’d love to make a casting call for a non-alcoholic, burka-wearing troll and throw them all off!”

Conspiracy theories ebb and flow in waves associated with how confident people feel about their social environments. When times are hard and unemployment rates are high, individuals get creative in where they look for explanations. It is no accident that talented, powerful, popular, and rich African American male rappers, along with female artists, are being targeted by these claims.

Two very different films about what happens after we die are in the theaters right now: Clint Eastwood’s gentle Hereafter and Gaspar Noe’s raw, hallucinatory Enter the Void. While covering the same cosmological territory, the films couldn’t be more different, stylistically, thematically, and religiously.

Colbert finds his “interconnectedness.”

In recent years, country songwriters have seemed to be virtually required to produce jingoistic populist anthems. But the association of country and the political right is only a recent invention.

Award-winning movie is perfect synthesis of Christian Right with Tea Party ideology.

Alternative rock, with its default anti-establishment stance (whether feigned or forthright) has not been the typical go-to place for sincere religious music. That may be changing. Though stylistically diverse, several recent releases show a unique motif: treating religious histories and sacred texts as fonts of wisdom, experience, and poetry.