From a man in Japan who has romantic attachment to a pillow, to boom in realistic baby dolls, to a movie about a man who falls deeply in love with a life-size silicon woman, our craze for surrogate objects reveals more than simple fetishism.
In response, most likely, to the (fictional) account of the lesser status of women in Catholicism’s most notorious semi-secret society in The Da Vinci Code, a group of women has come together to explain what feminism looks like, Opus Dei-style.
We might be tempted to dismiss the entire legacy of an artist or thinker whose political position or moral beliefs do not accord with our own enlightened views. We forget that we, like they, are products of an age—and that what we are throwing away might be worth far more than the pieties we cling to.
Fox News has reported that a portion of the Obama administration’s stimulus money wound up supporting gay porn in San Francisco—the religious right is clamoring again to stop arts funding.
The quintessential protest musical, Hair, is back on Broadway some forty years later, with the spotlight on what many consider to be the biggest civil rights issue of our era: marriage equality.
Deep, rich, wingnuttery abounds as everyone from Pat Buchanan to Fred Thompson falls over one another to try to terrify us about government-sponsored eugenics.
When a particularly vicious, fear-baiting, anti-Muslim video makes the rounds of the author’s friends and family, he realizes that the propaganda wasn’t meant for his generation, but for those who actually trusted what they heard on the news.
