Noah Berlatsky

Who is memorialized in death has everything to do with race, class . . . and who you were in life.

It's not the gender that's the problem: It's the oppression.

With the death of Leonard Nimoy, it's a good moment to pay tribute to (and question) his most famous character.

"The look on Miley's face during Nicki Minaj's savage, expletive-laden rant says it all," Salon tweeted the day after the VMAs. Less than 140 characters, but still enough to link a black woman to a longstanding racial slur.

Country music is an overwhelmingly heterosexual endeavor. The LGBTQ community certainly listen to, and perform, country, but in terms of lyrical content and themes, country has been focused on male-female romantic love.

There's a good argument to be made that the earliest, and the best, rockabilly performers were women. Slicked-back, hiccuping, hopped up cool.

Katniss is the voice of conscience and morality in the film, and in The Hunger Games series as a whole. In the just released last film in the series, she tries repeatedly to avoid unnecessary deaths. She insists that refugees from an attacked base be given an escape route, for example, and exposes herself in an effort to help them.

For once, central character Andrew's flaws are tied up in the fact that he is—wait for it—fundamentally decent.

As a white woman, Swift can afford to celebrate carelessness. Beyoncé, though, knows that even her casualness has to be perfect.

With the prospect of another Bush/Clinton presidential contest looming as ominously as Donald Trump's hairpiece, the word "dynasty" seems to be frothing off of many a pundit's keyboard. "Clinton, Bush struggle to shed dynasty labels," a Washington Post headline declared.