Noah Berlatsky

english lit academic. wish fulfiller. thwarted world-changer.

Action movies don't usually bother much with romance. The trailer for The Transporter: Refueled certainly doesn't. The hero is cool — sexy women, plural, throw themselves at him, or at least stand near him and things blow up; there are fights and revenge and high production values. Romance is, at best, a secondary concern.

Rather than seeing Beyoncé's sexual performance as linked to destruction, we can consider whether eroticism might be an alternative to violence.

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

In the U.S., anti-Semitism is universally condemned. This means that, effectively, anti-Semitism doesn't exist.

David Ress' Aphexswift is genius precisely because it's so unlikely.

For a second, it looked like the rabid hordes of gamergaters would be joined by metalheads. But #metalgate was never meant to be.

Bus ads comparing Muslims to Hitler have been replaced with images of a superhero. And not just any superhero.

Illicit passions aren't less enjoyable because they're illicit. Quite the contrary.

Banks' "Ice Princess" video shows that it's not only white people who can pick up someone else's culture.