Noah Berlatsky

Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Edith Piaf: they're all still practically household names.

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.

Genre boundaries are conscious of race—and, in the case of rock, conscious of gender too.

It's hard to deny the appeal of the masculine ideal, especially when embodied in Jude Law. And yet, it's also a depressing vision.

Is it insulting to ask about the greatest female comics creator?

Art without politics actually results in a sweeping Puritanism. For art to have power, it needs to engage with power, with politics.

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

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.

So, if there are so many ways to sing this song, and if it's meant different things at different points, why complain about Beyoncé's version?

Critics say call-out culture is mean-spirited and bullying. Not so fast.