Noah Berlatsky

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

Daredevil focuses on the dynamics of heroism—the display of strength and violence as a way to distance oneself from weakness.

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.

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.

These covers remind us of the lengthy, rich—but often obscured—history of female songwriters.

Sex and bodies don't clarify gender; they confuse the issue.

"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.

This doesn't mean that the outcomes of domestic violence are always equal; men tend to be bigger and stronger than women, and therefore are more likely to cause serious harm, even in situations where violence is reciprocal. Still, the fact that women are frequently perpetrators of violence in domestic situations substantially undermines the typical story of domestic abuse—and helps to show just how harmful that story is.

Is the gender of the philosopher a marginal curiosity—or is it more central?

The Lord of the Flies can feel like a vacation spot for conflict-management consultants in comparison to social media.