Noah Berlatsky

The surface text of the film is that you can't trust some guys. The (barely) subtext is that you can't trust any guys.

"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.

Lower your standards, live in moderate amounts of filth, and go to bed early. The cat will thank you.

The loss of gospel history has meant forgetting how important black women have been to American performance styles.

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

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

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

At first, this looks like sexism. And then you realize, hey, this is sexism. Hope isn't allowed to do the dangerous job because Pym has put her on a pedestal, and won't let her off it.

Under the guise of philanthropy, 8 Minutes essentially blackmails some of the most marginalized and powerless people in society.

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?