Noah Berlatsky

"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.

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

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

"I believe that, in order to address these problems, we need to first understand how we got here."

The first graphic novel to win a Caldeott gives children the chance to be adults, and adults the chance to be kids.

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

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

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

As a parent, you tend to assume that you have some say in forming your child's mental landscape. Then Santa comes along.

Their sexuality traps and destroys male innocence, as they grad hold, by the penis- the better to lead him to castration. Make no mistake that castration is greeted with fear, terror, and disgust—but also with glee. Women as super villains allow their characters to be super powerful; a force for evil is at least a force. In a media landscape where women are often rendered secondary, invisible, and passive, the femme fatale, in her icy violence, seizes female agency along with the phallus that she so efficiently cuts off.