Noah Berlatsky

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

Did the classic Adam West Batman show strike a blow (Kerwhap!) for feminism?

Iin a passionate Facebook thread last week, children's author Meg Rosoff rejected the idea that there are "too few books for marginalized young people," as librarian Edith Edi Campbell had suggested.

Metal aggression isn't sexual, but existential. As a result, women in the genre are both rare and unexpectedly equal.

The founder of the brilliant fyeahblackrockmusic Tumblr talks racial politics, Kelis, and . . . the Doobie Brothers?

Bulimia.com has reworked superhero images to show more realistic body types—and their efforts are valuable in more than the expected ways.

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

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.

Some love stories don't end happily. So why do so many romance novels insist they do?

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