Television Shows That Need to Die
There comes a time when even the greatest of television shows must be brought to a graceful and quiet end; see, for example, the stellar and possibly unbeatable closure in Six Feet Under’s finale...
Category: North America
Why do some feminist spaces tolerate male abusers?
What role, if any, should men with a history of abuse of women have in feminism? This question is at the heart of ongoing debates in the feminist blogosphere over Hugo Schwyzer, a professor of gender...
Alcatraz is Boring: J.J. Abrams’ New Show Fails To Break Out
J. J. Abrams returned to television on Fox this week with Alcatraz, a crime thriller that manages to be surprisingly mundane, given the premise and the creative team behind it. The pilot informed us...
Midseason Horror: A Turn Towards Collectivity on TV?
At the start of the 2011-2012 television season, the networks were catering to a demand for fairytales. Four months later, they’re rolling out two shows with a strong horror lean, bent on creeping...
Flying While Anarchist: The Black Bloc Whipping Boy For the Security State
There was once a bargain offered to the more privileged inhabitants of the world’s more privileged nation states. It went something like this: We will treat people with brown skin and funny clothes...
Palling around with Nazis: How Republican rhetoric obscures Ron Paul’s white supremacist base and undermines democracy
Throughout the Obama presidency, members of the GOP have been quick to compare the President to Hitler. Many of the party’s current presidential hopefuls have engaged in this kind of inflammatory...
Review: Downton Abbey, Season Two
The second season of Downton Abbey returns to US airwaves this weekend, just in time for the seven households that haven’t torrented it yet. The British import has turned out to be an unexpected...
Slumming: Consuming misery on reality TV
I have been in rickety condemned buildings that it was absolutely dangerous to go through! Found six families living in one miserably ventilated cellar—24 persons, 16 of them adults, living in the...
Is Department of Justice Action on Voter Suppression Too Little, Too Late?
The 2008 Obama campaign’s brilliance when it came to grassroots organising and get out the vote campaigns clearly terrified the right, which has responded with a campaign to eradicate voting rights...
Gendering Fairy Tales: Or, the Difference Between Grimm and Once Upon a Time
In the world of books, changing the gender of the protagonist apparently changes the genre; if it’s a woman, it’s chick lit, if it’s a man, it’s literary fiction. This trend can be seen...