Review: Drive
Drive is slick. Spy Hunter slick. Every frame oozes class, bleeds cool. Newman cool, McQueen cool, O’Neal cool. Ryan Gosling is their heir apparent, a silent human machine, driving gloves and satin...
Category: North America
How NBC Sold Out Its Female Viewers with Whitney
It’s hard to say exactly when I figured out Whitney. I’d been dreading it since this summer, when I heard that Whitney Cummings — a spectacularly hacky stand-up who trades in tired “women are...
Creating Political Change? Occupy Wall Street’s experiment in direct democracy
You wouldn’t know it from the news headlines in the United States, but for the past ten days hundreds of activists have been protesting 300 metres from the heart of Wall Street. On September...
Review: Jane Gallop – The Deaths of the Author
Jane Gallop, The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time, Duke UP, 2011. “The death of the author” has long been a theme in literary theory. First posed by the French intellectual...
So many more like Troy Davis: The Injustice of the Death Penalty
Two men were murdered by the state last night in ‘legal executions’ in Texas and Georgia, respectively. Lawrence Russel Brewer was a white supremacist who committed a vile hate crime and was...
Review: Cherie Priest – Ganymede
Cherie Priest's Ganymede (Tor, 2011), the latest entry in the Clockwork Century series, is a delicious cross-country steampunk adventure spanning from the bayous of Louisiana to an underground...
How much lower can TV go? A fall preview
This network television season, it appears that the big players are in a race to the bottom to see how low you can go in an exploitation of current economic and political conditions. My hat is off to...
Bridging the digital divide? Comcast and media consolidation
The seemingly unending anxiety over the digital divide has made it’s way into the press again the past few weeks. This anxiety speaks to a very real emergent source of injustice in the US, with...
Mad Men, and the new crop of retro sexist TV shows
This weekend, I found myself having a night out with my boyfriend. (I know, I know. It’s an exciting way to start a story. Just wait a second.) There was food, there was music, there was flattering...
Review: Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch
Jamrach's Menagerie, by Carol Birch, Doubleday 2011. Jaffy Brown has lived all of his short life among the streets and sewers of London. Everything changes one day when he encounters a tiger in the...