Review: Showtime’s Homeland
It would be easy to write Showtime’s Homeland, which debuted to smashing ratings, off as a classic Cold War drama updated for the modern age; plucky, driven CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes)...
Heroes, bumblers, and patriarchs: Fathers on Doctor Who
The latest season of Doctor Who (a long-running UK scifi/fantasy series about a time traveling even-longer-lived body-changing alien -- whew, shortest summary ever!), the second of current showrunner...
Police Entrapment and the Explosion of the Occupy Wall Street Movement: An Eyewitness Account
Two weeks after a small band of protesters set up camp in New York’s Liberty Plaza Park, deep in the heart of the financial district, our numbers have expanded to staggering numbers. This is true...
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...
The intriguing world of Boardwalk Empire
The critically acclaimed Boardwalk Empire returned for its second season this week with ‘21,’ which informed viewers that all was not well in Atlantic City, and set the stage for what looks like...
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: Tinker Tailor, Soldier Spy
"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" is out now in the UK, December in the US 1973. The opening scene of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” tastes like a can of ox-tail soup washed down with whiskey and 40 fags....