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Culture Trust

Columns

Shutting Up
June 09, 2015
This weekend, I used up one of my ten free monthly views of The New York Times to find film critic A.O. Scott declaring a national “humor crisis.” No, he wasn’t referring to any of his colleague Maureen Dowd’s perennial struggles with political humor; rather, he ...

The Fantastic Four Under Fire
May 29, 2015
Only in America can the skin color of someone who spends much of his waking life on fire supply the basis for a spirited pop-culture controversy. That’s the grim lesson of the media run-up to the latest in the long line of lumbering comics franchises’ superhero cash-cows ...

Freedom of Choice Degree Zero
May 26, 2015
Soon there will only be two kinds of ads on broadcast TV: commercials for things that make you sick and commercials for things that cure the illnesses caused by the things that make you sick. That’s why fast-food ads are stocked with images of youth living it up, while Big ...

Hello, Twitter! It’s Barack.
May 22, 2015
This Monday, President Obama joined Twitter. That, clearly, was his first mistake. In short order, a barrage of racist tweets greeted our first African American president. The whole contretemps called to mind the premise of the popular “Obama’s Anger ...

Hell’s Pundits
May 20, 2015
When the news broke this weekend that a violent biker melee at a theme restaurant in Waco claimed nine lives and otherwise injured 18, there were all sorts of solemn topics available to the interlocuters of pundit discourse.  There was the awkward contrast of the Waco episode ...

Spare Change
May 15, 2015
Roll over, Andrew Jackson, and tell Frederick Douglass the news. That, in essence, was the upshot of a feverishly buzzed-over online poll conducted earlier this week—except that the African American eminence selected to replace our redoubtably racist and ...

Behind Every Fortune Lies Nail Polish
May 11, 2015
I woke up this morning to the news that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo had announced increased employment law regulation and enforcement in response to last week’s blockbuster New York Times investigation of nail salons, effective immediately. Workers will be required to wear ...

What Bono Does Next Won’t Shock You
May 08, 2015
If you’re looking to make a splash in the oversaturated social-mediasphere, nice is the new rule of thumb. The trendlet—officially dubbed the “Nice Internet” by no less an authority than the New York Times—encompasses videos devoted to cute animals, precocious kiddies, ...

Pep Talks for Spinsters
May 04, 2015
Here we go again! We are in another moment of pondering the benefits of marriage versus those of singlehood, with the all-important corollary question: Should we choose to become parents or go childfree? When I say we, I mean women, of course. As Elissa Strauss, writing for The ...

Nights of the Living Dread
May 01, 2015
This week, the luridly misleading media coverage of the Baltimore uprisings called to mind a fittingly grim narrative template from the entertainment world: shlocky action-horror fare. The strange alchemy by which reportage of Freddie Gray’s murder at the hands of six ...

Free Speech Culture Warriors of the World, Unite
April 29, 2015
It can be hard keeping track of all the awards that PEN America gives out. The organization, devoted to promoting freedom of expression, offers some two dozen, for translations, essays, novels, plays, and seemingly, every single other literary form. (There are two awards for ...

An American Marriage, Revisited
April 24, 2015
Limited Partnership, a new documentary about one of the nation’s first gay couples to be lawfully married, begins with a scene you might find in a legal thriller: an establishing shot of gray-slate courthouse columns gives way to a scrum of reporters positioned nearby. ...