Ted Lasso Is So Good Because We Are So Broken
Like many other Americans with a budget for streaming services, I watched the first season of Ted Lasso, initially with tremendous hesitation and then with ardent affection—the latter overcoming the...
View ArticleI Want My Lesbian TV
There’s a scene in HBO’s series Hacks in which Jean Smart, who stars as a Joan Rivers–esque comic named Deborah Vance, asks her 20-something comedy writer Ava (played by Hannah Einbinder) if she’s a...
View ArticleHow Reality TV Fails Its Stars
Reality television has an almost universally bad reputation. Those that decry it say that it is vapid and an unwelcome peek into the worst parts of the human psyche, and even those that love it think...
View ArticleWe Sure Do Love Our White Lady Grifter Stories
“Anna Delvey scammed her way into places that I’d never be allowed into,” said my friend Mutale Nkonde, founder of AI for the People, a non-profit dedicated to bridging knowledge gaps about artificial...
View ArticleFandom Hasn’t Changed, Its Power and Influence Has
Franz Liszt sat at his piano, his profile in full view of the audience. He cut a dashing figure onstage: his thick hair hung to his shoulders, his aquiline nose jutted dramatically above his full lips,...
View Article‘Blonde’ Is Little More Than Torture Porn
In the early pages of Blonde, Joyce Carol Oates’s best-selling fictionalized biography of Marilyn Monroe that was published in 2000, our iconic protagonist—still Norma Jeane, though already sporting...
View ArticleWhere Are All the Bisexual Men on Television?
“I’m not even sure bisexuality exists. I think it’s just a layover on the way to Gaytown,” Carrie Bradshaw famously said in the offensive, misinformed 1998 episode of Sex and the City in which she...
View ArticleDungeons & Dragons Is the Game We Need Now
Dungeons and Dragons has been around for a very long time, yet is more popular than ever and attracting much more diverse players than in the past. I’ve been playing since 1987, and I’ve been...
View ArticleThat Time Barbie and I Had an Epiphany
Warning: Light spoilers ahead. I never believed I had a right to play with Barbies. Though I wasn’t exactly the stereotypical tomboy who thought girl stuff was stupid, I was an awkward child who found...
View ArticleWill the Real Priscilla Presley Please Stand Up?
Roughly midway into Priscilla—Sofia Coppola’s chamber piece of a biopic about Priscilla Presley—there is a moment that defines the film’s greatest strengths and its major failing. During a sun-soaked...
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