Latest Articles

Douchebag Decree: Ken Buck

October 14, 2010 at 6:23pm

Oh, Ken Buck. You make my job so easy, what with your refusing to prosecute a rapist because you thought the victim had had an abortion. Maybe you’ve heard of the Douchebag Decree, and you got so excited that you tried to be as outrageously bigoted as possible so that we would give you a shout-out? Was that it? Or are you…oh no… you are… just a HUGE...

Tube Tied: Parenthood and the Demise of the Nuclear Family on Television

by Michelle Dean

October 14, 2010 at 11:29am

I'm probably alone on this one, but my secret obsession at the moment is NBC's completely milquetoast Parenthood, and I wish I could better explain why. The show is, of course, well-cast—I'd watch either Peter Krause or Lauren Graham pick their noses for an hour if it came to it—and has that patina of shiny Bay-Area bourgeois healthfulness, complete with artfully cluttered ranch...

Music Matters: Kool Thing

by Sarah Jaffe

October 14, 2010 at 10:42am

I wanted to BE Kim Gordon. Hell, the fact that her music sort of scared me was a plus. I wanted to make myself scary.

Bibliobitch: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

by Lindsay Baltus

October 13, 2010 at 3:23pm

Books that use food as a gateway to emotion can be pretty unbearable (hi again, Eat, Pray, Love). Thankfully, Aimee Bender's new novel is more like one of the fairy tale rewrites I wrote about a few weeks ago than one of those self-indulgent food memoirs.

The story follows Rose Edelstein, who discovers on her ninth birthday that she can taste feelings. When Rose...

Adventures in Feministory: Anna Julia Cooper

by Kjerstin Johnson

October 13, 2010 at 2:17pm

Speaking as one of the few women at the Pan-African Congress conference in London, 1900, founding the Colored Women’s YWCA in 1905, and pushing W.E.B Du Bois to write Black Reconstruction are only three of Anna Julia Cooper’s achievements. Sure, when you live to be 105, you can set your sights high, but in an era of progressive depravity when it came to race and gender, Cooper...

Tube Tied: The Wire, Mad Men, and the Ideal of Inclusivity in Popular Culture

by Michelle Dean

October 13, 2010 at 12:22pm

I've been following the discussion about the representativeness of The Social Network, about whether it accurately depicts women and "toxic masculinity" in technology particularly—a conversation which, as I said last week, I've been sort of surprised we're even having. Such a jaded feminist have I become, I guess, since I'm now actively surprised when people actually care about how women are...

Political InQueery: Campaigns Run Afoul

by Everett Maroon

October 13, 2010 at 12:04pm

I double-checked a map of the United States this evening just to make sure that Nevada is not on a border with Mexico, because an ad from Sharron Angle's campaign against Harry Reid implies that undocumented workers sneak into Nevada on a regular basis. Only the ad doesn't call them "undocumented workers," it just refers to "illegals," and I hate when people use adjectives as nouns. The...

Music Matters: Magic Songs

by Sarah Jaffe

October 13, 2010 at 11:54am

It's something I can never quite put my finger on but I use certain songs to play my own emotions like a musical instrument, to change the way I feel (as long as I can handle feeling something intensely).

Which songs do it for you?

Mad World: The Naked Truth

by Kelsey Wallace

October 12, 2010 at 12:34pm

Calling all Mad World readers! Our second Mad World Forum is next week, on October 20, right here in Portland! We'll be discussing The Naked Truth: Body image, Photoshop, and Other Adventures in Advertising. Let's get started on that discussion right now, shall we?

Yes, let's.

Tube Tied: Towards a Feminist Theory of Superheroes: “No Ordinary Family”

by Michelle Dean

October 12, 2010 at 12:12pm

It's been an abnormally bad year for new shows—there are few I'm sticking with past one episode. But so far, I'm still watching No Ordinary Family, a little one-hour drama from ABC that will air its third episode tonight. The premise is fairly simple: distracted, over-committed modern nuclear family goes on family vacation. They get into a plane crash in the jungle, mingle...