Friday, June 24 2011
Enter Night: A Biography of Metallica
While Ride the Lightning was Metallica’s first exceptionally accomplished recording, Master of Puppets would swiftly become recognised as their first stone cold masterpiece; their Led Zeppelin II; their Ziggy Stardust; their legacy. There would never be a Metallica album quite like it again.
Monday, June 20 2011
Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright: The Role of the Asian American in American Pop Culture
From New York magazine to Punk Planet, Audrea Lim shows us how recent Asian American writing sensations Wesley Yang and Amy Chua get it wrong in their interpretations of what it means to be of Asian descent in American at the dawn of the 21st century.
Friday, June 17 2011
Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future—And Locked Us In
As technology becomes more intimately woven into our lives, the implications of a single point of control over our digital experiences, such as Apple has over the iPhone, are threatening creative freedom.
Monday, June 13 2011
The Best Books and Graphic Fiction for Summer
PopMatters writers recommend some of their all-time favorite summer reads. Look for music summer picks on Tuesday, film/TV/DVD summer picks on Wednesday, and event and game picks for summer on Thursday.
Friday, June 10 2011
Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style
Los Angeles’s 1943 “zoot suit riot” may be the only time in American history that fashion was believed to be the cause of widespread civil unrest.
Friday, June 3 2011
I Know Where I’m Going: Katharine Hepburn, A Personal Biography
Katherine Hepburn’s mother was a suffragette, her father, a prominent doctor. At 13, she discovered the body of her adored older brother Tom, an apparent suicide. From then on, Kate assumed her brother’s birthday as her own and always considered Tom “the most important man in my life.”
Thursday, June 2 2011
Socially Valuable Knowledge: An Interview with Louis Menand
Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard Professor Louis Menand diagnoses some of the problems in the American university system and makes some proposals for what can be done, all without the alarmism of many of his colleagues.
Tuesday, May 31 2011
Defending the Imperialist
Ours (Canadians) is not an in-your-face passion-filled ‘clutch your breast in pride’ existence. We are but a country of high hopes and slow lopes, of lofty dreams and starry visions, of mighty pragmatism and irreproachable logic.
Friday, May 27 2011
Prince: Chaos, Disorder, and Revolution
Prince imbued his art with his idiosyncratic view of life, turning out music from the mind of a sex-obsessed deviant, a bomb-fearing party-animal, and a God-fearing man searching for a ways to reconcile the spiritual with the sexual… and so much more.
Friday, May 20 2011
The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait
Bob Dylan lurched toward his place onstage wearing a steel harmonica holder around his neck that made him look like a wild creature in harness, blinking at the floodlights, hunching his shoulders to adjust the guitar strap that held the Gibson Special acoustic high on his slender body.
Friday, May 13 2011
The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress
There is a deep current of cynicism that runs through much of American journalism… It is safe and painless to produce "balanced" news. It is very unsafe… to produce truth.
Friday, May 6 2011
The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes
Despite or even because of its jumble of missing pieces, half-finished recordings, garbled chronologies of composition or performance -- the basement tapes can begin to sound like a map; but if they are a map, what country, what lost mine, is it that they center and fix?
Tuesday, May 3 2011
20 Questions: David Thorne
Humorist and Satirist David Thorne’s book, The Internet is a Playground, published in April. Finally, he gets his biggest break, his surefire launch to celebritydom, here on PopMatters 20 Questions. (The royalty check is in the mail, David.)
Monday, April 25 2011
20 Questions: Meg Wolitzer
Bestselling author Meg Woliter's The Uncoupling, a humorous novel about female desire, publishes this month. Wolitzer taks with PopMatters 20 Questions about, among other things, the simple pleasures of having one's own man shirt.
Friday, April 22 2011
Excerpt from ‘A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS’
Julia and Paul Child were on the front lines of the Cold War in Europe, though Julia could not help feeling that the chill in the air had its origin in the “rampant right wingery” that had seized their own country… Washington was awash in paranoia and suspicion.
Wednesday, April 20 2011
The Ferocious Morality of David Foster Wallace
Any relationship with Wallace is destined for generosity, spirituality, and given the honesty and vulnerability of the writer, intimacy. It’s also going to be a serious challenge. It will challenge the reader’s intellect, ideology, and most of all, conception of morality.
Tuesday, April 19 2011
‘Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling’
“We thought sampling was just a way of arranging sounds,” says Chuck D… Public Enemy wanted “to blend sound. Just as visual artists take yellow and blue and come up with green, we wanted to be able to do that with sound.”
Monday, April 18 2011
From the Fringe of Islam: An Interview with Michael Muhammad Knight
Famous amongst orphaned Muslims -- teens and adults trying to find a place in a religion known for stringency -- Knight’s first book, The Taqwacores straddles the line between manifesto and coming of age novel.
Friday, April 8 2011
20 Questions: Jonathan Franklin
Award-winning investigative journalist and Hugh Laurie-kinda lookalike Jonathan Franklin has a knack for finding humor in the funniest places. Hugo Chavez as stand-up comedian we get. But Patrick Buchanan...?
Friday, April 1 2011
Is This the Real Life?: The Untold Story of Queen
'Good on showmanship, but not sure about the singing,’ admitted Brian May, about the future Freddie Mercury. ‘Fred had a strange vibrato,’ chuckled Roger Taylor, ‘which some people found rather distressing.’
