Friday, May 25 2012
Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup
In 1953, the American and British intelligence agencies launched a coup in Iran against a bedridden 72-year-old man. Muhammad Mossadegh's crimes had been to flirt with communism and to nationalize his country's oil industry, which for 40 years had been in British hands. Mossadegh must go.
Thursday, May 10 2012
Black Panther: The Next Avenger
The politics of Marvel's Black Panther would make this unsung character a smart addition to the next Avengers movie.
Friday, April 13 2012
The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
A chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world.
Friday, March 30 2012
Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power
Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow's Drift argues that we've drifted away from America's original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war, with all the financial and human costs that entails.
Tuesday, February 7 2012
Mitt Romney Can Reside at Today’s Proverbial ‘Downton Abbey’... Newt Gingrich Cannot
Downton Abbey reveals not only the play of chance that often confounds choice, but the power of social class to confine choice within established boundaries -- and we're comfortable with that.
Tuesday, January 3 2012
Occupying Video: The Underbelly of Globalization Caught on Camera
Occupy Wall Street's strength might be how it enables diverse constituencies to seize upon its imagery and message to engage with social justice concerns, both on the ground and within the video.
Wednesday, November 23 2011
The Revolution Will Be Amplified: Is the Occupy Movement Liberating Music?
Forty years from now, people will be writing books on the art and music, literature and culture that came out of the Occupy Wall Street / Occupy Everything movements.
Monday, October 3 2011
Michael Moore’s ‘Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life’
Capturing the zeitgeist of the past 50 years, yet deeply personal and unflinchingly honest, this memoir takes readers on an unforgettable, take-no-prisoners ride through the life and times of Michael Moore.
Tuesday, September 6 2011
Next Stop: Marijuanaland
Inside the making of Jonah Raskin’s journey through California’s Emerald Triangle -- one of the main fronts of the global drug war. Raskin not only describes himself as a chronicler of marijuana, but also a smoker who has a medical marijuana card.
Tuesday, August 30 2011
Run Red Run: Funny Song, Serious Message
The Coasters aren't thought of as particularly revolutionary, yet a single they released in 1959 was the first pop record to challenge the racism of post-World War II America.
Friday, August 12 2011
It’s the Film at Work: Interview with Shamim Sarif and Hanan Kattan
"Whatever situation you are in," says Shamim Sarif, "there are opportunities for the human spirit to grow, and I like to have that possibility in the films and the work that we do."
Wednesday, July 20 2011
Rust Belt Visions: The 2011 Allied Media Conference
In Detroit, a cauldron where neoliberal experiments are tested and then unleashed upon the world, the Allied Media Conference reveals both the huge challenges facing community organizing and how media can assist the disenfranchised.
Friday, April 8 2011
Revolution in the Mirror: Life Imitates Art in the Middle East and North Africa
Mass uprisings were sweeping the Middle East and North Africa just as Sergei Eisenstein’s 86-year-old agit-prop masterwork, Battleship Potemkin, commenced a multi-city US tour.
Tuesday, November 2 2010
At the Rally to Restore Sanity, We Were ‘It’
PopMatters' Kirby Fields travels to Washington -- with two-year-olds wearing matching Colonial Boy and Colonial Girl outfits in tow -- to find sanity amidst the massive event that was 'The Rally to Restore Sanity'.
Friday, January 8 2010
Pocket Protectors and Politics: Is (Stephen Jay Gould’s) Science Political?
Our biology granted us a faculty (rationality) that allows us, when desirable or necessary, to deny aspects of our biology.
Friday, October 30 2009
Agonies of an ‘Antichrist’: Lars von Trier in the Forest of Unreason
Despite the efforts of some to dismiss it as a prank, Antichrist is a serious film and its disturbing extremes speak of broad and deeply felt moral, social, and ultimately, political anxieties.
Friday, August 7 2009
“And Now Your Moment of Zen”: The Cultural Significance of ‘The Daily Show’
The Daily Show is an intellectual respite from the self-aggrandizing sensationalism of traditional news sources, and as such, one can’t help but cringe a little at the idea that it, too, may have begun to take itself a bit too seriously.
Thursday, July 9 2009
The Teflon King: Ronald Reagan and the Death of Michael Jackson
Oddly enough, the Jackson debacle reminds me of another recent death, that of Ronald Reagan just over five years ago.
Wednesday, July 8 2009
Michael Jackson, Barack Obama, and The Politics of Inspiration
Despite my limited enthusiasm for Jackson’s music, I became increasingly shaken by the announcement of his untimely and unfortunate death, and the reality that an odd man whose reputation was tarnished by a series of accusations, was no longer in the living world.
Friday, June 12 2009
Love Your Big Brother: What Orwell’s ‘1984’ Tells Us About 2009
George Orwell’s seminal book can equip its readers with the intellectual apparatus necessary to see through the routine mendacity and stupefying barrage of euphemism that plagues contemporary political life.
