PopMatters is moving to WordPress in December. We will continue to publish on this site as we work on the move. We aim to make it a seamless experience for readers.
Books
Please Donate to Help Save PopMatters
PopMatters have been informed by our current technology provider that we have until December to move off their service. We are moving to WordPress and a new host, but we really need your help to fund the move and further development.
Recent
Books
'A Peculiar Indifference' Takes on Violence in Black America
Pulitzer Prize finalist Elliott Currie's scrupulous investigation of the impacts of violence on Black Americans, A Peculiar Indifference, shows the damaging effect of widespread suffering and identifies an achievable solution.
26 Oct 2020
Books
Bishakh Som's 'Spellbound' Is an Innovative Take on the Graphic Memoir
Bishakh's Som's graphic memoir, Spellbound, serves as a reminder that trans memoirs need not hinge on transition narratives, or at least not on the ones we are used to seeing.
20 Oct 2020
Books
Peter Guralnick's 'Looking to Get Lost' Is an Ode to the Pleasures of Writing About Music
Peter Guralnick's homage to writing about music, 'Looking to Get Lost', shows how good music writing gets the music into the readers' head.
19 Oct 2020
Books
Tommy Siegel's Comic 'I Hope This Helps' Pokes at Social Media Addiction
Jukebox the Ghost's Tommy Siegel discusses his "500 Comics in 500 Days" project, which is now a new book, I Hope This Helps.
14 Oct 2020
Film
The Human Animal in Natural Labitat: A Brief Study of the Outcast
The secluded island trope in films such as Cast Away and television shows such as Lost gives culture a chance to examine and explain the human animal in pristine, lab like, habitat conditions. Here is what we discover about Homo sapiens.
13 Oct 2020
Books
Heathen's Queer Feminist Vikings Are the Heroines Pop Culture Needed
Natasha Alterici's comic series, Heathen, has single-handedly redeemed the disaster that pop culture has been making of Norse mythology.
09 Oct 2020
Books
Is Trump's COVID-19 Diagnosis Ironic?
Just hours before tweeting that he was COVID positive, Trump recorded a speech wherein he opined that "The end of the pandemic is in sight."
Roger Kreuz
05 Oct 2020
By the Book
Jack Halberstam's 'Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire' (excerpt)
Enjoy this excerpt of Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire, wherein Jack Halberstam offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which wildness has been associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the 20th century.
Jack Halberstam
01 Oct 2020
Books
Can Queer Studies Rescue American Universities?
Matt Brim's Poor Queer Studies underscores the impact of poorer disciplines and institutions, which often do more to translate and apply transformative intellectual ideas in the world than do their ivory-tower counterparts.
01 Oct 2020
Books
For Don DeLillo, 'The Silence' Is Deafening
In Don DeLillo's latest novel, The Silence, it is much like our post-pandemic life -- everything changed but nothing happened. Are we listening?
30 Sep 2020
Books
'We're Not Here to Entertain' Is Not Here to Break the Cycle of Punk's Failures
Even as it irritates me, Kevin Mattson's We're Not Here to Entertain is worth reading because it has so much direct relevance to American punks operating today.
29 Sep 2020
Film
Uncensored 'Native Son' (1951) Is True to Richard Wright's Work
Compared to the two film versions of Native Son in more recent times, the 1951 version more acutely captures the race-driven existential dread at the heart of Richard Wright's masterwork.
29 Sep 2020
Books
'World War 3 Illustrated #51: The World We Are Fighting For'
World War 3 Illustrated #51 displays an eclectic range of artists united in their call to save democracy from rising fascism.
28 Sep 2020
By the Book
The Story of Life in 10 1/2 Species (excerpt)
If an alien visitor were to collect ten souvenir life forms to represent life on earth, which would they be? This excerpt of Marianne Taylor's The Story of Life in 10 and a Half Species explores in text and photos the tiny but powerful earthling, the virus.
Marianne Taylor
28 Sep 2020
Books
Oscar Hijuelos' 'Mambo Kings Play the Songs of Love' Dances On
Oscar Hijuelos' dizzyingly ambitious foot-tapping family epic, Mambo Kings Play the Songs of Love, opened the door for Latinx writers to tell their stories in all their richness.
25 Sep 2020
Books
David Lazar's 'Celeste Holm Syndrome' Appreciates Hollywood's Unsung Character Actors
David Lazar's Celeste Holm Syndrome documents how character actor work is about scene-defining, not scene-stealing.
22 Sep 2020
Books
Literary Scholar Andrew H. Miller On Solitude As a Common Bond
Andrew H. Miller's On Not Being Someone Else considers how contemplating other possibilities for one's life is a way of creating meaning in the life one leads.
21 Sep 2020
Books
Ignorance, Fear, and Democracy in America
Anti-intellectualism in America is, sadly, older than the nation itself. A new collection of Richard Hofstadter's work from Library of America traces the history of ideas and cultural currents in American society and politics.
17 Sep 2020
By the Book
Democratizing Our Data: A Manifesto (excerpt)
Just as big tech leads world in data for profit, the US government can produce data for the public good, sans the bureaucracy. This excerpt of Julia Lane's Democratizing Our Data: A Manifesto will whet your appetite for disruptive change in data management, which is critical for democracy's survival.
Julia Lane
16 Sep 2020
Books
On Bruce Springsteen's Music in Film and TV
Bruce Springsteen's music in film and television captured author Caroline Madden's imagination. She discuses her book, Springsteen as Soundtrack, and other things Springsteen in this interview.
16 Sep 2020
Film
Tears in Rain: 'Blade Runner' and Philip K. Dick's Legacy in Film
Blade Runner, and the work of Philip K. Dick, continues to find its way into our cinemas and minds. How did the visions of a paranoid loner become the most relevant science fiction of our time?
15 Sep 2020
Books
Vigdis Hjorth's 'Long Live the Post Horn!' Breathes Life into Bureaucratic Anxiety
Vigdis Hjorth's Long Live the Post Horn! is a study in existential torpor that, happily, does not induce the same condition in the reader.
15 Sep 2020
By the Book
Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest (excerpt)
In this excerpt of Black in the Middle, PopMatters' Mark Reynolds compares the nearly identical racial divides in his cities, Cleveland and Chicago, that to this day are stubbornly entrenched.
14 Sep 2020
Reviews
Features
PM Picks
© 1999-2020 PopMatters.com. All rights reserved.
PopMatters is wholly independent, women-owned and operated.