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Does Amber Tamblyn's 'Era of Ignition' Ignite Your Flame?

Actor Amber Tamblyn is aspiring to something deeper than just the chronicle of herself as a young ingénue who came of age as a TV star in her memoir, Era of Ignition. In our politically tumultuous times, does she succeed?

Books

Joy Division and Jon Savage's Latest, 'This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else'

Jon Savage's This Searing Light, The Sun and Everything Else, marks a time for considering how Joy Division became, and continues to be, so popular.

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By the Book: Pick up the Pieces: Excursions in Seventies Music

In this excerpt of '70s music, Pick up the Pieces, John Corbett puts his critique of Kraftwerk's Autobahn to poetry and pogos with his conflict for the Clash and their album, The Clash.

Books

Complicit Christianity vs. Courages Christianity: 'The Color of Compromise'

Jemar Tisby's historical overview of the American church's complicity in racism, The Color of Compromise, will help provoke dialogue, but we face significant challenges, still.

Justin Cober-Lake

Books

'Sleeping with Strangers' May Be More Prurient Than Its Hollywood Subjects

In an apparent attempt to generate understanding and contextuality in film history, David Thomson only ends up perpetuating myths and stigmas against homosexuals in his latest, Sleeping with Strangers.

Books

'All the Lives We Ever Lived' Finds Comfort in Mourning with Virginia Woolf

These days, when personal grief becomes a public performance on social media, it's heartening to have a book such as Katharine Smyth's All the Lives We Ever Lived, wherein deep introspection is given space and literature provides both solace and inspiration.

Books

Learn from Your Female Elders: Read Feminism's Forgotten Fight

When progressives adopt an ahistorical critique of feminism, they risking aiding and abetting its subversion. Historian Kirsten Swinth offers a remedy with Feminism's Forgotten Fight.

Books

#PopMatters20: Stephen King, 'On Writing' 20 Years Later

Had Stephen King and Bryan Smith "met" on that same street on 19 June 2019 -- 20 years after the Accident -- the physical consequences would have probably been complicated by media drones, TMZ helicopters, Instagram and Twitter posts, and Facebook livestream coverage.

Books

Is There Hope for Knowledge? On Robert Pasnau's 'After Certainty'

In After Certainty, Robert Pasnau constructs a history of knowledge and concludes that most theories of knowledge aren't up to par. But, he says, we can hope.

Books

Nora Krug's 'Belonging' Could Serve as a Model for Understanding Collective Responsibility

In graphic novel Belonging, Nora Krug takes a single idea – her family's involvement in the Second World War and Nazi Germany – and pursues it with relentless, forensic determination.

Books

The Enigma of Russian Dada

If art is about the fostering and maintenance of traditions, then the Russians were proposing a kind of anti-art. An exploration of the exhibition catalog, Russian Dada 1914-1924.

Books

From Paris, with Poetry: On Henri Cole's 'Orphic Paris'

Henri Cole's Orphic Paris mines the city of light to illuminate the ends of his art.

Books

Chronicling the Non-Event: Anton Chekhov and the Short Story

Chekhov is engaging with an underlying, rumbling, non-event that pervades life and yet is nearly always blithely ignored. His stories move us in their ability to excavate this subterranean, haunting static that informs all experience.

Books

Alyson Hagy's 'Scribe' Is Gloriously Artful, but Something Is Missing

Hagy's new novel, Scribe, a beautiful work clearly rooted in the ethos of the Program Era, seems the very example of a return to the bourgeois novel of art for art's sake.

Books

Graphic Fiction 'Apollo' Reminds Us of the Heights Humanity Can Reach

Revisiting the moon landing via graphic fiction work, Apollo, offers a vital reminder of hope and possibility in these dark and petty times.

Books

When Sexually Frustrated Angry White Men (Mis)Read the Classics

Donna Zuckerberg's Not All Dead White Men is a powerful study of the ways the alt-right distorts the understanding of ancient Greek and Roman literature to serve hateful interests today.

Books

Pop Ten

The 50 Best Albums of 2019 So Far

Jackie Chan's 10 Best Films

The 100 Greatest Alternative Singles of the '80s: Part 1: 100 - 81

Sounds of the Zomia, Sounds of Resistance: An Interview with Kink Gong

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