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Film

Kamala Harris' 2020 VP Run Evokes Rod Lurie's 2000 'The Contender'

Like The Contender's Laine Hanson 20 years prior, US Democratic Party Vice-President choice, Kamala Harris, cuts the oxygen feeding the US political climate's raging sexism.
Recent
Books

'Lake Success' Is a Picaresque Journey to Nowhere

Gary Shteyngart's state of the nation satire about a billionaire on the run doesn't tell us much about anything.

Music

If It Happens Again: Revisiting UB40 in the Age of Brett Kavanaugh

In a typically absurd twist of Trump politics, England's reggae-pop hitmakers are back on the radar. Time to dig back into music's past.

Books

'War in 140 Characters' Is to the Point

David Patrikarakos has written an engaging narrative that covers the activities and surroundings of eight 21st century social media crusaders.

Books

On the Tight Confines of Madeleine Albright's Cold War Intellectual Straitjacket

The status quo of the past 30 years facilitated a massive transfer in wealth and public resources away from the average American and into the hands of a wealthy minority; a radical coup if ever there was one. Yet it was achieved democratically. A response to Madeleine Albright's Fascism: A Warning.

Books

Why Are Evangelicals So Full of Fear? and So Supportive of Trump? Interview with Historian John Fea

As discussed with PopMatters, in Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, Fea finds long roots in answering his questions, but he clears a path forward, too.

Justin Cober-Lake
Books

"We are all Rachel Dolezal": on Asad Haider's 'Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump'

Among other critiques of identity politics, Haider believes that we each can slip between identities at will. Indeed, it's a universal human condition.

Music

Kanye West: The Iconoclast Gives In

How the allure of newness is leading Kanye West astray.

Books

How the Nobel Committee and the Great American Read (Among Others) Got Philip Roth Wrong

A sense of bitterness remains for those of us mourning the loss of this final great literary lion of the 20th century.

Culture

Dispatches from the Sunken Place: Kanye, Kim, and Cosby

Get Out's Sunken Place is not at a distant location -- it subsists and persists in the here and now. Kanye West, Kim Kardashian and Bill Cosby should know this.

Books

What Does Trump Owe Putin? Michael Isikoff and David Corn's 'Russian Roulette'

These hard-hitting investigative reporters deliver the last (for this month, at least) word on Trump's mysterious infatuation with Putin.

Film

Daryle Lamont Jenkins of Antifa Doc 'Alt-Right: Age of Rage' Isn't Waiting for Approval

Jenkins, founder of One Peoples Project, tells PopMatters that contrary to the fear many Americans feel, it's actually life-affirming to talk about fascism and racism.

Books

Informed or Inflamed? Author Steve Almond Talks About How We Consume Trump

With the recent release of Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country, Steve Almond talks in-depth about the US president whom most parents wouldn't even let on the playground -- and about his beef with the American left.

Television

Is the Revival of 'Roseanne' Merely Televisual Grave-Robbing?

The return of Roseanne brings with it some complicated political baggage -- and it brings Dan Connor back from the dead.

Books

'Bunk' Joins the Dots Between Barnum and Trump

Kevin Young painstakingly presents the history of hoaxes and why we keep falling for the same old shtick.

Books

He's Martin Amis...and We're Not

The recent release of The Rub of Time once again marks Martin Amis amongst our most proficient critics, seemingly without peer in terms of his range and scope.

Film

True/False Film Fest: 'Our New President'

The next film from Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer director Maxim Pozdorovkin treats us to Russian propaganda about the United States.

Television

Stephen Colbert Gets a New Way to Satirize Trump with 'Our Cartoon President'

Beginning 11 February, Stephen Colbert will expand his satirical franchise with Our Cartoon President, an animated series lampooning the colorful personalities, complicated relationships and nonstop controversies of the Trump administration.

Books

Is ‘Fire and Fury’ Trump’s Harvey Weinstein Moment?

Deft and crude, Michael Wolff's gossipy Trump Administration rip-and-read tells us what we already know—America is led by a mendacious man-child surrounded by dishonorable lackeys—but in a pungent style that makes it resonate.

Books

‘The Best American Sports Writing 2017’: The Power of the Pen in a Year of Unquiet Americans

"We sometimes project our problems onto sports," Louisa Thomas notes. "But sports can also be ... where we start to work them out."

Books

It Takes a Village to Raise a Feminist: 'Nasty Women', an Anthology

Wars of attrition are a matter of stamina, of who has the most tools with which to keep fighting. A surprising common tool in this collection? Humor.

Books

On the Cathartic POW!er of Appropriating Trumpisms

R. Sikoryak's The Unquotable Trump is devious, dark, disturbing, brilliant delight that will prove the standard bearer for texts from the resistance.

Books

Trump Parody 'You Can't Spell America Without Me' Is Undercooked

Alec Baldwin and Kurt Andersen present a rushed "meal" stuffed with random ingredients and served to a public that's still digesting the appetizer.

Film

'11/8/16' : Engineered Shock

"You been saying white folks coming out to vote in record numbers, in the rural areas. And why did they come out? Because he [Trump] spoke their language."

Interviews

Noah Preminger Talks About His Bold Jazz Protest Album, 'Meditations on Freedom'

Protest music is both an empathizing artform and an empowering oppositional force. Saxophonist Noah Preminger has taken his own stand, releasing his sixth album on Inauguration Day.

Reviews

'The Devil's Bargain': Some Men Just Want to Watch America Burn

Joshua Green’s swift and incisive political war story tells how Steve Bannon's years-long nationalist insurgent campaign culminated in the election of Donald Trump.

Books

'Pussy' Is a Savage Satire in the Form of a Comic Fairytale

Howard Jacobson shows that Donald Trump may not be beyond satire, after all...

Television

One Nation, Divided by Humor

We may be one nation in America, but today we appear to be living on different planets.

Politics

Can We Say the F Word Yet? On Fascism and Humor

In light of the decrees and executive orders signed thus far by Donald Trump, we might reasonably ask: is fascism relevant to America's current political state?

Politics

Vulgarians 101: A Course for Future Leaders of America

A dystopian syllabus for an inevitable future at a hypothetical university.

Culture

The Spoiled Little Man-Child They Made King: Celebrity, Richard II, and Donald Trump

Did Shakespeare predict Trump? No. That's ridiculous. He just wrote a play about a thin-skinned, petty, self-aggrandising narcissist whose poor leadership drove an empire to ruin. Totally different.

Events

On the Glories of Mardi Gras and Trump's Inaugural Just Desserts

I suppose sometimes a cake is just a cake, but more often than not, it’s not.

Politics

America in the Age of Trump: Boycotts, Condonations, and 'The Divide'

Is AntiBookClub's call to Penguin Random House to drop The Art of the Deal from their catalog an effective form of resistance?

Music

Privilege Corrupts: Donald Trump and "The Devil in His Youth"

How a song by Protomartyr keeps taking on new meaning in the age of Donald Trump.

Music

Fantastic Negrito's "Working Poor" Is the Soundtrack to the Summer of '16

America's working poor exist in a shadow cast by the harsh light of prosperity. "Working Poor" speaks from those shadows, creates light within that space, and insists on being heard.

Politics

Tomorrow Belongs to Me: "Freedom's Call", Donald Trump and Propaganda

When you see and hear a group of children in star-spangled cheerleader outfits lip-syncing the words “Cowardice! Are you serious?” to an EDM reworking of the 1917 patriotic song “Over There”, that is the moment you should wake up.


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