Click on the links below to go to a specific section, or scroll down the page to browse the entire archive.

Archive Sections: Film Venues   Television Style Food Travel   Music Bestsellers   Sports Emerging Popular Culture Corner Politics

Film Archive

• At Long Last: America's First Female Best Director Oscar Nomination
• The Contradiction of Comedy: Steve Martin, Queen Latifah, and Race in Bringing Down the House
• An Interview with Comedy Director Garry Marshall
• The Making of a Movie Trailer
• Kat and Bianca Avenged: Or, Things to Love about 10 Things I Hate about You
• A Declaration of Independence ('night Mother)
• Towanda! (Fried Green Tomatoes)
• Star Wars Episode 1: The "Reagan" Menace?
• Looking through Richard: Al Pacino and His Call to Shakespeare
• The Divine Secrets of the American Box Office
• "You Don't Sound Stupid to Me": The Proto-Feminism of Marilyn Monroe
• Bound and Gagged
• Bound and Gagged II
• Fathers, Sons, and Symbolic Ethnicity: Considering Two Generations of The Jazz Singer
• Max Linder: The Light That Burns Twice As Bright Lasts Half As Long
• Body Image and the American Popular Culture Landscape: The Shifting Identity of Young Latinas in Real Women Have Curves
• The Wrong Guy on Trial?: Historical Reality in The Caine Mutiny
• "Oh, You Shouldn't Have!": Books-as-Gifts Turned Trysts
• Hearst and Davies: A Titan Makes His Mark, Part 1 of 3
• Hearst and Davies: The Gayest Social Scene, Or, Where we Had the Most Fun, Part 2 of 3
• Hearst and Davies: Doomsday, Part 3 of 3
• Life After The Movies: Former Film Stars Transition into 1950s Television
• The Color Line and the Silver Screen: Sidney Poitier, Liberal Hollywood, and Racial Integration in Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones and Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night
• Who Won the War, Daddy? Garry Wills and Alexander Werth Ambush the John Wayne Myth of World War II
• Channeling the Culture: A Second Look at Elizabeth: The Golden Age
• The Making of a Box Office Smash: Or, Why the Christian Right Loved Juno
• Simone: Lost in Translation
• Achieving Grace: Allegory and The Dark Knight
• I'm Mad as Hell: Network in the New Millenium
• In Defense of Grey Gardens
• Hollywood North: Canada in the Age of the Film and Television Action Committee
• Man Out of Time: Reflections on Burt Reynolds
• A Class Act: Reflections on Warren Beatty
• Modest Intentionalism and the Replicant Debate
• The President and the Dragon: The Rise of Bruce Lee in the 1970s
• Astaire²
• From Trickster to Heroic Savior: Jake Sully's Journey in Avatar
• Disney Witches and Femmes Fatales: Making Women into Witches
• Taking It Back: Urban Vigilantism and Community in Film, 1980-1985
• "Schooled in All the Social Hypocrisies": Notes on Frances Marion's Autobiography
  Off With Their Heads
• Chandler in Hollywood: The Neon, the Noir, and the Nickel
• Anita Loos: The Shock Jock of Autobiography
• "Inconveivable": Spiritual Transcendence in The Princess Bride
• The Oscars vs. Do the Right Thing
• The Education of the Tenderfoot: Three Western Films Starring Jeff Bridges
• Swimming Upstream in Hollywood: William Goldman in His Own Words
• Phillip Todd's The Joker: A Narrative Maze
  

Television Archive

• Beleaguered Husbands and Demanding Wives: The New Domestic Sitcom
• Who Is Watching the Watchers? Or, What I Ponder When I Watch Big Brother
• It Can't Happen Here Redux (with gratitude to Sinclair Lewis and Jonathan Swift)
• Horatio Alger in Drag (Oprah Winfrey)
• Pro-fane (Pro Wrestling)
• Dwelling in Possibility (WNBA)
• The Buried Treasure (T.V.'s Commercial Debut)
• Finding the Love Connection on Television: What Are the Messages about Dating?
• "She’s Unpredictable": Illyria and the Liberating Potential of Chaotic Postmodern Identity
• In Defense of Television
• “O for a Beaker Full of the Warm South": Some Thoughts on Naples, Keats, and the West Virginia Coal Miners
• Making Strides: Manolo Blahniks and Postfemininity in Sex and the City
• What a Day for Television
• Television and Tradition in Sherman Alexie's Flight
• The Biggest Loser: An Act of Sacrifice on a Surrealist and Melodramatic Stage
• The Political Divide on Television: Hannity, Olbermann, and the Loss of Civility
• The Great White North Revisited: Or, What Fox News Doesn't Understand
• C-SPAN in Normandy: The Case for Bardic Television
• "No Retiring from This": Dreams of Escape and the Last Season of The Sopranos
• Restoring Language, and More: Hot Topics Singe The View
• Batman: The Unexpected Cultural Revolution
• Weddings and Reality Television
• Jane Espenson: Philosopher Writer
• The Grotesque and the Post-Apocalyptic South: Ourselves and Our Ghosts
• The New Americana TV Channel: Jeff Harris and the P-38 Lightning Honey Bunny
• Reinvention and the Power of Community: Five Lessons from Greendale's Finest Students
• What's Wrong with a Little Bad? The Antihero in Modern American Television
• "It's Different for Girls": Complicating Gender and Genre on TV's Friday Night Lights
• Being Human Has Never Been More Frightening
• Whitman in Alaska: On Poetry and Democracy in Northern Exposure
• The Undeniable Left
• The Drug Queen: Or, TV Dreams and Real Nightmares in Requiem for a Dream
• "I Know Enough to Exploit": South Park, Satire, and the Culture Industry
  

Music Archive

• Rap Wars
• From a Roughened Wooden Bench in Central Park
• Rap and Young, White Males: Masculinity, Masking, and Denial
• Shooting Lou Rawls
• The Fender Strat Turns 50
• “How Deep Is the Ocean? How High Is the Sky?": The Question Song and the Jewish Lyricist in American Musical Theater
• Darkness on the Edge of Town: Bruce Springsteen's Representations of Working-Class Distress
• Fables of the Reconstruction: The Utopian Spirit in Tim Burton’s Big Fish
• How Do You Solve a Problem like Petruchio?: Kiss Me, Kate as a Product of Its Time and Place
• The Japanese Hip Hop Movement: Its Cultural and Economic Impact
• Analyze This: Modern Music and Popular Psychology
• Michael Stanley and Cleveland, Ohio: Conflicting Images and Mixed Results
• Man in the Mirror: Don Wilson on Michael Jackson
• Beyonce, Gwen, and Kathryn: Notes on the Current State of Women in the Arts
• John Mellencamp's America: Life, Death, Love, and Freedom
• Blackface and the Hollywood Musical
• Pop Music Iconography
• Watching the Wall's Dance: Charles Bukowski's Musical Landscape
• "Do You Remember Those Days?": The Fifties and Sixties According to Billy Joel
• "The Streets of Where I'm From": Masculinity and Simulations of the past in Alt.Country Music
• Protest Without Boundaries: A Nobrow Reading of Richard Wright's Native Son and NWA's Straight Outta Compton
• Johnny Mercer: Jazz Imagist Poet
• Strange Bedfellows: Mingus and Joni: A Jazz Fusion of Styles
• What Went Wrong with Allegro? Exploring Rodgers and Hammerstein's First Major Flop
• Surf Rock and Its Effect on California Culture: The Perpetuation of the California Myth
• "In the Fullness of Time": The Lee-Lifeson Art Park and the Rush Legacy
• What Ever Happened to Hazel Scott?
• I Love Piano
  
•  "One Head Ain't Better Than Two: A Tribe Called Quest and Mary Gaitskill on Mutual Agency"
• "The Breath of a Song": The Anxiety of Folk Music's Influence on Josh Ritter

Sports Archive

• SportSass: All in Adu Time
• SportSass: Once and for All: Athletes Are Not Heroes
• SportSass: One Bright Shining Star (NASCAR)
• SportSass: The Great American Art (Baseball)
• SportSass: Fire and Spit (Lakers)
• SportSass: Not with a Bang, but a Whimper (Carla Overbeck)
• SportSass: The Philosophy of Softball
• SportSass: The American Resistance (Soccer)
• SportSass: Putting Stock in Experience (John Stockton)
• SportSass: Show Me the...Love
• SportSass: Comments From the Cheap Seats on World Cup Soccer
• SportSass: A Farewell Letter to Chick Hearn
• SportSass: California Dreamin': The 2002 World Series
• SportSass: Teaching the Masters (Tiger Woods)
• SportSass: Go, Funny Cide, Go!
• SportSass: Who Was Althea Gibson?
• SportSass:Ten Myths about the Boston Red Sox
• SportSass:The Legend of Chico Ruiz: Forty Years Later, A City Still Bleeds
• SportSass: Nice Guys Finish Last, Even in Baseball
• The Perfect Backdrop: Uses of the Bonneville Salt Flats
• SportSass: Parents, Please!
• SportSass: The United States Saints
• SportSass: Favre Freaks Out
• SportSass: Phelps on Fire
• SportSass: The Longshot
• SportsSass: Hunter as Sportsman: A Reappraisal of Nanook of the North
• The President and the Tiger: Just War, Pacifism, and Enlightened Self-Interest
• Frank Wilkinson and the Battle of Chavez Ravine
• So Long, Joe
• The Great Baby Ruth Debate - Resolved
• The Indy Racing League and the Indianapolis 500: Increasing Competition in Open-Wheeled Automobile Racing in the United States
• The Emergence of Greater-Than-Human Sports... and Baseball
• About-Face: Modern Portrayals of Heroes and Villains in WWE
• SportSass: Hunter as Sportsman: A Reappraisal of Nanook of the North
• Baseball: A Hard Game
• Baseball as National Innocence
• Just One of the Guys: Equality and Intergender Professional Wrestling
  

Politics Archive

• From the Left: Ignorance Bloated
• From the Left: American Voters Make History
• From the Center: The Intolerable Zero Tolerance
• From the Center: All Rise (Scalia in Bush v. Gore)
• From the Center: Intolerance (Anti-Arab Bigotry)
• From the Center: The Cowboy Myth, George W. Bush, and the War with Iraq
• From the Right: Abolish Affirmative Action in University Admissions
• From the Right: Three Reasons Why the Palin Pick Totally Rocks
• From the Right: Wanda Sykes Goes Too Far
• Social Mobility in Reagan-Era Teen Films: From Inaugural Optimism to the Invention of Generation X
• "What You Are Seeing Outside Is a Reflection of What You Are Feeling Within": Space, Ideology and Biopolitics in Safe
• Because We Could Not Walk on Water: Bernard Malamud's "My Son the Murderer" and the Limits of Magical Realism
• Galileo in Hollywood
• What Price Progressivism?
• The Wellspring of Football and Blizzard
• More Man Than Machine: Defeating the Empire and the Nature/Culture Dichotomy
• The Scandal of Incarceration: Popular Journailsm as Prophecy?
• Boomlet for Jack Kennedy: What It Might Mean
• Violence Rains in American Society
• Ishtar and Hollywood Gender Politics: Elaine May's Orwellian Vision
• Making Art/ Making History: The Negro History Quilt Club of Marin City and Sausalito
• Power Politics in Django Unchained: Broomhilda as Victim
• The Elephant in the Room: Dennis Hopper and American Politics
• Why We Must Keep the Electoral College
• The Politics of Screenwriting During the Code: Or, More Thoughts on Art and Social Responsibility
• "Just Do It": Gary Gilmore, Nancy Reagan, and Other Cultural Entanglements of the Nike Slogan
  

Venues Archive

• Route 66: America’s First Highway
• Some Thoughts on Life in the Boonies
• If These Walls (Ingleside Inn)
• Of Blues and Things (Antone's)
• Requiem for a Joshua Tree
• Camping Culture (The Grand Canyon)
• Naked, Poor and Mangled (Olympics)
• The Old Man and the Key (Hemingway House)
• The Museum of Jurassic Technology
• The Heart of the Apple: Skating in Central Park after 9/11
• Pooh Corner
• Herzlich Willkommen, Oktoberfest!
• Laissez les Bon Temps Roulez! It’s Mardi Gras!
• Appalachia as an American Region: Studying to Make Sense of a Marginalized Culture
• The Man Who Would Have It All: George Sterling and the American Dream
• Stannie White and the Girl on the Red Velvet Swing: Tabloid Celebrity in Gilded Age New York
• "Quacks, Yokels and Light-Fingered Folk": Oral Performance Art at the Fair
• American Consumption and Academic Production in Joe Wenderoth's Letters to Wendy's
• Going Up the Valley: History and Intention in the Shenendoah
• (Re)Remembering the Apocalyptic Specter: Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers
• God Inc.: The Business Model of the Megachurch and Changing Conceptions of God
• The Better Angels of Abraham Lincoln: Thoughts from the Base of the Lincoln Memorial
• When the Eiffel Tower Brought American Cities Together
• Kelly Pavlik: The Ghost and His Link to the Youngstown Community
• Subversive Kitsch and the American Dream at the Liberace Museum
• Gloom and Glamour in Gotham
• Zuckerberg Saves Egypt!
• Summer of Superheroes/Autumn of Remembrance
• Signposts of the Divine Mundane
• Bridging the Partisan D'Oh!-vide: Springfield as National Metaphor
• Crook's Tour: Crime and Crime Scene Tourism
• The Death of Baseball Card Culture: Or, What I Learned at the Sports Memoribilia Store
• Tonto and the Hollywood Indian
• Race, Gender, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
• Another White Year at the Oscars
• A Tale of Two Theme Parks
• Mosquitoes and Tortoises
• Marilyn Kallet and Venues in How Our Bodies Learned
  
• Universal Contradictions: Carl Laemmle, Women, and Leadership in Hollywood 

Style Food Travel Archive

• Time-out Is Killing Americans: On Discipline and Love American Style
• An American in Sunglasses
• The Return of Turquoise
• Homo Redneckus: Notes on Being White Trash in America
• Gucci Babies: From the Madonna and Child to Madonna and Children
• "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend": Performances of Femininity and Sexuality in
  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, "Material Girl," and Moulin Rouge!
• About Face: The Emergence, Evolution, and Demise of the Decorative Compact
• From Frijoles to French Fries: Gringolandia and Traditional Laredo Border Culture
• Politics, Marketing, and the Metrosexual: The Eloquence of a Marketing Tool
• Period Men, Manly Periodicals: True - The Man's Magazine, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Issue
• "The Fox in the Chicken Coop": Elvis Presley and 1950s Small-Town America in Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending
• African-American Men's Self Expression in Fashion: A Cultural Commentary, a Political Statement, or Both?
• "Dem a Bleach" : Shades of Blackness and Beauty
• Leaving MGM: Notes on Garbo and Adrian
• Steve Jobs on Style
• Michael Kors Maternity Line? Or, How I Negotiated a Fashionable Pregnancy
• Mika, Running
• Why We Love Bert Stern
• A Brief History of American Modesty
• The Gay Nineties: Costume Design in Mae West's She Done Him Wrong
• Costume as Character: Jenny Beaven and Mad Max: Fury Road
• Glassy-Eyed Nostagia
  

Bestsellers Archive

• “Appreciate the Mushrooms Completely": Hemingway’s Missed Message
• Maidens and Machines
• The First Wives Club Phenomenon
• "What Do I Need Feet for When I Have Wings?" (Ana Castillo)
• From Springer to Shakespeare (Romance Novels)
• Desiring Desirability: The Disfiguring Power of a Dominant Ideology (The Bluest Eye)
• Sower of Seeds (Octavia Butler)
• In Love with Louis L'Amour
• A Breeding Place of Evil (Anne Rice)
• A Bad Dream (Sylvia Plath)
• Silence (Maxine Hong Kingston)
• Female Justice
• Rand the Winner Is: Thoughts on the Continuing Value of Objectivism
• The Ducks in Central Park, or Why You Can't Teach The Catcher in the Rye
• Fragments from Africa
• Harry Potter and the Standardized Test: Some Thoughts for Teachers on Magic, Rhetoric and Composition
•  The End of Delillo's Plot: Death, Fear, and Religion in White Noise
• The Lovers and Other Stories: Female Empowerment in the Short Fiction of Pearl S. Buck
• The Postmodern Proctor: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible
• Running on Empty: Suicide, Rape, and Murder in the Modern Suburban Novel
• Color Symbolism and Mythology in Margaret Mitchell’s Novel Gone with the Wind
• The Horrors of Housekeeping: A Comparative Analysis of the Grimm Fairy Tale and
  Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
• Kurt Vonnegut as Billy Pilgrim's Case Worker: Slaughterhouse Five Reread for the Era of PTSD
• Little House in Limbo: Rediscovering Almanzo Wilder
• Lunching with Tobias
• Reading Oprah Reading Franzen
• Romancing the Villain: Nabokov, Capote, and the Grotesque
• "Every Girl's Dream," Or Is It?: A Feminist Critique of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight
• Faith and the Hollywood Box Office: Notes on The Blind Side and The Book of Eli (With an Additional Word to Screenwriters)
• Rediscovering Leaves of Grass
• Uncomfortable Fictions: Why Zombie Lit Should Be on the President's Reading List - And Yours
• The Stuff of Legend: The Graphic Novel's Re-Imagination of Children's Literature
• Representing the Street: Space and Place in Street Literature
• White Collar Fantasies: Imaginative Identities in Revolutionary Road
• The Responsibility of Remembering: Traumatic Memory and War in The Hunger Games
• Turn Down the Jazz: A New Approach to Reading On the Road
• Once a Legend, Always a Legend: Disney's Sleepy Hollow and Post-WWII America
  
• Greek Myths Orienting The Batman's Narratives: An Archeology of the Imaginary in Pop Culture
• On My Favorite Photograph of Sylvia Plath
• White Washing Chocolate
• Light in August: The Instability of Racial and Religious Truth
• Racial and Ethnic Stereotypes in Dick Tracy, 1931-1945
• The Coming of Age Novel, Feminism, and Stephen King's Carrie
  
  

Emerging Popular Culture Corner Archive

• Playing War: The Emerging Trend of Real Virtual Combat in Current Video Games
• Graphic Responses: Comic Book Superheroes' Militarism Post 9/11
• The Consumer Consumed, or: Harnessing the Cheapest Labor - Yours!
• "Eyes without a Face": Facebook as the New Panopticon
• Candy Shop Culture: How Adults Can Affect Tween Consumerism
• The Brave New World of Twitter
• Occupiers Break Through: We Are the Ones We've Been Waiting For
• "Autobiographical Fantasies": Identity Constructions in a Virtual World
• On the State of Online Political Debates: Facebook, Chick-fil-A, and the Limits of Human Reason
• Fibber McGee and Molly: Irish-American Respectability Through Radio Programs, 1930-1950
• Lena Dunham and Her Simulated (CGI) Double: A Baudrillardian Interpretation of the Photoshop Controversy
• Dreadfully Funny: Grotesque Monsters in Welcome to Night Vale and the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft
• Can the New American Theater Save Us? Notes on Jule Selbo's Boxes
• From Branagh's Cinderella to Oplev's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: On Theme and Family Values
• "We Are the Walking Dead": Zombies, Souls, and Fear of the Flesh
• Spike Jonze and the Short Film
• The Child Orator: Epideictic Rhetoric in Kubo and the Two Strings