There is no shortage of voices decrying the sexualization of mass culture. Just last month, actor and director David Schwimmer complained to a London newspaper: “We have this real emphasis on how important it is to look young and sexual, so that’s the message we’re sending our girls. Look at the biggest pop stars around at the moment: Everything they do is about sex.” Newly published research finds the former Friends star has a point: Over the past four decades, images of female celebrities have become much more sexualized. Evidence of this trend, which troubles feminists and social ... Read More
Scholars and The Big Lebowski: Deconstructing The Dude
July 11, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
A bowling alley. A severed toe sporting a neatly polished nail. An aging hippie and his best friend, a Vietnam War veteran with a hair-trigger temper. If those images don't add up to anything for you, feel free to flip the page. If they do, it means you're familiar — perhaps intimately so — with one of the most analyzed, deconstructed and eclectically interpreted films of recent decades: The Big Lebowski. Joel and Ethan Coen's subversive comedy, in which a slovenly slacker (Jeff Bridges) in modern-day L.A. gets caught up in a convoluted kidnapping case, was neither a critical nor a ... Read More
How Google Disrespected Mexican History
July 10, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In September 2006, Google News launched News Archive Search “to help users quickly and easily search for events, people and ideas over different periods of time.” Google News, in turn, had been launched in September 2002 “to [use] computers to organize the world’s news in real time.” Then, in September 2008 (September must be some sort of talisman in Sunnyvale), Google announced it was expanding the News Archive Search back in time “to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online.” “History buffs: take note,” Google triumphantly proclaimed. Well, yes, ... Read More
The Last Mountain: A Scary Movie About … Coal
June 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The Last Mountain is scarier than any Saw, Alien or Friday the 13th film ever made. It's a documentary about mountaintop coal removal in West Virginia, starring a group of locals whose environment is slowly turning into toxic sludge and an energy company whose methods are so predatory, they make Wall Street bankers look like acolytes of Mother Teresa. "If someone tried to blow up a mountain in Utah or Colorado, they'd be put in jail. Why is that allowed in West Virginia?" asks environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who figures prominently in the film. "It's because the public does ... Read More
Welcome to Shelbyville: Loving, Fearing Thy Neighbors
May 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In news headlines and broadcast bulletins, the word "Somali" is inevitably followed by a dread-inducing plural noun: "pirates" or "warlords" or "terrorists." So it's no surprise that natives of the war-ravaged East African country of Somalia are viewed with fear and suspicion by many, if not most, Americans. When significant numbers of Somali refugees moved to Shelbyville, Tenn., (population 16,000) to work at the nearby Tyson Foods processing plant, the town's residents reacted with deep suspicion. "We don't know what diseases they have," a former mayor frets in the opening minutes of the ... Read More
WikiLeaks and the Future of Whistle-blowing
May 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Mark Stephens, the British attorney for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, is traveling to the United States this week for a debate hosted by Index on Censorship and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism on the impact of the whistle-blowing site for journalism, national security and government secrecy. The event, set for Wednesday night in New York, is open to the public. (The Idea Lobby’s Emily Badger is also the U.S. editor for Index.) The panel, chaired by Index’s chief executive, John Kampfner, will also include investigative journalist and security services expert ... Read More
‘State of Minds’ Puts Research in the Spotlight
April 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One of the pleasant aspects of being the editor of Miller-McCune is regular and often unexpected contact with people and entities that are working to improve the world by introducing some small piece of it to factual reality. Look, for just one instance, at the network of investigative reporting and transparency nonprofits — from ProPublica and the Texas Tribune to the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Public Integrity — that has grown in the last decade or so, and tell me your old daily paper used to do accountability journalism better. Another hopeful part of the media future ... Read More
Lessons From China and India’s Newspaper Boom
April 17, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In most discussions of global affairs, China and India are the 800-pound (insert large animal of your choice) in the room. With almost half of the world's population, the two nations are developing at an alarming — and inspiring — rate, their newspapers along with them. While much media analysis mourns the decline of print journalism in the U.S., associate professors Nikhil Moro of the University of North Texas and Debashis Aikat of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill looked at the newspaper industry boom in China and India for solutions. Taking their cue from Eric Schmidt, ... Read More
‘Making the Boys’ Examines Controversial Gay Play
March 10, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Mart Crowley was in a desperate situation. The screenplay he had written for 20th Century Fox was never produced, a TV pilot he scripted for a major star wasn't picked up by the network, and his agent had dropped him. Crowley needed something to write about that would get him back in the game. Then Crowley read a New York Times article in which theater critic Stanley Kauffmann complained that three of America's most famous playwrights — Edward Albee, William Inge and Tennessee Williams — were gay, but refused to write about homosexuality. Crowley, gay himself, thought this was a good ... Read More
Media and Revolution 2.0: Tiananmen to Tahrir
February 24, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Have the latest advances in communication technology radically altered the fundamental dynamics of struggles for change in authoritarian settings? Or have cell phones and social media merely brought about small shifts in the dynamics of revolution? Is the Web a godsend to those trapped in oppressive states, as Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo suggests in his essay “The Internet is God’s Gift to China”? Or does this thinking give in to a form of “cyber-utopianism” that glosses over the potential of new media to be used by autocrats, their propaganda ministries and security forces to massage ... Read More
