At about the midway point of Interstellar, a spacecraft descends into the atmosphere of a pristine white planet. Gliding downwards, the tip of the craft brushes against a cloud, and the cloud shatters…
A. David Lewis, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
Among comic book fans, there’s the joke that the only characters in superhero comics who stay dead are Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben, Batman’s parents, and Captain America’s sidekick Bucky. For everybody else…
In October the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released its new documentary Meet the Mormons to wide theatrical distribution. The film depicts the lives of six individuals – two women and four…
John Oliver’s new program Last Week Tonight is the most recent addition to the parody news genre. Like its predecessors, the show frequently mocks American politics; for example, an attention-grabbing…
On October 28, journalist Matt Taibbi resigned from First Look Media, a fledgling news organization only ten months old. According to an article published on The Intercept: Taibbi and other journalists…
For more than 500 years, she has wandered, weeping and searching without rest. A ghostly woman in white who is said to have murdered her children, she is doomed to roam the earth, searching for their lost…
On October 12, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art unveiled its exhibition of Henri Matisse’s cut-outs. This came on the heels an exhibition of the cut-outs at the Tate Modern in London, which displayed…
On an October day in 1894, a group of New York City’s leading doctors gathered to unveil a statue in honor of one of the greatest surgeons of his day and the founder of New York’s Women’s Hospital, J…
In today’s China, the philosopher Confucius is back. To mark his 2,565th birthday this September, the nation’s President, Xi Jinping, paid homage to the sage at an international conference convened for…
This past June, radio conglomerate Clear Channel (now known as iHeartRadio) announced it was converting Boston’s 101.7 FM to a country station. The story they told the Boston Globe was a familiar one…
This fall, French street artist JR and American cinematographer Bradford Young each installed a series of portraits in crumbling New York buildings. The two projects were not coordinated, but together…
This article was published in 2014. An updated version was published in 2017 Foundation essay: This article was part of a series marking the launch of The Conversation in the US. Our foundation essays…
In the fall of 2010, as The Walking Dead was about to debut on TV, I launched my Media Genres: Zombies course at the University of Baltimore and examined what that horror subgenre reflects about our culture…
Earth is “fucked” and our insatiable growth economy is to blame. So argues Naomi Klein in her intentionally provocative best-seller This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Klein is the latest…