Imagine my surprise when the movie turned out to be brilliant. Brilliant, note—not enjoyable. The cinematography was fantastic and every one of us was retrospectively amazed that the whole thing was accomplished using a mere five actors. So yes, an incredible piece of work. The technical coups, however, were only icing on the cake. Its true distinction lay in its patent ability to discomfort the viewer in ways that I no longer thought possible, in a show-all, tell-all world.

Every year, on the fourteenth day of February, one is bound to hear numerous complaints from just about everyone (besides florists) about how Valentine’s Day is mere commercialism. Whichever side they come from – and whichever variation of the arguments they choose – it all boils down to this: they are decrying the fact that relationships have moved from the private to the public sphere. The underlying logic is that love is between two persons only and should remain between them; love should remain an unmediated experience between the two persons in that relationship.

Directly following the Obamania surrounding the January 2009 presidential inauguration, U.S. news media began running stories about Natalie Dylan, the 22-year-old women’s studies graduate who decided, in the wake of completing a degree based on the refutation of patriarchal principles, to sell her virginity online to the highest bidder. While the media made much ado about the implications of Dylan as a failed “role model”—with much hand-wringing about the decline of civilized courtship, the encroaching tidal wave of raunch culture onto “good girl” suburbia, and the loss of old-fashioned values of purity and chastity—they failed to take seriously Dylan’s own narrative about this exchange. This essay asks: What does Dylan’s reading of selling her virginity offer to a feminist politics?

After the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States of America, Glenn Beck, on FoxNews.com, quickly criticized the racialism of Barack Obama’s inaugural ceremony. While he was not the least bit bothered by Rick Warren’s divisive invocation, Beck found the closing benediction from civil-rights veteran, Joseph Lowery, aggravating simply because it ended on [...]

Overt evil is easy to discuss. It’s banal evil that is hard to acknowledge. And you can’t confess to a sin until that sin has been acknowledged. Churches spent the rest of the twentieth century acknowledging the sins of genocide. However, in her writings, Hannah Arendt, who witnessed the trials against the Nazis, wrote about how the Nazi war criminals resisted acknowledging that their boring, nine-to-five office jobs of record keeping or laboratory work on the use of chemicals in the gas chambers had actually been evil. In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt chronicles the wartime activities and trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, who claimed that he was only doing his bureaucratic job as a transportation logician.

1. I eat mud  when sun doesn’t shine and eyes, mine like seas, busk heavy with the sadness of every season at winter. To cheer me up they use illumination therapy and melatonin, carefully ionized air, but I tell them nothing of what I cannot speak: that I eat mud because I can’t swallow this [...]

What exactly is this relationship between big hair and handicapped animals in American society? The bigger your hair, the more likely you are to share your life with a domesticated animal missing a limb. Case in point: the tripod canine hobbling around the pool at our motel in El Rio, Oklahoma and his owner, the [...]

Fantasy is a wonderful thing in a child’s life. It’s a wonderful thing in anyone’s life. And there’s no harm in it; after all, the vast majority of us, once we’ve reached adulthood, know the difference between what we see in movies and what we know in real life. Don’t we?