Welcome to our new feature, Late to the Party. Each week, our contributors will consume and report on a canonical or otherwise significant piece of media that they have missed until now. Next up: Kyra Glass von der Osten on Myst.
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Perspectives
Late to the Party: Myst and Why You Can Never Go Home Again
Dancing with Democracy
While controversy is nothing new for reality TV, the political overtones of Bristol Palin's run on Dancing with the Stars illuminate the genre's tenuous relationship with the principles of democracy.
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Late to the Party: Twin Peaks (1990-91)
Welcome to our new feature, Late to the Party. Each week, our contributors will consume and report on a canonical or otherwise significant piece of media that they have missed until now. First up: Myles McNutt on Twin Peaks.
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Your Friendly Neighborhood Araña: The State of Latinidad in Marvel Comics
Marvel Comics has quietly responded to the increased presence of Latinos in America with a corresponding, if tentative, increase in the number of Latino Marvel characters, as epitomized by this week's debut of a new Spider-Girl series starring Puerto Rican Anya Sofia Corazon.
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Analog Video and Derisive Laughter
What's so funny about old videotape?
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Replying with the Enemy: Showrunners on Twitter II
For showrunners, the risks and rewards of replying to Twitter users are magnified: replying could create a sense of a personal relationship with their followers, but getting into long conversations with fans (especially antagonistic fans) could spark controversy.
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Media, Mothers, and Me
CBS's The Good Wife doesn't shy away from the challenges its protagonist faces in negotiating her adult life, something more than we tend to expect to see on television, where story lines often trade in emotionally false dichotomies.
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Rehabilitating the Investment in Sports Stardom
Nike tries to give LeBron James a chance to address his off-season controversy in a new 90-second ad while re-establishing the commodity of sports stardom.
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The Flying Frenchman: Édouard Carpentier, 1926-2010
Precursor to what would now be called a "sports entertainer," the athletic Carpentier came into his own as wrestling expanded its influence on North American pop culture through television and film.
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Are Bodies Politically Meaningful? Report from The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear
What is the meaning of political bodies in a hypermediated world? If five hundred thousand of my best friends show up and the New York Times doesn't know how to read us, has Sanity occurred? A report from the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.
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Television and the Haunted Holiday
By disrupting the everyday with a yearly tradition which unite a show's cast, Halloween episodes can use the holiday's blurring of fantasy and reality to speak to questions of character.
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Net Neutrality
Despite its reputation as a wonky and bewildering issue, net neutrality actually boils down to a pretty simple principle of openness and nondiscrimination. It’s important to point out, then, that a lot of those who are talking about “net neutrality” these days aren’t actually talking about this.
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Ambient Nationality
For all the interest in using foreign media to immerse oneself in a "foreign" nationality, perhaps what a lot of us want/need is simply a background, faint, weak, unobtrusive ambience.
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Report From Internet Research 11
IR 11 is wildly interdisciplinary, tied together largely by research topic, leading to a number of fascinating connections, disjunctures, and challenges.
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The ACTA Retreat: Their Ignorance, And Ours
The ACTA retreat is indicative of a larger crisis in how media policy works today. Specifically: we have no idea how media policy works today.
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