The unending string of hilarious #SochiProblems and daily stories of government gluttony have positioned Russia as a sort of shadow version of the American Way of Life.
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Author Archive
Sucks to Be Ru: America’s new Russian Other
Creating is Collecting
The culture of contemporary baseball card collecting is an excellent example of how creativity can serve as a satisfying replacement for traditional economic incentives.
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The Middle East: Inside, Outside, and Online
Antenna introduces a new series on the mediation of Middle Eastern politics, edited by Matt Sienkiewicz and articulated through the side-by-side perspectives of bloggers and academics.
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The Internet, Baseball Analysis, and the Persistence of Dogma
A brief discussion and interview with Baseball Prospectus podcaster Kevin Goldstein on the current state of baseball analysis.
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Klosterman, philosophy and cultural studies: An audio interview
An audio interview with Chuck Klosterman, accompanied by a discussion of how his work not only blurs things that us cultural studies professors celebrate by taking “low” culture seriously, but also in a way that inevitably makes us nervous.
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Jewpacabra
Last week’s South Park episode, “Jewpacabra,” is just the latest in the program’s intermittent efforts to use their medium to introduce otherwise silenced elements of society and culture into the public sphere. Though packaged in exactly the sort of silliness and Jew jokiness that the title implies, the episode actually features one...
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Part-time Occupation
Keeping shooting schedules is hard enough under perfect conditions. For producers in the West Bank things are never perfect. For a scholar, for better and for worse, that’s part of the story.
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For Worse and For Better: My Bill Simmons Weekend
Bill Simmons' organization of a series of live fan chants during the Celtics game underscores his unique power as an internet star to turn commentary into real life action.
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Farewell to a Great TV Show
Thoughts on the retirement of one of America's great journalists, Bill Moyers.
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Is It OK to Type This?
How did the recent South Park controversy on depicting Mohammed contribute to our overall understanding of the issue?
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Discursive Disintegration
Politically engaged, “discursively integrated” comedy has become quite the buzz topic both within the television industry as well as the academy, with all sorts of attention being paid to programs like South Park, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show etc. Nowhere is this expectation for up-to-the-minute political satire made more apparent than in...
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5 Thoughts On: ABC’s Modern Family
One Show, Five Thoughts.
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Five Thoughts On: Peter’s Palestinian Alarm Clock
I don’t know if I’m the only Jew who watched this episode of Family Guy while residing in the Palestinian Territories, but I’ve got a suspicion that if we all got together we’d have trouble making a minyan. In any case, it’s a good opportunity to offer up a new gimmick for Antenna: ...
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And You Thought We Didn’t Care
Last week Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas announced his intention not to run for reelection (big) if and when a vote is held. This isn't the forum to discuss the political significance of this move, but I thought I'd throw out some quick observations on the international media side of the story.
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Ricky Gervais likes Girls and Girls Like Status
So I'm not living in a place where my social life includes television or movie theaters or talking about things that aren't terrifying. As a result I was not reduced to watching Ricky Gervais' The Invention of Lying by myself; I was reduced to watching some guy on the Internet's camcorder recording of Ricky...
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