Current Events

This wasn't such an interesting Super Bowl in terms of commercials, but one spot for the Ram truck line stood out to us. Was there an ad that seemed particularly notable to you?
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The sale of U.S. cable station Current TV to the Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera raises questions about how a foreign network might explain Americans to themselves. Might Al Jazeera provide a foreign lens for Americans to examine themselves? What would that even look like?
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Despite hard times and dire predictions for U.S. daytime soap operas in recent years, the present moment has in fact turned out to be one of the more exciting and promising in the genre's history.
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Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty has ignited a virtual powder keg of controversy regarding its depictions of the use of torture as a means of getting information during the ten-year hunt for Osama bin Laden. Despite complaints that it justifies the use and effectiveness of torture, the film cannot be dismissed so easily.
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While a complex production mythology makes Syfy's ambitious transmedia series/game Defiance unique, the first of two parts explores how this mythology also breeds uncertainty as the franchise's April debut nears.
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Rudolph was created when gayness as identity was rarely represented on screens, instead shunned off into the shadowy world of coded meanings waiting to be activated by knowing readers or “appearing” as semiotic excess waiting to be queered through the practice of camp.
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If Star Trek was once a foundation for the idea of taking fans seriously, then today it might simply be a sad commentary on fandom’s token function within the industry, another form of “crowdsourcing,” a destructive marriage based on the contradictory feelings of mutual dependence and contempt.
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Nick Jr.'s new NickMom lineup fits with its brand but ends up missing the mark with a core segment of its audience, highlighting the ambivalence surrounding contemporary representations of motherhood.
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In honor of Geography Awareness Week I thought it apropos to take a closer look at some participatory cultures and popular grievances that have concretized around errors in digital cartography -- especially in light of the recent and now infamous mapping debacle, Apple Maps.
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With election results now in, attention has inevitably turned to the one media source that has seemingly dedicated itself, 24/7, to making sure Obama was defeated and Republicans would take control of the Senate: Fox News.
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A week after Hurricane Sandy, it is clear that media presentations of white ethnic working-class "shore" populations are distinct from, yet overlapping with, both those of the more privileged and more visible Manhattan, and also those of the poorer and more disenfranchised Lower 9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina.
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Wednesday morning left both the electoral map and Republican politicians feeling a little blue, yet there was another group in need of collective introspection: political journalists, commentators and pundits.
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U.S. paternalism and egoism takes center stage in the third round of presidential debates.
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How fact-checking and the win/lose paradigm may distract voters from the more important moments in a debate.
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The referee lockout has been resolved, but we would do well do consider its broader implications before we allow it to recede into the past.
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