How Keanu Reeves Radically Rescripts Race
Reeves’s career showcases his transnational mobility as well as a representational flexibility granted by the melding of races, ethnicities, and cultures.
Doctor Who, the Traveling Time Lord
Though they each arrive with an individual sense of humor and fashion, the fifteen Doctors reflect the political and social issues of their respective eras.
The Development of Central American Film
A new collection of essays examines the reasons behind the recent boom in feature and documentary film-making from Belize to Panama.
Sheet Music: the Original Problematic Pop?
A Johns Hopkins University curator of sheet music and pop culture discusses a “Middle East-inspired” sheet-music collection that’s anything but.
Going “Black to the Future”
How has Afrofuturism supported the imagining of other worlds in the face of the anthropogenic climate crisis?
From Saint to Stereotype: A Story of Brigid
Caricatures of Irish immigrants—especially Irish women—have softened, but persist in characters whose Irishness is expressed in subtle cues.
A Night at the Oscars
All (or at least a lot) of what you need to know before going to this year’s Academy Awards watch party.
The Annotated Oppenheimer
Celebrated and damned as the “father of the atomic bomb,” theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a complicated scientific and political life.
Freeing Birdman of Alcatraz
Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor the Production Code Administration could stop the production of a movie about murderer and ornithologist Robert Stroud.
Land of the Free, Home of the Bootleggers
When technology made music mobile, the American South changed from one type of bootlegging industry to another: copying and selling records.