News
So we’re getting a good bit more spam since I turned off the captcha requirement. Is this annoying people? Or is it worth not having to struggle with the captcha? Let me know if people are happy as is or if I should try to bring the captcha back.
On HU
Featured Archive Post: a report on a panel on gender and cartooning in Chicago.
I review the mediocre mockumentary Troll Hunting.
A list of the best essays I wrote in 2013.
Ilana Gershon on firing teachers for what they say on social media.
Chris Gavaler on the superhero pilgrimage to Tibet.
Richard Cook got engaged! To celebrate, he provides a history of marriage in comic book covers.
Adrielle Mitchell for PencilPanelPage kicks Moon and Ba’s Daytripper.
Isaac Butler on the labor practices of the theater The Flea and whether people should be paid for acting. (This is I think our biggest single day post since the Victorian Wire in terms of traffic.)
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Atlantic
—I argue that Britney belongs in Vegas.
—I celebrate Sherlock Holmes’ freedom from copyright.
At Salon I have a list of winter songs.
At the Dissolve I am unimpressed with The Rocket, a feel-good Laotian drama with spunky kids.
At Splice Today I write about
the upsides of hypocritical homophobia.
Chris Christie losing my vote.
Other Links
NPR’s Code Switch did a big segment on Orion Martin’s HU piece asking What if the X-Men Were Black?
Calum Marsh on why every war movie is a pro-war movie.
Jonathan Bernstein has started his new politics blog at Bloomberg.
Andreas Stoehr has a brutal short review of Saving Mr. Banks.
Jill Filopovic on online harassment of women.
I haven’t really noticed any spam.
That’s really cool about the NPR Codeswitch picking up on Orion’s work.
Having never seen it, I think Lone Survivor is trying to use traditionally antiwar imagery in a pro-war context and narrative. In other words, their suffering makes them heroic. It’s possible to make an antiwar movie using both antiwar imagery and antiwar narratives. MASH immediately comes to mind, but there are probably others.
Noah, I hope you were being disingenuous when you implied that you were likely to have voted for Christie if not for the bridge scandal. I don’t follow New Jersey politics much, despite living here, but I know he’s been terrible for teachers and is generally a prick. Also, I doubt that he’s better than Clinton or Biden in any way, and the idea of a left-leaning person voting Republican just to keep the party from going totally insane doesn’t make any sense to me. Vote for a third party if you can’t stomach the Democrats!
Not disingenuous; I just didn’t know that much about him. If this didn’t turn me against him, I suspect something else would have.
I might have voted for him in the Republican primary, though, if the Democratic one was all sewn up. I’ve done that before. (And I voted 3rd party last presidential election, actually.)