Every four years, the Summer Olympic Games brings together over 200 countries to celebrate the highest levels of athleticism on the world stage. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, viewers have turned on televisions (or, as of recently, logged onto streaming platforms) to see athletic feats, individual and collective… Read More
The album cover to the Wonder Years’s third album Suburbia, I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing Read More
Big Feelings and Critical NostalgiaReleased in January 2024, I Saw the TV Glow (ISTTVG) caused an improbable sensation for an arthouse film that never quite coheres into a recognizable genre. Though horrifying, it can’t be called a horror movie; at the same time, though highly stylized and full of teenaged existentialism, it’s too… Read More
En el año 2017, comenzó un periodo de transformaciones profundas para las luchas democráticas por el derecho al aborto libre y gratuito en Argentina. Entre marzo y agosto de 2018, se realizó a nivel nacional una serie de manifestaciones en apoyo a las instancias legislativas del proyecto de… Read More
Relatively recently, in a galaxy quite close to home, literary scholar Gerry Canavan vividly captured the ambiguity that shrouded the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). The second Star Wars feature film to be produced after Disney’s well-publicized acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012, Rogue One was also… Read More
On the evening of August 8, 2008, the Buskirk-Chumley Theater of Bloomington, Indiana, opened its doors for the premiere of ¡Únicamente la verdad! (Only the Truth), the first opera by Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz (b. 1964). The work is a video-opera that was announced as the authentic story of Camelia… Read More
The international attention Ukraine has received in the 270 days since Russia’s full-scale invasion of its sovereign neighbor is unprecedented. The world has never before shown such support for and interest in Ukrainian culture, including the world of the performing arts. Countless benefit concerts have been organized by high-profile orchestras,… Read More
We are perhaps the only musicologists to have made it onto the front page of the National Enquirer, a newspaper that was the nation’s most renowned scandal-sheet for many decades. The story of our extended research trip in the late 1970s that led, in part, to that brief moment of… Read More
Avengers: Endgame is an unapologetic love letter to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s ( MCU’s) past, celebrating the growth that each hero has sustained over the twenty-two film franchise. Set five years after the cataclysmic events of Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Endgame sees the defeated… Read More
Recently I spoke to a reporter about the controversy over singer Kate Smith (1907–1986). Although I have written about American popular music of the 1930s and 40s and its racial politics, I have not written specifically on Kate Smith. A radio, recording,… Read More