The American Dream is a conceit that’s woven into the fabric of the country: Anyone can come to the U.S., and through hard work and diligence, accomplish anything they set out to do. It’s also almost a complete fabrication, as evidenced by the fact that the majority of the wealth in this country is controlled by an…

As the atrocities of the Trump administration continue to pile up, let’s remember to keep Jimmy Fallon in our thoughts and prayers. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Fallon admits that playfully stroking Donald Trump’s hair (and ego) on The Tonight Show in the run-up to the November 2016 presidential…

“Revisionist Western” has become a redundant distinction. After all, we live in an age when the very few Westerns that still get made are almost all postmodern in outlook—challenging this once-dominant genre’s most romantic clichés, depicting frontier life with unsparing historical accuracy, pushing back against the…

Any oppositional subculture depends on a larger culture; there is no rebellion without a mainstream to rebel against. A couple decades ago when homebrewers and craft beer fans were still very much a subculture, they had their target: “fizzy, yellow beer.” Given a legitimacy boost when homebrewing was legalized in…

While most of the nation is caught up watching the Mexican border with soul-sick revulsion, there’s been another big drama playing out in the papers that you might not have been following as closely: the epic pissing match over which enormous media conglomerate gets the privilege of throwing more money at Fox ruler…

Another reminder to carefully rinse wash your produce: Ohio resident Jacob Vaughn found a surprising stowaway in his recently purchased broccoli from Kroger: a black-widow spider. As WTOL in Toledo explains, quoting an interview with an expert from Scientific American, spiders may be found in your grocery-store fruit,…

“If I gave two fucks - two fucks about streaming numbers, would have put Lemonade up on Spotify,” Beyoncé proclaims on “NICE” from her joint album with Jay-Z which they dropped exclusively on Tidal over the weekend. Unfortunately for those emotionally or monetarily invested in the streaming service, your sudden need…

The hero of Harlem, Luke Cage, returns to Netflix this Friday with its second season. The last we saw Cage, he was punching his way through the criminal syndicate The Hand as part of Marvel’s 2017 team-up miniseries The Defenders, but his first solo outing premiered almost two years ago. So before you head back to…

Following the success of Set It Up—which opened to a chorus of “actually kind of good??”s and “great for watching while eating ice cream in your sweatpants”s from critics last week—Netflix is expanding its slate of original rom-coms, touting releases through September in its monthly newsletter. None of them will debut…

With the successful relaunch and expansion of the Archie universe, it’s no surprise that publishers continue to revisit other aging classics. They have name recognition across multiple demographics, and many of them are overdue for a revamp. Nancy Drew #1 (Dynamite) is the perfect example of how to initiate a…

Nobody in TV bats a thousand. Well, maybe the British The Office. But, by and large, even the medium’s most vaunted series have a dud episode or two in the mix. Just look at Stranger Things’ second season last year, which paired us up with a bunch of bargain-bin X-Men in one of the most disappointing TV episodes in…

Every once in awhile, you encounter a story that makes you say, “Wow, I wish I had been smart/talented/cool/thoughtful/funny enough to write that.” Such is the case with this fun read from Slate’s Nick Greene, who interviewed the San Francisco Chronicle’s wine critic, Esther Mobley, about where the wine-loving LeBron…

Like its lead character, Marvel’s Luke Cage is aware of the upward climb it’s facing in season two. Luke (Mike Colter) cleared his name in Defenders, but when the new episodes begin, he’s wrestling with his newfound fame and obligations, the return of his estranged father (the late, great Reg E. Cathey), and, oh yeah,…

The original Sicario was full of uneasy sequences where you knew something was about to go terribly wrong (or at least terribly violent), but you were never quite sure when it would all pop off. The sequel, Day Of The Soldado, looks like it will have a similarly unflinching approach to the dangers of battling drug…

Yesterday, we reported on the bizarre marketing tactics being used to promote John Travolta’s terribly received John Gotti biopic, Gotti. The movie’s marketing team railed against “troll” critics who lambasted the film and used the Rotten Tomatoes audience rating to justify the claim that “audiences loved Gotti.”…

For almost a year now, movie fans have been enjoying the benefits of MoviePass, a subscription service (and by most accounts a wildly unsustainable business model) letting people see a movie a day for the flat fee of about ten bucks a month. Now, AMC has looked at the company’s popularity, and grouchily said, “We want…