Thursday 2013-03-28, 12:00am
Lost tampons, Buzz Bissinger, and the world of endless memoir.
Lost tampons, Buzz Bissinger, and the world of endless memoir.
Ah, the satisfying pop of a Snapple cap—the memories it brings back, from the sharpness of the salt bagel it accompanied to the satisfying sweetness of its first sip.
In the interest of at least dragging people out of bed in the morning, the marketing department at PepsiCo Inc. has devised the breakfast soda. A review of MTN Dew Kickstart.
Thanks to savvy marketing by the likes of Apple and Google, free virtual places eventually become just as real as the corner store. But now Google Reader has a “Closed” sign at the door.
At 14, I wasn’t smart enough to not feel that the simple act of preferring hard rock—the long-haired, dick-swinging kind that most often manifested itself in power-ballad form on top-40 radio—to “softer” music differentiated myself from my peers.
The failure of recent movie offerings from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone says something about how the action movie landscape has changed since their glory days—although Bruce Willis might be lighting the way for aging action stars.
Do women deserve more from romance novels?
Back in the dialup era, February was notorious among the denizens of a bulletin board I frequented; without fail, it would be the month when so many long-simmering disagreements would boil over and catch fire, causing multi-post back-and-forths, resigning of conferences, snipey private-conference messages, and, sometimes, real-life dissolutions of friendships. The story went that even […]
A look back at The Joe Schmo Show, Spike’s reality-TV hoax that rewards viewers’ over-familiarity with reality TV with a broad satire of its tropes and conventions.
When I was a cheeky, take-no-prisoners music blogger, one of my favorite tags was “lol words,” which I used to spotlight the silly, stupid, and downright horrifying ways that words would be twisted in service of some band or record or what-have-you. I got a lot of mileage out of it, and am a bit sad that my blogging career ended before social media really took off.
What does it mean when a band hooks a “the” on its name?
The curious case of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter.
One lesson to take from Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Not even a fairly average entry into the world of corporate advice books is immune from double standards.
Before the screening of the new Harmony Korine film Spring Breakers, the publicist announced that it was “like a dream; just go with it.” (I tend to “just go with” most films, as that’s how they are generally meant to be watched.)
In pop music, “perfection” measures pleasure. Calling an album or song “perfect” is usually a sign that music has resulted in a system shock, whether because it landed directly on one’s soul, jolted a person’s nervous system, or caused the body to physically react.
This issue is Maura Magazine’s 10th, and it looks at Big Things: American pop idolatry, country radio in New York City, the idea of the “perfect” song, and movies that fall in on themselves because of way too much self-referentiality.
New York’s history with country radio stretches as far back as the era before the genre was even called country.
If American Idol—not to mention its intranetwork rival X Factor, and even to an extent its blind-taste-test copycat The Voice—were truly a singing competition, of course, matters of styling and “marketability” would be taboo subjects, and the contestants would only focus on getting as much vocal rest time and tea as they could before their 90 seconds were up. (No taping of extraneous commercials for Ford for these kids). But of course it isn’t
It might be cliché to say it, but man oh man am I happy February is over.