Pop Culture

On Tortured Poets, Taylor Swift Dreams of Marriage

Taylor Swift invokes marriage as the ultimate symbol of enduring love and commitment on her eleventh studio album. Continue Reading »

27 May 2024

Tom Hanks Gets Empathy Wrong

by Carl R. Trueman

In declaring that it is inappropriate for a straight actor to play a gay man on screen, Hanks negates the importance of the shared humanity that makes him empathetic in the first place. Continue Reading »

23 Jun 2022

The Last Twentieth-Century Film

by Miles Smith

Commitment makes Maverick the oldest and truest type of Naval officer; the oldest and truest type of American; and finally, the oldest and truest type of man. Continue Reading »

14 Jun 2022

Batman Beyond Vengeance

by Alexi Sargeant

Despite its noir trappings and deeply dysfunctional Gotham, The Batman shows its protagonist growing in a way few other portrayals have. Continue Reading »

11 Mar 2022

Sting in the Shadow of the Cross

by John Duggan

As his latest album demonstrates, a subset of Sting’s songs reverberates with the legacy of an urban English Catholic childhood of the 1950s and ’60s. Continue Reading »

1 Mar 2022

Loving and Hating the Middle Ages

by John Duggan

Modern people, despite being drawn to medieval aesthetics and artificats, cannot seem to bear to examine what those artifacts are modeled on: the intelligible order glimpsed by the eye of faith. Continue Reading »

24 Jan 2022

The Strange Fate of Hamilton and Harry Potter

by Carl R. Trueman

The moral shelf life of pop cultural artifacts seems much shorter than ever before, and the criteria by which they might be judged far less predictable. Continue Reading »

6 Jan 2022