If our cultural lives are sick, it is likely to be an impediment to our spiritual lives. Much popular culture promotes a spirit of restlessness. That is likely to be an obstacle to prayer, to...

The Professor noted two nymphs with strawberries on their heads, a DayGlo Amish lady, a mustachioed man in a rainbow apron. He wrote Saturday Night Fever, then crossed it out and wrote Drag Ball +...

I kind of hate Nick right now, too, but there’s someone else higher on my list, someone I hate more than Saddam Hussein and any asshole named Bush combined, hate more than that fuckhead who...

I think the skin revolution for women, I will call it, really all started with Mariah Carey. Madonna was pretty risqué too, but she was pretty much always known as a “bad girl.” Mariah was...

He was a boom boom shake the room ” kind of guy

It’s basically a joke.” “I think it’s cool,” Julian says. “It’s all about control, right?” He considers something. “It’s not a joke. You should take it seriously. I mean, you’re also one of the producers–”...

Rocket Fever Grips Nation’s Teenagers’ cheers on enthusiastic newsreel, reflecting the nation’s sudden reversal in attitude following the successful launch of Explorer-I into Earth orbit. Rather than being strange and threatening, outer space looks set...

She has enough black eyeliner on to outline a corpse, and her skin’s so pale she looks like she’s just broken dawn.

For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction’s seriousness by dating it out of the...

They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics. Szabo often wished that he could be as well adjusted as Melinda’s...

It was understood that they shared the same thresholds–the same inexhaustible appetite for wasting time, for discussing lofty ideas, for dissecting trivial things, for driving to nowhere in particular, for listening to music, for talking...

These were the kids who would take LSD for recreational purposes, who relied upon tape recorders to supply the weird studio effects their music required and who could repeat the cosmic wisdom of the Space...

A picture is worth 1,000 megapixels. High-definition (HD) TV images are used to camouflage some writers’ low-definition (LD) vocabulary.

On the whole I try to keep Modesty and Willie in timeless settings, which is why I avoid all the latest slang and in-words. It won’t be long before ‘brill’ sounds as dated as ‘super’...

(Brin) ‘How good is your lawyer, on a scale of Atticus Finch to Franklin and Bash?

Popular culture is a place where pity is called compassion, flattery is called love, propaganda is called knowledge, tension is called peace, gossip is called news, and auto-tune is called singing.

We will never understand our world until we have come to terms with its future: it is the age in which we live. The Cold War depended upon internal division in order to maintain itself....

So this needs to be said, and so I will try to say it

The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party.

Apparently our portmanteau is trending on Twitter.” He let out a self-deprecating laugh. “I didn’t even know what a portmanteau was before Jukebox Hero. It’s a mashup of our names, like Brangelina or Robsten. No...

Describing current human mindsets reflecting our ignorance and cowardice and non action-oriented mentality:”I’m going to do nothing but escapist drugs and hop from one party or festival to another. I will dance my way out...

It was Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the television series, 1997-2003, not the lackluster movie that preceded it) that blazed the trail for Twilight and the slew of other paranormal romance novels that followed,...

If parents start to fear that monsters may have been let loose in their children’s bedrooms, it may be because their children are the monsters. Consider what kind of world they are growing up in....

It’s the only way anything will change. Because we are both mother and child, cause and effect, villain and victim

The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated ‘wholeness’ of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes....

I blame Doctor Who. Mr Spock. The Scooby Gang: both the ones in the Mystery Machine and the ones with the stakes. I’ve spent my life with stories of people who don’t walk away, who...

I learned that it’s okay to feel the way I do: that my life has no meaning unless I have a boyfriend. A real man is like the perfect vampire-boy and all the perfect guys...

The young are often savvy in the cultural world but not so much the intellectual; the old the intellectual but not so much the cultural. But I tell you those who do the most damage...

Reported sightings of UFOs are tailing off. With public interest declining and subscriptions dwindling, NICAP and APRO start to compete with each other over membership. The open-minded middle ground is stretched to breaking point, caught...

Everything around me affirmed there was nothing else I could do – yet everything inside me cried that I was not doing enough.

They should.””Should be like a wood bee,” she said.It was a private joke, a mocking appreciation of the slipperiness of even the simplest hope, a nonce catchphrase like so many others lifted from favorite movies...

Songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic… whatever the case, it wasn’t that I...

Alice is fictional. This isn’t.

Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case “Big Shot” and “Bette Davis Eyes.” The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there...

The public’s abiding fascination with flaying saucers, C.G. Jung suggests, ‘may be a spontaneous reaction of the subconscious to fear of the apparently insoluble political situation in the world that may lead at any moment...

After college I got a job and started working. This new career had absolutely nothing to do with my degree.

The mythology warped and twisted back along itself until Buffy Summers, the girl who once railed against the unfairness of being Chosen, looked at a squadron of girls who were just like she’d been and...

The dominant myth of the day seemed to be that anybody could do anything, even go to the moon. You could do whatever you wanted -in the ads and in the articles, ignore your limitations,...

People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.

All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I say.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That...

The existence of flying saucers is unlikely to be verified by an accumulation of facts and figures, dates and times, which, if anything, tend to dull and distract the creative intelligence, obscuring more than they...

A lifelong movie I already knew the ending to

A few years ago I started an online flirtation with a high school flame, Andy. Things got weird and I called it off and two months later…Versace was dead…dead.

Sejal had not thought of her home, or of India as a whole, as cool. She was dimly aware, however, of a white Westerner habit of wearing other cultures like T-shirts—the sticker bindis on club...

This has suggested to some that the very structure of human thought is oppositional-that is to say, rational and associative, rather than linear and categorical.

Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary...

Apocalyptic saucer cults have started to spring up all over America. One small group, which has been receiving messages from outer space via Lake City housewife Mrs. Marian Keech, becomes the subject of a research...

I avoided one-on-one situations, eye contact, and healthy relationships. Instead I took refuge in drinking too much, cheap sex, and sarcasm.

If I must choose, I’d rather be tuned in than ‘turnt up’.

Fake it. We know you can do that. We’ve seen your sex tape.