This review originally appeared on The Awl.

I don't have to tell you that Antichrist sucks. Plenty of highbrow places like the New York Times and Slate have already done so, their writers leaping to slather disdain on this latest morsel of art-horror crap. Oh, it's so distasteful!...

We're comfortable with moral relativism in this country -- or, at least, we love us a good "sinned and redeemed" narrative. And, for the most part, we realize that there are few lives on which we can slap a "Good" or "Evil" label and expect it to be accurate.

Apparently, Megan Fox is stupid. I wouldn't know personally -- I've never seen her do an IQ test or crash a Mensa meeting. But oodles of news articles are more than happy to tell me how skull-crushingly dense she is. "She may be a movie beauty, but is Megan...

I'm hardly the only woman/human/advocate of sanity that's losing sleep over Sarah Palin. For the past week and a half, I've jerked awake every night between 3 and 4 AM, spitting with rage over the possibility that Alaska's biggest celebrity could hold one (or two! Cancer's a bitch)...

Last week, I heard a panel of women speak in a Lower East Side bar. They each had three things in common: They were magazine-cover gorgeous, had enough combined graduate degrees to create a new department at M.I.T., and every one of them had sold her eggs.

The...

Last week, I had a forced identity crisis. As it did for plenty of other women/writers/people who consume far too much media, Emily Gould's infamous cover story and the resulting maelstrom sat in my thoughts, roiling and churning until the inside of my head looked like something envisioned...

A month ago, I woke up feeling peaceful for the first time in months. I'm 29, I had just closed on my first apartment, and I was leaving a five-year relationship that, despite my dogged hopes of marriage, had become a stew pot of resentment and anger. While

There's been plenty written about the ever-vigilant blogosphere's effects on the coming election. Now the Washington Post examines a new twist to blogger/candidate relations: the aggressive push by bloggers for a direct say in Internet-related policymaking. The key issue at stake, as Post staff writer Charles Babington...

The Los Angeles Times has stirred up controversy with an op-ed provacatively titled, "Was 9/11 really that bad? The attacks were a horrible act of mass murder, but history says we're overreacting." The piece, written by Johns Hopkins history professor and New Republic contributing editor David Bell, is a...

Newsweek has an exclusive interview this week with Reade Seligmann, one of the three Duke lacrosse players embroiled in the much-rehashed rape case. It's a tear-jerker of a piece, with tales of dashed innocence, traumatized siblings and parents stretched to near breaking points after their son was identified by...

This post originally appeared in Huffpo's "Eat The Press" section.

The New York Times checks in today on The Politico, Allbritton Communications' much-discussed multimedia venture that's set to launch in two weeks. It first made waves in November, when former Washington Post political bigwigs Jim VandeHei and...

The theater lights dim. Digitally mastered drum beats burst from three-foot speakers lining the walls. A jungle canopy appears on the screen, just visible through a hazy mist. Cut to a young man dressed in a loincloth, his black hair spilling over muscular shoulders, a canine tooth dangling from his...

It's easy to remember Bush's address from Jackson Square last September. Seventeen days after Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast, with hundreds of thousands still stranded, lethargic recovery efforts trickling forward and a major city still in the throes of emergency, our nation's leader spoke to us at last. He appeared...

The newest installment of The Times' "The New Gender Divide" series, "Men Not Working, And Not Wanting Just Any Job," seems only too proud to expose more casualties of the feminist era. This time, we're bemoaning the troubles of men in their prime who exit the work force...

Joel Siegel's highly-publicized condemnation of Kevin Smith's Clerks II at a recent press screening can be called at best naive, at worst melodramatic. Yelling in a packed theater that you're offended by raucous humor in a Kevin Smith film is like walking out on the first...

(This post appears with an illustration on HufPo's Eat The Press)

Two weeks ago, blogger Andrew Hearst, well-known in the industry for his magazine-cover parodies, posted another offering on his site, Panopticist.com. Hearst's latest was a takeoff of teen-girl bible Seventeen, re-imagined as a book for...

Capitalizing on social trends is hardly a new phenomenon. Conservative zealots like Ann Coulter have struck gold by tapping into collective fears and festering anger. George Ouzounian's "Alphabet of Manliness," which debuted at Number Four on The New York Times Bestseller List, slides smoothly...

Mainstrea media often brims with depressing images. Iraq footage, newly released Abu Ghraib photos, still shots of Tom Hanks with truly awful hair. But the newest widely circulated video of Paris Hilton and her cohort debasing Lindsay Lohan tops this week's list of material most likely...

We all know the feeling of being watched. That prickly chill lodging itself in your spine and crawling under your hairline, leaving you absolutely certain that unseen eyes are invading...

It has been said that the the mood at this year's Tribeca Film Festival is a bit on the somber side - no surprise, infused as it is with intense dramas and documentaries tackling bleak subjects like war, genocide and mass destruction. But with such an...