We've all seen "Got Milk," "Beef. It's What's for Dinner," and who could forget "The Incredible, Edible Egg"? With the rise of processed food, people had abandoned their milk for cola and eggs for Pop-Tarts. Christmas trees almost got a catchy slogan, but today the right-wing blogosphere is congratulating itself...

The holidays are nearly over and New Year's Eve is, as always, the last gasp of partying in 2010. But 2010 included some seriously festive debauchery.

December 11 convened the annual New York SantaCon--where thousands of Santas, elves and reindeer take to the New York streets in a combination...

Bloomberg News reports today that a company email from Nov. 30 instructed Walmart stores to mark up prices on more than a thousand kinds of toys during the holiday rush.

Wal-Mart managers in the U.S. received instructions to mark up an average of 1,800 types of toys per store,...

It's that time of year again: time to transform your home into a cozy, deforested forest.

This short film was made in 2007 for T Magazine at the New York Times, by celebrated director siblings Josh & Benny Safdie (Daddy Longlegs, The Pleasure of Being Robbed) and...

If there's a silver lining in the recent Jessica Simpson PR blooper -- in which her father/manager reportedly fired a group of singing veterans because of their camo pants -- it's that we'll have our pick of holiday music out this season. A spokesperson at Sony Music says the...

Do you remember when a Christmas Special was a way to give back to the fans? Bob Hope, John Denver and the Muppets. Johnny Cash brought his extended family onstage and to living rooms across the country through the end of the Seventies.

Flash forward to 2010, where Detroit Public...

The US Military has announced this year's deadlines for shipping to soldiers to ensure they arrive by Christmas Day. This applies to troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and other overseas deployments. As they instruct, it's important not to include the name of a foreign country in the address, since...

There are a lot of funny opinions in politics. Some are provably false. Thanks Media Matters, thanks Snopes. But only the most unprovable, paranoid ideas become enshrined in the pantheon of genuine conspiracy theories. What is it about conspiracy theories -- the Kennedy assassination, Vince Foster, 9-11,...

The era of collecting movies may finally be on the wane. Eminent film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has the centerpiece article in this summer's Cineaste Magazine, which is dedicated to the video formats of DVD and Blu-ray. It's not the old debate of whether home video will...

Countless blurbs have been published in recent weeks about Bob Dylan and the October 13th release of his 34th studio album, 47th official album--and first Christmas album--Christmas in the Heart. The instant meme was that the record, comprised of traditional songs in a traditional setting, was a bridge too...

It's 1934. Johnny Depp and Christian Bale are very serious about committing and stopping crime, respectively, flanked by every other handsome, gruff-faced man in Hollywood, plus a wealth of Tommy guns and Marion Cotillard. Sounds good; sounds like a lot of movies made between then and now. Recounting the last...

Fifteen years since the release of Toy Story, Pixar has made it very clear that they would like to be considered a movie studio in the classic sense: their films all seem to illustrate a singular creative perspective. As their individuals films do incredible things with franchising and merchandise (Cars...

In some ways the tart title Star Trek seems ridiculous for the eleventh movie in a series plus six television series, almost ignoring the episodic nature of the franchise. Director J.J. Abrams and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman are obviously and admittedly no Trekkies, and they bring back a...

If last year's spate of big political movies (from Milk to Wall E via Che and Changeling) reverberated with protest and populism, the three shorts by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon-ho that comprise the omnibus film Tokyo! might give a taste of this year's political cinema as, in...

So Hollywood finally pulled the trigger on Watchmen, the landmark graphic novel, after twenty years in the making as a film. They got a lot of smart people to make the movie, but it doesn't seem like they thought about it the whole time we were waiting.

Watchmen lasts three...