In the closing scene of Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture, main character Aura, in a rare moment of self-reflection, declares to her mother "I want to be as successful as you are." The autobiographical movie -- with Aura played by Dunham, her mother played by Dunham's own mom, artist Laurie Simmons,...

Last Thursday, Ron Paul ended his twenty-three year career in Congress with an appeal to the idealist. "The idealism of non-aggression and rejecting all offensive use of force should be tried," he proffered in his farewell address. "The idealism of government sanctioned violence has been abused throughout history and is...

Perhaps Donald Glover was overstating things a bit when he suggested that "people have stopped laughing, bees have stopped making honey, [and] no one has died in forty-eight hours." But since NBC made the incredibly ill-advised decision to place Dan Harmon's Community on hiatus (whatever that...

It is not easy for a white woman to write a book about her experience in an interracial relationship without inspiring a few eye rolls. More than a few when she opens Chapter 1 with a delightful anecdote about picking up her Korean-American husband by making this Miley...

A few years ago, some friends and I dropped 40 bucks apiece to catch Lady Gaga at Boston's House of Blues. We were all really there to hear "Just Dance," but were perfectly happy to sit through her unreleased singles. Still, even the most diehard fans amongst us couldn't contain...

So yeah, I just want all you girls out there to know that I totes love Mindy Kaling. Seriously. She's awesome and pretty and put together and all and I think she's, like, really funny. So I was super excited to read an excerpt of her book online...

Wesley Yang's "Paper Tigers" voices some of the deepest fears of the Asian-American community. "Here is what I sometimes suspect my face signifies to other Americans," he writes, "an invisible person, barely distinguishable from a mass of faces that resemble it...a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots...

In November of 2008, as I listened to a close friend relay her father's stories of Jim Crow segregation as tears welled up in her eyes, I was reminded of a debate I'd had a year prior. I couldn't believe that many months ago I'd argued, with the certainty I...

If the world learned anything from Donald Trump last week, it's that when you feel compelled to declare that you're really smart, you're about to say something really stupid. For Trump to assert that he's "a very smart guy" before revealing to the world that he hadn't even...

The highly anticipated The Book of Mormon didn't quite provoke the highly anticipated shower of controversy we were told to highly anticipate. In the months leading up to its debut, the show indulged the predicted criticism by dismissing it. Its website touted reviews calling it "blasphemous,"...

A few days ago, Alec Baldwin offered some advice to Charlie Sheen (perhaps you've heard of him?). "Take a nap. Get a shower. Call Chuck. Go on Letterman and make an apology. Write a huge check to the B'Nai Brith. And then beg for your job back." Non-celebrity...