Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Late last month Marketplace Money did a story on "hauls," online video diaries about the junk people buy. Call me a Luddite, but that makes me want to cuddle up with Tolstoy's War and Peace. If you have a different reaction it might be because you--like so many savvy entrepreneurs in the information age--are seeing dollar signs where others might see cultural decline.

Are death threats and regularly broadcasted rage throwbacks to similar times in American history, or is it a new phenomenon that a quarter of the Republican party thinks our president is, without exaggeration, the Antichrist? I recently took a turn through Gallup's Presidential Approval Center to get some answers about how today's political and cultural climate truly differs from the past.

Recently, I wrote a blog for Mother Jones about the new Sherlock Holmes flick. It wasn't about Robert Downey Jr.'s celebrity comeback, or Jude Law and Sienna Miller's tumultuous relationship. It was about the (possibly) homosexual relationship at the center of the film, and what it revealed about America's attitudes toward sexuality and masculinity. As an example, here was one commentator's response: "Awww, come on folks--I think they scooped TMZ [the online gossip rag]! Unfan."