Chris Hedges argues that we now live in two societies: one, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world, able to cope with complexity and to separate illusion from truth. The other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. In this "other society," comforting, reassuring images, fantasies, slogans and a celebration of violence push reality, complexity and nuance to the margins....

"Imagine watching an entire day's worth of television on every single channel. Acclaimed environmental writer and culture critic Bill McKibben subjected himself to this sensory overload in an experiment to verify whether we are truly better informed than previous generations. Bombarded with newscasts and fluff pieces, game shows and talk shows, ads and infomercials, televangelist pleas and Brady Bunch episodes, McKibben processed twenty-four hours...

"From one of our leading film historians and interpreters: a brilliantly researched, irresistibly witty, delightfully illustrated examination of "the marriage movie": what it is (or isn't) and what it has to tell us about the movies--and ourselves. As long as there have been feature movies there have been marriage movies, and yet Hollywood has always been cautious about how to label them--perhaps because unlike any other genre of film, the marriage...

"In 1965 Thomas Merton fulfilled a twenty-four-year-old dream and went to live as a hermit beyond the walls of his Trappist monastery. Seven months later, after a secret romance with a woman half his age, he was in danger of losing it all. Yet on the very day that his abbot uncovered the affair, Merton found solace in an unlikely place--the songs of Bob Dylan, who, as fate would have it, was experiencing his own personal and creative crises during...

"A history of the thinkers, writers, and artists who shaped intellectual culture in Cold War Europe and America"-- Menand analyzes the economic, demographic, and technological forces that drove social and cultural change in US during the twenty years following the end of the Second World War. Introducing us to the personalities at the center of this transformation -- artists and thinkers both in the US and abroad -- he shows how they exerted a powerful...

A hit sketch comedy series that is driven by hilarious character-based shorts, all of which take place in "Portlandia", the creators' dreamy and absurd rendering of Portland, Oregon, where 90s culture reigns supreme and political correctness is all the rage. A series of short comedy sketches which are centered around the fictitious town of Portlandia and 1990s pop culture.

In the minds of many Americans, Islam is synonymous with the Middle East, Muslim men with violence, and Muslim women with oppression. A clash of civilizations appears to be increasingly manifest and the war on terror seems a struggle against Islam. These are all symptoms of Islamophobia. Meanwhile, the current surge in nativist bias reveals the racism of anti-Muslim sentiment. This book explores these anxieties through political cartoons and film--media...