Alex Pagliuca

I recorded this yesterday, and took some time to think about whether or not it belonged here, and came to the conclusion it does. I find it deeply disturbing that we treat half the people on the planet this way, and the way it plays out in the arts is part of why it keeps happening. As an audience,

Having gone through John Marshall's sense of his masculinity, its foundations, and the personal issues it's causing him in Part 1 of this series, then the way the film presents the spectrum of masculinity in the town of Snow Hollow in Part 2, it's time to take a look at the way the film presents an

There are few things audiences in the United States appreciate less than than the degree the narratives that shape the society they exist in, and therefore themselves and their lives, are often myths. For this reason, it’s not particularly surprising the festival run for Compliance was marred by con

NPR recently reposted a piece from May that accompanied a segment of All Things Considered. It’s a piece in what has become a genre in our news. It concerns people refusing to date outside of their personal political affinities. For a number of years now, we’ve been seeing these pieces with some reg

It has become routine that every major publication runs columns, op-eds, even "hard news" pieces focusing on how political polarization has been effecting social bonds in the United States. The tenor these columns and op-eds have taken is one of either trying to cajole or guilt people the writer cha

The older I get, the more I appreciate Kurt Vonnegut. The absurdity of this life, maybe particularly American aburdity, has become an inescapable presence, towering over everything. Twain was the first satirist to be celebrated for it, and Vonnegut replaces Twain’s bucolic America with one where TV,

Make the stake thick, the bonds stiff on my innocent wrists. Burn me the same way you burned her: do it because we took the plain thoughts from our own heads into the square, and spoke. From "How to Burn a Woman" by Claire Askew It’s been some year, hasn’t it? I recently saw someone invoking the uni

Are you familiar with the idea that if you live in a city, and you're ever in peril or having an emergency of some kind, you should yell "fire" and not "help"? The idea is that in cities especially, if you yell help, no one will come because they're too self involved. They don't want to get involved

Fear. Anger. Two of the most common and destructive human emotional and psychological responses. They're deeply interconnected, and one of the few real truisms is how often anger is the veil for fear, especially but certainly not only for men. Market Street, on August 12 in Charlottesville in 2012,

It's finally here. Tomorrow, some things will be different. At the very least, we won't be bombarded with political ads, we'll stop having pundits in every single news outlet trying to interpret polls, and so on. Chances are good we'll have some idea who our next president is going to be, come this

I'm currently working a piece which has expanded in scope and breadth far beyond what the initial idea was, but I think I have something good, and something useful. In the meantime, there's something connected to it which seems worth bringing up. A good deal of our current political climate is awash

In the last few days there's been a story about between Chris Cuomo and a conservative YouTuber who called him "Fredo." Cuomo responded with pretty standard tough guy talk. All of it was caught on camera, and the internet lit up over it. Vox has a pretty good breakdown on the blow by blow. If you ha