Showing titles in Popular Culture

Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop became the Esperanto of youth rebellion and a generation-defining movement. In a post-civil rights era defined by deindustrialization and globalization, hip-hop crystallized a multiracial, polycultural generation's worldview and transformed American politics and culture. But that epic story has never been told with this kind of breadth, insight, and style.

Dana Brown was a 21-year-old college dropout playing in punk bands and partying his way through downtown New York’s early-'90s milieu when he first encountered Graydon Carter, the legendary editor of Vanity Fair. After the two had a handful of brief interactions (mostly with Brown in the role of cater waiter at Carter’s famous cultural salons he hosted at his home), Carter saw what he believed to be Brown’s untapped potential, and on a whim, hired him as his assistant

We live in a new age of beauty. With advancements in cosmetic surgery, walk-in treatments, augmented reality face filters, photo editing apps, and exposure to more images than ever, we have the ability to craft the image we want everyone to see. We pinch, pull, squeeze, tweeze, smooth and slice ourselves beyond recognition. But is our beauty culture truly empowering? Are we really in control? In Pixel Flesh, Ellen Atlanta holds a mirror up to our modern beauty ideal, as well as the pressure to present a perfect image, to live in an age of constant comparison and curated feeds.

Is the Dude a bowling-loving stoner or a philosophical genius living the good life? Naturally, it's the latter, and The Big Lebowski and Philosophy explains why. Enlisting the help of great thinkers like Plato and Nietzsche, the book explores the movie's hidden philosophical layers, cultural reflection, and political commentary.

Few American television series are as deeply entrenched in twentieth-century popular culture as M*A*S*H, a Korean War medical comedy characterized by its dark tone and finesse in tackling serious social and political issues. By the end of its run, M*A*S*H had been a mainstream hit for several seasons and won fourteen Emmys, leading it to be called, "the most popular pre-Seinfeld series in television history." In this comprehensive study of M*A*S*H, David Scott Diffrient analyzes the series' contextual issues such as its creation, reception, and circulation as well as textual issues like its formal innovations, narrative strategies, and themes.

Unlikeable Female Characters traces the evolution of highly memorable female characters, examining what exactly makes them popular, how audiences have reacted to them, and the ways in which pop culture is finally allowing us to celebrate the complexities of being a woman. Anna Bogutskaya, film programmer, broadcaster, and cofounder of the horror film collective and podcast The Final Girls takes us on a journey through popular film, TV, and music, looking at the nuances of womanhood on and off-screen to reveal whether pop culture—and society—is finally ready to embrace complicated women.

Astounding is the landmark account of the extraordinary partnership between four controversial writers - John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard - who set off a revolution in science fiction and forever changed our world.

“As I sat in the front row that day, I was 80% faking it with a 100% real Gucci bag.” Samhita Mukhopadhyay had finally made it: she had her dream job, dream clothes—dream life. But time and time again, she found herself sacrificing time with family and friends, paying too much for lattes, and limping home after working for twelve hours a day. Success didn't come without costs, right? Or so she kept telling herself. The Myth of Making It is a field guide and manifesto for all of us who are tired, searching for justice, and longing to be liberated from the oppressive grip of hustle culture.

From the Emmy Award-winning Squid Game to streaming sensations like The Glory and Crash Landing on You, Korean television has emerged onto the global pop culture scene as compelling television—but what exactly makes these shows so irresistibly bingeable? And what can we learn about our societies and ourselves from watching them? From stand-up comedian and media studies PhD Grace Jung comes a rollicking deep dive into the cultural significance of Korean television.

In I Wear the Black Hat, Klosterman questions the very nature of how modern people understand the concept of villainy. What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don't we see Batman the same way we see Bernhard Goetz? Who's more worthy of our vitriol - Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O.J. Simpson's second-worst decision? Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and limitless imagination, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the anti-hero.

Cuteness is an area where culture and biology get tangled up. Seeing a cute animal triggers some of the most powerful psychological instincts we have – the ones that elicit our care and protection – but there is a deeper story behind the broad appeal of Japanese cats and saccharine greetings cards. Joshua Paul Dale, a pioneer in the burgeoning field of cuteness studies, explains how the cute aesthetic spread around the globe, from pop brands to Lolita fashion, kids' cartoons and the unstoppable rise of Hello Kitty.

Reality TV. Celebutantes. YouTube. Sex Tapes. Gossip Blogs. Drunk Driving. Tabloids. Drug Overdoses. Is this entertainment? Why do we keep watching? What does it mean for our kids? In the last decade, the face of entertainment has changed radically - and dangerously, as addiction specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky and business and entertainment expert Dr. S. Mark Young argue in this eye-opening new book.

The culture wars are over and the idiots have won. This is a veteran journalist’s caustically funny, righteously angry lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States. The three Great Premises of Idiot America: · Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units; anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough; "fact" is that which enough people believe. And "truth" is determined by how fervently they believe it.

The Allman Brothers Band’s Brothers and Sisters was not only the band’s best-selling album at over seven million copies sold, it was also a powerfully influential release, both musically and culturally, one whose influence continues to be profoundly felt.

Every week, at a different University, it pits a team of three Students against three of their Lecturers. The rounds vary between Specialist Knowledge and General Knowledge, quickfire bell-and-buzzer rounds and ‘Highbrow and Lowbrow’. Which of the students will turn out to be complete trivia-boffins? Will the Lecturers reveal they know more about Beyoncé than Barthes? There’s plenty of scope for embarrassment on both sides...

Harry Potter has been heralded as one of the most popular book series of all time, and the philosophical nature of Harry, Hermione, and Ron's quest to rid the world of its ultimate evil is one of the many things that make this series special. The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy covers all seven titles in J.K. Rowling's groundbreaking series and takes fans back to Godric's Hollow to discuss life after death, to consider what moral reasoning drove Harry to choose death, and to debate whether Sirius Black is a man or a dog.

Marvel Comics in the 1970s explores a forgotten chapter in the story of the rise of comics as an art form. Bridging Marvel's dizzying innovations and the birth of the underground comics scene in the 1960s and the rise of the prestige graphic novel and postmodern superheroics in the 1980s, Eliot Borenstein reveals a generation of comic book writers whose work at Marvel in the 1970s established their own authorial voice within the strictures of corporate comics.

In Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it means - or doesn’t - to be funny in it now. Tracing the evolution of humor from the caveman days to the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Python’s game-changing silliness to the fast-paced meta-humor of The Simpsons, Jennings explains how we built our humor-saturated modern age, where lots of us get our news from comedy shows and a comic figure can even be elected president of the United States purely on showmanship.

James Gleick's story begins at the turn of the 20th century, with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation: The Time Machine. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological - the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilizations, and the perfection of clocks.

Final Fantasy is one of the most iconic and beloved video game series in the world. Since its inception, its titles have adopted names, themes, and stories from across global mythology, including the beliefs of the Vikings. This book embarks on a detailed exploration of how Norse lore in particular influenced the writing and design of Final Fantasy VII - arguably the most critically acclaimed of the franchise - and its wider Compilation. This work is presented as a tribute to the metaseries Compilation of Final Fantasy VII.