“Fifty years ago this spring, the best selling young adult novel of all time was published to adulation and outrage. This was 1967, so youth culture was not exactly new, but something about the plain, emotional voice of The Outsiders did away with the grownups’ interference and spoke […]
Smithsonian Magazine discusses the dangers to children parents saw in Little Orphan Annie. “These days, when Annie is known mainly as the little girl who sang brightly about ‘Tomorrow,’ it may be hard to picture her radio series as the Grand Theft Auto of its day. But the […]
Stephen Marche writes about Love Actually, class, English public school and being a colonized person. “I am obsessed with English culture while hating Englishness itself: That’s what it means to be a colonized person. I am Canadian, but I also spent part of my childhood as a schoolboy […]
Friend of the Gutter Aditi Sen writes elegantly about ghost stories and “Golper Desh,” the land of stories created by her father: “Ghosts are never created in a vacuum. They are a culmination of numerous things – actual historical events, social oppressions, and injustice. They hold a mirror […]
Friend of the Gutter Kimberly Lindbergs writes about Kaneto Shindo’s anti-war horror classic, Onibaba. “The film begins with a vicious murder. While making their way through a dense field of tall grass, two fugitive samurai are impaled on spears by hidden aggressors. Their killers are women who strip […]
At Hazlitt, Emma Healey writes about a particular scene in the fourth season of Louis CK’s Louie. “By the time Louie was in its fourth season, its protagonist had a lot of audience goodwill to burn, and C.K. seemed to want to do something legitimately complicated with it: […]
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The Cultural Gutter 