If you want to understand a society in its own time and place, read its magazines.
Not its novels, which will evoke an imagined past or extrapolate (successfully or not) an endpoint to then-contemporary trends; nor its newspapers, which, burdened by the self-knowledge of serving as the historical record, must by and large confine themselves to the facts as they are found on the ground, with no feeling for the poetry of events.
Do you have what it takes to be a Man's Man? Read TIME columnist Joel Stein's funny account of modern-day manhood in 'Man Made.'
Magazines ...
Read the full post 
The “before they were famous” narrative is a mainstay of writing about pop culture, and accounts of the Beatles’ residency in Hamburg are at the head of that canon.
Read the last Popdose on Man vs. Wild's Bear Grylls' latest memoir.
Like all such stories, the Hamburg narrative lets us look at familiar subjects in new ways. It restores to the lads from Liverpool some of the sexy-dangerous aura that faded from them as the ’60s ground on—caftans, love beads and bad mustaches still in some hazy future, the Fab Four still Five, leather-clad shag-monsters, greasy-quiffed, tearing through ...
Read the full post
1. You can't always depend on arriving at the right time. Bear Grylls knows that.
In 1998, when at age 23 he became the then-youngest Briton to climb Mt. Everest, his approach to the summit coincided with the arrival of a monsoon.
Bad luck.
Read our interview with Bear Grylls on his new autobiography, 'Mud, Sweat, and Tears.'
Now the U.S. publication of his autobiography Mud, Sweat, and Tears—already a bestseller across the rest of the English-speaking world—comes on the heels of the cancellation of the TV show that made him famous: Discovery Channel's Man ...
Read the full post
Criticism is a touchy subject at the best of times, but subjecting popular culture to academic analysis is particularly dicey.
With most of the commercial arts—film, TV, comic books, pop music, comedy—the pleasures of the product are primarily experiential. Populist works are by design neither dense nor particularly allusive, because those mediating qualities make it more difficult to “enter” a work.
Read the last Popdose on 'Scandalous! 50 Shocking Events You Should Know About.'
And so they neither beg for nor benefit from intensive explication. No work is entirely without subtext, of course, but for the most part ...
Read the full post
Scandal is a sort of cultural currency, grounding narratives to their place and time. Those contemporary concerns—whether significant or petty in the grand scheme of things—are the backdrop against which our human dramas play out, and the texture that marks the date of a literary work.
Read the last Popdose on Heather Donahue's 'Growgirl.'
You can read Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and grasp intuitively its themes of sexual deception, class anxiety and the uncertainties of memory. You’ll need footnotes, though, to get you up speed on the Dreyfus Affair that so engages and ...
Read the full post
When F. Scott Fitzgerald observed that there are no second acts in American lives, he was not (as is commonly misunderstood) saying that those lives are over after their opening acts—but noting, rather, the curious phenomenon of careers that segue directly from Act One to Act Three.
Read the last Popdose on the book about 'Animal House,' 'Fat, Drunk, and Stupid.'
This path is particularly prevalent in the entertainment industry, where it is standard procedure to skip from Promising Newcomer to Superstar (or, just as likely, to Embittered Has-Been) without any sustained period of steady, high-quality-but-low-profile work in between ...
Read the full post
In the week that I write this, there have been two stories in the news about college fraternities.
The first—the more depressing and less surprising—concerns the Greek system at Dartmouth College, which has come under fire following disturbing revelations regarding the hazing of pledges. Google the specific allegations for yourself, if you dare; they’re far too vile to go into here.
Read the last Popdose on Gen-X icon Kate Moss.
As heinous as these actions are, they can be explained by the human tendency toward escalation. Minus any mediating outside authority, in a closed system of tradition ...
Read the full post
There’s a point in the development of every self-defined intellectual when he—and it’s almost always a he—dismisses fashion as a meaningless frippery with no place in the life of the mind, lavishing especial scorn on the profession of modeling: Their “talent” is to wear clothes! he’ll sneer, in a tone suggesting that this encapsulates all that is wrong with the modern condition.
Read the last Popdose on SNL alum Rachel Dratch's life after showbiz.
This phase is often (not always) followed by a pendulum swing to the opposite pole, as inchoate iconoclasm gives way ...
Read the full post
Some books you write because you’ve got a new story that you’re excited to share. Some books you write because there’s an old story that you’re sick of telling, and you figure that maybe if you set it out in print people will stop asking you about it at parties. The new memoir by Rachel Dratch splits the difference.
Did you see 'The Hunger Games' yet?
Girl Walks Into a Bar: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle provides an update on Dratch’s new life as a full-time mom, while giving the final word ...
Read the full post
Kevin Smith’s most successful and enduring creation is, without a doubt, Kevin Smith.
An owlish, pop-culture savant from Jersey, Smith has transformed himself—through charm, smarts and years of relentless hustle—into something like the voice of a generation. He’s a moviemaker, Twitter celeb, writer of comic books and memoirs, comedian and tireless champion of independent film.
Read the last Popdose on 'Dirty Dancing's' 25th anniversary retrospective.
Additionally, he owns a comics shop, runs a production company, presides over an empire of message boards and podcasts, and, for all I know by the time this is published ...
Read the full post
Although it’s now one of the iconic films of the 1980s—and certainly one of the most quoted—Dirty Dancing was a box office dark horse upon its release. A teen movie for former teenagers, set in the Jewish summer resorts of the Catskills—a milieu that was fading even in 1963, when the movie is set—it was seen as a nostalgia piece. It might connect with a core market of Boomers, but was considered a long shot to bring in the all-important youth audience.
Popdose takes on the Real Housewives.
But the screenplay—loosely based on writer-producer ...
Read the full post
Artist Derf Backderf turns to a most fascinating—and grisly—subject for his latest graphic novel My Friend Dahmer.
In the book, Backderf pulls from his own memories of attending high school with the infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, as well as hours of detailed interviews with his friends and acquaintances who were there at the time, and news reports and interviews that covered Dahmer’s crimes when he was caught. The result is a portrait of a young man on the brink of a dark, depraved place almost impossible to imagine. In a starred review, we called it “a ...
Read the full post
Time was, I had to actually go to Canada to experience the adventures of Captain Canuck. The one and only issue that I’d ever seen of the original run—issue No. 3, I think—was picked up in a visitor’s center gift shop during a family trip to Niagara Falls.
Check out Popdose on Ballad of the Salt Sea, the first adventure of Corto Maltese.
I was 10 or 11 years old, and I had never seen anything like it. It was my first indie comic, my first non-U.S. comic, and I had no context for it ...
Read the full post
So there are apparently seven TV shows comprising the Real Housewives franchise, which seems wrong to me. Not as a moral judgment, mind, but factually. Statistically unlikely, let’s say.
Love Bravo? Did you know that 'Top Chef's' Gail Simmons has a book out?
Oh, certainly the series in one of its permutations seems always to be on whenever I’m flipping channels—there are enough showings in any given week to account for dozens of shows—but I attributed that to the basic-cable strategy of rerunning any hit show as often as possible. I figured there were three ...
Read the full post
Culinary expert, food critic, Top Chef judge and special projects director at Food & Wine magazine, Gail Simmons describes how her life is connected by a deep appreciation for food in her new memoir, Talking with My Mouth Full: My Life As a Professional Eater.
Check out more recently published books on food and cooking.
Why this book now?
When I first started thinking about a book, I didn’t know…maybe I’d write a cookbook? But then I asked myself, do I really have 100 recipes in me that have never been done before, that the world really needs ...
Read the full post
There’s a mixed blessing to being a pop-culture maven based in the United States. The same vibrancy and volume we celebrate in our homegrown product make the American market extraordinarily resistant to penetration by foreign properties. It’s a little embarrassing that American films can rule the overseas box office from Milan to Yucatán, but that Doctor Who is only now—50 years after its debut—starting to garner some brand recognition in the States.
Read the last Popdose on 'Tales From Development Hell.'
For every Pokémon or Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that pushes through to ...
Read the full post
Five things I learned from the revised and expanded paperback edition of Tales From Development Hell: The Greatest Movies Never Made? by David Hughes:
Read the last Popdose on the cult behind the comic Nancy.
It’s a goddam miracle that any movie, good or bad, ever gets made at all. A feature film can fall apart at literally any point in the intricate process of its making and marketing. You might think that a Ridley Scott thriller with Robert Redford in the lead would be bulletproof—but Hughes details how The Hot Zone came to pieces literally days before ...
Read the full post
It’s hard to say just when and how the Cult of Nancy started. Oh, you’d always read the strip, but that’s just because it was always there, a lingering holdover from midcentury, an era before the invention of such concepts as “taste” and “humor,” when the so-called “funny pages” served the merely utilitarian function of filling the space between TV listings and classifieds.
Like showtunes and Broadway? Check out the last Popdose on 'Jazz Hands.'
Nancy—which dates in its current form to 1938, and which sees nearly a thousand strips from its mid-’40s run collected ...
Read the full post
New year, new semester and fresh episodes of Glee are on the air.
Read the last Popdose on the new graphic novel 'One Model Nation.'
And if the TV show is no longer the headline-grabbing pop juggernaut that it was in its earlier seasons, we have yet to see the extent of its true, long-term cultural impact—as the gateway, for a generation of high-schoolers, into the odd and wondrous world of show choir. Because the coming of the new semester also means that, all over America, real-life high school show choirs are getting ready for competition season.
Most of ...
Read the full post
Rock ’n’ roll is an art form of gesture and mood, and the skillset it requires does not always translate to the demands of telling a story. The rockers who successfully manage the transition to fiction are those who approach it from a position of strength.
Read the last Popdose on Groucho Marx.
When Nick Cave made the jump to screenplays and novels (The Proposition and The Death of Bunny Monroe, most notably), you could see the groundwork in the narrative songs he’d been writing for years. Leonard Cohen was a novelist before he was a songwriter. And before ...
Read the full post
