Nick Yee— Gender is a hotly contested topic in gaming. There is a lot of noise and vitriol, but at its core, much of the debate revolves around the shifting demographics of gaming due to its mainstreaming, and the resulting tension over who gets to be a real “gamer” and
Katrina Jagodinsky— For many Americans, summer is a season marked by patriotic holidays and family gatherings. Memorial Day kicks off our appreciation for military service and three-day weekends, Fourth of July announces independence through pyrotechnics, and Labor Day offers the last, official, summer day of rest whether we choose to
The exciting exhibition Warhol & Mapplethorpe: Guise & Dolls opened this weekend at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford. Focusing on New York in the 1970s and early 80s, the exhibition explores the vibrant and tumultuous era of change through the work of Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe, both of
Read Nick Yee’s piece on how the media gets video games wrong on the Huffington Post. Online games such as Second Life or EverQuest might seem escapes from reality, opportunities to create new persona and new worlds. In his book, The Proteus Paradox, gaming researcher Nick Yee instead contends
Ariana Parenti— Though I never thought of myself as a follower of the fashion world, in picking up A Queer History of Fashion I was excited to discover the rich history of gay men and women throughout the fashion industry. That gay men are unusually prevalent is perhaps not so surprising.
A writer, novelist, filmmaker, and activist, Susan Sontag was an engaged intellectual for whom thinking was a form of feeling and feeling a form of thinking. One of the most influential critics of her generation, she was widely admired by many women and something of a contested figure within the LGBTQ communities,
Follow @MHarrisPerry Follow @MHPShow “Citizenship is more than an individual exchange of freedoms for rights,” writes Melissa V. Harris-Perry, professor, writer and television host, in Sister Citizen. “It is also membership in a body politic, a nation, and a community.” In Sister Citizen, now available in paperback, Harris-Perry looks at
What does it mean for a Muslim woman to wear a veil? What is the role of women in Islam? What is the relationship between culture and faith? Leila Ahmed, an author and professor at Harvard Divinity School, investigates these topics most recently in A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence,
From ancient Babylonian princesses and rebellious medieval nuns to Nineteenth-century New England mill girls and the women of modern day Afghanistan, women readers have sparked controversy in every era of human history. In her new book, The Woman Reader, Belinda Jack traces the stories of these women, which are marked
From the Cro-Magnon cave to the digital bookstore, Belinda Jack covers a lot of ground in her new book, The Woman Reader, the first to address the controversies associated with women’s reading throughout history, and to show how vastly different women’s reading experiences have often been compared to those of men.