Culture/Society

Marriage is not sexy.  That's the conclusion that readers might make after examining Entertainment Weekly's list of the "50 Sexiest Movies Ever."  Of the 50 movies on the list, 42 center on unmarried adult relationships.  Three of the relationships featured on the list occur between two women ("Kissing Jessica Stein," "Bound," and "Mulholland Drive"), one occurs between two men ("Yossi &…

Barbara Walters invites Great Leader to "give" Thanksgiving message to "the people."  Great Leader obliges: be inspired by . . . me. Check out the clip of Barbara Walters's interview of the Obamas, aired on GMA today, and tell me whether you find something off-putting in the way Walters poses what is, after all, a very banal question. And then there's the President-elect's self-centered answer…

YouTube is promoting as its "citizen news report of the day" a video of an alleged attack on Greenpeace activists at a coal plant in Poland. There are two problems with the news judgment behind this video selection.First, both the initial report on the video and YouTube's description of it overstate what actually happened. Watch the video for yourself and see. Aside from some unjustifiable…

The Associated Press is worried that Americans might accidentally imagine that the elevation of Barack Obama to the presidency could make people think that blacks in America really can get ahead. The AP is so worried that it sought out a race hustler to deny that blacks can make it here no matter what happened on November 4. As the AP reports it, apparently young Kari Fulton "cringed" when…

Ya gotta hand it to them. The Associated Press knows how to cut out all the extraneous background noise and get right to the important issues of the day. Barack Obama will surely be in the center of the vortex of some of the most important decisions in the world during the next four years and even his preparations for taking office are vitally important as a marker to what he might do in office.…

Yahoo News featured an interesting short report issued by Agence France-Presse on November 20. In it we discover that a consortium of French, German and Hungarian mathematicians are claiming to have proven that Einstein's famous equation, e=mc2, is correct. The report is all good except for one very small aspect. They call the effort of these mathematicians "heroic" in contradiction to the root…

Former Philadelphia Inquirer editorial page editor Chris Satullo, who in a July 1, 2008 editorial suggested that “America doesn't deserve to celebrate its birthday” on Independence Day due to the “waterboarding, the snarling dogs, the theft of sleep” used on some enemy combatants since 9/11, has been hired to become the director of news operations for WHYY, the PBS affiliate in the Philadelphia…

Finding Michelle Obama to be the "First Lady of Fashion," ABCNews.com's Luchina Fisher wondered if the president-elect's wife could save the fashion industry.:Michelle Obama will soon be the nation's first lady and mom in chief, but others are expecting even grander things from her, like saving the fashion industry. And who in their right mind would think that?: "We're all obviously trying to…

Drumstick or breast for accused daddy killer?  Details at 11!If that wasn't quite how the Early Show played it, it's not far off. Of all the angles to promote its coverage of the story of the eight-year old accused of killing his father, CBS highlighted the issue of . . . where the boy would celebrate Thanksgiving.View video here.

On Tuesday’s Situation Room, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer referred to a Catholic cardinal’s criticism of Barack Obama’s abortion position as a "scathing rant" and a "diatribe." A CNN graphic also used the "scathing rant" term, and Blitzer later referred to the cardinal’s words as a "blistering rant." All three of these terms came during Blitzer’s promos for a report by CNN correspondent Brian Todd,…

With just nine days until Thanksgiving, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer saw fit to find a way to rain on the holiday that pretty much any American can and does celebrate regardless of religious background or ethnicity. Yet on the hunt for unbridled leftist anger in her November 18 article -- "Making peace with Thanksgiving; Holiday still hurts for some Native Americans" -- the best the paper's…

The plot surrounding Father Jay Scott Newman's admonishment to Barack Obama-supporting parishoners has thickened. On Friday (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I noted news that Fr. Newman, a Catholic priest and pastor at St. Mary's Church in Greenville, South Carolina, had informed parishoners who voted for Barack Obama in full knowledge of the Illinois Senator's aggressively proabortion positions…

Looks like a couple of fellows pushing a book were able to convince the Boston Globe to let them contribute some soothsaying about the future of talk radio. Scratch that, they are talking about today, here and now -- and it's all bad. In the Boston Globe, Steve Elman and Alan Tolz have proclaimed "the rising irrelevance of talk radio," so Rush... fuggedaboutit. Hannity... go back to house…

To quote tennis player John McEnroe, "You cannot be serious!"Newsweek is exploring the possibility of a baby boom being sparked by the "euphoria of Obama fans."Jessica Bennett of Newsweek comes firing out of the gates with the somewhat disturbing headline, "Change You Can Conceive In."  She quickly follows that up in the sub-headline, posing this question:  Could euphoric Obama fans be sparking a…