Review of a Marvel comic in which Northstar, the first openly gay superhero, marries his boyfriend Kyle.

From the perspective of image spam, people are improvable, or, as Hegel put it, perfectible. They are imagined to be potentially “flawless,” which in this context means horny, super skinny, armed with recession-proof college degrees, and always on time for their service jobs, courtesy of their replica watches. This is the contemporary family of men and women: a bunch of people on knockoff antidepressants, fitted with enhanced body parts. They are the dream team of hyper-capitalism.

Good for a gut-check on what mass entertainment culture thinks technology is (as opposed to what it actually is). Via Phil Gyford.

Last Night on Late Night: Allison Williams Proved She’s Always Been Type A

is now on YouTube

I’m not surprised that a lot of people are drinking the haterade when it comes to [Girls]. Anything that’s deemed hipster-ish with witty humor, a Modcloth wardrobe and critical acclaim is never consumed easily by the masses. A lot of the backlash against the show is misogynistic: television is a male-dominated media, yet we still find reasons to not celebrate an original, female oriented series. But here’s the problem. The writers behind Girls really don’t understand why this lack of representation, especially for young women of color, is a valid issue. Example #1: Lesley Arfin, one of the show writers, responded to the criticism with the perfect tweet: "What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME." Arfin’s tweet proves all along that she (and probably the other writers) has no idea how institutionalized racism works in this country. The criticism against her show can’t be countered with “Well, minorities don’t support equal representation either.” It’s about the complete and visible exclusion of a very present part of New York’s population.

My chief beef is not simply that the girls in Girls are white. I'm a white girl and not a white girl, identified by other people as black and not black for as long as I can remember – which, in mixed people speak means biracial. But the problem with Girls is that while the show reaches — and succeeds, in many ways — to show female characters that are not caricatures, it feels alienating, a party of four engineered to appeal to a very specific subset of the television viewing audience, when the show has the potential to be so much bigger than that. And that is a huge fucking disappointment.

The argument has been made that smart women on screen are already enough of a minority to make up for the lack of women of color. Nope. Not good enough. This is more than a stock photo op, it's more important than that.

photos from Justice & Police Museum collection.