Here’s How Your “Apology” Statement Should Have Read — Power is the playground of the powerful. For everyone else, it can be a minefield. Motorcycle-collecting Russian citizen and French actor Gérard Depardieu is in the news again, this time for publishing his iteration of the predictably formulaic male celebrity “apology” — the outraged sidestep. Depardieu published an open letter…

Looking for classic novels with an impassioned research thesis on European sewer systems? French Romantic Victor Hugo does not disappoint. Hundreds of pages into Les Miserables, Hugo suddenly indulges an unexpected but thorough exploration of the poetry, architecture, and civil engineering of Parisian sewers to world-build for a dramatic underground…

It took someone thirty years to answer Paula Cole’s question but it seems all the cowboys have gone to CBS. The khaki-est of middle America TV networks is now airing Yellowstone — “a desperate and threatened appeal to American identity and white masculinity.”¹ Real men lasso cattle thieves and grizzly…

Anyone who’s ever grazed the sandpaper of an actual fig leaf knows the Bible isn’t literal. Nor does it have to be in order to offer a wealth of history, parables, and an unending New Testament call to love one another. But Christian Supremacy, referred to by others as White…

Opponents can vote their conscience — if they jump through the right bureaucratic hoops. Make sure you know them. — Plutarch said the tyrant never grows old but it seems neither does Trump’s perpetual impunity. The self-proclaimed “business tycoon” had already been embroiled in more than 4,000 lawsuits¹ before he became the president of the United States — and a sneering grotesque golem of American hypocrisy, transmuted into a celebrity…

If the exhilaration of a big win justifies and excuses grabbing another human being with both hands by the head and kissing them on the mouth is anyone responsible for their behavior when celebrating? Like so many famous men who only apologize when they get caught, Luis Rubiales is repeatedly…

Small-town living in country music is not without its murder ballads and is almost synonymous with its neverending anthems of cheating and heartbreak. There are no perfect places. But there are better small-town songs than a costume cowboy’s thinly-veiled racist angst. When Jason Aldean got called out for filming “Try…

Jason Aldean’s response to accusations of dog-whistle racism in his Try That In A Small Town video is a failed attempt at a rebrand. It should’ve been an apology. His defensive statement does not acknowledge how different other people’s “small-town” experiences are while simultaneously invoking fear as a threat. Instead…

17-year-old Celeste Burgess did not get herself pregnant. But she is the only one being frog-marched across the news for terminating the pregnancy. Meanwhile, the media wholesale failed to question or even mention, let alone equally cover whoever got her pregnant. The Norfolk teenager was tried as an adult for…