Mostrando títulos en Cultura Popular

A collection of essays about father figures in popular culture, Dad Bod unpack the ideas that inform our collective image of fatherhood as it is found in movies, television shows, and video games. Follow a newly minted parent as he journeys to the heart of dadness to redefine what it means to be a father.

For all of human history, we have made permanent marks on our skin—for multifarious, fascinating, reasons. The oldest preserved tattooed skin that survives is European: Ötzi, the famous ‘Iceman’ mummy, whose body is covered in small tattoo marks, allows us a brief glimpse into the pre-history of the practice. Since then, people in every corner of the world have decided to tattoo themselves, and countless cultures have performed this ancient artistic practice. But for the most part, these fascinating histories remain stubbornly untold.

Since 1998, MTV’s The Challenge has tested competitors’ physical, mental, and emotional endurance. Some go on to become Challenge legends, going down in history as players who changed the game forever. But for each champion, there are dozens more who try and fail to earn the title. In her time covering the show, pop culture journalist and Challenge superfan Sydney Bucksbaum has gotten to know many of the champs, gaining an insider’s knowl­edge of what goes into making a winning strategy—and how difficult it is to actually pull it off.

Oggi, l'inondazione di immagini a cui molti bambini, adolescenti e adulti vanno incontro per l'abitudine di stare per molte ore davanti a uno schermo, (televisione, telefonino) espropria gli stessi di quel tipo di azione che è caratterizzato dal linguaggio parlato e dalla comunicazione sociale. Insomma, la tendenza naturale che l'individuo ha di immaginare, giocare, dialogare, viene lentamente ma progressivamente repressa dall'influenza di questi mezzi moderni di comunicazione.

Since The Karate Kid first crane-kicked its way into the pop culture stratosphere in June 1984, there hasn’t been a week Ralph Macchio hasn’t heard friendly shouts of “Wax on, wax off” or “Sweep the leg!” Now, with Macchio reprising his role as Daniel LaRusso in the number one ranked Netflix show Cobra Kai, he is finally ready to look back at this classic movie and give the fans something they’ve long craved.

The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it’s the most popular music genre in America. Just as jazz did in the first half of the twentieth century, hip-hop and its groundbreaking DJs and artists—nearly all of them people of color from some of America’s most overlooked communities—pushed the boundaries of music to new frontiers, while transfixing the country’s youth and reshaping fashion, art, and even language.

Este libro es la historia de una sombra que mató a un hombre de una puñalada, fue condenado a veinte años de prisión y huyó antes de entrar en la cárcel. En vez de ocultarse en un pueblo remoto o marcharse a otro país, se camufló entre la multitud de su ciudad, Barcelona, donde pasó los siguientes treinta años perfeccionando el arte de la invisibilidad a la vista de todos: detrás de la barra de un bar, recogiendo a su hija del colegio, yendo de excursión los fines de semana.

Arianna Warsaw-Fan Rauch’s life-long fascination with classical music has taken her through Juilliard and into the shiny world of symphony halls and international concert tours. She’s loved classical music her whole life. But she’s also hated classical music her whole life. After all, if you can like Beyoncé without liking Bieber, you can certainly like Brahms without liking Bach—especially since they were born 148 years apart and the thing we call “classical music” is really just centuries of compositions shoved into one hodge-podge of a genre.

As a critic at large at The New York Times, Phillips has written extensively on theater, poetry, and the latest blockbusters—with her love of some of the most popular and nerdy fandoms informing her career. Now, she analyzes the mark these beloved intellectual properties leave on young and adult minds, and what they teach us about race, gender expression, religion, and more. Spanning from the nineties through to today, Nerd is a collection of cultural criticism essays through the lens of fandom for everyone from the Marvel movie watcher to the hardcore Star Wars expanded universe connoisseur.

In 1970, Erin Keane’s mother ran away from home for the first time. She was thirteen years old. Over the next several years, and under two assumed identities, she hitchhiked her way across America, experiencing freedom, hardship, and tragedy. At fifteen, she met a man in New York City and married him. He was thirty-six. Through a deft balance of journalistic digging, cultural criticism, and poetic reimagining, Keane pieces together the true story of her mother’s teenage years, questioning almost everything she’s been told about her parents and their relationship.

Despite being unable to play an instrument, Susan Rogers became an extraordinarily successful record producer—and certainly one of the most successful women record producers in history—because of her ability to listen. (She was an engineer on Prince's "When Doves Cry", which inspired the title of the book.) This Is What It Sounds Like distils a lifetime's expertise as a producer and an award-winning professor with a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, to present a new theory of listening for everyday music fans.

Our fears and compulsions often feel like part of our deepest selves—yet they're bound up in the currents of the world around us. This thrilling compendium of 99 phobias and manias, rare and familiar, delves into the obsessions that shape us all. Award-winning author Kate Summerscale takes us from the Middle Ages to the present day, using rich and riveting case studies to trace the links between the private and the public, the personal and the political.

For the past one hundred years, Emily Post has been the definitive source for how to navigate—and enhance—every social interaction. In an increasingly diverse and intersectional world, the need for a trusted primer on how to treat others with confidence and kindness has never been greater.

The primal image of the black-caped vampire Dracula has become an indelible fixture of the modern imagination. It's recognition factor rivals, in its own perverse way, the familiarity of Santa Claus. In this critically acclaimed excursion through the life of a cultural icon, David Skal maps out the archetypal vampire's relentless trajectory from Victorian literary oddity to movie idol to cultural commodity, digging through the populist veneer to reveal what the prince of darkness says about us all.

More than just a simple journey through the history of Pokémon, Daniel Dockery offers an in-depth look at the franchise’s many branches of impact and influence. With dozens of firsthand interviews, Monster Kids covers its beginnings as a Japanese video game created to recapture one man's love of bug-collecting as a child before diving into the decisions and conditions that would ultimately lead to that game's global domination.

Una colección de ensayos magistrales sobre la cultura de masas.

En estos ensayos magistrales, en los que analiza la estructura del mal gusto, la lectura de cómics, el mito de Superman, la canción de consumo, el papel de los medios audiovisuales como instrumento de información o el influjo de la televisión en el mundo actual, Umberto Eco se plantea el problema central de la doble postura ante la cultura de masas: la de los apocalípticos, que ven en ella el signo de una caída irrecuperable.

A staunch feminist of mixed-race heritage, Hanna has succeeded in an industry not designed for people like her. Interweaving anecdotes from familial and personal experiences—episodes of messy sex, introspection, and that time actor Vincent D'Onofrio tweeted that Hanna Flint sounded 'like a secret agent'—she offers a critical eye on the screen's representation of women and ethnic minorities, their impact on her life, body image and ambitions, with the humour and eloquence that has made her a leading film critic of her generation.

Found throughout the plant and animal kingdom, DMT (dimethyltryptamine) is also naturally occurring in humans, and may be released during near-death and actual death experiences, earning it the title “the spirit molecule.” When taken as a psychedelic, either via ayahuasca or in pure form, DMT is experientially considered to be one of the strongest and strangest of all entheogens. The majority of high-dose users report visions of unknown yet curiously familiar alien worlds and encounters with sentient nonhuman presences.

Despite the high number of programs and their evident popularity, paranormal reality television has to date received little critical attention. Ghost Channels provides an overview of the paranormal reality television genre, its development, and its place in television history. Conducting in-depth analyses of over thirty paranormal television series, author Amy Lawrence suggests these programs reveal much about Americans' contemporary fears.

The television industry is changing, and with it, the small screen's potential to engage in debate and present valuable representations of American history. Founded in 1972, HBO has been at the forefront of these changes, leading the way for many network, cable, and streaming services into the "post-network" era. Despite this, most scholarship has been dedicated to analyzing historical feature films and documentary films, leaving TV and the long-form drama hungry for coverage. Rebecca Weeks fills the gap in this area and defends the historiographic power of long-form dramas.