Ellen DeGeneres, one of the most powerful openly gay celebrities in Hollywood, really really wants her pal Kevin Hart to host the 2019 Oscars, despite all of the jokes the comedian has made at the expense of the LGBTQ community. During…
Lost in the recent outrage over film critic David Edelstein’s off-color Facebook comment about the infamous “butter scene” in Last Tango in Paris is one salient fact: By any measure, the late Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 succès de scandale conveys a powerful feminist…
The battle over free speech raged in courtrooms, on college campuses, and on social media in 2018, with wedding cakes for same-sex couples and the federal government’s attack on sex workers taking center stage. In no particular order, are the…
One of the best things about having Donald Trump in the White House is that you never have to guess when he’s angry. And he’s angry a lot. Take this past Sunday morning, when indulged in a presidential airing of…
Administrators at the Los Angeles Unified School District taught high school students at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools a valuable lesson. In institutional cowardice. In a December 11 story, Los Angeles Times education reporter Howard Blume recounts how the school district caved…
When the right and left of the political spectrum defend the First Amendment on identical grounds, free speech triumphs — even if neither side wants to share the glory after the fact. All of that came to pass with a…
Serial killer Samuel Little’s hunting ground for humans stretched from Southern California to just outside Washington, D.C., encompassing 90 murders of mostly black and Latino women, which took place between 1970 and 2005, in some 37 cities across the nation….
The once fiercely transgressive social-media platform Tumblr has announced that it is hopping aboard the censorship express. In a statement posted to its staff blog on December 3, Tumblr CEO Jeff D’Onofrio warned that beginning December 17, the company will no longer allow…
What do the demise of former presidential contender Gary Hart’s political career and Starbucks’ recent decision to block porn on its public Wi-Fi have in common? Donna Rice Hughes. If you’re old enough to remember Hart — the U.S. senator…
Calling b.s. on fake news stories that hype the nonexistent epidemic of sex trafficking may be like shooting fish in a barrel. But sometimes those scaly swimmers need to be shot. Take “Holiday shopping is prime time for human trafficking…
