Pro-Wrestling Knows What ‘The Godfather’ Knows: The Art of the Sell
You’ve gotta be tough to sell one helluva story. That’s just one thing that Coppola’s The Godfather Trilogy and Pro-Wrestling have in common.
roland barthes
Dan Brown Meets Roland Barthes in ‘The Seventh Function of Language’
Laurent Binet's over-the-top amalgam of the airport conspiracy thriller and the French intelligentsia poses a simple question: can high theory be thrilling?
A Sock Is Never Just a Sock: Thoughts on Object Lessons’ ‘Sock’
Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg, the editors of Object Lessons, have built an incredibly robust template for 21st century pop cultural contemplation.
What’s the Plural of Roland Barthes?
Andy Stafford offers readers this overwhelmingly funny and delightfully obvious argument: Roland Barthes was not a Barthesian.
Professional Wrestling, Racism, Transracial Identity, and Why We All Need to Lighten Up
In contrast to our ossified conceptions of race in other aspects of life, race in professional wrestling is a gimmick, a performance of an identity, which one can adopt or drop as part of the game.