Matt Cornell is a writer, artist and performer based in Los Angeles. He supports himself as a copywriter for an adult toy retailer and as a film festival programmer. Follow him on Twitter at @mattcornell.
This past spring, a trilogy of kinky romance novels penned by EL James developed into a cultural phenomenon. The Fifty Shades of Grey series first became popular as ebooks that could be quickly downloaded and read on Kindles and similar devices without arousing social embarrassment. When they finally came out in print, they sold over ten million copies in just six weeks. A Hollywood movie is already in the works.
In August of 2012, Amy Zegart conducted a poll on American attitudes toward torture, and found that Americans had become more supportive of the use of torture in the previous half decade. Zegart also found an increase in support for a number of specific tactics known to be used during the Bush era, including waterboarding, intimidation with military dogs and naked stress positions.
Continue reading 'The torturer as feminist: from Abu Ghraib to Zero Dark Thirty' 3
The defining moment in The Dictatorcomes when Sacha Baron Cohen sings ‘Ebony and Ivory’ with the decapitated head of a black man.
While protesters in Oakland, Portland, Boston, New York and cities throughout the US faced riot police with tear gas canisters, their comrades in Los Angeles enjoyed a much cosier relationship with the city and its police. From the very beginning,…
Continue reading 'City Hall as Trojan Horse: lessons from Occupy LA' 2