Festival atmosphere transcends fashion


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It’s 1993. Many current USC undergraduates aren’t even born yet. Michael Jordan is on fire. Cheers airs its last episode. Unforgiven wins the Oscar for best picture. And perhaps most important, current Real Housewives of Atlanta star Kenya Moore wins Miss USA. But something else happened in 1993. Something that might have felt small at […]

TV still plagued by gender gap


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There are dramatically fewer female writers than male writers working in the television industry, according to a new study released by the Writers Guild of America, West, which examined employment patterns for writers from the 2011-12 television season. In a world that seems to have progressed in the matter of gender equality, not only is […]

Different genres duke it out in the box office


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It was another robust weekend at the box office as four films managed to earn more than $18 million each, with the Evil Dead remake hauling in $25.7 million —which is more than the rest of the franchise combined. Though Evil Dead didn’t turn out to be the most terrifying film ever (as it declared […]

E-book trend doesn’t lessen joy of reading


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They are easily downloadable, cheap — if not free — and highly portable for those settling in on a long plane ride. And though no one’s quite sure when they first arrived, e-books have confounded the publishing world since they first reached mainstream success in 2007, when Amazon unveiled its Kindle e-reader. For bibliophiles, the […]

Artists travel down new roads this week


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Even though bands create their images based on a certain sound or by conquering a particular genre, it’s always good to shake things up a bit. Experimenting with different music styles is always a risky endeavor, though, since no one — neither the band nor the audience — truly knows how the experiment will turn […]

’60s style takes over runway


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Everyone was waiting for it, counting down the days until April 7 arrived. Holding their breaths, biting their nails, hearts pounding in anticipation. The Mad Men season six premiere. It seemed like you couldn’t sign on to a news feed or walk into a coffee shop without hearing someone moaning and crying over how badly […]

Modern audiences gravitate to television storytelling format


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Have we reached a point where television is more influential to popular culture than film?   That’s what Vanity Fair seems to argue, at least. The lifestyle magazine made a point to say that television, rather than film, “enriches the iconography and collective lore of pop culture,” as culture critic James Wolcott was quoted as […]

Jurassic Park looks to wipe out competition


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The box office rose to nice enough levels over the Easter weekend, with G.I. Joe: Retaliation commandeering a $51 million-plus total for its four-day opening weekend. Though that’s slightly less than the take of its predecessor, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, that film opened in the middle of the summer. The real story is […]

Nonfiction engages entertaining realities


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With all of the buzz surrounding new fiction releases such as Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and upcoming titles such as Dan Brown’s Inferno, it’s easy to lose track of another important facet of the literary world: nonfiction. Though debates about the values of nonfiction and fiction have yielded no concrete results — it’s nearly […]