1999

Marcel Khalife and Blasphemy

Joe Lockard
Two days ago, a Lebanese court found Marcel Khalife innocent of blasphemy. He never should have been tried.

Tranny 2000

Annalee Newitz
As we enter the next century, it's becoming more and more obvious that what's good for the trannies is good for us.

Microsoft Jungle: Bytes and Beef

Joe Lockard
The Internet and electronics industries claim exemptions from all previous known forms of economic structure.

Sensation Show

Joe Lockard
P.T. Barnum would have loved the din surrounding the Sensation show at the Brooklyn Museum. Barnum and his advertising methods were the direct forebears of Charles Saatchi, who has installed his collection of contemporary British art over pious furor blasting out of Rudolph Giuliani's mayoral offices.

Untitled

Frederick Aldama
It would seem that in spite of all the steps forward, homosexuality is only acceptable if pathologized -- associated with images of AIDS and/or as effemenized masculinity -- kept completely in the closet, and/or kept in the realm of fiction (movies etc.).

California Violences

Joe Lockard
The difference between the stories and their coverage is not simply one of egregious criminal intent versus accidental deaths, so that the news interest of a neo-Nazi attack on a Jewish institution and children merits greater attention.

Buffy: Hero for the Columbine Generation

Annalee Newitz
"Buffy: Graduation Day" is a fable about the dangerous power adults have over teens. Adults, we learn, are not all benevolent, and some will even try to destroy you. The only way to fight back is to be ready with the right weapons.

Letter from South Africa

J C Myers
As I have been forced, night after night, to account for myself as an American it has become clearer to me just what was wrong with this way of posing the question. There never was one America to be accepted or rejected as a package deal.

A Consideration of the Shootings in Littleton, Colorado

Megan Shaw
Unfortunately for the public image of adolescents nationwide, the shootings in Littleton fit into our national prejudice against "dangerous" teens like a nickel into a slot machine.

Kosovo and Neo-Nationalism

Joe Lockard
Kosovo has meaning far beyond its borders: what Kosovo means today is the emergence of old ethnicities as new nationalisms.

More than an Overstuffed Purple Space Alien

Charlie Bertsch
To look for evidence of pro-homosexual propaganda in a TV sitcom for twenty-somethings or an NEA-funded museum show was one thing, but to look for it in a show where the protagonists are four overstuffed space aliens with TV screens in their bellies was quite another.

Racak, Mon Amour

Joe Lockard
The bodies of Racak villagers stretched out in a Kosovan mosque repeat and extend this decade's history of massacre in the Balkans. And, with equally repetitive predictability, western Europe, NATO and Washington speak their heartfelt but rote lines about the violation of human decency and the laws of war.

Reconsidering Desert Fox

Joel Schalit
What distinguished this attack on Iraq from previous attacks is that the American government's propaganda apparatus drummed up very little political sympathy for the operation among American citizens.

Impeachable Orgasms

Joe Lockard
A pack of baying Republicans claim that this impeachment concerns presidential perjury and cover-ups, not the sex itself. No one believes it.