There’s a great scene in the third episode of The Ranch, Netflix’s new three-camera sitcom starring Ashton Kutcher and veteran character actor Sam Elliott. Kutcher plays 34-year-old high-school football hero Colt Bennett, who never quite made it in pros and is forced to return home to Colorado to work on his family’s cattle ranch. Elliott plays Colt’s stern, old-fashioned father Beau, who for nearly three episodes has berated his prodigal son in every scene for being a layabout, has-been, good-for-nothing brat.

 

The morning after Colt has taken a drunken joyride on a neighbor’s tractor through town, he sits down at the kitchen table expecting another tongue-lashing from his angry, disappointed father. Instead, Beau gives him a straightforward monologue about hard work, duty, and personal responsibility.

“You know, Colt, I’m not smart enough to tell you how to live your life,” Beau says. “That’s for…

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The Huffington Post has a new feature where the children of famous, wealthy, and well-connected media and Hollywood moguls interview and pay someone to ghost write about their powerful and famous parents. Called “Talk To Me,” creator and producer Christina Huffington has written the first piece where she talks about the woman who raised her—her nanny . . . oops, I mean, her mother—the founder and namesake of the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington.

Setting aside the hard-to-ignore stench of nepotism, self-indulgence, and hypocrisy given the “check your privilege” narrative so often promoted on sites like the Huffington Post, Christina Huffington offers an interesting insight into her family’s dynamic.

She starts off explaining that she’s very close to her parents and speaks by phone to them daily. Yet, she’s also confused about the relationship, which has required regular trips to various therapists, all of whom have advised her that she needs…

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A recent infographic by The Economist tracks the changes in Batman’s physique over the last 50 years, showing that Ben Affleck’s Batman (6’4” and 216 lbs) is like a god compared to past versions of the Caped Crusader. But compared with other recent superheroes, he’s only a tall man; Affleck stands only a few inches taller than Henry Cavill’s Superman (6’1” and 204 lbs), and almost eye to eye with Chris Hemsworth’s Thor (6’3” and 215 lbs).

One writer for The Atlantic noticed this change in superhero physiques and worried that Hollywood is starting to make uninteresting heroes. For if superheroes are supposed to be super versions of regular people, then the more super they go, the less regular they’ll be, and the less we’ll be able to relate to them. Soon, she worries, superheroes might get so muscular that they’ll strike audiences as ridiculous. So if producers want to recapture audiences…

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Advertising has become Ground Zero in the culture wars. Companies aren’t just out to sell their products; they are out to make a statement. Two years ago a General Mills commercial for Cheerios featured gay dads and their adopted child of another race. The spot earned the cereal company millions in free media, with coverage across the web arguing for and against the ad’s message, which was simply about enjoying meals together as a family. Somewhere along the line, advertising became about more than just selling products. Companies and their ad agencies now want to be agents of social change, which is why it’s so amusing when it backfires.

Last weekend, the clothing store the Gap sent out a picture on its Twitter account featuring children wearing some of the brand’s Gap Kids clothing. In its search for new models last year, Gap advertised that it wanted…

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Recently, a video of Superior Court Judge Verda Colvin in Macon, Georgia, was posted to Facebook and quickly went viral:

“Stop acting like you’re trash!” Judge Verda Colvin’s brutally honest speech inspires young kids to be better peoplehttps://t.co/XdiRhak4iX

— FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) April 7, 2016

The video shows Judge Colvin talking to a group of kids in her courtroom; her tone is tough. “Stop treating yourselves like trash,” she says. But she isn’t just threatening or ranting to these kids. She is clearly concerned about their future. She doesn’t want these kids to fail; she wants them to turn their lives around. But unlike many feel-good messages of empowerment kids are fed these days, Judge Colvin is clear about the consequences if they don’t: jail or ending up in a body bag.

Much of what makes her brief…

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It’s good to be a young jock. To feel strong, graceful, metaphysically focused on a task, and able to easily overpower or humiliate an opposing player on the field is righteous and cool. It’s a feeling that non-jocks don’t really get to experience, and ever since Steve Jobs recreated the world in his garage, nerds took over and jocks are not valorized the way they once were. Oh, ball players are gushed over on ESPN and in the sports pages, but in the era of Caitlyn Jenner, antipathy towards “bro” culture, the ascendance of the comic geek, and trigger warnings, being a confident heterosexual ball player doesn’t translate into the kind of wide glorification it once did.

This is what makes Everybody Wants Some!!, the new Richard Linklater film, so intoxicating. The film depicts three days in the lives of a group of college baseball players…

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Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice is a superhero movie for people who don’t believe in heroism. Moreover, it is a movie that tries to build a cinematic superhero universe, but one inhabited by no superheroes. The characters in this film named “Batman” and “Superman” are cynical deconstructions of the comic book heroes whose names they bear. (Wonder Woman fares better, mostly by virtue of being in the movie for only a short span of time.) Zach Snyder’s directorial vision doesn’t allow for much decency and kindness. “Nobody stays good in this world,” says Superman, and in this film it’s hard to say he’s wrong. Snyder seems to have taken all the tropes of superhero critiques (that superheroes are fascist, immature, selfish, and/or id-driven power fantasies) and made them a blueprint for his versions of two of the best-loved superheroes of all time.

I…

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In Croatia there is a warehouse of discarded objects masquerading as artifacts called the Museum of Broken Relationships. The conceit of the museum is this: Disgruntled lovers around the world share objects from past love affairs along with details about how the objects tell the story behind the demise of the relationship. The museum, which contrasts itself with “destructive self-help instructions for recovery from failed loves,” claims to offer “a chance to overcome an emotional collapse through creation: by contributing to the Museum’s collection.” It’s evidently popular; the museum recently won the Kenneth Hudson Award for the Most Innovative Museum in Europe. And it’s traveling to Los Angeles this spring.

What does it say about our culture when emblems of our private emotional lives become public displays? And when activities better relegated to the psychotherapist’s office or the priest’s confessional instead form the basis of a museum…

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Just as smart phones went from being pricey, specialty gadgets to ubiquitous today, some tech industry leaders believe artificially intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) could be the next innovation to transform society and further embed technology into the fabric of our lives. Major companies are competing to design the most appealing IPA, and commentators are taking note of a trend: IPAs are commonly given female names and voices.

Unsurprisingly, some detect the vile stink of sexism in this phenomenon: Americans—particularly all those white men at the helm of major tech firms—still see women as inferior, there to serve as men’s helpmates and do the chores others won’t. Writing in The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance describes how these digital assistants work, with users commanding the machines to do their bidding, and wonders: “if we’re going to live in a world in which we’re ordering our machines around so casually, why do so many…

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The children of celebrities are often the object of envy for their lavish lifestyles; seemingly from the moment they are born, celebrity kids find themselves on the covers of magazines or plastered all over Instagram. Not surprisingly, many children of celebrity parents grow up to become actors or celebrities themselves.

But there are drawbacks to having famous parents—especially if you’re a teenager.

Recently, John Travolta appeared on Ellen and brought his sixteen-year-old daughter Ella with him. After Travolta mentioned that she will soon take her test for a driver’s license, Ellen offered to let her practice parallel parking her car. On national television.

 

In fact, the interaction between Travolta and his daughter is very sweet—and would be normal if it hadn’t been filmed in front of a live studio audience. Travolta praises his daughter (even as she comes perilously close to running into another car) and…

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