Celebrities
Memes
35 Ways Mindy Kaling Won the Internet in 2014

photo via @MindyKaling People often say they love Mindy Kaling because she is “relatable,” but we’re going to avoid that word because we think it’s kind of a backhanded compliment. We can imagine the Underminer saying it. Like, the only reason you love Mindy Kaling is because she doesn’t make you feel bad about your […]

Pop Culture
Top 10 Joan Rivers Quotes About Sex

Joan Rivers died yesterday at the age of eighty-one, and we can’t be the only ones to be relieved that she died due to complications following throat surgery — and not, say, while getting another face lift. Because we want to remember her not for her plastic face (she liked to joke that when she […]

Pop Culture
What Kind of Feminist Are You: Miley, Beyonce, or Pharrell?

Time magazine just announced its list of the top 100 most influential people, declaring this to be “the year of pop feminism.” Their evidence? The lyrics, quotes, and attitude of Beyoncé, Pharrell (“Blurred Lines” notwithstanding)… and Miley Cyrus. “Beyoncé, Miley and Pharrell aren’t just accidental feminists,” according to Time. “They’ve actively promoted women’s empowerment through their songs, […]

Memes
Top 10 Male Celebrity Feminists Andrew Garfield Could Learn From

Emma Stone went viral this week when she called out her boyfriend, Andrew Garfield, for his casual sexism during a Q&A session promoting The Amazing Spider-Man 2. When a little boy asked Garfield how Spider-Man got his costume, he said: “He made it. He made it with his bare hands. He sewed it… It’s kind of […]

Movies
Sex and Dating Advice from Matthew McConaughey

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how Matthew McConaughey has reinvented himself as a Serious Actor, launching himself out of the chick flick ghetto (Ghosts of Girlfriends Past et al) and into Oscar-nominated territory with Important Movies like Dallas Buyers’ Club. But what we want to know is, how has his characters’ approach to […]

News
R.I.P., Maggie Estep

We were introduced to Maggie Estep‘s work more than ten years ago, when Nerve.com, where we were both editors at the time, published her fiction. Here are the opening lines to her short story Devil in Her Eye, published on Nerve in 2002: She wasn’t the kind of girl to make a bishop kick in […]

Pop Culture
The Year According to Miley Cyrus and Jennifer Lawrence

2013 was the year when two twenty-something women, Miley Cyrus, 21, and Jennifer Lawrence, 23, mouthed off — like, a lot. They both talked like they couldn’t give a sh*$, but we happen to think that JLaw (is that how the kids do it these days?) really doesn’t care what we think, while Miley’s quotes are a […]

Pop Culture
What to Do If You Bump Into Tom Hanks

According to scientific research, at least 17% of you, our dear readers, still harbor a sex fantasy based on Elizabeth Perkins’ not-quite pedophilic crush in Big, and 11% of you occasionally indulge in a mermaid-related Splash fantasy. Also, 3% of you have a fantasy based on the Forrest Gump premature ejaculation scene. And let’s not […]

Music
A Round-Up of Thoughtful Spankings Over the Miley Cyrus Spectacle

There’s been a LOT of talk this week over Miley Cyrus’s performance at last week’s VMAs. Here’s some of our favorite analysis: The 2013 VMAs Were Dominated by Miley’s Minstrel Show How Ratchet Culture Became The New Implied Bisexuality A 6-Minute Guide to the Prejudices of the Entertainment Industry What Miley Cyrus Did Was Disgusting […]

Music
The 10 Best and Worst Moments from the 2013 VMAs

photo via MTV.com THE WORST 1. Lady Gaga’s 26 costume changes into smaller and smaller outfits, ending in a Little Mermaid-inspired seashell/thong number. She’s just fucking with us at this point, right? 2. Miley Cyrus’s self-demotion to porny arm candy during her Blurred Lines “duet” with Robin Thicke (or was it the simulated rimming during […]

Movies
We Are So Over Celebrities Playing Strippers

Celebrities playing strippers seems to be a sort of rite of passage, a self-inflicted casting couch: Lindsay Lohan, Kristen Stewart, Salma Hayak, Olivia Wilde, Natalie Portman, Jessica Biel, Jessica Alba, Daryl Hannah, Heather Graham, Marisa Tomei, Julianne Hough, Diane Lane, Demi Moore, Elizabeth Berkley, Rose McGowan… we could go on. WTF? And to balance it […]

Pop Culture
Can You Beat the Urge to Stray with One Freebie a Year?

photo via flickr “If I tell my child, ‘No pizza, no pizza, no pizza,’ what does he want more than anything Pizza!” And so it is with her husband and sex, claims Russian pop star Masha Lopatova. She is married to Andrei Kirilenko, a basketball player for the Brooklyn Nets — and she has told […]

News
What We Talk About When We Talk About Angelina Jolie’s Boobs

photo via Flickr Angelina Jolie wrote an op ed in the New York Times today about her decision to have a preventive double mastectomy in order to greatly reduce her risk of breast cancer, which she had an almost 90% chance of getting due to a “faulty” gene (BRCA1) which greatly predisposes carriers to the disease. Her acting […]

Pop Culture
An Interview with This Week’s “Modern Love” Writer, Laurie Sandell

photo by Alexandra DeFurio Our good friend, colleague, and fellow shameless Bachelor  fan, Laurie Sandell, is a successful freelance magazine writer (Marie Claire, New York, In Style), graphic memoirist (The Impostor’s Daughter), nonfiction book author (Truth and Consequences: Life Inside the Madoff Family) and coffee shop dweller (18th Street Coffee Shop in Santa Monica). This past […]

Pop Culture
Top 10 Celebrity Sex Toy Endorsements

You know how major celebrities like Brad Pitt and George Clooney stoop to appear in advertisements overseas — especially in Asia — on the promise that the ads never show in the U.S.? They shill for everything from cars to booze in ads that look impossibly fake because we are shielded from them. Well, it […]

Pop Culture
Top 10 Lessons Learned from The Bachelor, Season 17, “The Return of Sean’s Abs”

Never be a narc. It won’t get you laid or married. Ever. (We’re talking to you, Kacie.) If you want your music career to go nowhere, get booked on The Bachelor (even more effective if the couple you’re supposed to perform for breaks up before you strum your first note). If you’re going to an […]