Then you remember you forgot to buy condoms

No worries -- he's young, totally buffed, obviously well off

You know you've got nothing to worry about

In the mental health profession, we refer to

this type of thinking as cognitive distortion

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Keywords: barebacking, gay, culture, sex

Tyra is never above her topics and is always captivated by them, the perfect cruise director for train-wreck culture.

Her instincts are good because she has remained, in large part, a member of the audience itself.

Tyra has positioned herself as a curator of pop culture, driven by curiosity and her own innate consumerism.

When we watch "Tyra," we're really watching Tyra sit alongside us and watch something else. She is a celebrity among consumers.   more »

However the events on Wall Street play out during the next few weeks, there is no question but that a crisis of historic magnitude is now unfolding.

After a generation of relentless media propaganda, which touted the infallibility of the capitalist market and the genius of Wall Street’s financial wizards, the United States economy now stands on the very brink of an economic breakdown on a scale not seen since the Great Depression.

The collapse of Bear Stearns last Friday and its subsequent takeover organized by JP Morgan Chase and the Federal Reserve Board mark a major turning point in the history of post-war global capitalism.

It signifies that the contradictions within the world capitalist economy are now reaching the point where the type of financial catastrophe and social and economic devastation experienced in the 1930s is not only possible, but is becoming increasingly likely.   more »

As left culture critic Mark Crispin Miller noted in a 1986 essay titled “Cosby Knows Best,” the affluent, hyper-consumerist, apolitical African-American Huxtable family – headed by the affable, impish obstetrician Cliff (played by Dr. Cosby himself) – functioned as “an ad, implicitly proclaiming the fairness of the American System: ‘Look! [Cosby shows us] Even I can have all this!’”

“On ‘The Cosby show,’” Miller noted, “it appears as if blacks in general can have, and do have, what many whites enjoy and that such material equality need not entail a single break-in.

And there are no hard feelings, none at all, now that the old injustices have been so easily rectified.”

Consistent with its mission of selling the American System and the related idea that America’s racial divisions had been overcome, “The Cosby Show” refused to permit any “negativity” on the screen.   more »

Although caricatures won’t sway an election, they can influence public perception. Through caricatured distortion President Lyndon Johnson, with his elephantine ears and hooked beak, and President Richard Nixon, with his exaggerated five o’clock shadow and witches peak, were made equally buffoonish and demonic.

The visual satirist’s time-honored role is to make mountains out of physical molehills, thereby reducing their targets to comical icons, knocking the pomposity right out of them.

Every four years presidential candidates are given satiric makeovers and in this spirit I asked four caricaturist/illustrators to describe the most critical feature needed to achieve the likenesses of John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and whether or not a single pose best defines the candidate.   more »