Reading Time: 3 minutes Citizens in Charlottesville, Virginia., are giving input on what kind of public art ought to be created at a park where a massive statue once stood. Not just any statue. The monument glorifying Robert E. Lee. Not just any park, but the site of the infamous “Unite the Right” rally of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and “alt-right” denizens […]
Arts
What’s happening in arts and entertainment, shared through a secular lens at OnlySky, a secular community for nonreligious Americans.
Posted inFilm/TV
Q and Yahweh: Unworthy gods
Reading Time: 5 minutes Star Trek’s omnipotent prankster Q shows the folly of worshipping beings who possess superior power, but not superior morality or wisdom.
Posted inFilm/TV
Review: ‘Hit the Road’ is a sharp-witted directorial debut
Reading Time: 2 minutes There was a tweet by critic Matt Singer that made the Internet rounds earlier this month consisting of a screenshot of available showtimes for the AMC theater in Times Square, all for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It’s a lot of showtimes. “This is not all of them,” Singer’s tweet reads, “I couldn’t […]
Posted inBooks
Rationality: A book recommendation for National Day of Reason
Reading Time: 2 minutes The first Thursday in May every year is a tad significant in the U.S. With roots in the early Republic, a 1952 Congress established this day as the ‘National Day of Prayer,’ one in which the President is required to instruct citizens to pray. How odd a notion while wielding a Constitution that forbids the […]
Posted inFilm/TV
‘Stanleyville’ thumbs nose at meritocracy, basically everything
Reading Time: 2 minutes Kisangani is a major commercial port city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Under Belgian colonization it was known as Stanleyville, after Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley, of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” fame. Stanley had been tapped by Belgian King Leopold II to establish a foothold for eventual annexation of the region. In 1897 […]
Posted inFilm/TV
Christian show ‘The Chosen’ vandalizes its own billboards to generate buzz
Reading Time: 4 minutes In an attempt to portray themselves as better than other forms of faith-based media, the producers of a new Christian TV show engaged in the most stereotypically evangelical scheme ever: They depicted themselves as victims of persecution when no such thing was actually happening. The show is The Chosen, which generated plenty of (earned) media […]
Posted inTrue Story
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu
Reading Time: 4 minutes The true story of the librarians who risked their lives to rescue a priceless cultural heritage from the destructive rampage of Islamist fundamentalism.
Posted inFilm/TV
Double-feature review: ‘The Northman’ and ‘Saturday Fiction’
Reading Time: 3 minutes Back in 1996, writers Andrew Strader and Nick Nicholas took a mildly funny running gag from Star Trek VI to the final frontier of nerdom by translating all of Shakespeare’s Hamlet into Klingon. Because wouldn’t it be hilariously incongruous if the warlike baddies from the original series (sorry, Worf) were also super invested in the […]
Posted inBooks
It’s Earth Day, so read this book
Reading Time: 2 minutes In honor of Earth Day, you should consider reading this wonderful book, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters by Henry Gee. Mr. Gee is a senior editor at Nature magazine and the author of numerous books, and he has been a guest on several radio and […]
Posted inFilm/TV
‘Tony Hawk: Until The Wheels Fall Off’: Impossible to dislike
Reading Time: 3 minutes Some subjects lend themselves better to film. A skateboarder spinning 900 degrees in the air and crashing into a half-pipe is one of those subjects. It’s hard to describe to someone how pervasive Tony Hawk was in American culture for almost a decade. He brought an entire generation of kids into skateboarding. His Pro Skater […]