When a Pastor Sues a Rapper
How would you respond if you were a famous pastor and a rapper inserted a sound bite from one of your sermons into a profane, problematic song? Bishop T.D. Jakes of The Potter’s House megachurch in Dallas faced exactly that quandary recently when rapper Jeezy spliced a 20-second segment from one of Jakes’ 2013 messages into […]
Keep Calm and Read On
Stressed out? Feeling fragmented, distracted and disconnected? Maybe you just need a bit o’ time with a good book. About 30 to 45 minutes, to be precise. There’s only one catch: You’ve got to read—really read—slowly, not skimming. The anecdotal result, say some advocates of the growing slow reading movement, is reduced stress and a […]
Rebooting Your Family Media Habits
Order and discipline are not natural states of being. At least, they’re not in my life or family. I’m not a naturally disciplined person or parent. It’s easy for me to slide past (and let my kids slide past) the limits my wife and I set. Saying yes is easy. Saying no—to ourselves, to our […]
Fifty Shades Goes to Sesame Street
My wife and I regularly have conversations about whether something on TV is appropriate for our children (ages 4, 5 and 7). I’m not going to suggest that we always get it right. But we’re trying, in terms of both what our kiddos watch and how much. Lately, for instance, we’ve been working through the […]
Feed a Kid a Family Dinner, Starve a Cyberbully
We spend a fair bit of time at Plugged In keeping tabs on stories and studies correlating how entertainment and culture influence the choices we make. Much of the time, those behavioral associations aren’t positive. And the steady drip of stories about the damaging ways that entertainment influences our society can start to feel pretty depressing […]
How Do We Solve a Problem Like Ariana?
Earlier this summer, former Nickelodeon actress turned pop/R&B singer Ariana Grande nearly topped the charts with her catchy throwback hit “Problem.” And after reviewing the 21-year-old entertainer’s second album, My Everything, I’m sad to say that Ariana’s got more problems than just the addictive-but-dysfunctional guy she’s trying to offload in that song. And they’re the […]
Fifty Shades of Abusive Influence?
When the preview for the forthcoming big-screen adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey was released recently, the organization Morality in the Media responded, “The newly released trailer for Fifty Shades of Grey deceives the public with a visually appealing melodramatic love story that romanticizes and normalizes sexual violence.” It turns out they may have been even […]
Our Maddeningly Not-So-Magical Pop Culture ‘Multiverse’
If you’ve read any comic books in, oh, the last 30 years or so, you might be familiar with the concept of a multiverse. A multiverse consists of different parallel universes in which there are alternate outcomes for familiar characters involved in several storylines, sometimes simultaneously. In other words, things are similar … but different. […]
Tolkien & Lewis Head to the Big Screen Again … Differently
The fantastical, faith-laced stories of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien have captivated readers for decades. And in the last 15 years or so, big-screen adaptations of their beloved Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings franchises have raked in a mindboggling $6.4 billion combined. Audiences, it seems, have a voracious appetite for these two men’s […]
Movie Monday: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
What do you get when you combine four CGI turtles, actress Megan Fox and producer Michael Bay? Answer: $65.6 million for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles‘ opening weekend, enough to buy those iconic half-shelled adolescent martial arts experts a lot of pizza. That figure, it turns out, was about $20 million more than industry experts had […]