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Slate's pop critic, Jonah Weiner, published an article Wednesday arguing that Creed—a band dismissed by ''critical gatekeepers'' as ''derivative blowhards with a self-righteous Christian agenda''—is severely underrated. This contrarian take has outraged the gatekeepers of conventional wisdom. And even fairly unconventional members of the ...

Dan Brown's publishers are guarding the plot to his new novel, The Lost Symbol, as the Priory of Sion guards the truth about Jesus' love life. Rumor has it that the Freemasons play an important role, but Brown's editor will reveal only that the story takes place over the course of 12 hours. Nevertheless, I have a prediction to make: Whatever ...

A guest post from Slate contributor Zachary Pincus-Roth: After writing a piece for Slate on how journalists proclaim movie box-office records without accounting for inflation, I'm disheartened to see inaccurate reports—fueled by a Warner Bros. press release—that The Hangover's $236 million pushes it past Beverly Hills Cop as the top domestic ...

To mark the release of Whatever Works, Woody Allen's 40th movie, Entertainment Weekly film critic Owen Gleiberman has ranked each of Allen's films. As a Woody loyalist—in my book, he's a member of a small club of artists who've made both tragic and comic masterpieces—I commend the effort. But the rankings are so preposterous I wonder whether ...

Every film that receives theatrical release can expect some kind of mainstream media attention—at the very least a capsule review. But the situation is different for books. Publishers in the United States release on the order of 170,000 new titles annually—including about 23,000 just from large general trade houses—making it simply impossible for ...

I posted earlier this week on a bogus trend piece in the New York Times linking buoyant romance-novel sales to the recession. The piece offered no evidence beyond bland generalities, like ''In a recession, what people want is a happy ending.'' But that was nothing in comparison to the whopper in today's Times: ''Uptick in Vasectomies Seen as Sign ...

Slate ''Pressbox'' columnist Jack Shafer likes to catalog bogus trend stories—articles strewn with anecdotal data points and expressions like ''growing numbers'' or ''a handful'' instead of hard statistics. (See ''Dudes With Cats'' for a particularly hilarious takedown.) He's on vacation this week, but I'm sure he'd find fault with a story in ...

Maybe I'm mistaken, but I don't think we're all talking about the same thing. ''Wouldn't it be nice if I found a nice and cute man/woman who happens to be loaded'' versus ''I don't care what he/she's like, I need the cash and can't be bothered to provide for myself.'' The first take, is, to my mind, a harmless if telling fantasy. The second is ...

Melinda, Herman Rosenblat may not need a lecture from us, but perhaps he needs one from fellow survivors. If he'd written a memoir about how he kept his sanity by imagining a girl tossing apples at him, that'd be one thing. And if he were delusional, I'd cut him more slack. But from Gabe Sherman's account in The New Republic, he was fully aware of ...

Here's a guest post from Ben Crair, an assistant editor at The Daily Beast who wrote an article for Slate this week on Hollywood Holocaust films.  I hoped that my article on Holocaust film would provoke some discussion, and now that some XX Factor contributors have gotten the ball rolling, I find myself ...