Art Study

The Gospel According to Breaking Bad takes a thoroughly Christian look at AMC's popular and critical TV hit. Covering such weighty theological issues like identity, death, justice, power, fate, free will, and the gospel itself, listeners will be coerced into thinking more deeply about the universal questions Breaking Bad asks. In sections covering the colors and metaphors of Breaking Bad, fans will also come to a further appreciation for one of the most well-done TV series in recent history.

It’s 1985. The Bellport Evening Star, a weekly community paper headed by its sassy editor Vivian Allegra, covers both the humorous and serious issues that regularly erupt in this small village. When she agrees to host a teen exchange student from Catania for a year, Francesca, who descriptively discusses her ancient home city and is hilarious in her observations of American life and who teams up with Black student Keisha with her beautiful Broadway dancer aunt for the upcoming Step competition, life starts taking off. Actually it does for all of them. These are three strong women who in ...

This friendly, fun biography series focuses on the traits that made our heroes great - the traits that kids can aspire to in order to live heroically themselves. Each book tells the story of one of America's icons in a lively, conversational way that works well for the youngest nonfiction listeners and that always includes the hero's childhood influences. This volume features Walt Disney, who makes dreams come true for himself and countless kids around the world.

Almost 200 years after her death, Austen remains a hot topic, and the current flare in the cultural zeitgeist echoes the continuous revival of her works, from the time of original publication through the 20th century. In Jane's Fame, Claire Harman gives us the complete biography of the author and analyzes her lasting cultural influence, making this essential listening for anyone interested in Austen's life, works, and remarkably potent fame.

Back in January 1995 in Los Angeles, California, a Singaporean pornstar named Annabel Chong took cultural rebellion to an extreme, on terms that had never been negotiated before. She was filmed having sex with a long receiving line of men, servicing them 251 times over a ten-hour period to set a new world record: The World’s Biggest Gangbang.

This two-volume anthology conveniently contains useful academic tools for studying the combative arts. Each chapter will prove special to all interested in the intellectual side to the martial arts. Some chapters provide fine details for categorizing the variety of what we commonly refer to as "martial arts." Other chapters focus on the martial arts as living culture and social implications. The quality of instruction can either encourage negative traits such as violence or allow a practitioner to experience a self-transformation that improves character. NOTE: print edition is a single volume.

The Rainbow Age of Television explores why queer people are so invested in—and conflicted by—the kinds of storytelling that TV has to offer. Above all, it's a celebration of the LGBTQIA+ shows, their characters, and their creators that define this new age in television.

A groundbreaking book exploring the breadth of history of recorded music by and for the LGBT community and how those records influenced the evolution of the music we listen to today. From Sia to Elton John, from Billie Holiday to David Bowie, LGBT musicians have changed the course of modern music. But before their music - and the messages behind it - gained understanding and a place in the mainstream, how did the queer musicians of yesteryear fight to build foundations for those who would follow them?

What are you going to do for the rest of your life? For David Lawrence, Jr., a brilliant newspaper editor and publisher with a distinguished, three-decade-long journalism career who retired in 1999 at the age of 56, the answer in his words was to dedicate his life to a "[N]ewly energized purposefulness: that every child have a real chance to succeed."

For more than 75 years, Catwoman has forged her own path in a clear-cut world of stalwart heroes, diabolical villains, and damsels in distress. Her relentless independence across comic books, television, and film set her apart from the rest of the superhero world. When female-led comics were few and far between, Catwoman headlined her own series for over 20 years. But her unique path had its downsides as well.

Labor Day, 1969: Two recent college graduates move to New York to edit a new magazine called the National Lampoon. Over the next decade, Henry Beard and Doug Kenney, along with a loose amalgamation of fellow satirists such as Michael O’Donoghue and P. J. O’Rourke, popularized a smart, caustic, ironic brand of humor that has become the dominant voice of American comedy. Ranging from sophisticated political satire to broad raunchy jokes, the National Lampoon introduced iconoclasm to the mainstream, selling millions of copies to an audience both large and devoted.

Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm - these brilliant women are the central figures of Sharp. Their lives intertwine as they cut through the cultural and intellectual history of America in the 20th century, arguing as fervently with each other as they did with the sexist attitudes of the men who often undervalued their work as critics and essayists.These women are united by what Dean terms as "sharpness", the ability to cut to the quick with precision of thought and wit, a claiming of power through writing rather than position.

Generation after generation, women have faced the devastating reality that Hollywood is a system built to keep them out. The films created by that system influence everything from our worldviews to our brain chemistry. When women's voices are excluded from the medium, the impact on society is immense. Actor, screenwriter, and award-winning independent filmmaker Naomi McDougall Jones takes us inside the cutthroat, scandal-laden film industry, where only five percent of top studio films are directed by women and less than 20 percent of leading characters in mainstream films are female.

In literary circles of the mid-twentieth century, father and son, Ikbal and Idries Shah, spread seductive accounts of a mystical Middle East. Pitching themselves as the authentic voice of the Muslim world, they penned travelogues and exotic potboilers alongside weighty tomes on Islam and politics.

The JT LeRoy scandal is a story of our times. In January 2006, the New York Times unmasked Savannah Knoop as the face of the mysterious author JT LeRoy. A media frenzy ensued as JT's fans, mentors, and readers came to terms with the fact that the gay male-ex-truck stop prostitute turned literary wunderkind was really a girl from San Francisco whose sister-in-law wrote the books.

Inviting listeners to explore a modern field of study with deep historical foundations, the book begins by considering the complexities of the term "information" and the information life cycle from classification to preservation. Each chapter examines a different area within IS, surveying its history, technologies, and practices with a critical eye.

After the conversion of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, the dramatic conversion of St. Augustine - as he himself tells it in his Confessions - is the most significant conversion story in Christian history. Augustine's experience speaks to his dilemma that many people have understood when counting the cost of converting to Christ. He had come to intellectual certainty about the truth of Christianity but he could not embrace it in faith.

Super Black places the appearance of black superheroes alongside broad and sweeping cultural trends in American politics and pop culture, which reveals how black superheroes are not disposable pop products, but rather a fascinating racial phenomenon through which futuristic expressions and fantastic visions of black racial identity and symbolic political meaning are presented.

Trans woman and screenwriter Tilly Bridges takes you through the trans allegories of the Matrix franchise, with deep dives into The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Animatrix, The Matrix Revolutions, and The Matrix Resurrections, tracking one person’s transition journey—from Thomas Anderson, to Neo… to Trinity. Each movie’s allegory is deeply layered, building from movie to movie, and speaks to a different aspect of trans existence.

From Benjamin Franklin's newspaper hoax that faked the death of his rival to Abbie Hoffman's attempt to levitate the Pentagon - pranksters, hoaxers, and con artists have caused confusion, disorder, and laughter in Western society for centuries. Profiling the most notorious mischief-makers from the 1600s to the present day, Pranksters explores how "pranks" are part of a long tradition of speaking truth to power and social critique.