The Rise of Buffy Studies 

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Scholarly interest in Joss Whedon’s cult classic points to the growing belief that TV shows deserve to be studied as literature.

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went off the air in 2003, its cult status was still very much nascent. Cue the novels, comics, video games, and spinoffs, not to mention fan sites, fan fiction, conventions, and inclusion on scores of “Best TV Shows of All Time” lists. But while it remains good fun to watch a seemingly ditzy teenager and her friends fight the forces of darkness with super-strength, magic, and witty banter, the show’s seven seasons have also become the subject of critical inquiry from a more intellectually rigorous fanbase: academics.

, along with critically acclaimed series like

and the beginning of the Golden Age of Television, but helped pave the way for scholars to treat television shows like

as sprawling works of art to be dissected and analyzed alongside the greatest works of literature. Academics have found Whedon’s cult classic to be particularly multi-dimensional—trading heavily on allegory, myth, and cultural references—while combining an inventive narrative structure with dynamic characters and social commentary.

As a result, hundreds of scholarly books and articles have been written about

’s deeper themes, and an entire academic journal and conference series—appropriately called

—is devoted to using the show and other Whedon works to discuss subjects such as philosophy and cultural theory.

as a progressive, feminist challenge to gender hierarchy? Check.

Douglas Kellner, a professor at UCLA, has written that popular television does a particularly good job of expressing the subconscious fears and fantasies of a society, and that Buffy is an especially useful example. The show’s fantastical elements, he said, provide “access to social problems and issues and hopes and anxieties that are often not articulated in more ‘realist’ cultural forms,” like cop shows or sitcoms. But even popular dramas with similar surface-level conceits like

, which focus mostly on soap-opera romance and teen issues, lack

’s allegorical elements, which elevate the show and make it fascinating for scholars to study.

, monsters act as physical stand-ins for societal differences and threats: Vampires symbolize sexual predators, werewolves represent bodily forces out of control, and witches tap into tropes about how female power and sexuality is seen as threatening. By fighting the “Big Bad,” Buffy and her friends fight the monsters everyone faces—oppressive authority figures, meaningless rules, confining social norms, sexual awakening, loneliness, redemption—in other words, the terrors of growing up and finding one’s way in the world.

scholars have taken dozens of different approaches to understanding the television show or using it to further work in other disciplines. In the decade since it went off the air, a Stanford University population ecologist used mathematical formulas to determine potential vampire demographics in Sunnydale, the fictional California town where the show is set. A strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the prominent Washington, D.C. think tank, compared Buffy’s war against the forces of evil to the U.S.’s war on terror and named a new paradigm in biological warfare after the fictional vampire slayer. An English-language historian and linguist published a lexicon of ‘Buffyspeak,’ the insider name for the particular slang and expressions used in the show (Examples include: “Love makes you do the wacky,” “What’s with the grim?” and “She’s the Do-That Girl”).

“Whedon seems to be an almost inexhaustible source,” said David Lavery, an English professor at Middle Tennessee State University who teaches courses on

and co-founded the Whedon Studies Association, an academic organization devoted to analyzing the works of the eponymous writer, producer, and director. “There’s the complexity, intertextuality, authenticity of his stories that makes them so rich for study. If he keeps making stuff for the next 10 years, I think Whedon studies will be going on for quite a long time.”

By fighting the “Big Bad,” Buffy and her friends fight the monsters everyone faces.

Even though it helped set the stage for prestige shows like

to be studied in an academic context, Buffy lacks some of the same gravitas those series do. The

critic Emily Nussbaum has lamented that Buffy doesn’t look the way “worthy” television should look, which has made it difficult for her to convince friends and peers of its quality. (In early seasons, she noted, “the werewolf costume looked like it was my great-aunt Ida’s coat.”) Still,

’s sometimes Dr. Who-esque campiness itself has merited critical essays. Meanwhile, other scholars have unpacked the complex relationship Joss Whedon has to his universes, examining him as an auteur on par with show creators such as Vince Gilligan, Matthew Weiner, and Shonda Rhimes.

, the field of popular-culture studies is rising in universities across the country. Students are critiquing Madonna, Jay-Z, and

. These scholars—many of whom are fans of the works they study—sometimes brush up against an academic culture that looks down upon their texts of choice, despite television’s formal and thematic similarities to other well-established areas of study.

But throughout history, yesterday’s lowbrow is often tomorrow’s cultural classic. Rhonda Wilcox, who also co-founded the Whedon Studies Association, frequently compares the episodic format of television to 19th century serialization of novels, like those of Charles Dickens. Dickens, as well as Shakespeare, was considered “pop culture” and thus unworthy of study by close-minded academics who maintained that epic poetry was the most legitimate text. Literary studies and film studies as they’re known today both underwent similar battles for legitimacy that television studies is currently facing. “I think that we’re slowly getting people to recognize that television studies needs to be taken seriously. It’s a general prejudice because it’s fun,” Wilcox says.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Whedon himself supports the rise of the discipline. In an interview with

in 2003, he said, “I think it’s always important for academics to study popular culture, even if the thing they are studying is idiotic. If it’s successful or made a dent in culture, then it is worthy of study to find out why.”

A Visual Rendition of Walt Whitman\'s \'Song of Myself\'

Lines from the classic poem are captured in a whimsical animation

Photographs of what “the cloud” actually looks like

In an age when the line between childhood and adulthood is blurrier than ever, what is it that makes people grown up?

It would probably be fair to call Henry “aimless.” After he graduated from Harvard, he moved back in with his parents, a boomerang kid straight out of a trend piece about the travails of young adults.

Despite graduating into a recession, Henry managed to land a teaching job, but two weeks in, he decided it wasn’t for him and quit. It took him a while to find his calling—he worked in his father’s pencil factory, as a door-to-door magazine salesman, took on other teaching and tutoring gigs, and even spent a brief stint shoveling manure before finding some success with his true passion: writing.

, when he was 31 years old, after 12 years of changing jobs and bouncing back and forth between his parents’ home, living on his own, and crashing with a buddy, who believed in his potential. “[He] is a scholar & a poet & as full of buds of promise as a young apple tree,” his friend wrote, and eventually was proven right. He may have floundered during young adulthood, but Henry David Thoreau turned out pretty okay. (The buddy he crashed with, for the record, was Ralph Waldo Emerson.)

Members of America's political left share far more concerns in common with the armed protestors than many apparently realize.

The activists who began occupying government buildings in the Oregon wilderness over the weekend say that they’re protesting how federal authorities treated rancher Dwight Hammond, 73, and Steven Hammond, his middle-aged son.

Federal authorities charged the Hammonds with arson after they set a series of fires that spread to public land. A 2001 fire accidentally burned beyond their property line, according to

. The Department of Justice says it was set to cover up an illegal deer hunt, while the men say that they were burning away an invasive plant species on their land. Years later in 2006, “a burn ban was in effect while firefighters battled blazes started by a lightning storm on a hot day in August,” the newspaper reported. “Steven Hammond had started a ‘back burn’ to prevent the blaze from destroying the family’s winter feed for its cattle.” It was reported by Bureau of Land Management firefighters in the area, and the Justice Department notes that they “took steps to ensure their safety.” It burned about an acre of public land, causing less than $1,000 in damage. Charged with a number of crimes related to arson, the father was convicted of just one count of arson while the son was convicted of two counts for the wilderness fires. The government used an anti-terrorism statute to secure its convictions.

The Republican candidates ​claim Arab dictators ​have brought stability to the Middle East. Is that really true?

Once upon a time, Republican leaders said the United States should push the Middle East toward democracy because Arab dictators were breeding Arab terrorists. Not anymore. In the party George W. Bush once ran, his fight-terrorism-with-democratization thesis has been largely orphaned. The new buzzword is “stability.” Donald Trump publicly bemoans the fall of Saddam Hussein and Muammar al-Qaddafi. Ted Cruz attacks the Obama administration for not doing more to keep Hosni Mubarak in power and urges it to emulate Egypt’s current dictator, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Bush’s former vice president, Dick Cheney, insists that, “The Egyptian people are delighted that the military stepped in,” in a brutal coup d’état. And W.’s own brother, Jeb, whose Super PAC has received donations from at least two lobbyists for Saudi Arabia, says the next president must “restore trust” and “work more closely” with America’s “important partner” in Riyadh.

Republicans may have a lock on Congress and the nation’s statehouses—and could well win the presidency—but the liberal era ushered in by Barack Obama is only just beginning.

Over roughly the past 18 months, the following events have transfixed the nation.

In July 2014, Eric Garner, an African American man reportedly selling loose cigarettes illegally, was choked to death by a New York City policeman.

That August, a white police officer, Darren Wilson, shot and killed an African American teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. For close to two weeks, protesters battled police clad in military gear. Missouri’s governor said the city looked like a war zone.

In December, an African American man with a criminal record avenged Garner’s and Brown’s deaths by murdering two New York City police officers. At the officers’ funerals, hundreds of police turned their backs on New York’s liberal mayor, Bill de Blasio.

However the Republican presidential primary turns out, the conditions that fostered the mogul’s rise have left their mark on the party—and America.

In some ways, the most interesting political story of 2015 was not Donald Trump but the widespread pundit reaction to Trump. Throughout the year, until a different conclusion became unavoidable, the expert consensus was that Trump was a single day or one inflammatory statement away from self-destruction, that his ceiling of support was 25 percent of Republicans at most, and even that was transitory. Another theme was that once Republican primary and caucus voters saw that Trump was anything but a true conservative—given his past support for a single-payer health-care system, his insistence on taxing the rich, and his contributions to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton—he would collapse.

The willful suspension of disbelief by so many political professionals and analysts had multiple roots. One part was a deep belief that history rules—since rogue and inexperienced candidates had always faltered before, it followed that it would happen again. Another was that nothing has changed in a meaningful way in American politics—there has not been real polarization, only natural “sorting,” and the establishment will rule, as it always does. A third was that there are certain characteristics expected of a president—prudence, civility, expertise—that would eventually cause Trump and the other outsiders like Carson, Cruz, and Fiorina to fall by the wayside.

The president announced new measures that would tighten regulations on firearms purchases.

President Obama announced Tuesday new measures that he said would curb gun violence across the country.

“People are dying,” the president said. “And the constant excuses for inaction no longer do, no longer suffice. That is why we are here today. Not to debate the last mass shooting, but to do something to prevent the next one.”

Obama said his executive action would leverage existing law that requires all licensed gun sellers to carry out background checks of potential buyers. The president wants to make “anybody in the business of selling firearms” register as a licensed dealer. Such criteria would mean more oversight, particularly for people selling guns over the Internet, which could mean more buyers would be subject to background checks.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December,

The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

When we take turns speaking, we chime in after a culturally universal short gap.

One of the greatest human skills becomes evident during conversations. It’s there, not in what we say but in what we don’t. It’s there in the pauses, the silences, the gaps between the end of my words and the start of yours.  

When we talk we take turns, where the “right” to speak flips back and forth between partners. This conversational pitter-patter is so familiar and seemingly unremarkable that we rarely remark on it. But consider the timing: On average, each turn lasts for around 2 seconds, and the typical gap between them is just 200 milliseconds—barely enough time to utter a syllable. That figure is nigh-universal. It exists across cultures, with only slight variations. It’s even there in sign-language conversations.

We recently published an article naming Jupiter “the best planet.” As everyone knows, Saturn is the best planet. We regret the error.

The Atlantic published, “Jupiter Is the Best Planet,” an article by Adrienne LaFrance. As editor of that article, I must take responsibility for the way it misled readers. In cases like this, we usually append a correction to the original article, but here the error is so grave that a freestanding editorial mea culpa is required. Jupiter is not, as LaFrance asserts, the best planet.

LaFrance was right to choose from the outer planets. With the exception of Earth (off-limits in this exercise) the inner planets are a bore. Mercury is a tiny thing, sun-blasted and crater-pocked, more moon than planet. Venus glows lovely in the sky, but its atmosphere is a hellish, sulfur-smelling place, with temperatures hot enough to melt lead. Probes sent to its surface survive less than an hour before succumbing to the extreme conditions. Venus is useful only as a cautionary tale about the runaway greenhouse effect.

The Oregon Standoff, Black Lives Matter, and Criminal-Justice Reform

Police restraint and deescalation are as important in the standoff with an armed militia in Oregon as they are in urban police departments around the country.

The standoff in Oregon between armed militias and federal law-enforcement provides a great moment for reflecting on some of the lessons of Black Lives Matter and the criminal-justice-reform movement that grew over the last year.

The antigovernment protesters took over the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in support of two ranchers convicted of committing arson on public lands and have vowed “to stay as long as it takes.” The standoff—and the reaction to it—has implications far beyond Oregon: It touches on law enforcement’s reaction to protests nationwide, mandatory-minimum sentences, and even the terms we use to label protesters.

One obvious—and consequently widely remarked-upon—point is about double standards: Given how individual African Americans or groups of people of color have been labeled, why is a group of armed men who have forcibly occupied a government building being referred to simply as a “militia”? (The frontrunner for alternative proposal is the clever “Yallqaeda.”) If they were black, argued

, the crew led by Ammon Bundy would have been killed. These points were also made after Cliven Bundy, Ammon’s father, mounted a stand in Nevada in 2014, and they are worthwhile.

Donna Ferrato on her ethnographic approach to documenting dangerous relationships

James Hamblin, Nicolas Pollock, and Jaclyn Skurie