Linda Holmes

Pop culture does not mean celebrity culture; I have perhaps said this more often than anyone you're going to meet. Who dates, who gets a divorce, who has a tantrum, who has surreptitious photos snapped of him by mangy, grim opportunists — these things are not culture of any kind, ...

This is Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield, performing David Bowie's "Space Oddity" while floating around the International Space Station. You may have last seen the space station team walking around in outer space fixing stuff.

Yes, you will never do anything this cool. You could miniaturize ...

Over the weekend, ABC posted a trailer for Marvel's Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D., its fall show (time slot and premiere date to come) that jumps off from Marvel's Avengers universe, as seen in all kinds of movies that have made all kinds of money.

The series, created by Avengers director and ...

Christopher Guest has made so many people laugh since he started making mock documentaries with This Is Spinal Tap in 1984 that his fans might be surprised to hear his response to Scott Simon's question on Saturday's Weekend Edition about whether he ever thinks about making a serious movie.

Referencing ...

On this week's show, we're joined by our friend Matt Thompson, who was around last summer for The Avengers and who here helps us tackle Iron Man 3. We chat about the importance of the suit, the quality of the villainy, and whether Robert Downey, Jr. should win an Oscar. ...

[I really hope it goes without saying that this piece about the film adaptation of a decades-old novel gives away the plot of a decades-old novel. But: Be aware.]

The sheer zazz that Baz Luhrmann introduces into The Great Gatsby is so imposing in quantity that it's surprising that it ...

Let's start with a brief tour of streaming television online.

For quite a while, streaming television meant sitting and watching it on your computer. It wasn't ideal, for obvious reasons. Then, it got easier to sit and watch it on your phone. That wasn't ideal, either, if you liked the ...

Look, I like Channing Tatum. I like Jamie Foxx. And heaven knows, I love Die Hard.

But ... law enforcement guy goes to a closed environment, is separated from a close family member, escapes a siege that grabs practically everybody else, calls out from the building that there's ...

Note: It is 100 percent true and 51 percent relevant that this entire story was written inside my brain while I was in the dentist's chair under the influence of anesthesia. I began to think, "Jeff Probst [the host of Survivor] will not be happy until he is more important ...

Monday night was the big night for unusual dresses (you may remember a previous post about Madonna's bunny ears): the Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, known as the "Met Ball." It had a loose punk theme (because the costume exhibit it's celebrating is punk-centric), ...

Let me tell you a quick story from NPR's move from our old headquarters to our new one.

When I was emptying out my old desk and workspace, in addition to all the shoes under my desk and an alarming number of vessels designed to keep coffee warm, I had ...

The words "grossed out" evoke enough of a watery 1980s vibe that they need to be saved for the times when they really apply: movie scenes where somebody sticks something in somebody else's eye, sewage spills, and so forth.

Having said that, it was hard not to be grossed out ...

It's generally understood that something about MTV was revolutionary. Perhaps it was the music video, perhaps it was the short attention span, perhaps it was The Real World, but something about MTV had enough cultural permanency that it made for a fine oral history from Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum, ...

Of all the museums opening tomorrow that are devoted to supergroups of the 1970s, surely none is more hotly anticipated than ABBA The Museum.

You can dance. You can jive. You can visit the gift shop.

And you can see these puppets, which also appeared in ...

[CAUTION: This is all about Sunday night's Mad Men. Obviously, if you haven't seen Sunday night's Mad Men and you still intend to, you might hold off.]

It's reductive to conclude that on far too many episodes of Mad Men, nothing happens. Of course something always happens: someone feels something, ...

Meet Tony Stark at the opening of Iron Man 3: insanely wealthy, possessed of every toy, and traumatized by an attack on New York that has left him restless, anxious, belligerent, and given to both hunker-down security measures and fate-tempting swagger. He declares his total lack of fear, then builds ...

Happy Friday, PCHH-ers. This weekend brings us all Free Comic Book Day, and we take that opportunity in this episode to talk about how changes in brick-and-mortar retail are affecting pop culture. Do you need a bookstore guy to tell you what to buy? Do you need a ...

One more quick item for this morning.

Filmmaker/designer/animator Adam Patch has posted this video to Vimeo, in which his wife, while somewhat drunk, tells him a joke about two corn chips. He created the animation to go with it.

I cannot begin to tell you why this is ...

It's Friday, and that means it's time for a photo of Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler clowning around with a guy dressed up like a monster wearing essentially the same shiny housecoat as Steven Tyler.

It's a new tradition, but I'm hoping it will catch on.

In this case, Tyler is ...

Perhaps the most revolutionary thing about Discovery's nifty new science series The Big Brain Theory, hosted by Kal Penn, is how ordinary it is.

Right from the title, Big Brain plays into the same fascination with nerd culture that fuels The Big Bang Theory, and that fueled other reality shows ...