Taylor Swift New Song, Obama Jon Stewart Interview, Felix Baumgartner Jump and the Top Culture Stories This Week

Culture

Another awesome week at PolicyMic. In addition to Joe Biden's endless smiling, and Paul Ryan's incredible water intake, there were a whole slew of top-notch culture stories to check out. Catch up here on the Culture stories, reviews, and interviews from this week. 

Top Feature Stories in Culture:

Why Orlando Cruz Coming Out Could Change Professional Contact Sports Forever (Frank Hagler) – "Homosexuality is not allowed in contact sports. It exists but it is not allowed. There has never been an openly gay active athlete in the major contact sports – football, basketball, baseball, hockey, or boxing."

Is Lena Dunham's Memoir Worth $3.5 Million? (Megan Malloy) – "Whether or not someone is the voice of a generation seems like a fairly asinine debate. Every generation, particularly the millennial generation who grew up in a globalized world, is too diverse and multifaceted to be represented by a singular voice. Perhaps a chorus would be more apt. To expect Dunham to render the lives of  an entire generation of people is to set her up for failure."

Why the Prospect of Zombie Apocalypse Gets Human Beings Excited About Life (Thomas Barnes) – "Other thriller fads have come and gone, but zombies persist. Alien movies and games aren’t as ever-present as they once were. King Kong and his fellow city-crushers died out a long time ago. Even our vampire craze is running its course. After all these years of groaning and brain-nomming, why is the zombie genre still so popular?"

Ayn Rand, the Woman Behind the Paul Ryan Philosophy (Juan Pablo Llaso) – "Seligman finds that the film is “one of the purest examples of camp in the history of cinema,” which may be too harsh a treatment considering director King Vidor’s often dazzling cinematography, but does speak to the characters’ flatness and inhumanity. Neither Roark nor any of the other characters are written as plausible human beings, but as the personified ideologies that make up Rand’s understanding of modernity."

Reviews of the Week:

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People Around the Web are Talking About:

Felix Baumgartner's 120,000 foot skydive: Quite honestly, one of the most amazing things live on the internet ... ever. Check out Baumgartner seconds before he jumped down to Earth. 

Taylor Swift is Solid Pop: The cross-over country artist seems to be country no longer. The latest release from her forthcoming album Red is a track called "I Knew You Were Trouble." Swift's new sound is more dubstep than twang. 

Picasso at the Guggenheim: The ongoing exhibition at New York's Guggenheim showcases work from the modern artist all from his black-and-white palette. The work spans 1904-1971 and the exhibtion runs until Jan. 23 2013.