You can learn a lot from the movies-about sex and relationships, about business, about history. Sure, there's a fair amount of fantasy, wish fulfillment, and glorious hair to exaggerate everything, but for better or for worse, films remain one of the most important ways that viewers around the world learn about other people and cultures. And almost since the dawn of the medium, movies have shaped the public's understanding of and assumptions about disability. As a movie critic and disabled person, Kristen Lopez speaks with particular authority on how disability is represented-and too often misrepresented-in Hollywood movies. Having dealt with the effects of osteogenesis imperfecta for her entire life, she has experienced directly the lack of accommodations, political neglect, and social difficulties that disabled people deal with daily-and she has witnessed the vast difference between those everyday challenges and how they are typically depicted on-screen. As Lopez points out in this book, even when they're not just narrative props to help out an able-bodied protagonist, disabled movie characters are overwhelmingly white, affluent, and conventionally attractive, which obscures the variety of disabilities and the experiences of those who deal with them. (Roughly one in four people in the US have a disability, and a disproportionate number of them live in poverty.) Popcorn Disabilities is an impassioned but nonetheless fun and engaging survey of how Hollywood has dealt with disability over the last century, covering not only the many ways that cinema has distorted the lived reality of disabled people, but also where films have gotten it right, and how the power of the medium can continue to be used to enlighten and educate in the future. From little-remembered gems like Tod Browning's Freaks—one of the earliest well-intentioned attempts to show disabled characters as complex, three-dimensional human beings—to contemporary films like Coda, My Left Foot, The Little Mermaid, Unbreakable, and many others, it challenges popular assumptions about disability while never losing sight of movies' unique power, influence, and potential as a tool for social good.

Interviews with young Muslims in Chicago explore the complexity of identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hop This groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, "Muslim Cool." Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim--displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the 'hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic US Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between "Black" and "Muslim." Thus, by countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are "foreign" to the United States and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam. Yet Muslim Cool also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested--critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.

When COVID-19 sweeps through New York City, Jamie Gray is stuck as a dead-end driver for food delivery apps. That is, until Jamie makes a delivery to an old acquaintance, Tom, who works at what he calls "an animal rights organization." Tom's team needs a last-minute grunt to handle things on their next field visit. Jamie, eager to do anything, immediately signs on. What Tom doesn't tell Jamie is that the animals his team cares for are not here on Earth. Not our Earth, at least. In an alternate dimension, massive dinosaur-like creatures named Kaiju roam a warm and human-free world. They're the universe's largest and most dangerous panda and they're in trouble. It's not just the Kaiju Preservation Society that's found its way to the alternate world. Others have, too--and their carelessness could cause millions back on our Earth to die.