Monday, April 18 2011
From the Fringe of Islam: An Interview with Michael Muhammad Knight
Famous amongst orphaned Muslims -- teens and adults trying to find a place in a religion known for stringency -- Knight’s first book, The Taqwacores straddles the line between manifesto and coming of age novel.
Thursday, March 31 2011
De-Normalize Your Brain: Charlie Sheen as Prophet
Sheen is the new psychic outlaw. He is a psychopathic prophet warning of the dangers, lunacy, and criminality of the mainline media and everything they stand for. No wonder he looks so crazy.
Thursday, February 24 2011
These Long Years, and the Miles: Remembering Dwayne McDuffie
With the passing of Dwayne McDuffie this last Tuesday we're left with the loss of a pioneer in film, television and comics, and a man of singular vision.
Wednesday, February 9 2011
Life, The Universe and Everything
Like Richard Feynman before him, Dr. Leonard Mlodinow has a gift that’s all too rare in physicists – he speaks Normal Person. The physicist and author of the New York Times best-seller The Drunkard’s Walk, Mlodinow has a knack for making the complicated issues that crop up in quantum physics understandable to everyday readers.
Wednesday, February 2 2011
The Urinal: A Brief Functional and Aesthetic History
How the history of the urinal is the history of America.
Thursday, January 27 2011
What ‘Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle Can—and Can’t—Tell Us About What Happened in Tucson
Imagine all of the elements contributing to Travis Bickle’s disintegration placed in the context of contemporary culture, with venom spewed 24/7. Imagine Travis Bickle – and Jared Loughner -- watching Fox News daily.
Friday, December 24 2010
Have Yourself a Counter-Culture XMas: Red-Nosed Misfits, Elven Outlaws & Bearded Marxists
The TV versions of Rudolph, Santa, and Frosty are chaotic, freewheeling, and anarchic -- closer in spirit to Heath Ledger's Joker than to Bing Crosby's Father O'Malley.
Monday, November 29 2010
Meme Maker: The Slater-Dodson Effect
If you are a fame-seeker that is paying attention, you've seen that the best way to get noticed is to get on TV -- in whatever way possible -- and bypass the usual arbiters of entertainment. It is a recipe for fame without any marketable talent: simply create a situation that centers on you.
Thursday, November 11 2010
Why the Caged Bird Sings
TED Fellow Juliana Machado Ferreira's work focuses on bringing the latest advances in forensic science to bear against “crimes against nature. Her bete noir—and the driving factor behind her research—is the illegal wildlife trade that removes hundreds of thousands of animals, primarily birds, from Brazil’s ecosystem every year.
Friday, August 27 2010
Mythologizing Michael Jackson
Aristotle's wisdom about these protagonists suffering irreparable loss at the hands of destiny is applicable to Jackson's journey: he suffered disproportionately more than he deserved; he was intelligent and gifted at evoking pathos in his audience; and he had influence but was in conflict with external forces and internal demons. In short: he was a flawed, tragic figure.
Friday, August 20 2010
Cults of an Unwitting Oracle: The (Unintended) Religious Legacy of H. P. Lovecraft
A horror writer, self-proclaimed atheist, and "mechanical materialist" who spent most of his life ridiculing religion, H.P. Lovecraft invented one of the most absurd and terrifying pseudomythologies in the history of modern literature. So, how is it that some of his audience came to take his cosmology seriously?
Monday, June 7 2010
New Theories of Everything Prompted by Guided by Voices Appreciation Night, or, Good News
Tonight I will go belly-up in some kind of mental cloud, a meandering consideration of what tribute shows are really about, and why Guided by Voices deserves one, and what they were really about -- and that will lead to thoughts about prophecy and nihilism and Ralph Waldo Emerson and postmodernism.
Friday, May 14 2010
Challenging Stereotypes: A Yank’s Guide to Working and (Mostly) Playing in Australia
What follows is a hearty recommendation for you 18-30-year-olds wondering “Great, I’ve got a degree in English. What now?” or “Lovely, a lay-off. Cheers for that. And?”
Monday, April 26 2010
Filesharing from Carter to Obama
There is a difference between sharing files and sharing music. In the '70s, victory was hearing your favorite song on the radio. And now it was all here, right in front of me. Just a click away.
Tuesday, April 13 2010
Lady Gaga: Fame Over
Lady Gaga is the return of the repressed mainstream, a Frankenstein of Tumblr fantasies and Twitter dreams. Social media’s decentralization and relativism run amok have brought us to a breaking point.
Monday, April 12 2010
Mental Machine Music: The Musical Mind in the Digital Age
How has the digital age changed our "musical brains"? At the quantitative level, what factors in the digital age lead our brains toward different musical choices? On the qualitative level, how have our listening experiences changed?
Friday, April 9 2010
Sons of Anarchy: Rebels and Bad Subjects with a Cause?
Our present 'social grid' -- the stage Sons of Anarchy plays upon – is one that most on the planet have fallen through; life outside of that grid may offer some hope, some new regime.
Monday, March 15 2010
All You Did Was Save My Life: An interview with Our Lady Peace’s Raine Maida
Our Lady Peace's lead singer opens up about the near break-up of his band, the inspiration behind their latest full-length, and how bright the future looks for the Canadian quartet.
Friday, March 5 2010
Autopsy TV
Autopsy entertainment makes painfully clear that no amount of Twitter and Prozac, Friending and Unfriending, Outplacement and Outsourcing, Bail Outs and Stimulus, Surges and Drones, Mii and Wii, Nunchuck and Netois can save us.
Friday, February 19 2010
Small Towns: Life in a Low Tech Web
To live in a small town is to be connected, and not electronically or digitally. Rather, it means to be connected to people in the flesh, to actual places, to land and buildings, to a common past.