tagged w/ Slate Magazine
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I'm High on Life!
Do artists do their best work before they get clean?
By Tom Shone
( an excerpt -
[ Even Charles Bukowski, briefly sober to battle tuberculosis, found himself composing a series of poems about his cats and one about the "little bluebird in my heart."
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
The headaches are biggest for the bad boys, whether bad-boy poets (Bukowski), bad-boy painters (Hirst), or bad-boy actors (Sheen). Theirs is the most humiliating of climb-downs. Dark sides tend to shrivel beneath the pitiless fluorescent glare of the rehab; nothing shrinks the gonads more than the prospect of drawing up an amends list to the bats whose heads you've bitten off. ]
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http://www.slate.com/id/2290972/pagenum/all/#p2I'm High on Life!
Do artists do their best work before they get clean?
By Tom... more
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A four-part series on Slate, one year after the earthquake.
The Most Dependent Independent Nation in the WorldA four-part series on Slate, one year after the earthquake.
The Most Dependent... more
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We altered or fabricated five events: Sen. Joe Lieberman voting to convict President Clinton at his impeachment trial (Lieberman actually voted for acquittal); Vice President Cheney rebuking Sen. John Edwards in their debate for mentioning Cheney's lesbian daughter (in fact, Cheney thanked him); President Bush relaxing at his ranch with Roger Clemens during Hurricane Katrina (Bush was at the White House that day, and Clemens didn't visit the ranch); Hillary Clinton using Jeremiah Wright in a 2008 TV ad (she never did); and President Obama shaking hands with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (it never happened).
http://www.slate.com/id/2254054/slideshow/2254660/We altered or fabricated five events: Sen. Joe Lieberman voting to convict President... more
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At a suburban school district near Washington, D.C., the most popular teacher happens to be a local star on YouTube. Unbeknown to him, students with cell-phone cameras have videotaped him dancing to "Soulja Boy Tell 'Em" and other songs taught to him by the students
Less sweetly, when another teacher from the same school Googled the school's name, she found videos showing students getting into fights with one another. They posted the videos to their MySpace pages and debated who had the better fighting skills. The teacher also found footage from a set of girls who had filmed themselves dancing suggestively in school stairwells. These videos were disturbing, inappropriate, and often exceptionally well-produced, with multiple camera angles and sophisticated editing cuts.
If the school administration knew of the videos, they would be deleted and the teenagers responsible for them would likely face suspension—including the ones who taught their teacher how to dance to Soulja Boy. Schools have had a nearly unanimous response to Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube: repression and silence. Administrators block access to these sites because they think it's important to keep classrooms free from the perceived harms associated with social networks—harassment, bullying, exploitative advertising, violence, and sexual imagery.
But this is shortsighted. Educators should stop thinking about how to repress the huge amounts of intellectual and social energy kids devote to social media and start thinking about how to channel that energy away from causing trouble and toward getting more out of their classes. After all, it's not as if most kids are investing commensurate energy into, say, their math homework. Why not try to start bridging the worlds of Facebook, YouTube, and the classroom?
The main reason is fear. Megan Meier, the 13-year-old student in Missouri who committed suicide after an ex-friend's mother created a fake MySpace profile to humiliate her, stands as a warning against school involvement with the intricacies of kids' online social lives. In response to cyber-stalking and online solicitation of minors, the House of Representatives passed a bill in 2006—the Deleting Online Predators Act—that would require schools to block students from accessing sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LiveJournal. The Senate has put forward similar proposals. And even without a Congressional mandate, many schools have already taken the initiative to ban students—and teachers—from using these sites.
Bad idea. Researchers have already enumerated the benefits that kids can get from traditional media. Watching Sesame Street or Blue's Clues improves children's problem-solving skills and school readiness. Teaching students how to use word-processing software, Web-design programs, and video-production tools is a proven way of refocusing at-risk teens on school, and, eventually, getting them jobs. Social networks can also pull in students who are otherwise disengaged, because they draw on kids' often intense interest in finding new ways to communicate with one another.
http://www.slate.com/id/2239560/At a suburban school district near Washington, D.C., the most popular teacher happens... more
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In September, a 13-year-old girl in Florida named Hope Witsell hanged herself. Raised in a rural Florida suburb, she was the only child of a church-going couple who met in the post office where they're both employed. "She often went fishing with her father in her big, white-framed sunglasses," according to the excellent reporting in this story in the St. Petersburg Times.
Last week, Hope's suicide became the second with a clear link to sexting and the peer torture that can follow from it. At the end of seventh grade last spring, Hope sent a photo of her breasts to a boy she liked, and the picture went viral at her school. "Tons of people talk about me behind my back and I hate it because they call me a whore!" Hope wrote in her journal before her death. Jessie Logan, who was 18 and lived outside Cincinnati, hanged herself last July after nude photos she sent to her boyfriend circulated widely among teenagers she knew. What explains this awful chain of events that leads to tragedy? Is this just the usual bullying, only with different tools, or a distinct harm unto itself? And are these isolated cases or legitimate cause for the wider uproar over sexting?
As a grown-up and a parent, at first I was skeptical about how prevalent anything this blindly risky could really be. But I'm starting to think I was wrong. In three polls that have been conducted on the prevalence of sexting, the numbers are fairly high. The latest, which looks methodologically solid, is an MTV-Associated Press poll reported last week of about 1,450 teens and young adults aged 14 to 24. More than one-quarter said they'd been involved in sexting in some way. Ten percent had sent out naked pictures of themselves on a cell phone or online. And 17 percent of the kids who'd received such a picture reported passing it along to someone else.
Those results match up fairly well with research by Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin, academics who direct the Cyberbullying Research Center, based on their 2007 survey of about 1,900 middle-schoolers. About 12 percent of the kids in that survey said they'd taken a picture of someone and posted it online without permission. That's a lower number than the MTV-AP poll, and the photos involved weren't necessarily sexually compromising. But these kids are younger, and the data was collected two years ago. So, again, dismaying. "Kids do it without thinking," Hinduju says of sexting. "It's a courtship ritual between boyfriend and girlfriend. Or in a more severe situation, there is coercion or trickery to get the picture. But it's becoming commonplace behavior, even if it seems moronic to you and me. We're talking about the neurological immaturity of youth."
http://www.slate.com/id/2237706/In September, a 13-year-old girl in Florida named Hope Witsell hanged herself. Raised... more
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Al Gore talks about global warming, those e-mails, and his new book.
If Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth raised awareness about global warming by frightening people, he hopes his latest book, Our Choice, will help people find solutions to the problem. He talked about those solutions with President Obama yesterday in advance of Obama's trip to the world climate-change meeting in Copenhagen. He was coy about their conversation but did talk about his book, the nature of the climate change debate, and the controversy surrounding those e-mails disclosed from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.
http://www.slate.com/id/2237789/Al Gore talks about global warming, those e-mails, and his new book.
If Al... more
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A full-page ad in the New York Times for Fantastic Mr. Fox includes the endorsement: "'Grade A. The #1 Must-See Movie' For Thanksgiving." Although this quote is attributed to Entertainment Weekly, it does not actually appear in the magazine's review. Likewise, in his Rolling Stone article on Pirate Radio, Peter Travers never calls the British film a "Rip-Roaring Comedy," as one newspaper ad states. How much latitude do movie studios have in writing blurbs?
http://www.slate.com/id/2236706/A full-page ad in the New York Times for Fantastic Mr. Fox includes the endorsement:... more
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Health care reform has arrived on the floor of the House of Representatives, with a final vote likely this evening. The proceedings (live C-span stream; House clerk's log) aren't easy to follow without quick access to government documents, blog updates, academic studies, news sites, and public statements from interested parties. Slate has gathered links to the most important of these, with summary descriptions of their significance.
http://www.slate.com/id/2220222/Health care reform has arrived on the floor of the House of Representatives, with a... more
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Commissions are often created to defer tough decisions; to forge a consensus around a hard solution to a genuine problem; and, rarely, actually to delve into underlying facts. The Angelides commission (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/business/16inquiry.html?_r=1), officially chartered by Congress this summer as the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, has the chance to be that third kind of commission, gathering the missing empirical data on fundamental questions that can guide future decision-making.
We already know an awful lot more about what happened last year than we did in 1932, when the legendary Pecora commission(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecora_Commission) was created to investigate the Wall Street crash. We know the fundamental violations of sound banking practice and regulatory failures that brought us to the precipice. Yet there are still critical areas that would benefit from the commission's detailed analysis: four structural issues that have not yet received adequate attention and one particular transaction that is still highly ambiguous.Commissions are often created to defer tough decisions; to forge a consensus around a... more
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The previous Levi's ad campaign was titled "Live Unbuttoned." It featured smiling, attractive people dancing around to jumpy pop music. Watching those ads now (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym_Z9tFv650), it seems clear they were conceived before the fall 2008 financial plunge. They already feel irrelevant—an attempt to capture a zeitgeist that's evaporated.
In December 2008, Levi's ditched its old ad agency and signed on with Wieden + Kennedy (the talented ad makers responsible for creating many of Nike's epic, stirring, one-minute anthems). The spots that W+K came up with—this new campaign is labeled "Go Forth"—have been running since the summer in movie theaters and, increasingly, on television. From the moment we see that "America" sign half-sunk in inky water, we know we're watching something new. The campaign inhabits a different universe from the one depicted in "Live Unbuttoned."
For one thing, it's a universe in which the ever-present soundtrack is Walt Whitman poetry. This spot uses a wax cylinder recording believed to be audio of Whitman himself reading from his poem "America." The second spot in the campaign employs a recording of an actor reading Whitman's "Pioneers! O Pioneers!"
Whitman is an involuntary spokes-celebrity here, and perhaps you deem this ad a desecration of all he stood for. I can't say I blame you. But were you forced to choose a clothing line for our favorite barbaric yawper to rep, you might choose this one. Levi's is the rare American brand that was actually around when Whitman was alive. And there's logic to this match between a quintessentially American poet and a quintessentially American product. Whitman's verse allows Levi's to evoke not only its proud history but a forward-looking present—the pioneering, American mindset that Whitman captured and that Levi's hopes to embody.The previous Levi's ad campaign was titled "Live Unbuttoned." It... more
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For a genuine presidential war on the press, see the one FDR waged in the 1930s.
How touchy can you get?
The White House fires a few pop-guns in the direction of Fox News Channel, and suddenly everybody from Louis Menand in The New Yorker to Michael Scherer in Time to Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post is heralding the Obama administration's declaration of war on Rupert Murdoch's cable station.
The direct declaration came not from Barack Obama, but underlings Anita Dunn, who called Fox the communications arm of the GOP; David Axelrod, who said Fox isn't really a news station; and Rahm Emanuel, who invoked the president's views to say, "It's not a news organization so much as it has a perspective." The closest His Obamaness has come to criticizing Fox on the record was in June, when he complained of "one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration."
o get a genuine picture of what a war on the press looks like, you can't fan the pages of Nexis for grouchy things George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, or even Richard Nixon said about reporters, newspapers, and networks. You've got to go back to the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt raged against the press like noisy clockwork.
Roosevelt's fury couldn't have been more displaced, in part because newspapers and reporters received him like a conquering hero after his 1932 election, reports Graham J. White in his 1979 book, FDR and the Press:
The initial victory of Franklin Roosevelt over the Washington press was swift and glorious. Demonstrating a virtuosity that amazed them, the new president took the Capital correspondents by storm, winning, from the outset, their affection and admiration; securing, over the crucial early stages of the New Deal, their allegiance and support.
Roosevelt especially disliked "interpretive reporting," which Time and Newsweek were popularizing, writes Betty Houchin Winfield in her 1990 book, FDR and the News Media. Roosevelt recoiled when a reporter asked him what interpretive angle the president would take if he were to write a piece about the Democratic Party's 1934 landslide victory. "I think it is a mistake for newspapers to go over into that field in the news stories," Roosevelt said. His prescription for what reporters should do for readers: "Give them the facts and nothing else." (One can almost see Dunn and Axelrod giving Fox the same advice.)
The president reserved his greatest disdain for press proprietors, whom he blamed for what he considered unfair and distorted coverage. "It is not the reporter" who is responsible for "colored news stories and the failure on the part of some papers to print the news," Roosevelt said in December 1935. "It goes back to the owner of the paper."For a genuine presidential war on the press, see the one FDR waged in the 1930s.... more
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I was thrilled to see that my favorite person in the whole world was number one on the list Eighty Most Influential People Over Age 80 of 2009 put out annually by Slate magazine.I was thrilled to see that my favorite person in the whole world was number one on the... more
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Take a look at Fox's own Web story on the episode. It begins by quoting a Fox News senior vice president named Michael Clemente, who says: "It's astounding the White House cannot distinguish between news and opinion programming. It seems self-serving on their part." Then it quotes David Gergen, the gravelly voice of Washington's conventional wisdom, who says the attack diminishes President Obama and works to Fox's benefit. Then we hear from Tony Blankley, Newt Gingrich's former press secretary and a frequent Fox contributor, who agrees that criticizing Fox makes no sense: "Fox has an audience of not just conservatives. They've got liberals and moderates who watch too." Then a White House correspondent for Politico echoes the claim that the controversy will boost Fox's ratings. Then comes an old quote from Fox anchor Chris Wallace, who calls Obama's team "the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in Washington." Then the story's anonymous author cites a joke Obama made at the White House Correspondents Dinner as evidence "that Fox News has gotten under his skin." Finally, the piece cites a Pew study that suggested that while Fox was equally negative about John McCain and Obama during the last six weeks of the 2008 campaign, CNN was more negative about McCain.
Let's do a quick study of our own. Five people are quoted in this article. Two of them work for Fox. All of them assert that administration officials are either wrong in substance or politically foolish to criticize the network. No one is cited supporting Dunn's criticisms or saying that it could make sense, morally or politically, for Obama to challenge the network's power. It's a textbook example of a biased news story.
If you were watching Fox News Channel, you saw the familiar roster of platinum pundettes and anchor androids reciting the same sound bites: criticizing Fox was Obama's version of Nixon's enemies list, the rest of the news media are in Obama's corner, Obama should get back to governing, Fox opinion shows are different from its news shows, it's always dumb to go after the press. On The O'Reilly Factor on Oct. 13, the evanescent Alan Colmes, the network's weak, battered house liberal, mumbled semi-agreement while "Doctor" Monica Crowley and Bill O'Reilly lit up the scoreboard with the familiar talking points.
Any news organization that took its responsibilities seriously would take pains to cover presidential criticism fairly. It would regard doing so as itself a test of integrity and take pains not to load the dice in its own favor. At any other network, accusation of bias might even lead to some soul-searching and behavioral adjustment. At Fox, by contrast, complaints of unfairness prompt only hoots of derision and demands for "evidence" and "proof," which when presented is brushed off and ignored.Take a look at Fox's own Web story on the episode. It begins by quoting a Fox... more
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The U.S. House of Commerce is wrong about climate change, health care and everything else. It must be stopped.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce must be stopped. Here's how to do it.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce—the self-proclaimed voice of business in Washington—has been wrong on virtually every major public-policy issue of the past decade: financial deregulation, tax and fiscal policy, global warming and environmental enforcement, consumer protection, health care reform …
The chamber remains an unabashed voice for the libertarian worldview that caused the most catastrophic economic meltdown since the Great Depression. And the chamber's view of social justice would warm Scrooge's heart. It is the chamber's right to be wrong, and its right to argue its preposterous ideas aggressively, as it does through vast expenditures on lobbyists and litigation. Last year alone, the chamber spent more than $91 million on lobbying, and, according to lobby tracker Opensecrets.org, it has spent more than twice as much on lobbying(http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=a&indexType=s) during the past 12 years as any other corporation or group.
The problem is, the chamber is doing all this with our money. The chamber survives financially on the dues and support of its members, which are most of America's major corporations listed on the stock exchange. The chamber derives its political clout from the fact that its membership includes these corporations. Yet we—you and I—own the companies that support the chamber and permit it to propagate its views. Our passive, permissive attitude toward the management of the companies we own has enabled the chamber to be one of the primary impediments to the reform of markets, health care, energy policy, and politics that we have all been calling for. It is time for that to change.
How, you might ask, do we own these companies? Public pension funds and mutual funds are the largest owners of equities in the market. They are the institutional shareholders that have the capacity to push management—and the boards of the corporations. Yet the mutual funds and pension funds have failed to do so. They have failed to control the management of the companies they own because the actual owners of those mutual funds and pension funds—you and I—have failed to raise our voices. We haven't even asked questions.The U.S. House of Commerce is wrong about climate change, health care and everything... more
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A better question might be, why vampires ever? Looking back, it's hard to think of a period when we weren't in the middle of a vampire craze. In the late 1970s, Anne Rice started raking in the money with Interview With the Vampire, and movies like Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre and the comedy Love at First Bite were critical hits. Then came The Lost Boys, Near Dark, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Innocent Blood, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the movie), four more Anne Rice books, and Interview With the Vampire (the movie)—which could all be lumped into a rage for vampires that lasted clear through from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Vampires were back again in the mid-1990s, with Buffy (the TV show), the Blade movies, Southern Vampire Mysteries (the book series), and From Dusk Till Dawn. And now we've arrived at the highly touted mid- to late-2000s vogue of Underworld, Twilight (books and movies), True Blood (based on Southern Vampire Mysteries), and The Vampire Diaries.
So perhaps instead of talking about vampire crazes, we should really be talking about vampire droughts. The brief, anomalous periods when few or perhaps even no vampire movies, books, or TV shows are produced at all. The Garlic Years.
To figure out whether there really have been any vampire-free periods, we dug through online compendiums, from Wikipedia to obsessive fan sites like the Vampire Library, and compiled a list of the most important vampire-related books, films, and TV shows of the last half-century. In total, we included 169 movies, 106 books, and 62 seasons' worth of TV.
It turns out there were indeed a few periods—four, to be precise—where the vampire genre seemed to hit a mini-recession. Here's a rundown of each dry spell and the vampire works that brought the genre back from the dead.A better question might be, why vampires ever? Looking back, it's hard to think... more
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Could iPhone apps change the way we travel?
"Transportation is civilization," Rudyard Kipling once wrote. Today we're more inclined to express this equation with words like mobility and accessibility, but the spirit's the same: The flow of people and goods ("traffic and all that it implies," per Kipling) makes the world hum. But transit can feel uncivilized: We sit in congestion (wishing for the path less taken); we miss trains; we hunt for good places to park a car or a bike; we get lost.
Enter the iPhone. One of the device's greatest areas of promise is as a transportation tool. Rival smartphones, of course, are equipped with GPS, Internet access, etc., but none corral quite so many of the features that delight transpo geeks (an accelerometer, a compass, etc.) into one device. And rival phones can only envy the iPhone's flourishing app market, which includes some 65,000 options, many at least peripherally related to transportation (that is, if you include parallel parking games and the like).
It's intriguing to imagine how transportation itself could be changed by such apps. Of course, the utility of any of them depends on a number of things, ranging from the robustness of the GPS signal to the transparency and fidelity of available information to the number of users the app boasts. (Not to mention battery power.) So here's a broad and by no means exhaustive look at the most promising—or at least most intriguing—apps to date.Could iPhone apps change the way we travel?
"Transportation is... more
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Quantum Physicist Approves the Time Traveler's Wife
Tragic love stories may not be your thing, but physicist Dave Goldberg says there's another reason to be excited for the film adaptation of The Time Traveler's Wife: it's the most accurate time travel movie you'll see all year.
Goldberg, a physics professor at Drexel University, and co-author of the upcoming book A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes and Quantum Uncertainty, says that amidst the current glut of more fantastical time travel dramas — in which he includes Lost, Star Trek, and Heroes — The Time Traveler's Wife is a breath of relatively accurate air.
Looking at the theories developed by Albert Einstein, Hugh Everett, Igor Novikov, and Kip Thorne, Goldberg creates a checklist for accurate time travel rules ("You can't visit any time before your time machine was built." "You can't kill your own grandfather."), and explains how well The Time Traveler's Wife fits within those rules. The verdict: the story bends the rules a bit, but in a somewhat justifiable way, and comes out leagues ahead of most popular time travel tales.
One point I wish Goldberg had addressed is whether nudity is a prerequisite for time travel, because personally when they build the time machine, I'd prefer to arrive fully clothed.Quantum Physicist Approves the Time Traveler's Wife
Tragic love stories may... more
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In August, 2005, three weeks before his nationally televised declaration that "George Bush doesn't care about black people," Kanye West made a statement he'd later describe as braver and more difficult than his attack on the White House. Hip-hop, he told MTV, was supposed to be about "speaking your mind and about breaking down barriers, but everyone in hip-hop discriminates against gay people … I wanna just come on TV and just tell my rappers, tell my friends, 'Yo, stop it.' " Taking on Bush was a perfectly hip-hop move, but taking on homophobia, West feared, could be career suicide. Undeterred, he revisited the subject in a November 2005 interview, discussing his love for his openly gay cousin, not to mention his conflicted but evolving attitude toward his interior decorator. West's call for tolerance remains the highest-profile rebuke of gay-bashing that hip-hop has seen.
But old habits die hard, and last week, West amended his position somewhat on "Run This Town," a new Jay-Z single on which the Chicago rapper is a featured guest. "It's crazy how you can go from being Joe Blow," West begins his rap, "to everybody on your dick—no homo." No homo, to those unfamiliar with the term, is a phrase added to statements in order to rid them of possible homosexual double-entendre. ("You've got beautiful balls," you tell your friend at the bocce game—"no homo.") No homo began life as East Harlem slang in the early '90s, and in the early aughts it entered the hip-hop lexicon via the Harlem rapper Cam'ron and his Diplomats crew. Lil Wayne brought the term into the mainstream, sprinkling "no homo" caveats across cameos, mix tapes, and his Tha Carter III LP, which was 2008's best-selling album. (Jay-Z has used the word pause in a similar way.)In August, 2005, three weeks before his nationally televised declaration that... more
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In his newest article, Jonah Weiner from Slate.com talks about the rise of the phrase 'no homo' in hip-hop music and culture and its effects. To him, while the use of the phrase is hardly radical, the fact that it allows hip-hop artists to make homosexuality part of the conversation at all by encouraging them to come up with clever rhymes that use is still worth something.
He writes: "No homo tweaks [the 'down-low'] dynamic because it allows, implicitly, that rap is a place where gayness can in fact be expressed by the guy on the mic, not just scorned in others. In the very act of trying to "purify" an utterance of any gayness, after all, the no homo tag must contaminate it first—it's both a denial and a flashing neon arrow.... There's a sense in which no homo, rather than limiting self-expression in hip-hop, actually helps to expand it..."In his newest article, Jonah Weiner from Slate.com talks about the rise of the phrase... more
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Should the FCC force Apple to sell Google's apps?
Apple has some explaining to do. Last week, the company banished every application that uses Google Voice—the search company's fantastic ring-all-your-phones telephone service—from the iPhone App Store. This wasn't unusual. Apple has been capriciously rejecting apps for reasons that it refuses to disclose since the App Store debuted; the only mild surprise was that Google, Apple's corporate ally, was on the receiving end. The truly shocking news came on Friday, when the Federal Communications Commission dashed off letters to Apple and AT&T asking why the apps were rejected.
The FCC has traditionally maintained a hands-off policy with regard to cell phone companies. But Julius Genachowski, the new FCC chairman, has vowed to increase competition in the wireless industry. The iPhone seems like the best place to start: It's the biggest new wireless software platform, and it's also the most locked-down. It's hard not to cheer—if mobile apps are going to prosper, it's time the government stepped in to keep Apple in lineShould the FCC force Apple to sell Google's apps?
Apple has some explaining to... more
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