“Ever since notes could be etched on paper, no beloved music has gone completely silent, especially since recorded technology emerged in the late 19th century. But some genres have become so peripheral to American lives as to be reduced to historical footnotes. Studied by academics, performed by die-hards and applauded by connoisseurs, they’re forgotten by nearly everyone else.

This is where Chicago blues is headed. A once visceral, urgent, profoundly complex music that told the story of a people — and, in so doing, ricocheted around the world — is slipping from public embrace in its primary home, Chicago, and beyond. Nearly banished from radio and TV, practically absent from the popular press and rarely heard in schools, real Chicago blues must be sought out, and only the most intrepid listeners find it.”

by Howard Reich

Chicago Tribune (28 December 2012)

“The economic downturn exacerbated the deep political and cultural divides in our 50-50 nation. Here’s what three years of polling data says about where America stands today…. With more than 12,000 cumulative interviews, the surveys paint a portrait of a nation struggling to maintain faith in old beliefs about opportunity, self-sufficiency, and the rewards of hard work amid a nagging fear that the economy’s new dynamics expose average Americans to far more financial insecurity than earlier generations—and sentence the nation to more disruptive cycles of boom and bust. By overwhelming margins, those polled consistently have expressed faith that they can still achieve the American Dream, defined as the opportunity to advance as far as their talents will take them, and to live better than their parents. And yet, the surveys also find ominous cracks in that conviction, with many Americans, especially whites, growing pessimistic that their children will exceed, or even equal, their own standard of living.”

by Ronald Brownstein

The Atlantic (7 January 2012)

“In 1982 the Duchess of Cambridge was born and the ‘Sloane Ranger Handbook’ published. Harry Mount tells how an oft-mocked social type has come of age as a global brand presided over by ‘the Sloane on the Throne’. Today, Fulham is only a state of mind…. Sloane characteristics are so deeply ingrained that you can be a Sloane anywhere. A brand once defined by a single London address – Sloane Square – is magically equipped to migrate across the globe, beyond Fulham even, and largely thanks to the new Queen of the Sloanes.”

by Harry Mount

The Telegraph (9 January 2012)

“The clerk has been killed by the economy, Netflix, iTunes and Amazon. Computers might want your creative job next…. He may not look much like Justin Timberlake, but Jeff Miller is something of a Hollywood player. Or, rather, he was — until he got a call on Labor Day from his employers, the owners of the best and most important movie rental store in the orbit of Hollywood. For a decade the bearded, teddy-bear-like Miller helped run Rocket Video, a place frequented by directors, actors and aspirants, and staffed by obsessive savants. But thanks to Netflix, streaming video and the damage done to the store’s rental revenue, it was all over for this onetime destination – in a hurry.”

by Scott Timberg

Salon (18 December 2011)

“In an iTunes age, do we need the record store?... The digital space, in particular, is one where brick-and-mortar stores probably don’t stand much of a chance. New services such as Google Music and Spotify keep springing up all the time, adding to the competition from old foes like Amazon’s MP3 — which often sells new albums for as little as $3.99 — and Apple’s iTunes. Mega-selling artists such as Lady Gaga, Kanye West and Jay-Z are striking exclusive deals with digital stores like Amazon and iTunes, leaving physical retailers out in the cold. While Other Music, for one, sells digital downloads, results elsewhere aren’t encouraging: The Coalition of Independent Music Stores, a 29-member consortium representing 59 U.S. locations, recently shut down its Think Indie digital store after less than two years, citing lack of business.”

by Marc Hogan

Salon (20 November 2011)

“Perhaps Wellman is well-founded in observing a degree of unconscious smugness in the use of the term “critical,” but if this smugness exists, it is a sublimated manifestation of the profound frustration and disappointment many of us feel with respect to a discipline that is so rife with conflicts of interest and so embedded in the very structures of power and domination (which, ironically, we were once central in highlighting), that we have lost our collective capacity for self-reflexivity.  Dialectics are at a standstill.  We have been subsumed by the very structures we are supposed to be criticizing.  The role of Critical Theory is to seek conditions in which revolutionary ideas will again be possible.  It is not a popular message because it challenges the stakes we have claimed to prestige and other resources; but it is, nonetheless, important to those of us who believe in higher ideals of social justice.”

by PJ Rey

The Society Pages (20 September 2011)

“After a few years of silence, sitcoms are giggling again. ABC has had modest success defrosting Tim Allen for Last Man Standing, a multicamera show—the traditional kind, with a flat living-room set and an audience in the studio. CBS, which never abandoned the form, launched a top-ten hit with 2 Broke Girls. NBC, whose critical darlings like 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation have been shot “single-camera,” sans audience, has gone back to the old multicamera setup for Whitney. And on every one, the audio track is filled with raucous laughter. At the upfronts last spring, when Whitney made its debut, critics and reporters noticed that the guffaws came in hard and abruptly, then evaporated. Is it possible that actual human beings respond to a barrage of vagina jokes with such gusto? And if so, why is it that a 59-year-old Hollywood sound engineer named John Bickelhaupt is so busy this fall?”

by Josef Adalian

New York (27 November 2011)

“In the 1980s, even before connectivity to the Internet became commonplace, people realized that connecting a group of computers together in a local area network (LAN) made those computers much more useful. Any user could then print to shared printers, store files on file servers, send electronic mail, and more. A decade later, the Internet revolution swept the world and LANs became the on-ramp to the information superhighway. The LAN technology of choice was almost universally Ethernet, which is terrific apart from one big downside: those pesky wires.

In the late 1990s, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) solved that problem with their 802.11 standard, which specified a protocol for creating wireless LANs. If ever the expression “easier said than done” applied, it was here. Huge challenges have been overcome in the past 15 years to get us to the point where reasonably reliable, fast, and secure wireless LAN equipment can today be deployed by anyone, and where every laptop comes with built-in Wi-Fi. But overcome they were—and here’s how.”

by Iljitsch van Beijnum and Jaume Barcelo

Ars Technica (November 2011)

“​There are times in the great big blogoverse in which we are faced with the fact that certain things we have been doing are somewhat or hugely annoying. Upon that discovery, we generally continue to do those things, but with a nagging feeling of guilt and self-doubt that only continues to grow in intensity until we can’t stand it any longer and throw up our hands and shout, “Make it stop!” And then, we blame everyone else, because they made us do it. In a similar vein, and because it’s Monday, here is a hand-crafted artisanal guide of commonly used words and phrases that we can take no longer, whether online or outside the confines of an internet connection. Mostly we hate them because they are overused, lazy, cliched, boring, deplorably cutesy, or could be better put another way. Other times we hate them because, well, frankly, haters gonna hate.”

by Jen Doll

The Village Voice (14 November 2011)

“Fans were shocked when Batman writer Frank Miller furiously attacked the Occupy movement. They shouldn’t have been, says Rick Moody – he was just voicing Hollywood’s unspoken values…. A sturdy corollary emerges in the wake of the graphic artist Frank Miller’s recent diatribe against the Occupy Wall Street movement (“A pack of louts, thieves, and rapists … Wake up, pond scum, America is at war against a ruthless enemy”), available for perusal at frankmillerink.com). That corollary, of which we should be reminded from time to time, is this: popular entertainment from Hollywood is – to greater or lesser extent – propaganda. And Miller has his part in that, thanks to films such as 300 and Sin City.”

by Rick Moody

The Guardian (24 November 2011)

“Three TV networks? Music dictated by MTV? Nostalgia for a shared past creates false history. We have it better now…. You’d think that people living in a monoculture would be able to agree on a soundtrack for all the shared experiences we were having. But guess what: People have always had differing opinions and tastes, even when they had fewer media options. I’m not saying that the monoculture is a fantasy created by myopic critics who willfully misremember the past and project their personal experiences onto a diverse population … actually, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Not only do monoculture fetishists romanticize a bygone era of centralized media that nobody really misses — three TV networks! Limited radio playlists! Art-house films that only play New York and L.A.! — they have constructed a utopian concept of cultural “togetherness” that only ever appeared to exist because of that very same centralized media.”

by Steve Hyden

Salon (10 October 2011)

“Foreign Policy presents a unique portrait of 2011’s global marketplace of ideas and the thinkers who make them…. All revolutionaries want their stories told to the world, and no one has conveyed the hopes and dreams of Egyptians more vividly than Alaa Al Aswany. The dentist turned author rose to fame with his 2002 novel, The Yacoubian Building, which charted Egypt’s cultural upheaval and gradual dilapidation since throwing off its colonial shackles. Aswany used his prominence to help found the Kefaya political movement, which first articulated the demands that would energize the youth in Tahrir Square: an end to corruption, a rejection of hereditary rule, and the establishment of a true democratic culture. For his political activism, Aswany was blacklisted by Egypt’s state-owned publishing houses, and security officials harassed the owner of the cafe where he met with young writers.”

by Foreign Policy

Foreign Policy (December 2011)

“Music has never been more accessible. Just a decade ago, we were lugging around clunky portable CD players that weighed as much as a hardcover book and would skip whenever we made any sudden movement. Now our entire record collection (and thanks to new companies like Spotify, almost any other song on the planet) can fit into our phones. We can listen to music nonstop — on our commute, at work, at the gym and everywhere else we might want to. But what is this explosion of sound doing to our brains?”

by Thomas Rogers

Salon (23 October 2011)

“One protagonist of Murakami’s new novel, “1Q84,” is tormented by his first memory to such an extent that he makes a point of asking everyone he meets about their own. When I met Murakami, finally, in his Tokyo office, I made a point of asking him what his own first memory was. When he was 3, he told me, he managed somehow to walk out the front door of his house all by himself. He tottered across the road, then fell into a creek. The water swept him downstream toward a dark and terrible tunnel. Just as he was about to enter it, however, his mother reached down and saved him. “I remember it very clearly,” he said. “The coldness of the water and the darkness of the tunnel — the shape of that darkness. It’s scary. I think that’s why I’m attracted to darkness.” As Murakami described this memory, I felt a strange internal joggling that I couldn’t quite place — it felt like déjà vu crossed with the spiritual equivalent of having to sneeze. It struck me that I had heard this memory before, or, eerily, that I was somehow remembering the memory myself, firsthand. Only much later did I realize that I was, indeed, remembering the memory: Murakami had transferred it to one of his very minor characters near the beginning of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.””

by Sam Anderson

The New York Times Magazine (21 October 2011)

“Politics and war, science and sports, memoir and biography — there’s a great big world of nonfiction books out there just waiting to be read. We picked the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME ... magazine.”

by TIME

TIME (2011)

“BookFinder.com tracks the most sought-after out-of-print titles in America.  This ninth annual edition is based on BookFinder.com searches from the past 12 months.  On this year’s list there are a fair share of out-of-print mainstays such as Madonna’s nearly perennial number one Sex, but also a host of interesting newcomers; here are a few examples.”

by BookFinder.com

BookFinder.com (2011)

“The shocking acts of looting may not be political, but they nevertheless say something about the beaten-down lives of the rioters…. Leaving Baudrillard aside, just because there is no political agenda on the part of the rioters doesn’t mean the answer isn’t rooted in politics. Theresa May – indeed most politicians, not just Conservatives – are keen to stress that this is “pure criminality”, untainted by higher purpose; the phrase is a gesture of reassurance rather than information, because we all know it’s illegal to smash shop windows and steal things. “We’re not going to be diverted by sophistry,” is the tacit message. “As soon as things have calmed down, these criminals are going to prison, where criminals belong.””

by Zoe Williams

The Guardian (9 August 2011)

“Don Stewart is the neat, smooth proprietor of a rather unkempt and chaotic bookstore, where leisurely browsing is addictive and almost mandatory…. Don Stewart, the owner of MacLeod’s Books in down­town Vancouver, takes cof­fee most morn­ings at the Caffè Buongiorno on the north­west cor­ner of Pender and Richards streets. He always sits at the same table, fac­ing the door. This way he can keep an eye on the entrance to his place of busi­ness across the way. Sometimes he will jump to his feet and tear across Richards if he sees some­one enter­ing the shop who’s best dealt with by him and not his staff: a wealthy out-of-town col­lec­tor, say, or a talking-to-himself addict with trou­ble writ­ten all over his face. Or some lively but bedrag­gled polit­i­cal pam­phle­teer. Or any of the famous authors to be found there when they hap­pen to be in town: the travel writer Paul Theroux, for exam­ple, or Barbara Kingsolver, the nov­el­ist and essay­ist, or Simon Winchester, the author of The Professor and the Madman.”

by George Fetherling

Geist (2011)

“While France celebrates its intelligentsia, you have to go back to Orwell and Huxley to find British intellectuals at the heart of national public debate. Why did we stop caring about ideas? When did ‘braininess’ become a laughing matter?
Who are our great, neglected intellectuals?”

by John Naughton

The Observer (8 May 2011)

“When Andrew Sullivan left Britain for America it was a dreary, divided land. On his return he finds political turmoil – yet a nation at peace with itself…. What should they know of England who only England know? That was Rudyard Kipling’s question in a famous piece of breezy, patriotic poetry, as he called upon the “winds of the world” to celebrate the triumph of Britishness across the globe. Of course, those who have known only England can know her pretty well, as another great Victorian, GK Chesterton, observed — “travel narrows the mind” — but a bit of perspective can sometimes help. Mine, perhaps, is a particularly strange one: a life lived in England for 21 continuous years and then one in America for a continuous 26.”

by Andrew Sullivan

The Sunday Times (24 July 2011)

“Such books aren’t just a repository of the weird and niche. Often they are a record of the most mundane aspects of everyday life. Glasse touches on everything from depilatories to the dangers of being cheated by the butter merchant. “Do not trust to the taste they give you,” she cautions the unwary reader, “lest you be deceived by a well-tasted and scented piece, artfully placed in the lump.” For the keen-eyed gourmand, each page of a cookbook is a fascinating hotchpotch of historical titbits, from the culinary style en vogue - French food was all the rage during the Restoration, eastern European fare a surprise hit between the world wars - to the audience that it seeks to entice.

One of Britain’s oldest surviving examples, The Forme of Cury, came from the kitchens of Richard II in the 1390s and was designed as a giant boast. It followed soon after a similar enterprise from the French court; each carefully rendered calfskin page screams, “My monarch’s got better taste than yours.””

by Felicity Cloake

New Statesman (27 June 2011)

“Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing. Nowadays you can’t have a long dinner-table argument about who won the Oscar for that Neil Simon movie where she plays an actress who doesn’t win an Oscar; at any moment someone will pull out a pocket device and Google it. If you need the art-history meaning of “picturesque,” you could find it in The Book of Answers, compiled two decades ago by the New York Public Library’s reference desk, but you won’t. Part of Google’s mission is to make the books of answers redundant (and the reference librarians, too). “A hamadryad is a wood-nymph, also a poisonous snake in India, and an Abyssinian baboon,” says the narrator of John Banville’s 2009 novel, The Infinities. “It takes a god to know a thing like that.” Not anymore.”

by James Gleick

The New York Review of Books (18 August 2011)

“In a way, cinema itself is the ultimate special effect: another world trapped onscreen for us to peer into. As the very first viewers of movies learned, shock and awe would always be a part of the experience. A massive revolution in digital technology has occurred within our lifetimes; Hollywood has reinvented itself, for good and ill, as a delivery device for fantasy and wonderment. So let’s take a trip along the definitive moments—the instants when jaws hung open and we gasped at something that had never been seen. And if you’ve been knocked out by a title that didn’t make our list, please let us know.”

by David Fear, Joshua Rothkopf and Keith Uhlich

Time Out (29 July 2011)

“The Mercury Prize shortlist reveals British music’s strength in depth. But as the iPod generation roam across genres in search of new sounds, are they missing out on some vital spark of youth?”

by Vanessa Thorpe

The Observer (24 July 2011)

“The old liquor store on Trumbull Avenue was abandoned until a handyman turned it into a hip bar about three years ago. Motor City Ghettoblaster is now on tap at Woodbridge Pub, located on the outer edge of the once-crumbling Detroit neighborhood that bears its name. The Woodbridge Community Garden is across the way, home to tomatoes, lettuces, and outdoor art. Not far from here, at the corner of Commonwealth and Willis, you’ll find the Charbonneau house: A shabby but regal place, rich with gables and terraces, built by a turn-of-the-century condiment magnate. It overwhelms the pretty but forgettable red-brick duplex next door, the one with wooden swings hanging from the roofed porch. On one side of that duplex lives the young co-founder of City Bird, a shop that sells handmade wares from Rust Belt cities. On the other, the memory of Ty Cobb.”

by Anna Clark

Grantland (22 July 2011)

“The Swedish streaming service, about to make its U.S. debut, may be the industry’s best shot at remaining profitable and relevant…. Ek likes to say—often—that to succeed, any music service needs to be more convenient than piracy. Spotify is. You open an account. You download a program. And you can listen to any one of 15 million tracks, the result of two years of negotiations with the world’s music conglomerates that began, says Ek, rubbing the wisp and stubble that covers his head, back when he had hair.”

by Brendan Greeley

Bloomberg Businessweek (13 July 2011)

“Actors have called Michael Bay an asshole, a cocksucker, a Nazi—often to his face—and then swiftly signed up for the sequel. As America braces for the third chapter of Transformers—the latest explode-a-thon from the director of Bad Boys, The Rock, and Armageddon—dozens of his collaborators and victims, from Will Smith to Steven Spielberg to Scarlett Johansson, reveal the secret genius behind a true Hollywood visionary. (And yes, we’re still talking about Michael Bay)”

by Sean Fennessey

GQ (July 2011)

“The Ticketmaster Turnaround Tour rolls into New York ready to rock. The audience on this fine day in mid-May is a who’s who of local clients including the Yankees, Madison Square Garden, and Blue Man Group, here to see if the live show is any different from what they’ve heard for, literally, decades. Hell, they can’t believe Ticketmaster is touring. Throughout its history, Ticketmaster’s executive team did not come to you. Call it the Sympathy for the Devil Tour, if the Rolling Stones hadn’t already used that moniker.

The road show, 10 cities in four weeks, is CEO Nathan Hubbard’s idea, as is the black T-shirt he’s wearing: TM on the front, dates and cities on the back, evoking a concert keepsake. But like any new lead singer of a band that everyone knows, Hubbard (who at 36 is as young as the big, bad ticket giant is old) faces skepticism from every corner. He can’t even get his new bandmates, the company’s COO and the heads of its data and marketing teams, to don the shirt. Undaunted, Hubbard takes the stage at the Westin hotel in Times Square to detail the changes he has made to transform the brand that sold 120 million tickets worth $8 billion last year.”

by Chuck Salter

Fast Company (21 June 2011)

“A fact that’s been nearly lost to music history in general, and to Southern Californians in particular, is that from the 1940s right through 1960, our part of the state was well known for country music. We had our own unvarnished sound before Buck Owens and Bakersfield rose to prominence in the early 1960s. Merle Travis and Wynn Stewart may be our most famous exports, but be sure to check out Skeets McDonald, Molly Bee, Cliff Crofford and Billy Mize—and they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

The performances of that time have a vitality and authenticity that’s lacking in today’s Nashville product. Once you’ve been introduced to the canon of SoCal country, you’ll be hooked. For this, we can thank the scores of Dust Bowl and southern migrants, who in the 1930s brought their fulsome musical traditions to the Golden State. To accommodate these newcomers and the impulses of those who already lived here, dance halls and honky-tonks blossomed like California poppies.”

by Elisabeth Greenbaum Kasson

Los Angeles Times Magazine (June 2011)

“Modern technology has made it incredibly easy to emulate the sound of a rock band. Plug the right guitar into the right amplifier and you’re already on your way to sounding like Kurt Cobain. In fact, you don’t even need the amplifier. Just plug the guitar into a computer and choose the “Kurt Cobain” setting on your favourite music software. Almost every sound in rock and pop history that’s caused your ears to prick up, or your eyebrows to raise, has been sampled or digitally reconstructed for our music-making convenience. But these sounds all started somewhere; a musician or a producer made a noise - often by mistake - and someone in the studio piped up and said, “Hey! Actually, that sounds quite good!” And so the palette of rock and pop music was formed - a series of happy accidents, developed, refined and combined, mixed down and presented to us. Here are some of the most distinctive and, in no particular order, the records that best showcase them.”

by Rhodri Marsden

The Word (9 July 2011)

“Right now, in fact, the movie and TV business looks a lot like the music one did in the early 2000s. And as we’ve seen, that decade didn’t work out too well for the labels. So it’s worth looking at the situation and wondering how things are going to fare in the TV and movie world in the decade ahead. It can all be summed up in one single sentence. I’ll get to that in a minute.

The situation for watching a movie or a TV show these days is a mess. Here’s a case study. If I want to watch some old episodes of The Office, for example, I have an extraordinary slew of options. But there are two problems with this. For one, I don’t want a slew of options. I really just want one. And, as for the second, they’re all hard to use or incomplete in one way or another.”

by Bill Wyman

Slate (8 July 2011)

“Rave was America’s last great outlaw musical subculture: created by kids, for kids, designed to be impenetrable to adults. American rave formed its own mutant funhouse approach to existing looks, sounds and ideologies. In the early-to-mid-1990s, it was driven not by stars but a sudden collective sense that, as the Milwaukee rave zine Massive put it in every issue above the masthead, “The underground is massive.”

What better place for such a subculture to flourish than on the Internet?”

by Michaelangelo Matos

The Record (NPR) (11 July 2011)

“Right now, he is crouched on top of a pile of crates, covering the entrance to a sandy courtyard with his rifle. Sättermon stays there, still, for a long while: he knows that somewhere in this dusty maze, three terrorists are looking for him. He can’t wait any longer: he jumps down from the boxes, hurls a flashbang ahead of him and sprints into the courtyard, scanning left and right for movement. He reloads and cocks his M16 in less than a second, one-handed. A grenade flies back at him. There’s a dull thud and smoke fills his field of vision. Sättermon rushes the corner anyway. A waiting terrorist, in balaclava and body armour, leaps straight up at him. The rifle crack is fast and brittle. The edge of Sättermon’s vision thumps red: he wheels clumsily and drops to the floor, and then he sees his own body from above. The crimson on his blue-suited corpse deepens, quickly staining the tawny ground.”

by Tom Cheshire

Wired (4 July 2011)

“There’s something especially daunting about preparing a feature on music books. There’s so much ground to cover in terms of time (a century-plus of popular experimental music), space (there’s writing on music from all over the world), sound (any genre is conceivably fair game), and format (biography, record guide, critical study, anthology, memoir). So the idea of saying that any 25 or 50 or 100 music books are the “best” seems ridiculous. So this is not that sort of list. Instead, it’s a list of 60 music-related books that explore the depth and breadth of our collective obsessions. There’s no shortage of writing about music—or ways to write about it—and this is not a definitive be-all-end-all list as much as a starting point. All of these works lead to other worthy titles, undiscovered albums, and new ways of thinking about the sounds flowing into our headphones on a daily basis.”

by Pitchfork

Pitchfork (11 July 2011)

“Animation is one of the most ubiquitous and all-permeating forms of visual communication today, seen everywhere from the multitude of TV channels dedicated solely to cartoons to the title sequences of our favorite movies to the reactive graphic interfaces our smartphones. And while most of us have a vague idea of how, when, and where it all began, we tend to take for granted the incredible visual wizardry possible today. With that in mind, here’s a brief history of the beloved medium’s beginnings through the seminal work of five early animation pioneers.”

by Maria Popova

The Atlantic (5 July 2011)

“Few news organizations can match the setting of The Miami Herald. The paper’s headquarters is perched on the edge of Biscayne Bay, offering sweeping views of the islands that buffer the city of Miami from the Atlantic Ocean. Pelicans and gulls float near the building; colorful cruise ships ply the waters a few miles away.

And Miami Herald executives long held some of the best views in the city, from the fifth floor of the company’s headquarters.

Not any longer.

The Herald, like most U.S. daily newspapers, has faced severe financial troubles in recent years, suffering deep cuts in the newsroom and other departments. So, in one of many efforts to raise revenue, executives attached a billboard to the east side of the Herald building, completely obscuring the bay views of many newspaper employees, including the publisher.”

by Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves

Columbia Journalism Review (10 May 2011)

“Did you see that movie about the moron? If so, it may have negatively impacted your own intelligence, according to new research from Austria…. From reality television to dumb-and-dumber films, contemporary entertainment often amounts to watching stupid people do stupid things. New research suggests such seemingly innocuous diversions should have their own rating: LYI. As in: Watching this may Lower Your Intelligence.”

by Tom Jacobs

Miller-McCune (7 June 2011)

“A study of 9-month-old babies found they prefer the brighter paintings of Picasso to the subtle shadings of Monet…. Taste in art is, of course, highly subjective. Personality, education and the norms of one’s culture all influence why one person craves Kandinsky while another has a crush on Kinkade. But what about babies, whose minds have yet to be shaped by any sort of cultural indoctrination? Newly published research finds they prefer the imagery of Pablo Picasso to the impressionism of Claude Monet.”

by Tom Jacobs

Miller-McCune (14 June 2011)

“The Smithsonian’s new national black museum hasn’t integrated Washington, D.C.‘s whitest address yet, and it’s already dodging spitballs from Congress. The Anacostia Community Museum is one of the Smithsonian Institution’s grand, federally chartered Washington, D.C., museums, but it is located miles from the Mall’s gleaming white marble monuments where millions of eighth-grade history students pilgrimage each year.”

by Natalie Hopkinson

The Root (20 May 2011)

“Almost a century and a half after Stewart’s innovation, a man named Pierre Omidyar opened another store unlike any that Americans had seen before. eBay, in Omidyar’s vision, was to be the world’s biggest open market: a democratic agora where small sellers could compete with huge corporations, where shoppers of all kinds could find products they’d never dreamed of being able to buy. As with the Marble Palace, though, eBay’s greatest innovation was in pricing: It replaced fixed prices with auctions. In line with the site’s democratic ethos, there would be no corporate central planner assigning value to goods. Instead, prices would be determined organically, by the ever-changing flow of supply and demand.”

by James Surowiecki

Wired (17 May 2011)

“Is there a new anti-intellectualism?  I mean one that is advocated by Internet geeks and some of the digerati.  I think so: more and more mavens of the Internet are coming out firmly against academic knowledge in all its forms.  This might sound outrageous to say, but it is sadly true.”

by Larry Sanger

LarrySanger.org (6 June 2011)

“What makes the data from Rotten Tomatoes so brutal is that they depict not just one person’s opinion of Shyamalan but the collective assessment of all our cultural critics. (The scores are based on aggregated reviews.) You may still run into the occasional Shyamalan defender, but as the graph shows, their numbers dwindle with every new film he makes. Rotten Tomatoes data reveal other trends, too. They show you how Brad Pitt went from being a regular star—the kind of Hollywood actor who appears in some good films and some bad ones—to a critical darling whose movies are almost always well-received. (It started with Babel in 2006.) Or how Matt Damon has made consistently better films than Ben Affleck since 1997, when the pair starred in Good Will Hunting.”

by Christopher Beam and Jeremy Singer-Vine

Slate (6 June 2011)

“When Abrams produced the 2008 disaster flick “Cloverfield,” which was based on his own idea, he and his collaborators took the mystery-box approach further. Not only were the dimensions and nature of whatever entity was laying waste to Manhattan kept hidden at first from the fleeing protagonists, but the marketing campaign for the movie itself was all evasion and obfuscation. There was the opaque title, “Cloverfield,” which hardly sounded spooky. The trailer showed the severed head of the Statue of Liberty rocketing down a city street, but no sign of the severer.

Now comes another mystery box, “Super 8,” which opens in movie theaters on June 10. It’s one of the summer’s most closely watched releases, in part because it bucks the season’s tide by trying to turn a tale that’s not a sequel or a superhero vehicle into a major event, and in part because it’s the culmination of an odd, amusing history between Abrams, who is 44, and one of his lifelong idols, Steven Spielberg, 64. Spielberg produced “Super 8,” which Abrams directed. He has been the director of two previous movies — “Mission: Impossible III” and the recent, wildly successful reboot of the “Star Trek” franchise — but this is the first one to showcase wholly original material, and it’s the first directorial effort for which he alone wrote the script. It’s also his most personal project to date. The setting is the late 1970s, when he was a teenager. And the main characters are adolescents who are consumed, as he was then, with shooting amateur 8-millimeter, or Super 8, films.”

by Frank Bruni

The New York Times Magazine (26 May 2011)

“Artemis Fowl

The Book: Eoin Colfer’s fantasy adventure series follows the adventures of 12-year-old Artemis Fowl, a young genius with a tendency to bend the law in order to line his pockets with gold. As Colfer himself describes the series, it’s “Die Hard with fairies.”

Potter Factor: A wide cast of weird and wonderfully named characters, many of whom sound as though they could have studied at Hogwarts in their younger years (Minerva Paradiso, Aloysius Maguire etc.), as well as a raft of magical elements have lead to Artemis frequently being dubbed the next HP.”

by George Wales

Total Film (25 May 2011)

“The onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America’s Unfair and Imbalanced Network…. At the Fox News holiday party the year the network overtook archrival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a Midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network’s founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as “the Chairman” – Roger Ailes.”

by Tom Dickinson

Rolling Stone (25 May 2011)

“1. Because he wrote the song “Blowin’ in the Wind”.

2. Because he made teenagers interested in poetry again. He offered a route into symbolists like Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire, and City Lights beats like Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti.”

by Andy Gill

The Independent (20 May 2011)

“A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger (PDF), in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. But it was too early for that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually describing a famous case study in psychology.

Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-area cult whose members thought they were communicating with aliens—including one, “Sananda,” who they believed was the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ. The group was led by Dorothy Martin, a Dianetics devotee who transcribed the interstellar messages through automatic writing.”

by Chris Mooney

Mother Jones (May 2011)

“Imagine if there were an “American Idol” just for opera. Actually, there is…. Ryan Speedo Green stands almost six-foot-five and weighs 300 pounds and wears size 17 shoes, and on a Sunday afternoon in March he was running in place and doing jumping jacks as he waited in the wings of the Metropolitan Opera for his turn to sing. It was the semifinals of the most important operatic voice competition in America, and Ryan was seized by such anxiety that he felt his massive body vanishing. Seventeen of the 22 singers left in the contest had gone before him; to his ears their performances were spectacular. He was fighting off the feeling that he didn’t belong here. Ryan, who is African-American, grew up in low-income housing and a trailer park in southeastern Virginia. When he was 12, he spent time in juvenile detention for threatening his brother and mother. During high school he moved to a street of shacklike homes, with a drug dealer’s headquarters across from his family’s front door and with bullet holes from stray gunfire just above his mother’s bedroom window.”

by Daniel Bergner

The New York Times Magazine (19 May 2011)

“Every culture has told some version of the wolfman story. But can a souped-up, sexed-up MTV werewolf win over a generation that takes its monsters very, very seriously?... MTV’s “Teen Wolf” was conceived as a darker, sexier reimagining of the “Teen Wolf” story, and also a gorier one. Within the first few minutes of the pilot episode, for example, Posey’s character, Scott McCall, discovers the naked, dismembered body of a young woman in the woods. So it’s clear right away that this will not be a sweet, silly sports comedy, like the old “Teen Wolf.” There will also be brooding! There will probably not be triumphant werewolf-basketball montages!”

by Alex Pappademas

The New York Times Magazine (22 May 2011)

“It started when the News of the World hacked into the voice mails of the British royal household, in 2005, touching off a scandal that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.—and, apparently, the British authorities—tried to contain. After a score of lawsuits and new arrests, the cover-up is falling apart…. The phone-hacking scandal is the story of a breathtaking moral logjam, a cautionary tale about what can happen when the boundaries between powerful entities blur—when the police and the politicians and the media are jockeying for self-preservation, even as they are aligned in a common interest not to run afoul of one another. It is also what happens when one group, in this case News Corp., Murdoch’s media conglomerate, holds the goods on all the others.”

by Sarah Ellison

Vanity Fair (June 2011)

“If you don’t live near any of the restaurants honored in last week’s James Beard Awards, at least you can still read the great stories nominated in the journalism categories.

Here are a couple of my favorites (not all of them were official winners).”

by Good

Good (17 May 2011)

“They’ve smashed headlights, torn down brooder houses and poisoned a husband’s helping of black-eyed peas - lyrically, at least. Female country singers have long been known for their songs about women who are fed up with the men in their lives - and are ready to do something about it. We talk about these angry anthems with PopMatters columnist Steve Leftridge and New York singer-songwriter Laura Cantrell.”

by WNYC

WNYC (17 May 2011)

“This summer, Hollywood is betting on a record 27 sequels. But as Roger Ebert argues in this week’s Newsweek, all this franchise madness might forever change what you see in theaters…. No movie executive has ever been fired for greenlighting a sequel. Once a brand has been established in the marketplace, it makes sound business sense to repeat the formula. When Procter & Gamble discovered that Ivory soap would float, do you think they came out two years later with a soap named Buoyant?”

by Roger Ebert

The Daily Beast (15 May 2011)

“Millions of men and women have lost their jobs in the latest global downturn - the biggest for decades. Why do we hear so little about them? Read much about the unemployed, lately? Did you even know there was an employment crisis? You’d be forgiven if you didn’t. Journalists report the numbers, but what about the individual lives the figures represent? You would have thought that a few of those stories might entice writers/film-makers/artists. You would be wrong.”

by Michael Goldfarb

BBC (11 May 2011)

“Why libraries matter, and how we can save them…. In an age of greed and selfishness, the public library stands as an enduring monument to the values of cooperation and sharing. In an age where global corporations stride the earth, public libraries remains firmly rooted in local communities. In an age of widespread cynicism and distrust of government, the tax-supported public library has widespread, enthusiastic support.”

by David Morris

Yes! (6 May 2011)

“From the moment Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech electrified the Republican convention, she was seen as an unbending, hard-charging, red-meat ideologue—to which soon was added “thin-skinned” and “vindictive.” But a look at what Palin did while in office in Alaska—the only record she has—shows a very different politician: one who worked with Democrats to tame Big Oil and solve the great problem at the heart of the state’s politics. That Sarah Palin might have set the nation on a different course. What went wrong?”

by Joshua Green

The Atlantic (June 2011)

“What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?... Sometimes I’ll glimpse my reflection in a window and feel astonished by what I see. Jet-black hair. Slanted eyes. A pancake-flat surface of yellow-and-green-toned skin. An expression that is nearly reptilian in its impassivity. I’ve contrived to think of this face as the equal in beauty to any other. But what I feel in these moments is its strangeness to me. It’s my face. I can’t disclaim it. But what does it have to do with me?

Millions of Americans must feel estranged from their own faces. But every self-estranged individual is estranged in his own way. I, for instance, am the child of Korean immigrants, but I do not speak my parents’ native tongue. I have never called my elders by the proper honorific, “big brother” or “big sister.” I have never dated a Korean woman. I don’t have a Korean friend. Though I am an immigrant, I have never wanted to strive like one.”

by Wesley Yang

New York (8 May 2011)

“More than any other branch of the pop-culture tree, music is associated with childhood. It’s something many of us discovered as we were discovering ourselves, providing a set of attitudes, poses, and even clothes for us to try on during our formative years. It was like acquiring an instant personality kit. Music made us feel like individuals, and yet also part of a group with people we could instantly relate to, or wanted to relate to. Just as important, music drew a line in the sand against everything we didn’t want to be, which was usually easier to figure out than who we really were.

Eventually, everyone grows up, and hopefully sheds whatever costume they wore to make it through puberty. But the power of those early music experiences remains. It’s telling that most of the entries in our My Favorite Music Year series—including some that are coming down the pike—are about years that took place at a turning point in the writer’s youth. Even for a lifelong music fan, it’s hard to top that initial impact of an artist, song, or album hitting you in just the right spot for the first time. (I certainly can’t argue against that after writing a sprawling 10-part series on the music of my teen years.)”

by Steven Hyden and Noel Murray

AV Club (10 May 2011)

“Indie bands and session musicians were once seen as incompatible, but with the likes of Calexico and Broken Social Scene blurring the boundaries, the freelancer is back in fashion…. You would think the indie band and the session musician could not be more diametrically opposed archetypes. The first is a self-sufficient unit, driven by art rather than (or at least as much as) commerce, expected to be a little indulgent as well as inspired, and generally with a very specific sonic stamp. The session musician is old-fashioned and individualistic; a gun for hire who comes in, sight-reads a complicated arrangement, and nails the solo in two takes. It’s Pete Doherty, as opposed to Pino Palladino.”

by Michaelangelo Matos

The Guardian (10 May 2011)

“Game of Thrones reviewers dismissed the series as appealing only to men. Why they’re wrong…. Bellafante has been taken to task both on the matter of Game of Thrones by critics like io9’s Annalee Newitz, and the Girl Geek section of the Internet for her general lack of exposure to women who can’t imagine joining a book group where Lorrie Moore would ever be in contention for read of the month. But it’s worth exploring something Bellafante appeared unable to even consider as a possibility: The reasons fantasy might be a uniquely appealing genre to women.”

by Alyssa Rosenberg

The Atlantic (10 May 2011)