An ad campaign for atheism in London is aiming to counter religious ads, one bus billboard at a time.

Kenan Malik writes that the attempt to preserve "cultural identity and authenticity" is largely an inauthentic act, one steeped in relativism and traditionalism, and more concerned with how individuals "should" act than how they actually do. Thanks to @kemp for the link.

A nicely designed list of the words of the year. Seems like half are from the election. Can't say I've ever heard of a "fish pedicure," but there it is.

Jim Carrey as a genius, the "representative jester of our time." "Carrey’s dream sequence of movies is a prophecy, a warning that this clanking ego-apparatus in which each of us walks around, this fissured, monumental self, half Job and half Bertie Wooster, cannot be sustained. Out of his own seemingly bottomless disquiet, Carrey writhes and reaches into the bottomless disquiet of his audience."

A fantastic blog on Japanese language, literature, and culture. I revel in this. (And this is what a blog should be — written only so often, and every post is high-quality. Comments are few and long and educated and of very high quality themselves.)

Why privacy persists. "Along with new visibilities comes social understanding of those new visibilities." "If the end of privacy comes about, it's because we misunderstand the current changes as the end of privacy, and make the mistake of encoding this misunderstanding into technology. It's not the end of privacy because of these new visibilities, but it may be the end of privacy because it looks like the end of privacy because of these new visibilities."

"2012 is claimed by some to be a great year of spiritual transformation (or apocalypse)." And no more foie gras in California.

Eric Harvey on point as usual: "Access to technology ≠ access to actual creative skill that people want to watch, not which is just dumb enough to drive people to iTunes."

A man with personal experience in the criminal justice system explains why trying to eradicate violence with violence is foolish, destructive, and a fundamentally broken idea.

"Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or 'scenes' can occasionally generate."

On the "cognitive surplus" we're going through, and how interesting and valuable all this new engagement and experimentation with technology is.

What to do if you're robbed.

"Now, it's very uncool to fall out in someone else's pad."

I.e.: "She spends her evenings reading manga and drinking at home alone, and she spends her weekends lazing around in bed. She’s a dried-fish woman." And whatever you do, do not miss the Bottom-Biting Bug.

M.I.A. as modern protest music. "It’s safe to assume, for instance, that when M.I.A. says in 'Bamboo Banga' that she’s 'knocking on the door of your Hummer-Hummer,' that she’s not looking for a lift."

"A Museum of Speculative Fiction-Inspired Spaceships." How big is the Death Star compared to Halo, or Marvin the Paranoid Android to Return of Jedi's Rancor?

"...the war is not what the media or the leaders of the religious right would have you think it is. It’s not Blue States vs. Red States. I think the Times has it right: The front line is within the red states"

"An artist is Advanced when they do something that is neither expected of them nor the opposite of what is expected of them." Tongue-in-cheek, but the article lives on. Note the notes on Val Kilmer and C-Murder.

On Advancement Theory: it's not bad; you just don't get it. "The most Advanced figure of all time is Lou Reed [who in] 1986 released the song 'The Original Wrapper,' in which he raps about AIDS, Louis Farrakhan, and waffles."

Kwyjibo.

"A documentary about the current state of copyright and culture." It's free, of course.

The sad dumbing-down of one of the most visited and trusted news sources in the country.

Some people with too many emails to handle have chosen to give up on the stack entirely.

"It is important to preserve this period of American history, or more exactly, the history of our (perhaps unique, or at least extreme) American propensity to believe the strangest things, to have the strangest practices."

All right. "Who decided that with age your desire to have a clean ass goes away?"

Who are those people out and about between 9 and 5? Poets and web designers, trust fund babies and people between jobs.

First in an interesting series. Does Bush use bad, "populist" design to appeal to unsophisticated right-wingers? Just one part of the unspoken debate over class in the world of design.

"Since tradition is fictive, there is no reason to feel genetically allied to a tradition. Everyone can freely choose the fictive tradition they wish to work with. Every artist may work with any of the elements found on the planet. Whether an artist can produce something new and exciting from that depends on not the origin of the artist but the artist’s ability."