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In other words, the press colludes with politicians in this culture of distraction-­mongering. Meanwhile, a new class of political figures has built careers almost entirely on shiny-object status. It’s more fun than writing policy treatises and much easier than actual governing — and it pays better too.

The truth is that the obsession with word magic and names is a primitive one, inherently irrational. Names are notional. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet—or as rancid, depending; a mountain by its older name is just as tall. Yet the desire to remedy the wrongs of the past by righting our nomenclature is a deep one, and it burns on. Word magic it may be, and no more than that, but we believe in magic, and we think in words. There is, in general, an easy resolution to this problem of when we should adjust the past to the present, one neither “relativist” nor unduly pietist. We need ask merely, What was the most humane view being widely urged at the time, and does the name or people we honor celebrate that?

Confident black men are constantly held under by society, frequently told to not say much and accept what society (i.e. the whims of white men in power) gives us. This is a tactic to hold us “in place,” to make sure we don’t “overstep our boundaries” (i.e. gain a level of influence as to overthrow the people in power, which, again, are a bunch of white dudes). We as black men are treated as secondary, even though our efforts have created some of the greatest art forms our society has been given. And when we hold onto our dignity by believing in ourselves, we are conditioned to hold it at a distance so as not to upset those nebulous powers that be.

Bands who don’t license their music, like Pearl Jam and R.E.M., have zero songs on this list of timeless music. What was a choice driven by integrity at the time couldn’t possibly have anticipated how much we now allow our media consumption to drive our music preferences. Some of the most important bands in music history will be lost in favor of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”, which is the most timeless song of the 1980s at this point, because a high school kid on an MTV reality show wanted Journey to be playing when he met his girlfriend.

With 50 plus opaquely named services, we decided that enough was enough and that some plain English descriptions were needed.

Interviewed by Choire Sicha. “There's always room for another story. There's always room for another tune, right?”

The sneering condescension and pearl-clutching panic about young people's relationship to sex and technology willfully misses the fruits of an impressive creative movement.

Also, take more of them. But better.

When white people educate themselves and begin to get an understanding of just how bad things still are, it can feel like a crushing weight. They might feel guilty, sad, overwhelmed. What are you supposed to do with this information? It seems unfixable and like there’s nothing you can do. I can’t give you any comforting words about this stage. This is the stage I spend my life in, to some degree. The difference is that now you understand that as a white person, you have the choice, the privilege of choosing not to think about it–because that’s one of the luxuries of fitting in to the dominant group. Now you know the answer to the question, “Why is she always talking about race?”

The Golden Age of sci-fi was just as politically-charged as today. The only difference is that the writers’ opinions aligned more closely to yours—or, maybe you didn’t pick up on the political messages the first time you read them because you were just a kid.

It’s great that you want to educate other white folks about racism. That is exactly what we need you to be doing. But THINK before you go dragging the nearest Black person into your fight, about whether you’re doing more harm than good.

Writer and musician Sean Gray discusses the experience of going to shows at venues without access for the disabled.

Good names are difficult to come up with. And if you’ve found one: have you considered what your potential name might mean in another language? What if it’s something obscene? WordSafety.com checks your word against swear words and unwanted associations in 19 languages. We also do phonetic matching, so you can catch pronounciations that might be problematic.

Celebrities being silly.

We have police aggression against black people because the white moneyed classes of this country have demanded aggressive policing and the moneyed control our policy. We have police aggression because the War on Drugs provokes it and we still have a War on Drugs because the War on Drugs puts vast amounts of tax dollars in the hands of police departments and a voracious prison industrial complex. We have police aggression against black people because centuries of gerrymandering and political manipulation have been undertaken with the explicit purpose of empowering some people and disenfranchising others. None of that can be solved through having pure hearts and pure minds. Racism is not a problem of mind. Racism cannot be combated by individuals not being racist. A pure heart makes no difference. In response to systemic injustice, you’ve got to change the systems themselves. It’s the only thing that will ever work.

No. When I was a kid with a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), sometimes my games wouldn't load. But I, like all kids, knew the secret: take out the game cartridge, blow on the contacts, and put it back in. And it seemed to work. (When it failed, I'd just keep trying until it worked.) But looking back, did blowing into the cartridge really help? I've talked to the experts, reviewed a study on this very topic, and have the answer.

King’s political courage at the end of his life found him on the wrong side of sitting American presidents, mainstream liberal thought leaders and the national racial status quo. Remarkably, King tapped into what he characterized as “those great wells of democracy” to reveal the depth and breadth of racial and economic injustice despite America’s insistence that civil rights laws had ushered in a new age of citizenship and justice.

In an age where we interact primarily with branded and marketed web content, Cameron’s World is a tribute to the lost days of unrefined self-expression on the Internet. This project recalls the visual aesthetics from an era when it was expected that personal spaces would always be under construction.

The Fat Jew and his ilk—Fuck Jerry, Beige Cardigan, Betches and other shitpic peddlers—have no doubt kept a lot of users coming back to Instagram, likely even a substantial portion of the three hundred million monthly active users that the site boasts. For years now, Instagram has served up sponsored posts to those users, bringing in revenue for itself and its parent company, Facebook, while taking little action in response to how users actually behave on its service. It believes that if it deprives users of certain tools, users will change their behavior to fit Instagram’s narrow view of how the service should work. It simply does not account for those that don’t. The Fat Jew might be hiding behind Instagram’s lack of functionality and profiting because of it, but he’s not the only one. Instagram is too.

Josh Ostrovsky, aka ‘The Fat Jew,’ rakes in six figures from his joke-sharing Instagram account and just signed with CAA. But his joke-stealing ways have irked the comedy world.

Hello! You have just been sent this link because you explained a woman's joke to her on Twitter! Or maybe you made her own joke back to her, except not as funny, or derailed her joke by talking about something else, or something similarly well-intentioned but cringeworthy. Whatever the case, we must regretfully inform you that you have almost certainly made her feel insulted, bored, annoyed and/or angry. This is probably not what you wanted.

My girlfriend is an opera singer and performance studies expert who has spent years working on breathing, so I asked her what to do next time. “[Breathlessness] is very normal and brought on by nerves,” she said. “And there's a simple exercise that fixes it.” For you, and for all those who might search Google for “running out of breath,” “breathing control,” and “reading for the radio,” I offer her opera-tested 4-step routine.

Slow SQL queries can crush your WordPress site's performance. Sometimes, slow queries are a result of poorly-formed SQL that never should have been done that way. And sometimes, slow queries were actually fast queries at one point—but as the site grew older, the query got slower and slower, unable to keep up with the expanding database.

As a result of this project, I’m on high alert for symbolism. I try to question all icons, especially those that feel the most familiar. For example, is the briefcase the best symbol for ‘work’? Which population carried briefcases and in which era? What are other ways that ‘work’ could be symbolized and what would those icons evoke for the majority of people on Earth?

By the end of its run in 1999, Peanuts was an institution. It had become an omnipresent part of American culture, and that’s not a compliment.

There are many studies showing that statistically, women tend to avoid negotiating and saying no and that those who do, are perceived more negatively then men doing the same. Equality shouldn’t and doesn’t have to be a burden on women’s shoulders.

Grief-documenters are so commonplace in Bombay Beach that, when I bought a bottle of water from the shop down the street, the owner, immediately recognizing me as an outsider, asked, "are you here making a documentary?"

And I wish there were a racial primer out there somewhere — mandatory reading — with five or 10 basic facts about housing, education, criminal justice and employment. Or maybe a simple overview so that before we enter into meaningful conversations around issues that are front and center before our nation, I don’t have to go person to person trying to convince a large population of citizenry that the world isn’t flat. It’s part of what feels like an ahistoric privilege some whites sometimes exercise. They treat foundational stories of how they’ve amassed wealth and power as pre-political, ignoring the violent, deeply discriminatory sides of the balance sheet. They see their experiences as normative, and anything else a deviation.

Fuck racist policing strategies. Go see this movie.

It would be fiscally irresponsible not to make sure public benefits are wisely spent, but if we are going to place restrictions on the poor, let’s be fair and require the same standards and scrutiny for everyone who gets financial help from the government. After all, if you buy too much house that consumes too much of your income, you’ll have trouble saving enough to help take care of yourself in your old age. And isn’t that a poor choice that shouldn’t be subsidized, either?