Saved (Public Feed)

At the top of the pay scale, technology is delivering on its promise. Workers can increase their hours and their output from home and even work second jobs with more ease than ever. But toward the bottom, anxiety lingers, and the Web enables some people to take risks they never would have imagined. In this way, the women of Gilgo Beach still have something to teach us. The Internet might have made pimps less necessary, but today’s escorts are as marginalized as ever, and every bit as vulnerable. The police rarely help them when they are at risk, and they rarely take their disappearances seriously. As far as the authorities are concerned, their profession still seals their fate.

Rap Genius is the newest example in a long tradition of black music explained for whites, now with a neoliberal twist.

Excellent interview with author Amy Hempel.

I don’t want to talk about race because it gives weight to a fiction that was created to oppress. It has no basis in biology and is a social construction in this country that was engineered to maintain access to free labor. The fiction created by race distorts the reality in which we live.

We believe ourselves to have inherited all of Jefferson's love of freedom, but none of his affection for white supremacy.

as a listener, and as a fan of music, i feel like my experience is also being fucked up by the way the industry is right now.

We hate most in others that which we fail to see in ourselves.

An intelligent, self-interested observer of this case, who happens to live in Florida, would not be wrong to do as George Zimmerman did—buy a gun, master the finer points of Florida self-defense law, and then wait.

There's something taunting and mean about the soul samples on Yeezus; they are like nightmare versions of West’s earliest work.

Rob Sevier and Ken Shipley from Numero Group compare the vinyl boom to the baseball card boom and offer some perspective.

But when we are talking about a marginalized group that isn’t even offered the same legal rights as the rest of the population in America and is still discriminated against in psychologically and physically horrible ways worldwide, there’s me who will absolutely moralize against the use of the word “faggot” the way Tyler, the Creator uses it. That’s when.

Here is what you need to meditate on before we deal with the rest of the issues: Standing up for your interests is going to destabilize your band status quo, but you cannot let the potential fallout or confrontations deter your course of action.

Author Devon Powers on how Village Voice writers Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau helped create rock journalism, and the evolving role of music critics.

Women want sex, and in particular, they want sex with people who really want them. But socially, many straight men still find it a turnoff when women are sexual aggressors. Which means that, for women, aggressively pursuing the thing they want actually leads to them not getting it. I suspect this is the source of much sexual dissatisfaction of the modern single lady, who's so horny she's running across the street to Walgreens to buy more batteries twice a week, but is unable to pick up men despite social conventions that men are "easy" to bed and women have to be coaxed into casual sex. The thing women are told they can access any time is, maddeningly, often just out of reach.

I have two main problems with the marriage equality movement: 1. That its operation takes a tremendous amount of money, energy, and attention away from far more pressing issues. (Sometimes this is clear and direct, such as California spending $43 million on Prop 8 while $85 million was being cut from HIV/AIDS services. Sometimes this is more subtle, the successes of which can be measured when every single straight person I know uses their approval for same-sex marriage to demonstrate their allyship to me.) 2. That its strategies actively work against movements for queer economic justice, by removing capitalism, meaningful immigration reform, and gender/sexual deviance from the discussion entirely.

The blurred messages Thicke, Cyrus and others are now sending fit a time when people think of themselves as products, more than ever before.

Rob Delaney: I so love my kids, I can be envious of my wife for carrying them when pregnant. But I care about her right to choose just as much

Great advice here.

On the occasion of Kanye West's sixth album, released the day before Juneteenth, 2013, Anno Domini, we are gathered here due to the dearth of Yeezus pieces written by women, which is a significant oversight since a) much of this album, and West's catalog, is about us; and b) it's 2013, call the freaking doctor. So we've amassed an all-star panel that includes frequent SPIN contributors Puja Patel, Jessica Hopper, and Maura Johnston, Stereogum's Claire Lobenfeld, Toronto-based uber-freelancer Anupa Mistry, and SiriusXM's Sway in the Morning on-air personality and pop-culture writer Tracy Garraud.

The effect is to enforce a historical blindness that’s entirely too common when we’re thinking about tech. If what we’re seeing now is totally new, there are no historical analogies to apply, no worker protections or regulations from the past that we might want to preserve — it’s all new, after all! And, therefore, all good.

On the Bustillos-Hoinsky interview in The Awl. Advice that encourages such a fundamental misunderstanding of and disregard for consent turns courtship and sex into a zero-sum game, where one partner gets what they want at the expense of the other’s comfort, bodily sovereignty and happiness. The outcry that led to Kickstarter’s change of policy was full of voices speaking from painful experience, saying that the world doesn’t need more advice like that, because it hurts people. In my view, it needs a lot more advice that teaches humans to truly listen to each other honestly and compassionately, including across genders.

Rap music clearly has a serious misogyny problem. Admitting that won't lead to the elimination of the music altogether and it doesn't mean that all other social issues have to take a backseat. But once the problem has been acknowledged, let's don't just leave the self-evident truth sitting there. Actually continue to think about this stuff. Too often, rap's misogyny has been treated as a given. And that's just as dangerous.

Where Durst was wearing black basketball shorts and a white Limp Bizkit hoodie, Borland was seriously dressed like a fucking orc, his entire body painted black with a giant black wig on his head and a light-up opera mask obscuring his face. He kept spitting water his water out instead of swallowing it, which seemed kinda weird but probably symbolized nothing.

Yes, she’s correct: The web offers an opportunity to fall into the open arms of fans, in ways that weren’t available before. Here’s the catch: The web also makes it near-impossible to fall into the arms of just one’s fans. Each time you dive into the crowd, some portion of the audience before you consists of observers with no interest in catching you. And you are still asking them to, because another thing the web has done is erode the ability to put something into the world that is directed only at interested parties. Its content isn’t like a newsletter mailed discreetly to private homes; it’s like a magazine on a newsstand, asking to be purchased. Telling the world all about your life can look generous to fans and like a barrage of narcissism to everyone else.

It's already clear that with FWD.us, the tech industry is going to have to reckon with exactly how real the realpolitik is going to get. If we're finally moving past our innocent, naive and idealistic lack of engagement with the actual dirty dealings of legislation, then let's try to figure out how to do it without losing our souls.

these reactions are also a signal of how expendable hip-hop culture — and, by extension, black culture and youth culture — is to mainstream, predominantly white-owned corporations. These companies have been happy to associate with hip-hop while turning a blind eye to some of the genre’s rougher edges, but at the same time they have remained at arm’s length, all the better to dispose of hip-hop artists once their liabilities outweighed their assets.

“Becoming oneself” has turned into a crappy job — a compulsory low-paying, low-skill job. The promise of modernity, that we might escape the contingent circumstances of our birth and become who we “really are,” has become an injunction to continually work on the self with no hope of ever fully knowing ourselves or feeling fully recognized.

Again, if you simply prefer the music of the early ’90′s, or more likely, that just happens to be the period in which you had a moment self of discovery (musical and otherwise) before real world circumstances beat it out of you, no problem. But blogs in general (or Pitchfork in particular) are a pretty convenient boogeyman compared to the public’s rotten taste and/or lazy music fans who’ve just fucking given up.

Paul is the perfect artist for a time when breathlessly reporting every step of a promotional campaign is prioritised over - or conflated with - actually assessing the art. Sure, most sites technically keep their news and reviews sections separate - but in the grand scheme of promo, this matters not a jot. The Paris Hiltonesque maxim that all that matters is that people are talking about you, not what they're actually saying, holds true across the board: in a crowded musical marketplace, repeated neutral mentions of an artist from a trusted source may not be an explicit recommendation, but they're more valuable than an averagely complimentary three-star review.

This week's sensationalist reframing of a nuanced profile of Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon to focus entirely upon her split from Thurston Moore, writes Paul Tucker, cast light on a wider problem.