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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.

By hanging up their rich textures in favour of rich effects, Apple has gone well beyond a coat of paint. If people fall in love with this new, beautifully living aesthetic, there will be an argument for building native apps for years yet.

You know what kind of image would have been nice to see on The New Yorker cover? Perhaps one of actual gay and lesbian couples. Were the magazine’s designers struggling to find one that anyone might recognize? How about Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer, whose relationship was at the center of the case that determined DOMA was unconstitutional in the first place?

For some reason, as soon as you describe something as a brand all this fake science marketing mysticism gets invoked and paralysing decisions get made.

Bustillos hopes that a nonjudgmental dialogue with Hoinsky will help us discover an ethical form of seduction. I doubt it. If a woman must be seduced, either (a) the desire is not mutual and she is in fact being coerced (he is waiting until she is weary enough, drunk enough, or feels guilty enough for leading him on), or (b) the desire is mutual but she can’t express it, for any number of sexist social reasons.

Hello sir, I- * briefcase full of jellybeans falls open *

The entirety of our conversation has been extracted from what essentially was Shaking the Habitual's PR campaign. The Knife talked about how thoroughly political the new album was, and a bunch of smart people patiently waited to see how those ideas were manifested. This is understandable, because The Knife seem like earnest people with important and indisputably unique perspectives. But it seems we've let Karin and Olof's rhetoric blend over into what we're hearing. There's nothing wrong with context, but we can't let the creative forces frame an album for our consumption.

Along with Pink Floyd, Thorgerson and Hipgnosis were central figures in the transition from 60s psychedelia to the expansive, million-selling radio rock that defined most of the 70s. More than any single figure, he established intricately composed, surrealist photographic techniques, collages, and pictorial reappropriations as key ingredients of mainstream album art.

America has stepped back from the brink in the past when wars ended. But we've never had a "war" go on this long -- and there's no end in sight. It's time for the people to pressure their elected representatives, so that, through Congress, we can dismantle the infrastructure Bush and Obama have built. In less than four years, an unknown person will start presiding over the national-security state.

Smart takes.

At some point, employers will have to face up to the unavoidability of hiring people whose first Google image is a shirtless selfie. Demographics will demand it. They’ll have to get used to it just as surely as they’ll have to get used to nose rings and, god help us, neck tattoos. It’s a shame, though, that it’ll be compulsory and reluctant. We should no more have to censor our electronic conversations than whisper in a restaurant. I suspect that as my own generation and the one after it finally manage to boot the Boomers from their tenacious hold on the steering wheel of this civilization that they’ve piloted ineluctably and inexorably toward the shoals, all the while whining about the lazy passengers, we will better understand this, and be better, and more understanding. And I hope that the kids today will refuse to heed the warnings and insist on making a world in which what is actually unacceptable is to make one’s public life little more than series of polite and carefully maintained lies.

Where is your Kanye limit, the temperature level at which fascination boils over into exasperation? That’s an issue with any Kanye West album, but...

An account by Justin Falcone of our week at the Tribeca Film Institute Storytelling Innovation Lab hackathon.

From the New York hackathon I attended.

Matthew is a serious PHP expert who loves pushing code. Matthew is a Friday hacker who seems to work best in the morning.