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If the government were to redefine normal weight as one that doesn’t increase the risk of death, then about 130 million of the 165 million American adults currently categorized as overweight and obese would be re-categorized as normal weight instead.

It is impossible to type these words without seeming sarcastic, but if you can lighten the oppressive burden of human existence by not having the kind of cell phone that will make people think less of you, why wouldn’t you do that?

If you want to create a custom HTML email signature for Mail on Mountain Lion, the HTML coding part remains the same but the installation have changed. Follow this tutorial to create a HTML email signature file and to get it installed into the new version of Mail on Mountain Lion OS X 10.8.

It could be anything—music, writing, drawing, acting, teaching—it really doesn’t matter. All that matters is that once you know what you want to do, you dive in a full 10 percent and spend the other 90 torturing yourself because you know damn well that it’s far too late to make a drastic career change, and that you’re stuck on this mind-numbing path for the rest of your life.

The catch is, this might be a terrible time to sell refined elegance and expensive menswear to a pop audience. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis' "Thrift Shop," the biggest pop hit of the past few months, is the polar opposite of "Suit & Tie" on a lyrical level, with the scrappy indie rapper essentially flipping off Timberlake's high-end style and celebrating the joy of creating a distinct look from dirt cheap items at the Salvation Army.

Without some sort of personal framework for approaching music, and expectations for what you think music should and shouldn’t be doing, there wouldn’t be much point in engaging it. And as pop and indie and hip-hop and R&B and metal all currently share a pretty close-knit territory, defining what you stand for might be the best preparation for the looming fallout from those who too often let us know what they are against.

Designy Temporary Tattoos

Matthew isolates individual moments from songs released this past year, and then very briefly explains why he likes these moments while allowing you to hear them. On one hand, he’s an electronic music composer himself, so he knows what he’s talking about in technical terms. On the other hand, it’s a very personal peek into the nooks and crannies of a music fan’s brain—what those things are that made him go “eh?” other than a cool chorus or a lyric segment. On the third hand (I have three hands, it helps with chores), a lot of these are just cool sounds. Listen and follow along.

All in all, the creative landscape is starting to look more toxic than it's been in our lifetimes: Artists with million-dollar checks in their pockets are telling other artists that they shouldn't expect to get paid; publications are telling writers that they shouldn't expect to get paid, either; and meanwhile everyone wonders why we can't get more diversity in the creative ranks. One obvious way to reverse media's glut of wealthy white people would be to stop making it so few others but wealthy white people can afford to get into media. But in the age of dramatic newsroom layoffs and folding publications, nobody wants to hear that. So we trudge on, forgetting what a luxury it is to do what you want to do for a living rather than what you have to do to survive.

Taking stock of Beck’s career 20 years after “Loser.”

SVG is an image format for vector graphics. It literally means Scalable Vector Graphics. Basically, what you work with in Adobe Illustrator. You can use SVG on the web pretty easily, but there is plenty you should know.

Robert Christgau reflects on the art of writing well about music.

The early history of MTV, with parallels to modern technology movements.

There's no conspiracy to recreate 1940s and 1950s childhoods. Rather, one era produced more enduring pop Christmas tunes than any other for social and technological reasons.

A seven part series history of appropriative collage in music, compositions made using recordings of older ones. It's a practice that in the '80s became known sampling — after the digital sampler — a breakthrough instrument which was designed to mimic traditional musical instruments by allowing the player to trigger recordings of them back on a keyboard. But it didn't take long for musicians to realize that the true strength of the sampler was the way in which it made it easy easy to collage and manipulate the best sounds from their favorite records into new pieces of music. This practice entered the popular mainstream by the 80s, long after observers had already identified collage as the defining new art form of the 20th century — and the roots of this music go back just as far. Over the course of this series, Leidecker looks at these roots, as appropriative collage developed across experimental and mainstream paths.

…a series of small case studies of a handful of characters whose work then, and perspective now, sheds light on how the foods are created and sold to people who, while not powerless, are extremely vulnerable to the intensity of these companies’ industrial formulations and selling campaigns.

On the eve of his first inauguration, President Lincoln snuck into Washington in the middle of the night, evading the would-be assassins who waited for him in Baltimore.

An anonymous writer explains his adventurous life with dangerous NGO work.

Deep-rooted cultural ideas about productivity, success, and gender roles are holding us back.

YouTube crushing everything does seem like a concern. I love novelty songs, I ride hard for novelty songs—but if, suddenly, all our big hits are goofy YouTube-incubated one-offs, the novelty song will cease to be novel.

When there is an influx of content, criticism, information, details, write-ups, reviews, and analyses to be read, it can greatly impede the progress and expansion of art. Suddenly, without even realizing it, it is seven hours later, all you’ve done is read reviews, then you’ve read reviews of reviews, and your mind is so gone that the only thing you know you can do is to pick up that guitar and let out the emotion through your fingers and onto the fretboard, whaling on it until you’re revived enough to return to the digital world.

81 years later, Lomax’s quandary is a different issue. Rap Genius aims for a comprehensive archive of rap meanings, while redefining the idea of “genius” altogether. The intelligence of a single person is replaced by a self-correcting form of knowledge derived from the crowd, which often leads to populist rhetoric that papers over very real power differentials and well-established hierarchies. The site’s investors invest their venture with bold religious significance, but practically speaking, perhaps the real genius is in transsubstantiation, via a technological capacity to turn pleasurable activities into value-producing labor. It’s the same logic that fuels Wikipedia and Google search results: a free market of anonymous contributors is a vastly better information aggregator and processor than an individual human brain, and a killer app is all that’s needed to derive stable meaning from the messiness of culture.

Humor … can be an incredible weapon for social progress, but it can also be … old stereotypes, rooted in hate.

Celebrities seeking to provide “a voice for the voiceless” would do well to remember that sex workers aren’t voiceless, just consistently ignored. There may well be women out there who relate to Fantine, but in reducing the experiences of all sex workers to one tale of tragic misery, Hathaway’s comments silence and dehumanize the same women she seeks to ‘help.’

The monied, celebrated, nuevo-social, 1% poster children of startup life spread the mythology of their cushy jobs, 20% time, and self-empowerment as a thinly-veiled recruiting tactic in the war for talent against internet giants. The materialistic, viral nature of these campaigns have redefined how we think about culture, replacing meaningful critique with symbols of privilege. The word “culture” has become a signifier of superficial company assets rather than an ongoing practice of examination and self-reflection.

A mediation on the late rock icon's strange journey from being a guy in a band to an idea that keeps cycling through culture via social media and our own minds.

Suggests 'Countdown to Ecstasy'.

As if matching bitter, poetic cynicism with freewheeling jazz-rock wasn’t enough, with 'Gaucho', Fagen and Becker approached anti-music in the same way that plastic surgery approaches being anti-human: somehow, shreds of the same ideals are in tact, but they’re pushed to queasy extremes.

The Best Free White Noise Generator on the Internet.

Our system has relentlessly denied the role of any human practice that cannot be monetized. The capitalist apparatus has worked tirelessly to commercialize everything, to reduce every aspect of human life to currency exchange. In such a context, there is little hope for the survival of the fully realized self.