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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.

A profile of Jeopardy legend Ken Jennings.

Record reviews are now brief, upbeat and simple: download these songs, they’re good. Beyond that service, writers don’t provide much real value. They are unlikely to establish a strong connection with their readers, as no sense of prejudices and predilections can emerge from four sentences (at least one of which is going to be strictly informational). And you can’t even blame space. They are simply kowtowing to the preferences of those readers who care the least.

Overwhelmed by information yet encouraged by that very fact to regard ourselves as nothing but information, we become alive to the danger of being diluted to insignificance.

Flexbox is pretty awesome and is certainly part of the future of layout. The syntax has changed quite a bit over the past few years, hence the "Old" and "New"

For the first time, a massive data set of 10,000 porn stars has been extracted from the world’s largest database of adult films and performers. I’ve spent the last six months analyzing it to discover the truth about what the average performer looks like, what they do on film, and how their role has evolved over the last forty years.

Like its predecessor, mbv feels like an album in part about love, but it approaches the grandest of human emotions from an unusual angle.

…we should ask: What exactly is it about Facebook that makes people ask if it’s making us lonely?”

Given 90 minutes of HBO airtime to sell us any story she wants, she paints a rosy, responsible, carefully composed picture of someone who is, at most, making baby steps toward being less of a perfectionist. The parts of Life Is But a Dream that show us a “real” and “vulnerable” ­Beyoncé feel like the parts of job interviews where someone’s asked about their greatest weaknesses.

Online courses may not enable a utopian future.

(UPDATED) By David Macias, president of Nashville based label services company Thirty Tigers. Much of the recent discourse about the music business reminds me of listening to partisan political commentators. Continue reading

On the tons of excellent free music coming out via rappers and their mixtapes. Rappers are very much analogous to bloggers in that both groups sort of do what they do because they want to do it, but they also know there’s not really any worth to what they’re doing - except sometimes one of their cohort gets scooped up by some faceless place with money, so there’s always a little halo of maybe-money attached to what they do. Maybe that halo’s worth more than actually making a piddly amount of money.

Explaining what we mean by ‘popular’ and ‘music’ when we talk about ‘popular music.’

The U.S. can’t afford regular Sandy-size disruptions in economic activity. To limit the costs of climate-related disasters, both politicians and the public need to accept how much they’re helping to cause them.

An implicit network, not overt racism, keeps tech writing dominated by white men.

How to set up SSH. Elementary beyond compare but overlooked.

Eraserhead, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Stars of the Lid, and a mixtape of dark ambience that was there when it was most needed.

All of which to say that Springsteen is very canny about his legacy. He’s smart and he should be. And he’s done a lot of good and made a ton of incredible music and inspired and even changed the lives of many people, including mine. But you have to remember to keep those two contradictory ideas about him in mind at the same time.

In 2012, attempts to stay ahead of readers' innate desires resulted in a collective throwing up of hands. Think pieces and reviews still existed, but they were accompanied by other attempts to lure readers: Trifles like album titles and track listings treated as news items worthy of their own "stories" (to maximize the possibility of people tripping over their fingers and into a unique view); artists out of the public spotlight for more than six months unearthed as if they were creatures from another dimension; Tweets and other public statements by artists taken out of context and drained of their tone so as to stoke "WTF" headlines; superlative-laden lists not even aimed at expressing an opinion in count-downable form; posts with factual errors seen as hits to institutional credibility and opportunities to wring double the traffic out of one story.

Classic and useful.