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ViolentAcrez is a deplorable guy. But he is honest in his ugly behavior. Nick Denton, in contrast, is a deeply unprincipled person who has meticulously crafted a veneer of respectability and outlaw journalism. I am, frankly, terrified of Reddit and the whole dark side of Internet practice that exists on forums and message boards. But it is a culture of open depravity. Gawker, and the larger scene of elite New York media it exemplifies, are something more devious, something more dangerous.

No.

Today, prosecutors feel they have license to treat leakers of information like crime lords or terrorists. In an age when our frontiers are digital, the criminal system threatens something intangible but incredibly valuable. It threatens youthful vigor, difference in outlook, the freedom to break some rules and not be condemned or ruined for the rest of your life. Swartz was a passionate eccentric who could have been one of the great innovators and creators of our future. Now we will never know.

The Windows and Android communities need to better understand why so many of us choose Apple, and the Apple community needs to better understand the large market of people who can’t or won’t.

Whose mercy are you at, and why? Is it a very good reason? In that complex equation of getting big things done well, why not value a good night’s sleep, time with your family, or a drink with a friend?

A fine way to school yourself on the finer points of Indian cooking—and be entertained by some of the more talented men in indie rock in the process—is to check out Dosa Hunt, a new short by filmmaker and music journalist (and Stereogum's Executive Editor) Amrit Singh.

This is no small issue, is what I’m saying. Whether we encounter language we find objectionable (or whatever) passively or actively is central to how we ought to consider it. Making monsters out of Racist Teens just to vanquish them seems lazy at best and ugly at worst.

I overestimate the value of my official "workouts" and underestimate the value of walking as a means to an end. Americans lag behind the rest of the world in steps taken precisely because we travel so rarely for transportation's sake. Our cities are spread out (NYC excepted) and car culture is everywhere. A Centers for Disease Control study found that almost 40 percent of Americans had not walked for 10 straight minutes in the past week!

We can and should support the companies we love with our money. Companies can and should have balanced streams of income so that they’re not solely dependent on just one. We all should consider the business models of the companies we trust with our data. But we should not assume that, just because we pay a company they’ll treat us better, or that if we’re not paying that the company is allowed to treat us like shit. Reality is just more complicated than that. What matters is how companies demonstrate their respect for their customers. We should hold their feet to the fire when they demonstrate a lack of respect.

So much of this news story is hauntingly familiar to me from fieldwork with Samoan migrants: the role of family, the half-hearted attempts to verify a person's identity that fail, the strong spiritual connection Te'o thought he felt with Kekua, and the hoax itself.

by Whitney Phillips and Kate MiltnerIn 2012, more than ever, the internet became the way we shame people now. Here to talk about online justice and public shaming are academic internet experts Whitney Phillips and Kate Miltner. (Whitney recently ...

A profile of the legend and how the shows go.

for the majority of small bands, touring is a necessary out-of-pocket promotional expense to drive sales for a new release, not a source of profit to offset sales. Not to mention the fact that there’s virtually no radio support for touring acts in all but the biggest cities, thanks to Clear Channel and deregulation leading to the outsourcing of local DJs. I think a lot of musicians love playing live in front of crowds, but hate everything else about touring, which is both financially and emotionally draining.

If doing what you want is an option for you, you should do it, because your one of the few lucky people who can. And even if you fail, you will be in a better position than if you’d never tried. The competition probably isn’t that crazy. Most people are too scared to even try. Bad things can happen, but every horrible thing that has ever happened to me has added integrity to my art and improved my understanding of the human race.

Everyone's relationship to music has changed because of the Internet, and in a way that invalidates year-in-review summaries: We rank and file music all year long on our blogs and web magazines, in the list-drenched advertorial press, and even on our iPods. If everyone's a critic, do we still need a critics' poll?

Great advice for freelancers.

Too many to ever play them all, but a good place to look if I’m hankering for something new.

Details on 1Password 4.1 and how to use bookmarklet in Chrome and Safari to open the current URL in 1Password's browser. So incredibly useful.

Knowing how to program has been one of the most fulfilling skills I have acquired in my life, but I believe having the ability to ship something into the world for people to use is much more important.

So the attempt to launch a from-scratch, celebrity-free outlet for longform music journalism has failed. Can a Kickstarter fail “spectacularly”? I don’t know. But reaching 17% of a proposed goal is something, for sure. This isn’t schadenfreude, though; there’s nothing in the Uncool idea to root against, per se. It’s more an opportunity to consider how campaigns like this, when undertaken in good faith, can underachieve. In brief: the idea may be modern, but the underlying realities are rooted in basic political economic realities that date back a very, very, long time.

Drag any movie file onto Beamer and it will start streaming wirelessly to your TV with Apple TV instantly. No jailbreak required.

Our society can't help becoming increasingly nostalgic when constantly bombarded with images remembered from our own lost youths. So a cyclic spiral is created, in which public demand increasingly opts for revivalism in place of new work, because information providers are more than happy to keep their costs low by keeping our attention focused on the past.

The experimental pioneer's groundbreaking work with computers in the 70s and 80s helped lay the foundation for many of today's electronic noise makers.

Many Arab men today are attempting to unseat patriarchy in their own marriages and family lives, just as they have attempted to unseat inhumane, dictatorial rulers. Instead of portraying and viewing Arab men as the unpredictably violent enemies of women—and of the United States—we need to realize that most young men who have taken to the streets during the Arab uprisings are there for a reason: to create more just and humane societies, including for and with their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters.

And It’s not like the moral stances against Chief Keef actually serve to enlighten his fanbase or empower the demographic that he is allegedly damaging anyway. They just widen the gap and give self-righteous idiots another controversy to wag their fingers and wave their torches at.

New Year's poem.

Still, it would be dishonest to deny that the mystery of Plux Quba adds to its appeal. The fact is I’m particularly curious about Nuno Canavarro because this record seems so personal; I listen and feel like I know him. Plux Quba is a disjointed, unpredictable work that sounds like the aural representation one sensitive and intelligent individual’s subconscious thoughts. Like a mind, Plux Quba veers from one fragment to the next, leapfrogs over an idea and lands on another, recalls a forgotten memory for an instant only to have it vanish before it can be examined in detail.

“Some Other Time”, my favorite standard. The sadness and the space in the music is for me just the perfect accompaniment to the lyric: “Oh well, we’ll catch up some other time.” And you so rarely do. You can hear the loss in it. Resignation. So much of life feels like that to me, of being just short of something, not quite getting what feels right and what you hope for. “Some other time” suggests the future but it’s one that never comes, so it’s a future of thinking about the past. The present moment doesn’t exist here, and that’s where the sorrow comes from.

For when your favorite song just isn't long enough