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Curiosity, sincerity, activism, and sexism.

I believe the company has good intentions, and is run by people who do not want to be racist or to create racist contributions to culture. Nevertheless, the company made a cultural contribution that was predicated on racist ideas. It's particularly egregious to trade in racist ideas when it's not for artistic purpose or to comment on society, but to sell a product. Therefore, the most helpful thing I can do is to help them fix the broken process within their company that produced this unfortunate result.

Now this is how you apologize. But more importantly, this is how you learn from your mistakes. On last Friday night’s episode of The Late Late Show on CBS, actor Jason Alexander repeatedly joked with host Craig Ferguson about the game of cricket being a “gay sport” as opposed to a “manly” one. Having had time to more carefully consider the jokes he made though, the Seinfeld actor released a new statement through his Twitter account, explaining how conversations with his gay friends made him realize the effect that kind of denigrating humor has on the adolescents that so often find themselves the subject of it.

Rappers are presented as violent, vulgar sexists and homophobes, and then they're not only expected to have fully-formed opinions on social issues, but progressive ones. This is an ugly update on the always implicit, often explicit demand that hip-hop, if it is to be lauded and celebrated, must espouse a strong, left-leaning political message.

Readability and Instapaper are two awesome reading tools that actually aren't in competition since Readability is mostly a network and Instapaper is mostly an app. But, foolish fanboy enthusiasm on both sides has got people choosing "sides" between the apps and turning legitimate feature debates into some sort of moral judgment of the people building the tools. Based on what I learned during a similar stage in the evolution of the blogging market, I fear these petty squabbles will hurt both tools and leave the market open only to the biggest, best-funded, most soulless competitors and that both these cool, innovative tools will lose.

Look on online travelers forums and you’ll see one of the most common threads is people on the verge of visiting Europe (or New York City), embarking on a panicked quest for “walking shoes”—as if they were taking up some exotic new sport, procuring strange equipment. For these people, one must assume, walking is as foreign as the place they are visiting.

Her flow, including the corny hashtag raps and the growls and all the other forms of play that make her simultaneously so old school and so fresh, have already shifted the zeitgeist and inspired a new generation of pop lovers in one short year. Now it's time for her to figure out how to step up to sound like she what she says on the album’s third track: “I Am Your Leader.”

Now I am older than Keats was when he died and I live in a room whose walls somebody else painted this very soothing shade of taupe and I’m still the same age as Lena Dunham but I’m not jealous of her anymore. I am making a living doing a different thing that I love and I feel as lucky as she has probably at some point felt, and I catch myself whenever I start buying into a worldview that mandates I see anyone a little bit like me as my competition. So good luck to her. May she make the space expand.

The act of archiving an extensive record collection, whether it's one's own personal set or that of a legend, is founded on the idea that space exists to hold time.

But this is it. This is where we start. Crowd-funded on Kickstarter; self-released on iTunes, Steam, and VHX. Our Edison is Steve Jobs, our Chaplin is Louis CK, our multiplex is VHX, and our Warner Brothers is Kickstarter. I hope you can be our Hitchcock, our Curtiz, our Méliès, or our Griffith.

…the way that people have written and talked about the searing physical images of her recent performances—her sinewy muscles and berserk movements and haphazardly-scrunchied hair—suggest that she’s providing [an unexpected jolt of humanness in the ever-churning, willfully plastic cultural machine], that she's a savior for those who need one (and, to be sure, not all of us do) from these airbrush’d, cyborg’d, sea-punk’d times. Because the wild physicality of these performances reminds us of our own muscle and bone.

Our consciousness and memory are moving into the ether, so the need for our senses is diminished. And the interface for this transformation turned out to be text.

We can decline. We can change our patterns. Identity is far deeper than any of these labels and habits. We are not what we do, or even how we do it or why. We are what we feel. Identity is in the surge when you recognize unverifiable truth, or the pang when something snaps that you can't see, or the way you know that you love something you'd never even contemplated. We are not the sum of our fears or our atrophies or our helplessnesses, we are the product of our hopes and our surprise and our inexplicable instincts. We are broken as a test; we are repaired as a challenge. We contain divinity and infinity and infamy. We are beautiful under these terrible layers and clothes, in motion where we sit, warm in these climes, improvised in panic. We can walk away from the stories they're trying to sell us, and write our own. If they hang on us, we can throw them off. If they pursue us, we can run.

The label's mission is to make a man out of Bieber. The only person who isn't ready to make a man out of Bieber is Bieber. He wants to be 18. He wants to be a swaggy bro—he seems incapable of being anything else—and that's as it should be. Manhood can wait.

A great, short profile directed by Spike Jonze

This piecemeal patchwork of tracks hangs together amazingly well as a front-to-back album.

A dozen years after its release, Fevers & Mirrors, Bright Eyes' defining LP, is reissued by Saddle Creek, along with 2002's There Is No Beginning to the Story EP.

But increasingly, people aren’t sniping about “whiteness” to be funny, or even defiant—at least not entirely. They’re using the term as a form of criticism, meant to be dismissive. “That movie looks very white,” or, “That sounds like music for white people,” is another way of saying, “That can’t be any good.” And I do have a problem with that.

Which brings us back to the question: Have we reached peak Facebook? And no, we haven’t. Even if Facebook never adds another user, it will keep growing: It has become a fundamental substrate, a difficult-to-avoid component of any site or app that requires users to register—making it essential to nearly every major web innovation now and in the future. There’s a related question: Is Facebook ever going to be cool again? That’s like asking “Is the phone company cool?” The interface may not be exciting anymore, but the network is very, very cool, in the disruptively awesome way that enormous things are: volcanoes, aircraft carriers, the New Deal.

Yahoo’s misplaced focus ruined every aspect of Flickr that was ahead of the curve, and so they became behind all of them.

There are millions of cover songs on YouTube, with around 12,000 new covers uploaded in the last 24 hours. Until recently, all but a sliver were illegal, considered infringement under current copyright law. Nearly all were non-commercial, created out of love by fans of the source material, with no negative impact on the market value of the original. This is creativity criminalized, quite possibly the most popular creative act that's against the law.

Limiting himself to one producer, legends-only guest spots, and a real sense that he'd better make this one count, Killer Mike rises to the occasion.

Many musicians express a complex relationship with the term 'riot grrrl'-- a reverence for the movement's origins but also frustrations about the difficulty of escaping the limits of gendered language.

Michael, a 9-year-old whose periodic rages alternate with moments of chilly detachment.

New album from Stephen Agustin and The Fourth Wall strikes timeless chords.

The ability to use “white” to mean “middle-class” to such an overwhelming extent that you actually start to misidentify people—all so that race itself, not class or background or culture or manner, can still remain the difference, the Other. There’s an odd habit here.

Hawaii was always going to be a tricky state to cover, detached from the mainland by some 2000 miles its music scene is naturally very insular. Of course I found the usual Ukulele music, but in my eyes no one plays the Uke as wonderfully as Elsa Rae. I also found a lot of hip hop, reggae, a little bit of indie and of course my Hawaii representative Welwing. The first and only instrumental entry into the State Of Music project, Welwing is a one man show headed by Matthew McVickar, a mainland exile doing his thing in the Pacific Ocean.

In general I’m excited for music to open up spatially, and for younger writers to resist the urge to fill every second with a million sounds. I’m looking for longer, more open lines now, with clear and confident production.

Incase you didn’t get to watch and learn about all of the producers battling we compiled all the videos shot & produced by Hypoetical, big ups.  Enjoy and hope to see you out on Friday Ni…

Beyond Digital assembled a free collection of Moroccan percussion loops for use by musicians & DJs. These are high-quality original recordings of Moroccan percussion instruments such as the bendir frame drum, calabash, darabuka hand percussion, kraqeb metal castanets, and taarija. You’ll find grooves and fills played in the style of chaâbi, reggada, and some hybrid rhythms.