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That’s the realm that Mercer is working in now, and when he has the confidence on Morrow to follow through on his glossy pop ambitions, his music manages to be as likeable as it always has been. It’s when Mercer tries to update the old Shins playbook with big-budget production that Morrow sounds awkward and dangerously sleepy.

On Bill Callahan and Grimes. Letting the hero die might mean opening yourself to new experiences. Finding more to identify with. Noticing the commonalities that point to the one, along with the differences point to the many, and identifying with songs from the inside and outside at the same time.

On Katy Perry covering ‘N***** in Paris’. The dumb, tee-hee transgression of saying the edited-for-television version sort of obscures what’s interesting and daring about this performance, which is that under the guise of tribute/ironic cover tune (it feels about half-and-half) it’s a girl refusing to let this song’s imaginary world of swinging-dick privilege be off-limits to her. But that’s all that’s happening here; she puts the word on like a piece of borrowed jewelry and parades in front of the mirror.

Mixed into a story about the author trying to learn to program.

The Comedy may be a challenging film, but it's one of the few character studies that has a clear focus and entertaining hook that will keep you invested. Heidecker was the perfect actor for this project. When he looks past his surroundings, you believe him. Sometimes making a joke is all you can do in a bad situation. For Swanson, life in its entirety is a bad situation.

Humans may have used to sleep in two distinct periods.…the waking period between sleeps, when people were forced into periods of rest and relaxation, could have played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally.

If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems? Or to propose only the simplest of solutions?

Enjoy the best Google Maps satellite imagery around the world.

Joseph Kony deserves to be put in cuffs and dragged before the ICC. Raising the profile of the heinous nature of the guy’s crimes is awesome. The idea that popular opinion can be leveraged with viral marketing to induce foreign military intervention is really, really dangerous. It is immoral to try and sell a sanitised vision of foreign intervention that neglects the fact that people will die as a result.

Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan. So I have a lot of trouble with the idea that the federal government is directing resources toward an ultimately ineffective game of piracy whack-a-mole (with some unknown amount of collateral damage to law-abiding citizens), when we are not even sure that piracy is a problem.

Tao Lin and his band of followers at Muumuu House are some of the most vehemently disliked—and discussed—writers on the internet. Critics call them hip. Haters call them frauds. But their fiction may be just what our digital lives deserve.

The art we like the best is generally the art that has the greatest access to us. So. This tweet has tremendous access to my feelings about Aaliyah. Aaliyah’s voice had tremendous access to me.

He Marries the Stuffed Owl Exhibit At the Indiana Welcome Center and The Feeling of Needing a Pen

Regarding Patricia Lockwood’s appreciation of @graeyalien’s tweet about Aaliyah. ‘when aaliyah "makes the decision" to engage in the bestial behavior of reaching compulsively for the first thing to appear in front of the field of her sensory organs, the bread of the material world, she ultimately dooms the flight.’

‘Del Rey doesn’t have the emotional and psychological depth to support all the satin and spotlights. Her invocations of Sinatra and Lolita are entirely appropriate to the sumptuous backing tracks, but, when it comes to lyrics, she and her collaborators get lost in a tangle of keywords.’

‘Anonymity is used as a way to stick your finger in a pot of something to see if it changes the flavor without taking responsibility for doing so.’

Kickstarter cofounder responds to Clay Johnson's inaccurate statistics and conclusions about Kickstarter out-funding the NEA this year.

A rounded look at Björk's latest, and just what it is she’s doing.

‘A complete from scratch recreation of Super Mario Bros. with a focus on perfectly imitating the feel the 1985 classic gave us. Then give Mario a portal gun, add puzzle game mechanics from Portal and there you go. And if that wasn't crazy enough, play 4-player coop, with everyone having their own Portal gun!’

The flâneur would wander the streets, observing and sometimes recounting what he saw. Nowadays, no one ‘surfs’ the web anymore.

‘It’s great to suggest that every student should be equipped with a laptop or given 24/7 access to Wi-Fi, but shouldn’t our federal bureaucrats figure out how to stem the tidal wave of layoffs in the teaching ranks and unrelenting cutbacks in school programs and maintenance budgets first? School districts can’t afford to buy enough textbooks for their pupils, but they’re supposed to equip every one of them with a $500 iPad?’

Advice from the successful radio host on ‘making independent media. Making it, and making it your job.’

‘In this light, a large portion of Pinterest's content starts to look largely like the great, white, suburban dreamscape of the 1950s pathologized, now crowd-sourced to showcase today's insecurity with the messier, dirtier, and much less wealthy lives we actually lead. It's an extension of the pleasure machines we've been trained to be: we please the perceived tastes of others with images of things that have little or no relation to who we actually are or what we do — most of which images are of things that are, in themselves, about creating pleasure for others — with hopes of little more than to continue being pleasing.’

On one hand, it’s great that she’s this new hot blog thing, because she is a woman who creates her own beats in a space that historically is not that friendly to non-males. On the other hand, her elevation been a case study in the values people consign to the music they love — in this case, thin representations of ideas, that people have praised her for her “naive” and “elf-like” qualities, as though by filtering her voice into wispiness to the point that she’s almost a specter (as she does), she becomes more admirable, a negation of herself.

‘It's tempting to view Reign of Terror as somehow ironic, pairing Krauss' saccharine cheerleader delivery with raging guitars and martial dance beats, but it doesn't feel that purposeful. Such a juxtaposition seems to arise naturally out of what they like and what they want to express: cheesy pop triumphalism dialed to "mosh" and drenched in tar-black bloodlust. It lacks cynicism, and goes for nothing deeper than the sacred ideal of teen gimme-gimme: the glorious joy of the big, loud, timeless Fuck You.’

‘Breitbart died, like all of us will, in darkness. But as a media persona he chose to also live there, and in the process has impelled countless others to throttle themselves into the abyss.’

‘”What To Expect” is, then, finally, a self-fulfilling prophesy, because what to expect as an expectant mother today is to be bombarded with information about how you are doing it wrong—whether it is carrying a baby in your womb, pushing it out, or raising it.’

‘Most gamification sucks because it breaks down our humanity like it is no more than a computer program that needs to be understood and then rewritten for maximum reward—reward for the company behind it, rather than for the player. That's how gamification is disrespectful: because it no longer treats us like people.’

Bottom-shelf products and home remedies/concoctions for cooking/cleaning/health/beauty/etc.

Watch the episodes in this order: IV, V, II, III, VI.