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‘Woman-beating rage-broccoli Chris Brown lip-synced his single “Turn Up the Music” (without being threatened by Sir Elton John) and danced roughly as well as a third-rate Chicago footwork dancer. He ended his performance by back-flipping off the stage, though sadly not off the earth.’

‘The Grammys. Think. That they. Were the victim. Of Chris Brown. Hitting. Rihanna. In the face.’

‘There was such intense (online) media coverage of Chris Brown’s horrible deed, plus indexical evidence of its effects on Rihanna’s face, that it quickly outpaced his musical identity. Now, he’s just tagged as a violent shithead, and arguably the Grammys’ ignorance of this fact only heightened this feeling.’

‘Over the last 10 years, we have deregulated high-speed Internet access in the hope that competition among providers would protect consumers. The result? We now have neither a functioning competitive market for high-speed wired Internet access nor government oversight.’

The Hum. ‘For some time now there appears to be certain people who have sensitive hearing that can hear a low frequency humming noise late at night or in the early hours of the morning. The problem appears to be all over the North Shore of Auckland. We don't know the origin of the generic hum which appears to be world-wide.’

By Alexander Swenson. ‘A dog realizes the lack of resolution inherent in living.’

A portrait of Manoj Bhargava, the man behind 5-Hour Energy.

‘The world is full of ideas that can be executed with 10 to 20 hours per week, let alone 40. The number of projects that are truly impossible unless you put in 80 or 120 hours per week are vanishingly small by comparison.’

‘Once granted, all of these services are issued a token that gives unlimited access to your complete Gmail history. And that's where the danger lies.’

‘Why would VEVO pirate content? Because it was easier than getting it legally. This is the actual root cause of piracy online. It’s not shady, masked individuals at swanky events commandeering computers to pirate for the hell of it. It’s VEVO employees. It’s everyone.’

‘Songs are always already their own advertisements; that’s what makes them such a compelling commodity. But my main problem with BTD is that it steps beyond the necessary function of pop song-as-ad and embodies the form of advertising as well. It doesn’t mean that LDR critiques thus can’t be (unconsciously) gendered (even this one), but to me it’s impossible to get past. We can both embrace the multiple pleasures of pop artifice while simultaneously critiquing its most craven examples.’

‘Why is pop music the only art form that still inspires such arrantly stupid discussion? The debates that surround authenticity have no relationship to popular music as it’s been practiced for more than a century. Artists write material, alone or with assistance, revise it, and then present a final work created with the help of professionals who are trained for specific and relevant production tasks. This makes popular music similar to film, television, visual art, books, dance, and related areas like food and fashion. And yet no movie review begins, “Meryl Streep, despite not being a Prime Minister, is reasonably convincing in ‘The Iron Lady.’”‘

‘So, here’s where this experiment fails. This is the point where I concede that it’s impossible to talk about Lana Del Rey without delving into the reams of criticism that attack, defend, or otherwise analyze her existence. It’s the lyrics to her songs themselves that prove there’s no way to think about her on her own terms — she doesn’t have her own terms. What she wants so desperately is to know what we — that is, the default heterosexual male listener — make of her.’

‘Exploring “what a woman should be” is boring and cliche in the 21st century, and perhaps that is why Lana Del Rey seems to many to be so bored and sad on stage. So let’s take Lana Del Rey for what she is—a pop star playing a role, a woman whose real life we know nothing about—and learn from what she’s taught us about our own insufferable addiction to a vapid version of femininity. In the future, I’m hoping we’ll accept more female artists who are interested in mining the depths of who they really are.’

On maximalism in electronic music. ‘Meanwhile, the software's scope for tweaking the parameters of any given sonic event opens up a potential "bad infinity" abyss of fiddly fine-tuning. When digital software meshes with the minimalist aesthetic you get what Ingram calls "audio trickle": a finicky focus on sound-design, intricate fluctuations in rhythm, and other minutiae that will be awfully familiar to anyone who has followed mnml or post-dubstep during the last decade. But now that same digital technology is getting deployed to opposite purposes: rococo-florid riffs, eruptions of digitally-enhanced virtuosity, skyscraping solos, and other "maxutiae," all daubed from a palette of fluorescent primary colors. Audio trickle has given way to audio torrent-- the frothing extravagance of fountain gardens in the Versailles style.’

They are 32bit PNGs, each have their own official shadow treatment, and no background matte color.

Correct but impossible -- this is starting too large. ‘So maybe, instead of waiting for the MPAA’s next law and changing our Twitter avatars for a few days in protest, it would be more productive to significantly reduce or eliminate our support of the MPAA member companies starting today, and start supporting campaign finance reform.’

‘The problem with the expansion of homeownership wasn’t that some people don’t have what it takes to be homeowners. They did. The problem was that traditional methods of discrimination were replaced by new forms of exploitation. Borrowers in certain neighborhoods were steered toward subprime loans. Appraisals were deliberately inflated. Loans with predatory terms were set up and designed to fail. None of that had to happen. And now, as that house of cards is collapsing, we’re losing decades of progress in integrating and stabilizing neighborhoods.’

‘An oral history of the British experimental rock act's remarkable Five EPs.’

‘2011 indeed was a remarkable year for the pop body in all of its beautiful, ugly, complex, and grotesque forms.’

‘To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.’

‘Look up HTML5, CSS3, etc features, know if they are ready for use, and if so find out how you should use them – with polyfills, fallbacks or as they are.’

‘ I present to you a Hawaii punk mix, which was put together by our comrade Harry, an ex-pat Hawaii punk currently living in Los Angeles, CA. He's been in a lot of bands since his teens, and is currently playing in Hands Like Bricks, Harry and the Hendersons and Black Fag (The Absolutely Fabulous Tribute to Black Flag) in L.A. and Eddie Murphy's Law when he visits the 808. ‘Harry made a mix for a friend who was curious about the scene over here. It kinda goes all over spectrum through genres and decades, with lots of old school stuff and a few current jams as well. Some bands on here have a discography of demos and albums, some only got to record one or two songs for a comp, so you get a really broad idea of the music scene over the years. Harry also wrote some great notes to go with it, which you'll find when you open the zip file.’

To what degree Lana Del Rey is camp, and to what degree she is successful at that and we are successful at reading it as such.

A first-hand account of hanging around Young Jeezy for a few days.

‘In other words, "Video Games" sounds classicist at first, "retro" in a vague way. But the closer it gets, the more obvious its theatrics become, even before you take Del Rey's image-building into account. It's uncanny valley pop about an uncanny valley love affair—almost convincing, but just wrong enough to chill and fascinate.’

‘The Republican position on inequality rests on five statements, all false.’

On Lana Del Rey’s ‘Born to Die’.

‘She’s really quite earnest about what she’s trying, and alarmingly scattershot in her ability to get there — good news for those of us with the critical distance to chuckle happily over Born to Die, and also, perhaps, for anyone who wants to swallow it whole and digest a lot of strange, messy ideas about being a “girl.”’