The New York Times, doing its best as always to hunt down news from the real world and bring it back to the drawing rooms of Manhattan, reported this sunday in the Style section that there exist some black folk who actually enjoy and identify with indie rock…
Upper East Side newsflash: There’s a lot [...]

 

 dry drunk emperor [6:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Sometimes “Martin’s got cooties!” and “Madison just peed her pants - again!” aren’t the only things hollered on the playground. In an event as likely as pigs taking flight, trashy British tabloid The Sun has gotten serious and pulled together a cross-section of kids to talk about the racial slurs they’ve been stung [...]

Who says public financing is dead? A bill introduced Tuesday is shaking up the way presidential campaigns are funded. It’s also making it a heck of a lot harder to comprehend an already complicated issue.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, it is important to understand how the system operates now. Spearheaded after [...]

After a week-long layoff, it’s time to get back on my cyber-grind, so to speak. So here it is - a melange of news stories that I have found interesting, illuminating, or most expedient when assembling my blog entry. I also saw Children of Men (for a second time), and would highly recommend it to [...]

Yesterday was the funeral of one of Burma’s most famous poets, U Tin Moe. Yet the Burmese government refused to allow the media in the country to report on his death. And though he was living in Los Angeles, the U.S. mainstream media did not cover the event because the poet was virtually unknown here.
U [...]

Here at PopandPolitics.com, we really dig tag clouds - the feature we have off to the right of our posts under “Heat”. With tagclouds, more frequently used tags are displayed in a larger font, whereas less popular words/subjects appear smaller in the tag cloud. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead [...]

To understand both pop + politics in the Web 2.0 world, one must be in touch with the specific feelings across online content-generating demographics at a particular point in time and place.
Enter WeFeelFine.org, the excellent real-time visualization of the above, created by Internet artist Jonathan Harris and Google personalization tech Sep Kamvar.
Basically, WeFeelFine aggregates and [...]

Smokin’ Aces is a most rare thing: a good movie released in January. Crazy! A Universal Pictures-Working Title Films product written and directed by Joe Carnahan, who brought audiences Narc (2002), this movie kills, it’s a “gotta see, no doubt” with enough action, suspense and violence to satisfy the entertainment masochist in all of us.
The [...]

I met two gang intervention specialists last week who work in Harbor City, Harbor Gateway and East Side Torrance in South LA. They are both former gang members and both fathers.
Leroy Martinez is now 52; he was an active gang member until eight years ago. He said he decided to get out because he [...]

 
Rock fans are crying “blasphemy” to the latest merchandizing of Jimi Hendrix. Jimi’s sacred image will soon appear on containers of “Liquid Experience,” a new energy drink developed by California-based Beverage Concepts.  This new “health” drink is set to appear in stores this April.  Hey didn’t Hendrix die of a drug overdose before he reached the [...]

By turning to the public personally via Yahoo! Answers, Hillary Clinton exemplifies how emerging applications of new media can help to foster and strengthen participatory democracy.
Check out Clinton’s question and the tens of thousands (and counting) of user-submitted answers.
Read SearchEngineJournal’s blog post about this.

On the Diebold Election Systems website you could find, until yesterday morning, the photo below of the little keys that open ALL of their e-voting machines. Could a hacker create a duplicate key from the Diebold website photo? Gee, I wonder…
Concerned citizen Ross Kinard of SploitCast decided to find out:
“I bought three blank [...]

CBS News’ Baghdad Correspondent Lara Logan recently sent out an e-mail pleading for friends and colleagues to push CBS to air her “Battle of Haifa Street” report on any of their news programs. They have thus far agreed only to post the video on their Web site. Watch it here and you’ll see why they’re [...]

Over the past month or so, announcements from presidential hopefuls have been delivered via webcasts posted on Youtube and other video-sharing sites (you can view them here). And it’s just the beginning of a new overall approach. Candidates are promising to engage directly with voters via new media, creating webcasts, blogs, and online chat. When [...]

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How come street art keeps getting better? Because it’s so utterly necessary, baby!