Time Magazine selected Vladimir Putin as its Person of the Year and yet managed in its fawning interview with him to get his birth year wrong by six years. Inspired by Time’s crack staff and more generally by the spirit of silly end-of-the-year lists and meaningless nominations, I propose semi-presidential candidate Chris Dodd as [...]

Happy holidays DJ Spooky… on the groaning glaciers of the South Pole! Serious, here’s what he’s telling us he’s up to:
“I’m going offline for a while ’cause I’m shooting a film in Antarctica for the next couple of weeks. If you have a moment, check out the trailer for the film I’m going to shoot [...]

According to a press release we received yesterday, AT&T, acting with profitable civic-mindedness, has gotten together with Rock the Vote to encourage young voters to… send more text messages about politics?!
In fact, the program seems cool. Rock the Vote is aiming to register 2 million people under the age of 30 for the 2008 [...]

Goldwater Likes: Cacti in the Sun

Some magazine end-of-the-year “best of” lists are better than others. Art Forum’s is comically arcane but also informative. You’ll find nothing, for instance, about Britney’s unraveling or Larry Craig’s urine-soaked sexcapades. But you will find out about so-called prankster artist Jeffrey Vallance. This year, the Art Forum critics gave Vallance [...]

What are “aspirational terrorists”? In an election cycle, they’re black kids with paintball guns. Of course.

We got word this weekend that the World Press Photo annual contest exhibition is coming again to USC’s Annenberg School, which means all those amazing news photos, blown up and pasted on nice poster board with explanatory text, are going to be resting right over our heads again for a month beginning January 15, [...]

According to a Chicago Tribune blog, Hillary is ratcheting it up in Iowa, using the piles in her warchest to hire a helicopter, or “Hill-a-copter” as the campaign has branded it, to ferry her over the midwest snow and ice on a blitz of twelve closely contested counties scheduled to begin Sunday. Is the Clinton [...]

Republican candidates went tête-à-tête in the umpteenth debate of the campaign season in Iowa yesterday.
The whole thing played out more like a special RNC episode of SNL, where the candidates played parodies of themselves. (Who says there isn’t such thing as good TV during a writer’s strike?). Throughout, the presidential hopefuls managed to dodge, duck [...]

A perennial holiday gift favorite should be crossed off the lists of any self-respecting patriot. Dallas local TV news CBS 11 gave Bill O’Reilly’s “War on Christmas” a run for its money yesterday, reporting that those beloved American Girl dolls that “teach our heritage” aren’t really American. The little darlings are infiltrators, “born” in [...]

Dead, they were all dead.
Spring 2006 was marked in New Orleans by the appearance, in patios and yards everywhere, of thick carpets composed of unmoving migratory butterflies, jeweled dragonflies, moths and honeybees.
In its zeal to stifle the clouds of aggressive disease-riddled carrion flies and mosquitoes, the government (which government, we don’t know, as they all [...]

“Everywhere, a thick carpet of migratory butterflies. Dead.” New Orleans recovery notes by Jim Gabour.

Let’s take a quick break from Iowa ballyhoo, and watch the best fingernail choreography ever produced.

An actual movie trailer. Serious. They’ve been making this movie for fifty years!
Update: Damn, how could we forget this one!

Last week we ran contributor JB Powell’s interview with Air America dj Thom Hartmann, who has a new book out about American political discourse called Cracking the Code. Turns out that, as part of our artful editing process, we stripped away a lot of the spiciest parts of the conversation. Why? Just because. Because of [...]

I’m choosing to take it as incredible evidence of American faith in our democracy that anyone can still be shocked by the dirt-bag actions of the CIA. This is an organization that renders innocents to torture prisons overseas, that trains death squads, that overthrows governments and assassinates elected leaders. Now the CIA admits to destroying [...]