The Burmese government has rigging votes down to an art. In the aftermath of protests demanding political reform, the Burmese junta is holding a referendum on its new constitution. The vote represents the junta’s way of appeasing the international community by pretending to enact democratic reforms. The referendum will be May 10, and advance voting [...]

Sen. Barack Obama’s 10-point loss in Pennsylvania turned the universe upside down in a few hours. Suddenly, he was no longer his party’s front-runner. Suddenly, he was facing questions about his candidacy in the general election. Suddenly, and rather remarkably Internet pop-up windows, of all things, shifted from “should Hillary quit” surveys to, “can Hillary [...]

Two med students and a few thousand nets are all it takes to save the lives of Senegalese besieged by one of Africa’s number one killers.

“You are the coolest place on earth right now!”
Prince exclaimed this at the beginning of his much-anticipated, $4.8 million set on Saturday night at Coachella. Looking around, it seemed like everyone believed it.
“From now on, this is Prince’s house!”
And that follow-up statement, that qualification of exactly what he meant, sort of felt like the [...]

How badly do you want him to want you? Her to want you? Check out “I Want You to Want Me” to see if there’s an answer to your plight…

It’s simple math, stoopid. Two plus two equals five…and a popular vote victory for Hillary!

Since reading Sebastian Junger’s wonderful expose on the issue last February in Vanity Fair, the situation surrounding the Nigerian Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has captivated me. In a region so strategically important to the United States, MEND has managed to single-handedly disrupt Chevron and Shell’s efforts to drain the [...]

Pop + Politics staff-writer and video-guru Marissa Monroy recently spent a great deal of time getting to know the inner-workings of a local after-school program for the underprivileged, underfunded, and all-around underestimated children of Southcentral L.A.
Its name is A Place Called Home.
Although we have had her piece featured in the In Depth sidebar for a [...]

A U.S. federal appeals court ruled yesterday that customs officers can search your laptop at the airport for absolutely no reason. No need for suspicious activity. You don’t even have to make a bomb joke (see below). Even if you look and act as innocent as a child, your laptop, cell phone and Blackberry are [...]

Here’s a link to Tim Robbins’s speech last week to the National Association of Broadcasters (audio here). Hilarious and daring but perhaps a tad misdirected.
“I’m here to tell you that we don’t need to look at the car crash,” he pleaded. “We don’t need to live off the pain and humiliation of the [...]