It took a while for a worthy follow-up to the cultural mash-up genius of the Bert n’ Ernie and M.O.P. combo, but we have finally found it.  Take a basement-level evangelical meeting, throw an old-school, warhouse raver track (circa 1992) under it, and watch how they line up.  Eat your heart out, Dark Side and [...]

Keep diggin, Vladdy…
Maybe McCain DOES get the Internet: The Los Angeles Times blog Webscout is reporting that on the site Digg “in the last 30 days, at least 28 stories critical of GOP Sen. John McCain have been mysteriously “buried”— meaning enough Digg users have voted against a story that the submission may no longer [...]

Plagiarism: Does the Medium Define the Word? Chris Nelson poses the question to some people with answers.

I think David Axelrod pushed Steve Schmidt down, gave him a wedgie, and stole his lunch money over the weekend at a bipartisan benefit gala for campaign reform.
(Someone wake me up when the bell rings and this presidential campaign exits the playground.)

From Shaft to Chef, we bid adieu to Isaac Hayes, cool before cool was cool.

The Stem is Mightier Than the Sword: The Associated Press reports that scientists at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute have concocted stem cells for 10 different diseases, which will let them observe diseases as they develop. World domination suspicions aside, they say that this will let them observe what goes wrong as the disease develops. [...]

The Daily Show once again proves that it is one of the few news programs putting real time and resources into calling candidates out on their bullshit, carving up political expediency like a Bushido blade on a tofurkey.
Here, Jon Stewart, some great writing, and some clever editing dismantle the newly revised openness both [...]

Is Evan Bayh Obama’s VP pick?

Youtube’s videos get translated to text. Is this the end of a million transcriber’s careers?

And now…make-up sex: After 140 years of sleeping on the couch in Black America, the House of Representatives has issued a formal apology for “the institution of slavery, and the subsequent Jim Crow laws that for years discriminated against blacks as second-class citizens in American society,” NPR reports.  As the Washington Post points out, though, [...]

In Gattaca, the Ethan Hawke film set in a Dystopian future with DNA-based discrimination, children are engineered to inherit all the good traits and none of the bad from mom and dad (dubbed the valids). Those who are born naturally are called “faith births” (the invalids).
We’re getting scarily closer to that dark vision, with new [...]

With his latest album The 3RD World, Harlem-based independent hip-hop artist Immortal Technique takes no prisoners.

Words cannot describe this. (But if a perfectly assembled rap video using all o.g. Bert and Ernie footage and set to M.O.P.’s “Ante Up”  doesn’t grab you, you gots issues.)
It’s an unprecedented era of cultural splicing and dicing we are in.  Some editing software, a YouTube account, and a little dead time open the gates to [...]

Perhaps the most notoriously unidentified graffiti artist of all time has been photographed (or has he??).  At least that’s what a recent TIME article is reporting.  Known for his beautifully subversive works, Banksy has been compared to Andy Warhol for his consumerism and pop-culture shish-kebabbing.
From the TIME article:
Banksy’s art is frequently political, often funny and [...]

The Grassy Knol: Google is flipping the bird to Wikipedia this week by launching their own collaborative web encyclopedia, dubbed “Knol“.  They define a knol as a “unit of knowledge” but the real jab is how they describe individual articles: “an authoritative article about a specific topic.” [emhpasis added]  Rather than opening a topic up [...]