THE REVOLUTION WILL BE COMMERCIALIZED: Q&A With NYT’s Consumed Columnist Rob Walker

BY ELIZABETH FLYNN Rob Walker wants you to think before you sink your money into another superficial purchase. Walker — who writes the Consumed column for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and author of Buying In, a highly-readable dissection of the dark art of branding — began his career focusing on advertising and media campaigns in 2000, writing the Moneybox column and other contributions for the online magazine Slate. Through his research into corporate strategies to incite a buying frenzy in consumers, he started asking some questions: If consumers had become, as many studies proclaimed “hyperaware” and “immune” to […]

Inky/DN Seeking $10 Million Bailout From State

NEWSBUSTERS: We all wondered if it would happen. NB readers said it would very soon. NB author Tom Blumer even predicted this would be the year for it. Now the largest newspaper in Philadelphia is requesting a bailout. In a perfectly ironic fashion it took a lawsuit for the public to learn that the Philadelphia Inquirer is seeking $10 million dollars from the state of Pennsylvania. The bailout request was revealed after the school filed suit against the paper for a series of articles questioning the school’s use of government funds.Now, according to an interview between the Philadelphia Bulletin and […]

CINEMA: Dancing In The Dark

WALTZ WITH BASHIR (2008, directed by Ari Folman, 90 minutes, Israel) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Like last years’ Persepolis, the true-life mystery Waltz With Bashir delivers the West some much-needed Middle Eastern history in an easy-to-digest cartoon format. Make that “easier-to-digest” format, because even when told with this expressionist mix of flash and hand-drawn animation this difficult-to-shake tale of the toll of war lures us to stare at some truly grueling memories that would be unbearable on film. With interviews collected as documentary then sculpted and rendered in animation, filmmaker Ari Folman presents the stories of his comrades from […]

EARLY WORD: Velvet Goldmine

Mercury Music Prize winner ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS KESWICK THEATRE MON., FEB. 2, 8 PM In their first area appearance since 2005, ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS will perform their internationally-acclaimed blend of highly dramatic, emotional and lyrical chamber cabaret at Glenside’s Keswick Theatre on Mon. Feb. 2 @ 8 PM .ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS will be touring in support of their highly-anticipated January 2009 release, The Crying Light. Their last full-length album, 2005’s I am a Bird Now, won the UK’s prestigious Mercury Prize for the best album of 2005 over rival nominees the Kaiser Chiefs, and was greeted with […]

BOOK EXCERPT: Tear Down This Myth

EDITOR’S NOTE: Phawker is proud to bring you this excerpt from Daily News scribe/Attytood blogger-in-chief Will Bunch’s soon-to-publish Tear Down This Myth: How The Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics And Haunts Our Future, a meaty, pointed dissection of the dream factory mythologizing of Ronald Reagan’s presidency — how this is being done, why, and the impact such historical revisionism has on our current political landscape. The short answer to all the above can be found the following quote from George Orwell, which kicks off the book: ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls […]

PAPERBOY: ‘We’re All Polar Bears Now’ Edition

BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week, PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]

OBJECTION: Today’s Inky Homeless Story

BY JEFF DEENEY This morning’s Inquirer story on Camden’s tent city strikes me as a step backwards in the paper’s coverage of the homelessness issue. Last year Inky reporter Jennifer Lin made incredible strides towards covering the region’s homelessness problem the way it should be covered. Chronic street homelessness is a mental health and addictions crisis. There are professionals in the field who are applying new methods of attacking the problem, which has resulted in precipitous drops of people living on the streets in cities around the country. This new method of attacking homelessness is called “housing first” and it […]

HEAR YE: In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

Now playing on PHAWKER RADIO! Why? Because it’s GREAT! That’s why. Of all the bands to come out of the Elephant 6 collective — that loose-knit cross-country cabal of weedy bus-station transcendentalists and grass-stained pranksters — Neutral Milk Hotel was the least beholden to classic psych-rock templates, yet somehow managed to evoke and advance them all at once. On 1998’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, Jeff Mangum’s mewling sunshine Superman melodies are colored by bare, ruined choirs of singing saw, fuzz bass, mariachi horns, bowed banjo, accordion, home organ and Salvation Army marching band brass. Produced by the Apples […]

BURN AFTER READING: CIA’s Algerian Station Chief Accused Of Drugging And Raping Two Muslim Women

ABC NEWS: The CIA’s station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug, U.S. law enforcement sources tell ABC News. The suspect in the case is identified as Andrew Warren in an affidavit for a search warrant filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. by an investigator for the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service. Officials say the 41-year old Warren, a convert to Islam, was ordered home by the U.S. Ambassador, David Pearce, in October […]

Google Launches Diagnostic Tools That Allow Users To Determine If Your ISP Is Rationing Your Web Access

PC MAGAZINE: Is your ISP throttling your Internet connection or is it just time to get a new computer? How much bandwidth are you actually using? Are you getting the Internet speeds promised by your provider?  These may seem like basic questions, but they are not easily answered. At the root of last year’s Comcast network management debacle was whether or not the cable provider was blocking access to file-sharing Web sites. Comcast said no, the Federal Communications Commission said yes, but we never got a clear answer. Measurement Lab (M-Lab), a new open platform announced Wednesday, is looking to […]

SEE NO EVIL: Judge Dismisses Graffiti Beatdown

DAILY NEWS: A Common Pleas judge — like another judge before him — dismissed all charges yesterday against two former Philadelphia police officers accused of punching and kicking a graffiti vandal in Feltonville two years ago. After an 80-minute hearing involving two new witnesses, plenty of objections by high-profile defense attorneys, and impassioned arguments, Judge Frank Palumbo ended the case by announcing: “Discharged.” The two ex-cops, Sheldon Fitzgerald and Howard Hill III, both 30, then left the courtroom and were congratulated by their former colleagues. The two declined comment. Fortunato “Fred” Perri Jr., who represented the men with his partner […]