Q&A: Charlie Siskel, Director Of American Anarchist

  BY DILLON ALEXANDER The Anarchist Cookbook is that forbidden book your older brother and his friends ordered off the internet and used to make napalm in your old, crazy neighbor’s driveway that wound through the woods. Or maybe it’s the book that your posh friends prominently displayed on top of their coffee table for shock value. Maybe you heard about it on the news, when it was found at the apartment of some alienated, mentally unstable man who was convinced that he was the Joker from The Dark Knight. Maybe you have no clue what it is, but chances […]

MUST READ: How Big Data & Bots Are Reverse Engineering The Hive Mind Of American Voters

  THE GUARDIAN: Billionaire Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of the mainstream media. […] But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to […]

SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: The Case For Illegitimacy

  BY WILLIAM C. HENRY This just in: Donald J. Trump announces that the November results give him an unequivocal “mandate” to govern, and to do so as he sees fit. First and foremost: I’ll take those assertions as your attempt at jocularity, Mr. Trump. But as you and I both know, the closest thing you’ll ever get to a “mandate” is probably a clandestine “man date” with your equally pseudo-macho boyfriend in his private Kremlin bathroom. So, how about we clarify a few things right up front: 1) You did NOT win the election, in fact you LOST it […]

TELEVISION: Mary Tyler Moore, Who Made Prime TV Time Ready For Modern Women, Dead @ 80

  NEW YORK TIMES: At least a decade before the twin figures of the harried working woman and the neurotic, unwed 30-something became media preoccupations, Ms. Moore’s portrayal — for which she won four of her seven Emmy Awards — expressed both the exuberance and the melancholy of the single career woman who could plot her own course without reference to cultural archetypes. The show, and her portrayal of Mary as a sisterly presence in the office,as well as a source of ingenuity and humor, was a balm to widespread anxieties about women in the work force. It modeled a […]

The Death Of Journalism In Post-Factual America

“NBC Poll” from a pro-Trump fake news site called The Real Strategy NEIL GABLER: Just as Trump has shredded our values, our nation and our democracy, he has shredded the media. In this, as in his politics, he is only the latest avatar of a process that began long before his candidacy. Just as the sainted Ronald Reagan created an unbridgeable chasm between rich and poor that the Republicans would later exploit against Democrats, conservatives delegitimized mainstream journalism so that they could fill the vacuum. Retiring conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes complained that after years of bashing from the […]

MODERN TIMES: Tales Of Accelerated Culture

  BY CONOR J. HARRINGTON If you were to ask someone who was born in the sixties or seventies “what has changed most since you were younger?” a now standard response would be “the speed/pace of the day,” but what do they really mean? Have things slowed down, or sped up? People born during that period have grown up through the sci-fi esque technological revolution. They’ve gone from cell phones the size and weight of a brick and televisions with four channels to virtual reality and self driving cars right around the corner. All of our cell phones, tablets, computers, […]

CINEMA: Bye Bye Miss American Pie

AMERICAN HONEY (2016, directed by Andrea Arnold, 163 minutes, U.K./U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Writer/director Andrea (Fish Tank) Arnold’s perspective is apparent from the first frame of her immersive youth epic American Honey. Being a British director shooting in the U.S. for the first time, you might imagine that Arnold’s instinct would be to use the widescreen frame to capture those endless horizons of the American Midwest. But no, Arnold uses an unusually boxy 1.37:1 aspect ratio to tell her story, a story of young characters enjoying a rambling freedom but not necessarily endless possibilities. The film laces us […]

FEAR & LOATHING IN PENNSYLTUCKY: A Savage Journey Into The Heart Of The American Nightmare

WASHINGTON POST: In a living room in western Pennsylvania, the Republican National Convention was on TV, and Melanie Austin was getting impatient. “Who’s that guy?” she said, watching some billionaire talk about prosperity and tolerance. “Prosperity and tolerance? Forget that sh–.” She lit a cigarette. Her boyfriend, Kevin Lisovich, was next to her on the couch, drifting to sleep, a pillow over his head. On the ottoman was her cellphone, her notes on the speakers so far — “LOCK HER UP!!” she had written — and the anti-anxiety pills she kept in a silver vial on her keychain. She was […]

BOOKS: The Last American Ghandi Still Standing

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post originally published on October 4th, 2016. ESQUIRE: Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) is a Civil Rights icon and a Mt. Rushmore-worthy American hero. Time and again at the dawn of the 1960s, Lewis marched fearlessly into the maws of the Jim Crow South, through angry racist mobs and truncheon-wielding state troopers, armed with nothing more than the courage of the righteous and the unconditional love in his heart, and shed his own blood to shame this country into living up to its founding promise that “all men were created equal.” This remains a work in progress. At […]

WORTH REPEATING: Dear White People, It’s Time We Talked Seriously About This Trump Noise

  DAILY KOS: I know it’s been a good long while since we had an honest and open conversation. I can’t say that I speak for everyone from my particular demographic of African Americans, because we don’t all agree—just as we all know not every Caucasian American thinks or believes the same. But before things go too much further and get too much worse, we need to talk. Seriously talk. Not at each other, not about each other from another room, but to each other. First: Let’s get to brass tacks about this Trump guy. He says he wants to make things better for all […]

SIDEWALKING: An American Horror Story

Man dressed as Michael Myers from Halloween, Kissimmee, Florida by FRANK THORP NEW YORK TIMES: Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s presence remains elsewhere here in the Kiev, where government investigators examining secret records have found his name, as well as companies he sought business with, as they try to untangle a corrupt network they say was used to loot Ukrainian assets and influence elections during the administration of Mr. Manafort’s main client, former President Viktor F. Yanukovych. Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr.Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according […]

HOT DOCUMENT: The Complete Dept. Of Justice Report On The Blatant And Unapologetically Racist Tactics Of The Baltimore Police Department

  EXCERPT: “BPD disproportionately stops African Americans standing, walking, or driving on Baltimore streets. The Department’s data on all pedestrian stops from January 2010 to June 2015 shows that African Americans account for 84 percent of stops 55 despite comprising only 63 percent of the City’s population. Expressed differently, BPD officers made 520 stops for every 1,000 black residents in Baltimore, but only 180 stops for every 1,000 Caucasian residents.” EXCERPT: “Illegal stops result in confrontations that can be avoided, the report said. In one case, police stopped a black man wearing a hoodie in a “high crime area” because […]

BE AFRAID: Trump Asked 3 Times In An Hour-Long Briefing ‘Why Can’t We Use Nuclear Weapons?’

[via @VICBURGERIV] NEW YORKER: So it feels like a double miracle to come across satire as vital and funny as that of Vic Berger. Berger, a video editor who works for the Web site Super Deluxe and collaborates with the comedy duo Tim & Eric, manipulates found footage to highlight and/or create moments of absurdity. His earliest work targeted a seemingly random cast of celebrities—a septuagenarian Chubby Checker, Emeril Lagasse, and Jimmy Fallon are favorite subjects—re-cutting videos of public appearances to focus on stray utterances, awkward gestures, or facial tics that hint at weird cracks in their seemingly anodyne personas.[…] […]