From The Planets.
RUDY TUESDAY: Who Could Hang A Shame On You?
BY AMY Z. QUINN You know how people like me always point out that New Yorkers hated Rudy Giuliani up until 9/11? And how many hearts softened toward him after, but it didn’t make anyone trust him more? That’s partly because everything the right wing hated about Bill Clinton in the ’90s — the two faces, the skirt-chasing, the marriage nobody could figure out — Giuliani was living, the whole time, back in the Empire State. So now it’s an hour before the CNN/YouTube GOP debate and the Giuliani camp is surely backstage scrambling to script some responses to this, […]
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Why?
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NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Sharon Jones, head of the old-school funk and soul band Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, is working it. She and her band have a new album, their third, called 100 Days, 100 Nights. They’ve been touring to support the album, and Jones was recently part of the cast of Berlin, along with Lou Reed. She also shot a part for the upcoming Denzel Washington film The Great Debaters. Jones shares a hometown with the Godfather of Soul himself, James Brown. Though she moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., when she was little, she spent months of every year in Augusta, Ga., […]
BLACKWATER WHITEWASH: Head Of State Dept.’s Blackwater Investigation Tells Staff To Shut It Down
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Before we get started I should tell you in the interest of full disclosure that the bitchin logo above is actually for the band Blackwater, not the mercenary army controversial independent security contractor we are about to discuss. However, A.) it is a bitchin logo, and B.) I am pretty sure these guys are too high or drunk to notice or care. So, let’s move on. This story is very convoluted and you really have to read the whole article to get your bearings on this, but in a nutshell: Long before the ongoing FBI probe into […]
MAILBAG: My Country Tis Of Thee?
AP photographer Bilal Hussein won the Pulitzer Prize for this 2004 photo of insurgents fighting the Battle Of Fallujah. He as been held in custody by the U.S. military without charge for the past 19 months. DEAR PHAWKER, Again, George Miller is my favorite professor. Today in my Journalism and Society class (which is responsible for introducing me to Phawker), Jim MacMillan came to talk about photojournalism, but more importantly Bilal Hussein. MacMillan personally knew Hussien. He was one of the members of the team who won the Pulitzer Prize. Watching MacMillan speak about a collegue and friend was tough-you […]
MADLIB: Slim’s Return
[Hat tip to EVA LIAO]
THE EARLY WORD: About A Girl
Closing Requiem Concert: Igni Natura Renovatur Integra The Artistic Legacy of Jennifer Bates On Saturday, December 1, 2007, six esteemed Philadelphia musicians will gather at Germ Books and Gallery to ritually close the current art show of our founder, the late Jennifer Bates. At approximately 3PM, David E. Williams — Germ’s owner and Bates’ widower — will open the performance on synthesizer with a plaintive melody from one of Jennifer’s own compositions. From there, the other musicians will join in an improvised performance of electronic drones, noises and other psychonautic sounds that evoke Jennifer’s spirit on the day before many […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR A MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, Peter Gleick runs one of the nation’s leading water-conservation assessment centers. The institute’s biennial report, The World’s Water, surveys global water trends and issues, including the links between water and terrorism and the growing risk of flood and drought. PLUS, n Tamara Jenkins’ new film The Savages, two 40-something siblings have to put their lives on hold while they learn how to deal with their elderly father, who’s slipping slowly into dementia. The film — it’s a comedy — stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, plus Broadway veteran […]
EDITORIAL: Ivy League Murder, GED Justice
BY AMY Z. QUINN The dead wife of Penn Professor Rafael Robb has been abused in death by Bruce Castor as badly as she was in life by her husband. He bludgeoned his wife to death with a metal bar in cold blood. By ANY objective analysis he appears to have gotten away with murder Despite evidence that Robb, a PhD and expert on game theory, had been a controlling, abusive husband who couldn’t stand that the wife he despised was daring to divorce him and was planning to take their daughter away on a trip, the Montgomery County District […]
GUNCRAZY: Five-Year-Old Shot In The Ass
A five-year-old boy was shot at his family’s home in the 600 block of West Huntingdon Street in Philadelphia’s West Kensington neighborhood around 1am on Tuesday. The young boy was under treatment late in the morning at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children where he was listed in stable condition with a gunshot wound of his buttocks. Police later found handguns in a nearby car and at the young victim’s house but had not immediately determined whether either of those weapons had been fired. Investigators initially said they were not sure if the shooting was deliberate or accidental, having received conflicting stories from various family […]
LIFE & DEATH: Redskin Dies, Veep Lives
MIAMI (AP) — Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor died early Tuesday, a day after he was shot at home by what police say was an intruder. He was 24. Family friend Richard Sharpstein said Taylor’s father told him the news around 5:30 a.m. “His father called and said he was with Christ and he cried and thanked me,” said Sharpstein, Taylor’s former lawyer. He said Taylor died early Tuesday at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, where he had been airlifted after the shooting early Monday. Doctors had been encouraged late Monday when Taylor squeezed a nurse’s hand, according to Vinny […]
WHY BEING TIME’S ‘PERSON OF THE YEAR’ MAKES YOU A HERO TO MOST BUT DON’T MEAN SHIT TO ME
The sad, slow self-inflicted deflation of Time’s Joe Klein: Thus, for now, I just want to ask that everyone ponder the extreme lack of professionalism and corruption required for someone like Klein to write the article that he did accusing Democrats of wanting to give Terrorists the same rights as Americans (therefore showing, as always, that Democrats can’t be trusted on national security), and then — once he is exposed for having spewed outright falsehoods — he announces that he really isn’t interested in bothering to find out (and isn’t even capable of determining) if anything he wrote was accurate. […]