Illustration by KARO-DESIGN Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. `’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door – Only this, and nothing more.’ Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow; – vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow […]

From Bowie spox: Last week David Bowie had an idea. His new single, ‘LOVE IS LOST’, was to be released this week and a video clip was needed. Eschewing both celebrity guests and splashy production, Bowie picked up his domestic camera from home, rescued a couple of puppets from his legendary archive and wrote, shot and edited the entire video over this last weekend in the darkened corridor of his office in Manhattan, New York. With his assistant Jimmy King on camera and best friend Coco Schwab handling everything from continuity to sandwiches they worked through the evenings finishing on […]

  PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER: Brian P. Tierney, a former publisher of The Inquirer, was dismissed Tuesday from a $25,000-a-month consulting job with the newspaper’s parent company. Tierney called the loss of his sales and marketing consulting contract “collateral damage of institutional infighting” that has spurred lawsuits among the owners of Interstate General Media. In a statement, he said, “All of those we worked with at The Inquirer have not only been pleased but delighted by the results we have generated.” MORE PHAWKER: Wait, so they fired you because they were ‘not only pleased but delighted?’ PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER: Associate publisher Michael Lorenca […]

FRESH AIR: While floating weightless in the International Space Station last spring, Commander Chris Hadfield recorded his own version of David Bowie’s “” — a video that’s now been viewed more than 18 million times on YouTube. But when he wasn’t busy being an Internet phenomenon, the Canadian astronaut was witnessing awe-inspiring beauty, facing life-threatening dangers and, at times, holding onto a spaceship orbiting Earth at 17,500 miles an hour. Hadfield has flown three space missions, conducted two space walks and spent a total of six months in space. On Earth, he’s been the chief of international space station operations […]

  NPR: Shortly after 8 p.m. on the Halloween Eve, 1938, the voice of a panicked radio announcer broke in with a news bulletin reporting strange explosions taking place on the planet Mars, followed minutes later by a report that Martians had landed in the tiny town of Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Although most listeners understood that the program was a radio drama, the next day’s headlines reported that thousands of others plunged into panic, convinced that America was under a deadly Martian attack. It turned out to be H.G. Wells’ classic The War of the Worlds, performed by 23-year-old […]

  FRESH AIR: Lou Reed, the transgressive and transcendent songwriter, singer and guitarist, died Sunday at 71 of liver disease, several months after undergoing a liver transplant. He co-founded and then embarked upon a long solo career. Fresh Air’s Terry Gross interviewed him in 1996, but he walked out after just a few minutes, annoyed by the questions. But that didn’t change her love of his music. Reed was famous for his prickly, sometimes combative relationship with the press. And it was up to Bill Bentley — Reed’s publicist from 1988 to 2004 — to work the very press Reed […]

SOURCE: Philebrity BIG TRIAL: The current Inky publisher, Bob Hall, is a part-timer who was supposed to step down in August. Rumors began circulating that  [former owner Brian] Tierney would return as Hall’s replacement. Against this backdrop one faction in the Inky ownership dispute, Lewis Katz and H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest were asked two weeks ago during a meeting with the leadership of the Newspaper Guild Of Greater Philadelphia if the Tierney rumors were true. According to Bill Ross, the Guild’s executive director, Lenfest responded, what would be so bad about that? […] When Lenfest asked the Newspaper Guild what would […]

  WASHINGTON POST: Look, I’m sure they’re very nice people, but on their fourth album, “Reflektor,” Arcade Fire still sound like gigantic dorks with boring sex lives. After winning a Grammy for album of the year in 2011, they’re still the biggest rock band on the block, still making music mysteriously devoid of wit, subtlety and danger. And now, they’re really into bongo drums, too. We should all be repulsed. Only partially because of the bongos.Mostly because this is rock music that lazily presumes life on the digital plane has made us so numb, so unable to feel for ourselves, […]

  SLANT: Assuming he’s one filmmaker who’s heavily involved with the marketing of his movies, Wes Anderson has become a master of the fetching teaser poster, using mysteriously detailed, illustrative one-sheets that only hint at what the given film is about. Recently, the posters for his films fall somewhere in between those that peddle attractive casts and director-as-brand, and those that merely tease a brand itself. Anderson is so unfailingly unique and exciting a filmmaker that he has become his own draw, but he doesn’t seem to rely on that, nor do his marquee names seem to be scrawled across […]

Live at Le Bataclan circa 1972.

  BILL KELLER: I find much to admire in America’s history of crusading journalists, from the pamphleteers to the muckrakers to the New Journalism of the ’60s to the best of today’s activist bloggers. At their best, their fortitude and passion have stimulated genuine reforms (often, as in the Progressive Era, thanks to the journalists’ “political relationships with governments”). I hope the coverage you led of the National Security Agency’s hyperactive surveillance will lead to some overdue accountability. But the kind of journalism The Times and other mainstream news organizations practice — at their best — includes an awful lot […]

  FRESH AIR It’s been 50 years since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and polls show that a majority of Americans still believe Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy, not a lone assassin. Though an official investigation concluded that Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, conspiracy theories about the assassination were spawned almost immediately, and they keep coming to this day: Republican consultant Roger Stone has a new book — The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ — arguing Lyndon Johnson was behind the crime. Veteran investigative […]