NEW YORK TIMES: At 54, Lunch combines the louche air of an Italian starlet with the authority of a den mother. She has alabaster skin and voluptuous curves and wears her hair in a strategically choppy cut. Some might find it difficult to reconcile the Lunch smiling at her assembled guests with the Lunch whom many of her fans remember best — the self-styled nihilist and lead singer of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, a seminal ’70s No Wave band whose songs featured lyrics like “Little orphans running through the bloody snow.” She lived in a loft in downtown […]

  BBC: Maria Alyokhina, a member of Russian punk band Pussy Riot, has been freed early from prison under an amnesty. She told a Russian TV channel the amnesty was a “PR stunt” and she would rather have remained in prison. The release of fellow band member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova is also expected later on Monday. The women were jailed in August 2012 for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” after performing a protest song in Moscow’s main cathedral. Their conviction was criticised by rights groups, anti-Putin activists and foreign governments. As soon as Maria Alyokhina stepped through the prison gates she […]

  WASHINGTON POST: In late September 1941, the German juggernaut reached the outskirts of Bryansk, hard against the Desna River southwest of Moscow. In the battle, the Nazis destroyed about 80 percent of the town and killed more than 80,000 people. Kalashnikov, who was 21, was wounded in his left shoulder when his tank came under artillery fire. He eventually made it to a hospital on foot after a harrowing two-day trip. He suffered nightmares about the Germans slaughtering his comrades. Kalashnikov became obsessed with creating a submachine gun that would drive the Germans from his homeland. In his hospital […]

The video was recorded at Best Friends Animal Society in Los Angeles. RELATED: This story starts in Moby’s apartment on a sunny pre-9/11 morning in New York city. Moby and his neighbor David Bowie are sitting on the couch strumming “Heroes” on acoustic guitars. They are prepping for a Tibet House benefit concert at Carnegie Hall organized by Phillip Glass. This is too good to be true, Moby thinks to himself. What if it isn’t? What if I’ve lost my mind and I’m institutionalized and just hallucinating this? Does it even matter? Just go with it. As hallucinations go, you […]

Artwork by BRANDON PIKE FRESH AIR

Sad, dark and beautiful. The ‘Sandy’ he is referring to is Sandy Hook. Sample lyric: “Little kids sitting all around / wishing they were sound asleep again.” Suffer the children. Fuck da NRA. Hard. RELATED: If, in the end, we do nothing to overcome the awful inertia of the status quo, if no good ever comes out of this evil, the wholesale slaughter of 20 six-year-olds and the educators that died trying to protect them will remain for all eternity just as mindfuckingly meaningless and endlessly heartbreaking as their killer intended. MORE

  THE ATLANTIC: A panel President Obama convened to assess the National Security Agency in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks has issued a 308-page report with this message: To protect privacy, civil liberties, and security, the NSA ought to be reformed.  […] Some of the most significant reforms suggested: The government’s storage of bulk metadata is a risk to personal privacy and civil liberty, and as a general rule, “the government should not be permitted to collect and store mass, undigested, non-public personal information about US persons.” Following this recommendation would end the Section 215 collection of telephone-call records as […]