Right friggin now, Phlly’s beloved sunburst ragamuffin old-timey neo-hippie soul-powered indie maximalists Dr. Dog — wearers of cheap sunglasses and many hats both good, bad and ugly — are celebrating today’s release of their new album B- Room with a suitably extravagant affair featuring ghosts, banjos, Carl Paladino, a stuck-up kitten who won’t sign autographs, furkels [fat Urkels], lights, psychos, Furbies, screaming babies in Mozart wigs, sunburned drifters with soap sud beards and hosted by  two prairie dogs (and a flannel-shirted prairie dog wrangler) and beamed worldwide via the internet from a secure, undisclosed location somewhere in the stony wastes […]

  THE NEW YORKER: With eighty-four million monthly visitors, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Guardian Web site is now the third most popular English-language newspaper Web site in the world, behind London’s Daily Mail, with its celebrity gossip and abundant cleavage, and the New York Times. But its print circulation, of a hundred and ninety thousand, is half what it was in 2002. The Guardian, which is supported by the Scott Trust, established nearly eighty years ago to subsidize an “independent” and “liberal” newspaper, has lost money for nine straight years. In the most recent fiscal year, […]

Illustration by GABRIEL MORENO PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE: To those following his case casually, there was only one word to describe Gosnell: monster. The charges against him, which spanned both federal and state courts, portrayed him as a one-man crime syndicate. The feds alleged that his clinic, at 3801 Lancaster Avenue in West Philadelphia, devolved into a “pill mill,” a hub for addicts and dealers who could walk in the door and garner multiple pain pill prescriptions in exchange for a fee. The state charges, meanwhile, detailed in a 261-page grand jury report, painted Gosnell as a mad doctor for the ages: […]

Ben Franklin Fire House, 4th & Arch, 12:58 pm by JONATHAN VALANIA RELATED: A fire erupted at a firehouse in downtown Philadelphia Friday causing extensive damage. The fire started at about 11:30 a.m. at the firehouse located at 4th and Arch Streets in Old City. In a twist of irony, firefighters had to turn their water hoses on their own building and attempt to contain the fire. It took firefighters approximately 15 minutes to bring the blaze fully under control, but not before the fire caused severe damage to the firehouse. The flames were so intense that at one point, […]

Photo by TYLER HICKS/NEW YORK TIMES ASSOCIATED PRESS: Sneha Kothari-Mashru, 28 and a part-time radio DJ, watches through a tangle of her long brown hair, which she has thrown across her face to appear as if she is already among the dead. She has smeared blood onto her arm and her clothes, taking it from the corpse of a teenage boy. She has kicked off her blue high heels. The gunman doesn’t scream, she recalls days later. He rarely speaks. There is no obvious anger in his expression. He seems confident, she says. “He was normal.” About 15 minutes later, […]

  Using data from the Pennsylvania Uniform CrimeReporting System, PhillyNORML is wrapping up their seventh annual review of marijuana arrest statistics in Philadelphia. The big takeaway this year? Pretty much the same as every year, everywhere: Blacks were arrested for marijuana possession at five times the rate of whites. According to PhillyNORML there were 6,614 marijuana related arrests in Philadelphia in 2012 — 4,272 of those arrests were for simple cannabis possession. Of those 4,272 arrested for simple possession, 3,052 were black and only 629 were white. DEVELOPING… RELATED: The War On Marijuana In Black And White

The Iggles, September 16th by JEFF FUSCO

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: Justin Bieber from Justin Bieber Probably the funniest episode to date wherein Zack G. says to Beebs what America has wanted to say to him for at least the last year — and what his parents should have said/done to him a long, long time ago. Having said that, credit to Bieber for agreeing to do this and then playing ball all the way through. Kid can take a punch.

  FRESH AIR Perhaps the most important military commander in Syria’s civil war is not Syrian at all. He’s Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, and he’s the subject of by Dexter Filkins in the current edition of The New Yorker. For the past 15 years, Suleimani has been the chief of the Quds Force, a small but powerful branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. He’s not a familiar name to Americans, but one former CIA officer described him to Filkins as “the single most powerful operative in the Middle East today.” Filkins writes that Suleimani “has sought to reshape the Middle […]

VULTURE: One of Key and Peele’s most viral bits is their rapid-fire college-football-player introductions, originally inspired by New York Jets offensive lineman D’Brickashaw Ferguson. “D’Brickashaw Ferguson! What? That was it for us,” Keegan Michael Key tells us. Their first sketch, with such players as Hingle McKringleberry and Donkey Teeth, aired last season and has since gathered more than 17 million views on YouTube. Last week, they released a follow-up, and it already has 5.5 million views. The names are so perfectly crafted for maximum hilarity, but how do they come up with them? Turns out there is a crucial third […]

  NEW YORK DAILY NEWS: In short: This was guerrilla theater, not legitimate governance. This page has many substantive qualms, large and small, with Obama’s health care law, particularly its threat to job creation. Cruz catalogued all the objections, predicting national disaster. Only time will tell how Obama’s massive health insurance overhaul plays out. For now, it is the law of the land, implicitly endorsed by the American people in Obama’s reelection. Cruz and his allies, who claim to revere the Constitution, pretend they can accomplish through symbolic grandstanding what they cannot by getting the votes in the House and […]

  ROLLING STONE: But it was last summer, in Philadelphia, where she really found her new style. She was living there with Hemsworth, who was filming a movie with Harrison Ford. “Best summer ever,” Miley says. “Have you ever been to South Street in Philly? That’s where I got my first chain. Sixteen bucks – not real,” she says, laughing. “I was away from people for a minute, and I just started feeling my own vibe. I bought a pair of Doc Martens. I shaved my head. Driving a fucking Ford Explorer around. Just blending in.” MORE