BY JONATHAN VALANIA My cousin is married to a cop who worked out in the ‘burbs. He’s a rock solid, salt of the earth kind of guy, straight out of central casting for a Scorsese cop flick: Irish, Catholic, served in Afghanistan. In other words, he doesn’t spend a lot of time reading the Huffington Post. In the wee hours of family gatherings, he’d share war stories about life on the beat in the mean streets of the Main Line: mostly a lot of pet-triggered false alarms, endless paper work, double shifts and back alley catnaps in his cruiser. […]

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs play the River Stage at Penn’s Landing’s Great Plaza on Tuesday, September 17th. Tickets go on sale this Friday, August 16 at 10am @ Ticketmaster.com.

Hot damn! If Valerie June had been a roots artist in America 80 years ago, and she often sings as if she was, she might have been a principle influence on today’s myriad retro troubadours, hers a stunningly emotive amalgamation of blues, folk, gospel, soul, Appalachian and bluegrass (including irresistible banjo). She exists, however, today, an artist as modern as an iPod Shuffle, a musician for the generation which carries the entire history of recorded music so casually inside its phone. Like a potent distillation bubbling on a Prohibition-era porch, Valerie June makes self-styled “organic moonshine roots music”, music for […]

INQUIRER: Camden County police are fed up with Darren T. Walp, the Ridley Park man who was arrested a second time Saturday on accusations that he used racial slurs and harassed people on his way to a country-music concert at the Susquehanna Bank Center in Camden. […] According to police, Walp, 33, got out of his pickup truck at a stoplight on Broadway on Saturday afternoon to grab a beer from the vehicle’s bed. Walp then began screaming racial slurs at the driver behind him, challenging the man to get out of his car, police said. The driver, a black […]

FRESH AIR Piper Kerman was a 24-year-old Smith College graduate in 1993, when she flew to Belgium with a suitcase of money intended for a West African drug lord. This misguided adventure started when she began a romantic relationship with a woman who was part of what Kerman describes as a “clique of impossibly stylish and cool lesbians in their mid-30s.” That woman was involved in a drug-smuggling ring, and got Kerman involved, too, though Kerman left that life after several months. Five years later, Kerman was named as part of the drug ring and, in February 2004, she reported […]

SLATE: “From One Second to the Next,” the rather unlikely film below, came together when AT&T approached the legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog and asked if he would direct a series of short films warning people about the dangers of texting while driving. The result is haunting. It focuses on four accidents, some of them fatal, and Herzog aims his camera squarely at the faces of both victims and perpetrators, asking them to describe in detail what happened and the aftermath. Herzog emphasizes the change in civilization he perceives in part by examining an accident in which an Amish family […]

“Bubb And His Great Uncle ‘Six Pack’ Sammy” 1990 by STEVE RUBIN USA TODAY: Four out of five U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream. Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend. While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially […]

  NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: In a memo to reporters circulated back in June, the Associated Press spelled out why “leaker” was the more appropriate way to refer to both Snowden and Manning. “A whistle-blower is a person who exposes wrongdoing,” explained Tom Kent, the AP standards editor. “It’s not a person who simply asserts that what he has uncovered is illegal or immoral.” For Snowden to have asserted that the NSA’s spying programs “corrupt the most basic notion of justice” and that “the US Constitution marks these programs as illegal” without a strong basis for saying so would […]

  DR. SANJAY GUPTA: Over the last year, I have been working on a new documentary called “Weed.” The title “Weed” may sound cavalier, but the content is not. I traveled around the world to interview medical leaders, experts, growers and patients. I spoke candidly to them, asking tough questions. What I found was stunning. Long before I began this project, I had steadily reviewed the scientific literature on medical marijuana from the United States and thought it was fairly unimpressive. Reading these papers five years ago, it was hard to make a case for medicinal marijuana. I even wrote […]

  Karen Black (July 1, 1939 – August 8, 2013) was an American actress, screenwriter, singer, and songwriter. She is noted for appearing in such films as Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Great Gatsby, Rhinoceros, The Day of the Locust, Nashville, Airport 1975, and Alfred Hitchcock‘s final film, Family Plot. Over the course of her career, she won two Golden Globe Awards (out of three nominations), and an Academy Award nomination in 1970 for Best Supporting Actress, among numerous other honors.

My Fellow Users, I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on–the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, […]