FRESH AIR “Who am I to judge?” With those five words, Pope Francis “stepped away from the disapproving tone, the explicit moralizing typical of popes and bishops,” writes columnist James Carroll. Francis made in July, in response to a reporter’s question about the status of gay priests in the Church. In a about Francis in The New Yorker, Carroll describes the pope as having “unilaterally declared a kind of truce in the culture wars that have divided the Vatican and much of the world.” Carroll was a seminarian and a priest during another great period of change — Vatican […]

  This is a devastatingly brilliant and hard-earned comeuppance, but we’ve come to expect nothing less from Alex Pareene. Although it probably won’t seem so funny in the not-so-distant future when we get all our news from animated GIFs and we’re, like, ROFL at how fucked we are. But until then, we’ll always have this. Check it out HERE. RELATED: Swamp People, Hippies, Hijabs, and a Gay Couple: See How the Obama Admin Is Branding America Abroad (& the LGBT Adviser Who’s Behind It!)

Spring Garden School No. 1, rooftop, December 2nd, 2012, by DANNY SCULLION

Artwork by TOM MULLER FRESH AIR If you ask the Coen brothers about how they write their films, you might not get a straight answer. “It’s mostly napping,” Ethan tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “We go to the office, we’re there, we’re in a room together,” Joel adds. “We take naps, but, you know, the important thing is that we’re at the office, should we be inspired to actually write something.” The brothers don’t split up writing responsibilities — they “talk through” the dialogue and “work it out together,” Joel explains. The process seems to be working for the brothers […]

Artwork by POASTERCHILD ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION: In a historic decision, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. today declared that the NSA’s mass phone records surveillance is likely unconstitutional, ruling that the plaintiff’s data should be purged from the system and prohibiting the NSA from collecting further phone records from the plaintiffs. The case, Klayman v. Obama, undermines the government’s assertions that its bulk surveillance program, which collects virtually every phone record in the United States, is legal. MORE U.S. DISTRICT COURT JUDGE RICHARD LEON: “I believe that bulk telephony metadata collection and analysis almost certainly does violate a reasonable expectation […]

Artwork by Shahin Gholizadeh NEW YORK TIMES: Peter O’Toole, an Irish bookmaker’s son with a hell-raising streak whose performance in the 1962 epic film “Lawrence of Arabia” earned him overnight fame and established him as one of his generation’s most charismatic actors, died on Saturday in London. He was 81. Blond, blue-eyed and well over six feet tall, Mr. O’Toole had the dashing good looks and high spirits befitting a leading man — and he did not disappoint in “Lawrence,” David Lean’s wide-screen, almost-four-hour homage to T. E. Lawrence, the daring British soldier and adventurer who led an Arab rebellion […]

  BBC: Vodka martini, “shaken not stirred” – often said as part of a bad Sean Connery impersonation – is one of the most quotable lines from Bond. Yet Her Majesty’s top secret agent’s love of the bottle would leave him impotent and at death’s door. Doctors analysing the Ian Fleming novels show James Bond polishes off the equivalent of one and a half bottles of wine every day. They say he is not the man to trust to deactivate a nuclear bomb. Doctors in Derby and Nottingham sat down to read the 14 Bond novels in their spare time. […]

Lee Fields and the Expressions play Union Transfer tonight! RELATED: Q&A With Lee Fields, Funk Soul Brother