He plays the Beacon Theater on November 8th as part of Comedy Central’s New York Comedy Festival.

  THE NEW YORKER: [Laura Poitras] turned to the documentary’s opening shot: a tunnel in Hong Kong, filmed with a narrow aperture, so that the camera appeared to be speeding through black space. A pattern of lights flashed overhead like Morse-code dashes. It created an ominous mood, evoking the beginning of David Lynch’s “Lost Highway.” The sound of wind rose and, in voice-over, an unidentified female—Poitras—read one of the first e-mails she received from Snowden: “At this stage I can offer nothing more than my word. I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community.” Bonnefoy stopped the film. […]

WASHINGTON POST: New figures from the Colorado Department of Revenue show that recreational marijuana sales continued to climb in August, the most recent month for which data are available. Recreational sales totaled approximately $34.1 million in August, up from $29.3 million the previous month. MORE

  DISCUSSED: Manson, Kent State, Buffalo Springfield, “Southern Man,” Pono, Woodstock, CSNY

  NEW YORK TIMES: After the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., I wrote a couple of columns entitled “When Whites Just Don’t Get It.” The reaction to those columns — sometimes bewildered, resentful or unprintable — suggests to me that many whites in America don’t understand the depths of racial inequity lingering in this country. This inequity is embedded in our law enforcement and criminal justice system, and that is why Bryan Stevenson may, indeed, be America’s Mandela. For decades he has fought judges, prosecutors and police on behalf of those who are impoverished, black or both. When […]

  PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER: [Pennsylvania State Attorney General Kathleen] Kane ignited the war in 2012, when she made a central theme of her campaign criticism of how [then-top prosecutor Frank] Fina‘s team in the Attorney General’s Office conducted the investigation into serial sex abuser Jerry Sandusky.[…] Though the review failed to back up Kane’s campaign rhetoric, it gave her a new and unexpected source of ammunition in the feud: Forensic computer work found that Fina, among dozens of others, had traded explicit [pornographic] photos and videos between 2008 and 2102 on state time on state computers. The X-rated e-mails were among […]

On September 10th, 2014, David Lynch gave a press conference at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to promote DAVID LYNCH: The Unified Field, the first major retrospective of his paintings in an American art museum. The retrospective is something of a homecoming for Lynch who studied painting at PAFA from 1966-1967, back when the City of Brotherly Love was a desolate hellscape of decay and despair after years of white flight, industrial collapse and seething racial animus. From 1965-1970, Lynch lived in a section of the city that has come to be known as The Eraserhood. It was in […]

SUB POP: There is no direct association between mysterious Swedish psychedelicists GOAT and revered Argentinian master of magical realism, Jorge Luis Borges. Yet their mission appears to be the same. Borges generated his ideas from historical curiosities across the globe—gaucho knife duels on the South American plains, Middle Eastern heresiarchs plotting treacheries in secret libraries, Chinese pirates waging wars against the Emperor—and twisted them into fictions that blurred the lines between fortified footnotes and outright fantasy. GOAT’s sound is the sonic manifestation of this principle, as evidenced in their aptly-named debut album World Music, which incorporated elements of Nigerian afrobeat, […]

  THE GUARDIAN: “[T]he book’s just the start of a conversation. I don’t know what you do about private education or private fuckin’ anything – I’m not a bloody politician. I want to address the alienation and sense of despair that you see all around us. Everyone’s fucked off, everyone’s had enough, so it don’t matter to me how much people have a go at me, because I live in the world and walk around, and people are going, ‘Well done, Russell, well done, son.’ I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready to die for this.” He finally takes a breath. […]

Laura Poitras’ documentary about Edward Snowden. Out October 24th. THE GUARDIAN: Poitras, the first journalist contacted by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, mirrors her topic. She rarely appears on news programs or chat shows. She is a mysterious character in her own movie, heard more than she is seen. But surreptitiously, Poitras has been a commander of a stream of disclosures for 16 months that have forced the NSA into a new and infamous era. Citizenfour demonstrates to the public the prowess that those of us who have worked with her on the NSA stories encountered. Her movie, the […]

  EDITOR’S NOTE: As you’ve probably heard by now, Malala Yousafzai, aka The Bravest Woman In All Of Islam, has won the Nobel Peace Prize. And deservedly so. To mark this auspicious occasion we are re-running the angry open letter to the Taliban we wrote for Philadelphia Magazine in the wake of their failed attempt to assassinate the then-14-year-old Malala by sending two goons to board her school bus and shoot her in the face. Like Ghandi or Martin Luther King or the Dalai Lama — men who have renounced violence, who come in the name of love and mercy […]