INQUIRER: Lower Merion School District employees activated the web cameras and tracking software on laptops they gave to high school students about 80 times in the past two school years, snapping nearly 56,000 images that included photos of students, pictures inside their homes and copies of the programs or files running on their screens, district investigators have concluded. In most of the cases, technicians turned on the system after a student or staffer reported a laptop missing and turned it off when the machine was found, the investigators determined. But in at least five instances, school employees let the Web […]

Do not be alarmed by A.P.’s sudden transformation into a 20-year-old art school student, it’s a flare-up of a rare medical condition that…well, we’ll let him explain.

BY MAVIS LINNEMANN Welcome to the world of the Kitchen Bitch. What makes me a kitchen bitch, you ask? Well, when I’m not working as a freelance writer and editor, I spend pretty much all of my time in pursuit of my next gastronomical adventure, whether its cooking, baking, gardening, dreaming up new meals ideas, sampling new foods in Chicago and abroad, or lazily watching the Food Network. And once I’m in the kitchen, I usually designate a friend or family member my “kitchen bitch” for the day—my sister Paige often gets the honor (and she happens to love it, […]

THE YES MEN: Bucolic Prospect park in Brooklyn, NY played host to a bizarre spectacle on Sunday, as a dramatically under-attended Dow-sponsored “Run for Water” was infiltrated and turned upside down by hundreds of furious activists, including a hundred dressed as Dow spokespeople. New Yorkers who came to the park expecting a light run followed by a free concert found themselves unwitting extras in a macabre and chaotic scene as runners keeled over dead, Dow-branded grim reapers chased participants, and a hundred fake Dow representatives harangued other protesters and and handed out literature that explained Dow’s greenwashing program in frank […]

There are no losers here at Phawker, just people who haven’t won yet. With that in mind, let’s get one of you into pair of tickets for Echo & The Bunnymen at the Keswick Theater on Sunday April 25th. We can still vividly recall the spring of 1984, furtively blowing bong smoke out our dorm room window while Ocean Rain blared from its semi-permanent perch on the turntable, only to be replaced by the Smith’s Meat Is Murder and REM’s Reckoning. Ah, good times — even if the jocks kept calling us ‘faggot’ because of our Ian McCulloch haircut (actually, […]

Bad advice about circumcision, ghost-busting, peeping toms and how to be a skank by the Queen of Row Home Philadelphia, straight outta Fishtown, yo.

BY JAMIE DAVIS My best friend Jack owns The Ugliest Guitar of All Time. Admittedly it’s not all the guitar’s fault, seeing has how we only made it butt-uglier with our misguided attempts to pretty it up.  Before we got our hands on it, it was a shit-brown sunburst Stratocaster with a too plastic-y finish that made it look like a kitchen countertop. The pickups were the same color as the pick-guard, black, which made it look about as cool as one of those fucking stupid stealth planes they built in the 80’s. You know, the fucking stupid as shit […]

BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH I received my site last wednesday. It’s a semi-arid town in the department of Paraguari, and its got 75 houses in it. The land has that flat, sun-seared look to it that you see driving down the interstates at the end of summer, when all the grass has turned tan-copper but the trees still are green. It’s basically one long road, very Spaghetti-Western-looking. The people there were incredibly nice and gung-ho when I met them. I was there for five days, and visited probably a third of the houses in the area. The main issues that […]

INQUIRER: A. Thomas McLellan, the former Penn professor whose appointment last year as the top federal official on addiction treatment was widely seen as signaling a dramatic shift in drug policy, is planning to resign. “There’s no deep dark secret here – I’m just ill-suited to government work,” McLellan said in an interview with the newsletter Alcoholism & Drug Abuse Weekly. McLellan, the deputy director of  the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, is known as a straight-talking, get-it-done kind of scientist. “I guess I could be called a ready, fire, aim kind of guy,” McLellan, 62, said in […]