We have a winner for yesterday’s contest: Phawker reader TIM ALLEN correctly answered that Creation Records was the label that My Bloody Valentine nearly bankrupted with the costly making of their landmark Loveless album. But fear not dear reader, 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 a pair of tickets for Day Three of All Points West, aka Sunday August 2nd. Even though we have long believed that headliners Coldplay are little more than Radiohead for people who still buy Sting solo albums, this […]
USEFUL INFORMATION: Getting Hassled By The Man
THE ETHICIST: Gates should enjoy a cool one and then file suit, assuming he has legal grounds to do so. We Americans are often mocked for being overly litigious, but we are not nearly litigious enough. In the right circumstances, filing suit can be a way to pursue social justice, and that makes it thoroughly ethical. I am not encouraging frivolous lawsuits or those inspired by TV pitchmen who use the words “slip and fall” as if invoking El Dorado. Rather, I refer to suits filed to oppose systemic injustice, for the benefit of the larger community, often at some […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
[Click image to enlarge] FRESH AIR Economists Paul Krugman and Stuart Butler discuss the way America’s health care system is financed — and how it should be. A Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist, Krugman argues in a July 25 New York Times column that free markets alone cannot fix the health care system. He’s a professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University, and his books include The Conscience of a Liberal, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century and The Return of Depression Economics. A native of Britain, Butler — the vice president […]
GEMINI WOLF: Sudseyfuss
Gemini Wolf — “Sudseyfuss” from Derek Moench on Vimeo. From Synchronized Eyes now out on Earsnake.
KILLADELPHIA: Murder Rate Drops 30%
DAILY NEWS: The city’s homicide rate has fallen 30 percent from the grim total it had registered by this point in 2007, when the constant deluge of murders led to the loathsome local nickname “Killadelphia.” According to police statistics, 162 homicides have been recorded so far this year, compared with 183 a year ago, and 234 in 2007. The city had 333 homicides all of last year, a 15 percent drop from the 392 slayings in ’07. The homicide rate — which soared at a time earlier this decade when homicides in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles were reaching […]
Senate Finance Committee Drops ‘Public Option’
ASSOCIATED PRESS: After weeks of secretive talks, a bipartisan group in the Senate edged closer Monday to a health care compromise that omits a requirement for businesses to offer coverage to their workers and lacks a government insurance option that President Barack Obama favors, according to numerous officials. Like bills drafted by Democrats, the proposal under discussion by six members on the Senate Finance Committee would bar insurance companies from denying coverage to any applicant. Nor could insurers charge higher premiums on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions. But it jettisons other core Democratic provisions in a reach for bipartisanship […]
CONTEST: Win Tix 2 See My Bloody Valentine At APW
Time for round two of our All Points West tix giveaway contest. These tix are for Day Two of APW, aka Saturday August 1st, and although Tool are the official headliner (along with Gogol Bordello, Ting Tings, Arctic Monkeys, Neko Case and Chairlift) in our estimation the real reason to be there that day is My Bloody Valentine. We can still remember where we were they day we heard Kennedy got shot: In our bedroom, listening to MBV’s Loveless, tripping our tits off. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Anyway, a pair of tickets […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Century Foundation fellow Maggie Mahar is the author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Healthcare Costs So Much, published in 2006. A former financial journalist for Institutional Investor, The New York Times, Barron’s and Bloomberg, Mahar writes the Healthbeat blog, a Century Foundation project. She has also contributed to Dartmouth Medicine, covering Medicare spending and the possibility of reform. Money-Driven Medicine argues that, over the past century, the history of U.S. health care has been shaped by corporate interests’ gradual encroachment on physician autonomy. According to Mahar, this has produced a system of costly and inefficient competition among […]
BOTTLED WATER: Lies And Propaganda
GOOD: Tappening, the tap-water campaigners, has taken its gloves off and is fighting the bottled-water business the dirty way. Using the old beat-them-at-their-own-game approach, Tappening’s new Start a Lie campaign takes on truth in advertising by allowing you to create your own viral lie about bottled water. Because, as they say, “If bottled water companies can lie, we can too.” MORE RELATED: There is so much wrong with bottled water that it’s hard to know where to begin (read Elizabeth Royte’s Bottlemania, for starters). But let’s start with the fact that bottled water is the most brilliantly marketed product ever […]
GREATEST HITS: Today I Saw… Revisited
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Today I Saw was a series of short imagistic non-fiction narratives I did back in 2007. I didn’t even conceive it as a series for publication, it was really just a bunch of scenes and images I jotted down while doing field work as a social worker. I was doing intensive community based work with homeless families, and writing about all the crazy things I saw in the field helped me decompress at the end of the day from the stress and pressure I was under at my often emotionally-grueling job. Phawker approached me about writing for them […]
THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH: John Travolta Reportedly Considering Split With Scientology
[Artwork by STEVEN BARRET] DAILY MAIL: His distress, say sources close to him, has been compounded by the first cracks in his 34-year relationship with the Church of Scientology, the cult-like religion of which Travolta is a prominent and generous benefactor. And there are dark mutterings that if he carries out private threats to leave, the organisation will go public with embarrassing details of his private life, including, it is claimed, allegations of past homosexual relationships. […] But there is much more to this than just a questioning of a once rock-solid faith. “I think it would be very difficult […]
LOSE YOUR ILLUSION: Quitters Never Win
WASHINGTON POST: Whether her ultimate goal now is to seek the presidency in 2012 or later is not known. Those who have some insight into her frame of mind believe she departs elected office without a real plan to make that happen — or even a plan for what to do with the next six months of her life. Palin left office about 18 months before the end of her term. In her farewell speech, she lashed out at the media, which she accused of “making things up,” and warned about encroachments from big government in Washington. “Be wary of […]
DEATH ON THE PIAZZA: Daily Beast Sends Deeney To Plush Night Club — Plush Night Club Is Not Amused
DAILY BEAST: The room has all the ambience of a high school gymnasium converted for a dance; the walls are brick and cinderblock painted a garish orange-red, and at the head of the room is a platform that barely qualifies as a stage where heavily tatted dudes in wifebeaters mill about, some holding microphones and rapping along with the music, some just taking up space. The music is so loud that you have to scream directly into someone’s ear for them to hear you. The crowd loves the down and dirty vibe that prevails; booty bounces to the beat of […]