FRESH AIR: A new book examines the conservative direction the Supreme Court has headed in over the past 50 years, ever since Nixon became president. The author, my guest Adam Cohen, writes, for five decades, the court has, with striking regularity, sided with the rich and powerful against the poor and weak in virtually every area of the law. He says, in campaign finance law, the court has opened the floodgates to money from wealthy individuals and corporations. In election law, it’s upheld rules and practices that make it more difficult for the poor and racial minorities to vote. In […]
GIRL UNINTERRUPTED: Q&A w/ Amy Rigby
BY SOPHIE BURKHOLDER A Catholic-raised Pittsburgh girl, Amy Rigby fled her steel mill hometown for New York, then in its mid-70s punk prime to attend Parsons School of Design. Soon shrouding her eyes in black liner, she quickly became a fixture at CBGB and fell into a crowd of downtown punk scenesters. Her love of music grew into a passion for making her own, first with bands like Last Roundup and The Shams, and later on her own. Her first solo album, 1996’s Diary of a Mod Housewife, received widespread critical acclaim in the press a few short years […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Here It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is now the richest man in the world, with an empire that stretches from Hollywood to Whole Foods — and even into outer space. The new PBS Frontline documentary, Amazon Empire: The Rise And Reign Of Jeff Bezos, investigates how Bezos transformed Amazon from an online bookseller into a trillion-dollar business that’s unprecedented in its size and reach. Director James Jacoby, who worked with fellow filmmaker Anya Bourg on the project, calls the company an “inescapable part of our modern lives.” “It’s not just how the majority of Americans are shopping online,” he […]
THEATER REVIEW: Queen Lear In Bristol
BY JON HOULON THEATER CRITIC I used to beat myself up over not being able to recall much of what I read. For instance, the only thing I remembered from the 400 plus pages of Kerouac’s rather spotty Desolation Angels was the word “passersby.” At least I got a song out of it — and that’s a fact, Jack! But then I read U and I by the great Nicholson Baker where he admits to only retaining a tiny bit of his literary hero John Updike’s canon. I figured if Baker could only summon up a phrase or two of […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR: The stories of the hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal to silence them about their affairs with Donald Trump were first reported in The Wall Street Journal by my guest, Joe Palazzolo and Michael Rothfeld. Last year, their “Hush Money” series won a Pulitzer Prize. Palazzolo and Rothfeld have expanded on that reporting in a new book called “The Fixers: The Bottom-Feeders, Crooked Lawyers, Gossipmongers And Porn Stars Who Created The 45th President.” The hush money payments were made on behalf of Donald Trump with Trump’s knowledge during the 2016 […]
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How The CIA Overthrew The Duly Elected Prime Minister Of Iran in 1953, AKA Why They Hate Us
NPR: On Aug. 19, 2013, the CIA publicly admitted for the first time its involvement in the 1953 coup against Iran’s elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. The documents provided details of the CIA’s plan at the time, which was led by senior officer Kermit Roosevelt Jr., the grandson of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. Over the course of four days in August 1953, Roosevelt would orchestrate not one, but two attempts to destabilize the government of Iran, forever changing the relationship between the country and the U.S. In this episode, we go back to retrace what happened in the inaugural episode […]
BOOK REVIEW: And Shit Yeah It’s Cool!
BY JON HOULON Indie rock. I never understood that. Independent of what? Commerce? I doubt it. Your Drag City is the Capitol of a state called Filthy Lucre. Songs? Yea, could be. I heard Tom Russell – one of the finest #OKboomer songwriters still plying his trade – say that the trouble with indie kids is that they don’t write songs but, rather, “soundscapes.” Ever try playing a Pavement ditty around a campfire? It falls flat. And, lord knows, don’t sing DCB over roasted marshmallows unless you want your pals propelled into a fiery furnace. My best guess is […]
EXCERPT: Postcard From The Edge
VULTURE: [Carrie] caused deep worry that was somehow hidden by the movie crews’ obsession with John’s addiction rather than her own. Carrie—younger than the others—was intensely fragile. She was generous, brilliant, witty, charismatic, caring—and deeply vulnerable: friends could see that. When they all got to the Belushis’ Vineyard house, “my brother was most concerned about her. He had to carry her limp body from room to room. I guess she was conscious enough that he didn’t call an ambulance, but he had a strong sense that she was really out of it.” It was during that spate of days on the […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR: Andrew Marantz has spent the past three years reporting on the alt-right’s use of social media. He’s embedded with the people he describes as the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into policy. Marantz is a staff writer for The New Yorker and started this reporting project during the 2016 presidential campaign. He watched how extremist memes and lies were created and went viral, and he profiled the people creating the means. Marantz has also been reporting on social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, that claim they’re dedicated to free […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR: Judd Apatow was a teenager when he first “met” comic Garry Shandling in a phone interview for his high school radio show. Years later, their paths intersected again when Shandling, who was hosting the Grammy Awards, hired Apatow to write jokes for him. Shandling had been Johnny Carson’s guest host on The Tonight Show before creating and starring in the groundbreaking comedy series It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and The Larry Sanders Show. He became Apatow’s mentor and close friend. “He completely changed my life,” Apatow says of Shandling. “He hired me to write for his show. He did […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR: Dan Piepenbring was a 29-year-old editor of the literary magazine The Paris Review in 2016 when he met Prince for the first time — and agreed to help the musical icon pen a memoir. It was the assignment of a lifetime for a writer who had not yet published a book, but Prince wanted someone he could open up to — and Piepenbring fit the bill. “If there was any advantage to the kind of guilelessness that I brought to our conversations, it was that it let me listen to him very openly and without judgment,” Piepenbring says. […]
WORTH REPEATING: How I Became A Weirdo
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following essay by Phawker almnus Elizabeth Fiend [pictured below] about her early days as a weirdo punk rocker/comic strip artist is included in THE BOOK OF WEIRDO just published by Last Gasp. Legendary in alt-comic book circles, Weirdo was a comics anthology created by R. Crumb in 1981 and ran until 1993. THE BOOK OF WEIRDO includes a comprehensive history of the publication, interviews with its three editors — R.Crumb, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and Peter Bagge (of Hate fame) — and testimonials from artists that contributed over the years, including Miss Fiend, hence this essay. Robert Aline […]