FRESH AIR: In the 1960s, Janis Joplin was an icon of the counterculture, a female rock star at a time when rock was an all-boys’ club. “At that point in time there weren’t too many women taking center stage,” biographer Holly George-Warren says. “Janis created this incredible image that went along with her amazing vocal ability. … [She] was very, very different than most of the women that came before.” On stage, Joplin oozed confidence, sexuality and exuberance. It all seemed so effortless, but George-Warren describes Joplin as a bookworm who worked hard to create her “blues feelin’ mama” musical […]
THE ELECTRIC HORSEMAN: Q&A W/ Author And BoJack Horseman Creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg
BY PEYTON MITZEL I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why the animated Netflix series Bojack Horseman, now in its sixth season, resonates so strongly with me. It’s an animated metafictional critique of stardom about a washed-up sitcom star named BoJack, who also happens to be an alcoholic horse, struggling to find functional happiness in the crushing shitstorm that is the world these days — so it’s not exactly telling me my life. And yet, despite the fact that I was 17 when I started watching the show, I found myself relating to the roughly middle-aged characters and their hardships, […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR: When Christopher Wylie first began working for the British behavioral research company SCL Group, the company used data drawn from a number of sources as a means of potentially altering outcomes for their, sometimes military, clients. But over time, Wylie’s mission — and that of the company — expanded. Conservative strategist Steve Bannon, who later worked in President Trump’s White House, became involved with the SCL subsidiary Cambridge Analytica. Wylie, who served as Cambridge Analytica’s research director for a year and a half, watched as his group began to use of data from Facebook and other online sources […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: Fables Of The Reconstruction
FRESH AIR: Some of today’s most divisive issues related to racial equality, voting rights and voter suppression, women’s rights, who gets to be a citizen, mass incarceration and what is the meaning of equal justice are issues you can’t fully understand without understanding the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. These are the amendments that were added to the Constitution after the Civil War in the era known as Reconstruction. The 13th ended slavery. The 14th made anyone born in the U.S. a citizen and said that the state can’t deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR: In 2013, Edward Snowden was an IT systems expert working under contract for the National Security Agency when he traveled to Hong Kong to provide three journalists with thousands of top-secret documents about U.S. intelligence agencies’ surveillance of American citizens. To Snowden, the classified information he shared with the journalists exposed privacy abuses by government intelligence agencies. He saw himself as a whistleblower. But the U.S. government considered him a traitor in violation of the Espionage Act. After meeting with the journalists, Snowden intended to leave Hong Kong and travel — via Russia — to Ecuador, where he […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR: Several Democratic presidential candidates are calling for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh after The New York Times published an essay Sept. 14 describing alleged sexual misconduct that occurred during his college years at Yale. New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, who penned the essay, covered Kavanaugh’s contentious 2018 confirmation hearings, in which Christine Blasey Ford alleged that he’d sexually assaulted her at a house party when they were both teenagers. The FBI conducted an investigation into Kavanaugh’s behavior, but it was restricted in terms of time and scope. The Senate ultimately voted […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR: During the early period of the Cold War, the CIA became convinced that communists had discovered a drug or technique that would allow them to control human minds. In response, the CIA began its own secret program, called MK-ULTRA, to search for a mind-control drug that could be weaponized against enemies. MK-ULTRA, which operated from the 1950s until the early ’60s, was created and run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Journalist Stephen Kinzer, who spent several years investigating the program, calls the operation the “most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control.” Some of Gottlieb’s […]
REST IN POWER: Author Toni Morrison, ‘Towering Novelist Of The Black Experience’, Dead At 88
Illustration by Alexandra Compain-Tissier NEW YORK TIMES: In awarding her the Nobel, the Swedish Academy cited her “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import,” through which she “gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” Ms. Morrison animated that reality in a style resembling that of no other writer in English. Her prose, often luminous and incantatory, rings with the cadences of black oral tradition. Her plots are dreamlike and nonlinear, spooling backward and forward in time as though characters bring the entire weight of history to bear on their every act. Her narratives mingle the voices of […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR: In the days following the 1986 explosion in the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, a military officer working to manage the response from an abandoned hotel nearby noticed a mysterious black carpet in the empty dining hall. When he got closer, he realized it was not a carpet; it was thousands of flies, alive but immobilized by the radiation in the air. That’s one of the details you’ll find in the book Midnight In Chernobyl by our guest, journalist Adam Higginbotham, who writes for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and other publications The book has drawn new […]
Win Tix 2 Freakonomics Radio Live @ Kimmel Ctr
Photo by AUDREY BERNSTEIN Freakonomics Radio, one of the ten most popular podcasts in the country, is hosting a live show at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia on June 6th and we have a pair of tickets to give away to some lucky Phawker reader. What’s that you say? “What is this *makes sarcastic air quotes* freakin’ nomix thing you speak of?” Oh brother, where art thou?!? Time to get your freak on. Here’s a brief history of time as it applies to Freakonomics from their web site: It began when New York journalist and author Stephen J. Dubner [pictured] […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR: On March 15, a 28-year-old Australian man opened fire in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 50 people and injuring dozens more. The shooter had previously declared allegiance to “white identity” — a fact that came as no surprise to J.M. Berger, an author who studies extremist movements. “We’re seeing a resurgence in various countries,” he says of white nationalism. “It’s a worldwide phenomenon.” Berger, who studies the online activity of extremists, notes that the New Zealand shooter praised President Trump as “as a symbol of renewed white identity” in a 74-page document he published before the […]
BOOKS: The Great Gritsby
PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE: Gritty is only four months old, but in that time he’s shown up everywhere. On wedding cakes, on Jimmy Fallon, on Christmas ornaments, on a fake (hopeful?) cover of Time magazine. So consider us highly un-shocked to discover that our favorite orange fur-ball made an appearance on some more fake covers: This time of the literary variety, thanks to a series of mock-ups by local indie publisher Quirk Books. MORE
BOOKS: The Importance Of Being Edward Gorey
THE ATLANTIC: When the war was over, Gorey went to Harvard, where he set about the business of—as Dery puts it—“becoming Gorey.” His assistant dean found him to be a “queer looking egg.” But his best buddy was the poet Frank O’Hara, so who cares? There began the long coats, the many rings, the weary supremacy. He had crushes on other men. No sex, though, as far as Dery can ascertain, and no long-term companionship. Sedulous bachelorhood became the MO. Morrissey again: The hills are alive with celibate cries. Gorey moved to Manhattan in 1953 and churned out book […]
