BETA BEAT: Anonymous announced its intention to “destroy” Westboro Baptist Church this weekend following news that the group would be picketing the funerals of children who died in Friday’s horrific school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Now, infamous 15-year-old hacker Cosmo the God of the Underground Nazi Hacktivist Group (UGNazi) appears to have joined the fray. The Twitter account of much-reviled Westboro spokesperson Shirley Phelps-Roper has been hacked, and Cosmo is claiming responsibility. Ms. Phelps-Roper is the daughter of Fred Phelps, who is the head of the WBC. Cosmo and the UG Nazi crew gained notoriety over the past year for […]
NOTHING IS REAL: The JFK Assassination
Illustration by PRINT MAFIA The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt He was the ultimate keeper of secrets, lurking in the shadows of American history. He toppled banana republics, planned the Bay of Pigs invasion and led the Watergate break-in. Now he would reveal what he’d always kept hidden: who killed JFK BY ERIK HEDEGAARD/ROLLING STONE EDITOR’S NOTE: Ordinarily we would tease a few paragraphs from the story and then send you to RS’s web site, but for reasons unclear this article is no longer there. Hence we have run it here in its entirety. It originally ran in the […]
MEDIA: Anderson Cooper’s First World Problems
The difference between Anderson Cooper flying to Gaza to get the ‘optics’ right for his reporting on the Israel Defense Forces’ bombing campaign — ducking off-camera when one lands a little too close for comfort — and the Palestinians that live in Gaza is that Anderson Cooper can leave any time he wants. RELATED: Death From Above
NPR FOR THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006
Illustration by ROBERLAN FRESH AIR What did Jesus look like? The many different depictions of Christ tell a story about race and religion in America. Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey explore that history in their new book, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. The book traces how different races and ethnic groups claimed Christ as their own — and how depictions of Jesus have both inspired civil rights crusades, and been used to justify the violence of white supremacists. The Ku Klux Klan could not rely on Christian doctrine to […]
EXCERPT: The Playboy Interview With Quentin Tarantino
“I just don’t want to be an old-man filmmaker. I want to stop at a certain point. Directors don’t get better as they get older. Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end. I am all about my filmography, and one bad film f*cks up three good ones … When directors get out-of-date, it’s not pretty,” says filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. Playboy’s November Interview sits down with the maverick director to talk about Django Unchained, facing 50 and why he’s no longer a Hollywood outsider (issue on newsstands and i.Playboy.com Tuesday, November 20, with the […]
TONITE: Sympathy For The Devil
“Mick ‘Rock N’ Roll Circus’” by MICHAEL HOUGHTON TIME: Stories sometimes have a way of making themselves true. The notion of The Rolling Stones as the “bad boys” of British ’60s rock, for instance, may have had a basis in reality and personality, but it also originated as a term of marketing and media shorthand. As Brett Morgen’s new HBO documentary Crossfire Hurricane (premieres tonight, Nov. 15) notes early on, as the Stones began to break out after The Beatles’ success, the press framed their narrative as the villains to the Beatles’ nice guys, the satisfaction-getters vs. the hand-holders. It […]
WORTH REPEATING: Guy F*cked Day
Image via TUMBLR NEW YORK TIMES: GUY FIERI, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square? Have you pulled up one of the 500 seats at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar and ordered a meal? Did you eat the food? Did it live up to your expectations? Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC […]
JUST ANNOUNCED: Wyatt Cenac @ The Troc
Daily Show funnyman Wyatt Cenac will rock The Troc January 18th. Tickets go on sale HERE Friday at noon. WIKIPEDIA: Cenac was born in New York City and raised in Dallas, Texas. He attended high school in Texas at the Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas.[3] He is of West Indian descent.[4][5] While in elementary school, he became friends with comic book writer Brian K. Vaughn,[6] who also introduced him to comic books. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before moving to Los Angeles to further his career. Having previously worked for three years as a […]
The Sins Of Gen. Petraeus & The Military-Media Complex
Illustration by WILLIAM BANZAI7 EDITOR’S NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IS AN EXCERPT FROM A JUST-PUBLISHED BUZZFEED PIECE BY MICHAEL HASTINGS, THE NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER WHO WROTE THE RUNAWAY GENERAL, THE ROLLING STONE PIECE THAT TOOK DOWN GENERAL STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL BUZZFEED: The warning signs about Petreaus’s core dishonesty have been around for years. A brief summary: we can start with the persistent questions critics have raised about his Bronze Star for Valor. Or, that in 2004, during the middle of a presidential election, Petraeus wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, supporting President Bush and saying that the Iraq policy was working. […]
STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES: ‘Don’t Get All Potted Up’
These assclowns have never let not knowing what they are talking about stop them from doing so at length. Every day. Day after day. Here’s some pearls of wisdom on the news that Colorado voters passed a referendum last Tuesday that legalizes recreational marijuana use.
CRUEL & USUAL: The Obscene Living Conditions Inside Philadelphia’s House Of Corrections And The Inquirer Series That Helped Make It That Way
Painting by Fernando Botero BY JEFF DEENEY Recently I had a rare opportunity to go inside Philadelphia’s House of Corrections, the oldest jail in the Philadelphia Prison System, and see the conditions inmates live in. I was there in my capacity as a social worker and not as a writer and frankly I had no intention of writing about the experience. But as I walked the block prisoners implored me to, perhaps thinking I was a reporter, so I feel I must report on their behalf. “Tell them out there about this overcrowding you seen here!” “Put it in the […]
WORTH REPEATING: The New Yorker Endorsement
Photo by PLATON THE NEW YORKER: Romney has embraced the values and the priorities of a Republican Party that has grown increasingly reactionary and rigid in its social vision. It is a party dominated by those who despise government and see no value in public efforts aimed at ameliorating the immense and rapidly increasing inequalities in American society. A visitor to the F.D.R. Memorial, in Washington, is confronted by these words from Roosevelt’s second Inaugural Address, etched in stone: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is […]
DEAR TERRY GROSS: Enough With The Gershwins!
Artwork by ANDY WARHOL Terry, we love, ya. We listen every day. The best in the biz, etc. We plug the show all the time and happy to do it. You name-checking us is our ringtone, fer chrissakes! But enough with the friggin’ Gershwins already! Especially when there is so much awesome music going on these days and so little of it finds its way onto Fresh Air. A Google search combining “Fresh Air” and “Gershwin” yields 430,000 results! We just had one of those LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE-style meltdowns, but with GERSHWIN instead of BRITNEY — and we’re not even […]