Why does it take the prime minister of Ireland to speak truth to douchebag? Right wing/Tea Party talk radio gasbag Michael Graham gets a smackdown of common sense from the Prime Minister of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins. Why is it that Ireland gets elected officials like Mr. Higgins and we get asshats like THIS? RELATED: The President of Ireland Michael D Higgins has become a celebrity on YouTube over a two year-old broadcast debate that resurfaced in which he eviscerates ardent US Republican radio broadcaster Michael Graham over issues like healthcare and foreign policy. The recording is hurtling towards 500,000 […]
TRUTH DIGGER: Q&A With Christopher Hedges, Author, Journalist, American Who Tells The Truth
Christopher Lynn Hedges (born September 18, 1956) is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies.[1] His most recent book, which he wrote with the cartoonist Joe Sacco, is “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012). Hedges and Sacco, who illustrated the book, reported from the poorest pockets in the United States including the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota, Camden, New Jersey, the coal fields of southern West Virginia, the nation’s produce fields and in the last chapter from the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park.[2] Hedges is also known as […]
BOOKS: Q&A With Daily Show Writer Kevin Bleyer, Fearless Re-Framer Of The U.S. Constitution
BY JONATHAN VALANIA The Constitution may be a remarkable schematic of human rights in a liberal democracy but it’s a terrible piece of comedy. Seriously, I didn’t laugh once. And what the world needs now, besides love-sweet-love, is funny. Kevin Bleyer has a pretty impressive resume in The Funny: humorous commentaries on NPR’s All Things considered; staff writer for Bill Maher and Dennis Miller; joke writer for President Obama’s White House Correspondence Dinner speeches; three Emmys and more than a 1000 broadcast hours of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart under his belt as a staff writer. One day he […]
Q&A w/ Jad Abumrad, Co-Host Of WNYC’s Radiolab
BY JONATHAN VALANIA If you are not already down with the broadcast brilliance that is WNYC’s Radiolab you are doing your life wrong. Every week co-hosts Jad Abumrad [pictured, below left] and Robert Krulwich [pictured, below right] create cinema between your ears. Each episode explores a big-picture topic — time, space, sleep, identity — and comes at it from four or five different angles, co-mingling seemingly disconnected sub-narratives into a lattice of cognition, uncannily mirroring the through lines of consciousness itself. It’s a show about understanding, that, when it works, and it pretty much always does, triggers understanding. Which is […]
EXTRA! EXTRA!: Mr. Phawker Goes To Washington
DAILY NEWS: We’re surprised he cleared Secret Service security, but Phawker.com editor Jonathan Valania was at the White House on Friday interviewing President Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, about his love of indie-rock veterans Guided By Voices. The interview is to appear in the October issue of Magnet. Like the local music magazine, which had been on hiatus, Guided By Voices is also back, after more than five years apart, and plays the Trocadero (1003 Arch) on July 6. Carney revealed his affinity for the Ohio-based Robert Pollard and his GBV cohorts last year. The interview was rescheduled a […]
The End Of Phawker As You Know It
Take a good look at the old Phawker, it’s your last chance. Later today Phawker will be unveiling a radical site re-design. Bold. Clean. Sharp. Uncluttered. Easier to use, easier to read, and easier to tell all your little friends about. Great taste, less filling. Even better than the real thing. No, this isn’t the new look, it’s a full-page, four-color ad trumpeting our makeover on page 40 of this week’s issue of the City Paper which hits the street today. See you on the other side.
THESE ARE PEOPLE WHO DIED: Photos Of The 77 Unarmed (Mostly) Teenagers Norwegian White Supremacist Anders Breivik Killed In ‘Self-Defense’
DAILY MAIL: Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik broke down in tears on the first day of his terror trial today — when a video clip he had created, mentioning Vlad the Impaler, was screened. The 33-year-old, who admits killing eight in an Oslo bomb blast and 69 in a shooting spree on the island of Utoya last July, remained emotionless as prosecutors spent two hours describing in graphic detail how each of his victims died. But he suddenly became emotional when shown an anti-Muslim 12-minute video he had posted on YouTube before the carnage, wiping away tears with trembling […]
NEW YORK TIMES ASKS: WTF Is Up With The People Running The Inquirer/Daily News?
NEW YORK TIMES: The new owners installed Mr. Osberg, who had been the president and publisher of Newsweek magazine, but the financial picture has continued to decline. According to sales documents obtained by The New York Times — marked as “highly confidential” — the company had a 13.9 percent drop in advertising revenues last year and earnings were less than $5 million. On Wednesday, the company announced a round of buyouts and potential layoffs that will eliminate 37 positions. MORE MEDIAWIRE: Philadelphia Media Network executives announced at a meeting with Guild leaders today that they will reduce the newsrooms of […]
THE DREAM POLICE: Q&A With Ray Lewis, Retired Philadelphia Police Captain & OWS Protester
EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally ran back in December. We are re-running it today on the occasion of Captain Ray Lewis speaking today at a noontime OccupyPhilly rally at Independence Mall. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Ray Lewis, a retired Philadelphia Police captain with 24 years of service under his belt, created some of the most iconic imagery of the Occupy Wall Street protests by showing up at Zuccotti Park in his uniform with a sign that read: NYPD, WATCH ‘INSIDE JOB,’ JOIN US. Footage of his high profile arrest outside the New York Stock Exchange went viral, and he quickly became […]
Q&A: With Online Privacy Expert Lori Andrews
The take away from I Know Who You Are And Saw What You Did is this: As an Internet user your rights are exactly none. Actually, that’s not true, you do have the right not to use it. But assuming you have waived that right, know that you are being watched, probed and profiled, your footprints are being tracked from your front door to the furthest reaches of the digital ether and back. They know who you are and what you did. Somewhere there is a file being kept on you. They know a thousand things about you. Preferences, locations, […]
REWIND 2011: BEST OF Q&A: The Year In Questions And Answers
THE TESTIFIER [Illustrations by ALEX FINE] BY JONATHAN VALANIA In advance of her recent reading at the Free Library to promote her new book Reimagining Equality: Stories Of Race, Gender And Finding A Home, we present a conversation with Anita Hill, professor of social policy, law, and women’s studies at Brandeis University. Discussed: The fantasia of a Post-Racial America; the mendacity, narcissism and hypocrisy of Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain; the right wing’s racializing the blame for the 2008 financial crisis; how she passed the lie detector test Clarence Thomas refused to take; the emancipation of her grandfather from slavery; […]
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A MIDDLE-AGED MAN: A Q&A With Cartoonist Dan Clowes
EDITOR’S NOTE: To mark the occasion of yet another swell New Yorker cover by Mr. Clowes, we are re-running our interview with him from last spring. Enjoy. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Daniel Clowes’ 30-plus-year career as a cartoonist/graphic novelist/screenwriter has seen some remarkable reversals of fortune. Back in the mid-80s, when Clowes was fresh out of Pratt and looking to take the graphic design/illustration world by storm, he couldn’t get art directors to return his phone calls. These days, post-Ghost World, the New Yorker and The New York Times plead with him to return their calls. When not busy cranking out […]
MEDIA: Life After Death Magnetic
INQUIRER: “The music industry was in the toilet, and we were able to weather that,” says Magnet editor Eric T. Miller, who in 1993 cofounded the magazine. (John Cusack was reading it in publicity shots for the 2000 movie adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. “And then the magazine industry was in the toilet, and we were able to weather that — for a while.” And then, in 2008, the economy crashed. “You’re able to weather 90 things going wrong, but 100 things . . . .” In a shrinking market where online music sites and blogs such as Pitchfork […]