Illustration by MATTHEW WOODSON NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Earlier this year, Greenwald, Poitras, and a third comrade in arms — former Nation writer Jeremy Scahill — launched a website called the Intercept. It is meant to be the prototype for a fleet of publications funded by Omidyar’s flagship company, First Look Media, to which Omidyar has initially committed $250 million. “We have the luxury of doing something different because we have this kind of infinite-resource backer,” Greenwald told me on the phone from Brazil, where he is based. “We’re thinking about how to do journalism structurally differently.” At the time of […]
THE GOOD SHEPHERD: A Q&A With Globe-Trotting New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Last week we got New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on the horn to discuss his new book, A Path Appears, co-authored with his wife Sheryl WuDunn, which extols the innovative but largely un-heralded efforts of a dedicated few to leave the world a better place than they found it. Just a few days prior, Kristof had been at the center of a cultural storm that erupted in the wake of his appearance on REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER along with Ben Affleck and Sam Harris, so we gave him an opportunity to clarify some points […]
STREET POET: Meet SEPTA’s Walt Whitman
Or maybe he’s the William Carlos Williams of SEPTA. Or the Carl Sandburg of SEPTA. Either way, his name is Mark Fuller and he gives mass transit rhyme and reason. From Scrapple TV, our partners in new media crime.
SMUS: Tax Inversion = You Pay Our Share
Illustration via FINANCIAL TIMES click HERE to enlarge BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Yet another tax-avoidance tumor is metastasizing in the belly of the corporate beast. The perps themselves refer to it as “tax inversion” (truth be told, they’d really prefer that the matter not be referred to at all) but please feel free to recognize it for what it really is: Big Greed’s most brazen effort to date to avoid its patriotic responsibility and shove the nation’s tax burden even farther up the ass of a dwindling middle class! Corporate apologists like to point out that America has the highest corporate tax rate (35%) on the planet, but what they don’t say […]
This Land Is My Land, This Land Is Your Land
“I Love You But…” by BEN HEINE BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Here we go again. The Israelis and the Palestinians. The “chosen” and the forsaken. The “sovereign” and the scorned. And the beatdown goes on. OK, so what’s the problem this time?! Why can’t these Gazan goat ropers accept their lot in life? Hell, what’s so bad about life in a concentration camp? You know, what with the Israelis being only too familiar with “attempted extermination,” you’d think they’d be at least somewhat, or maybe marginally, or how ’bout just a teeny weeny bit, shall we say, “ill-disposed” to the degradation and misery of others. Apparently […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Six Years A Slave
Illustration via ETHAN PERSOFF* BY WILLIAM C. HENRY So the leader of the haven’t-done-a-goddamn-thing klan is gonna sue the President for actually getting something done because the leader of the haven’t-done-a-goddamn-thing klan wants to make it look like he and the klan are actually doing something regardless of how maliciously racist and/or utterly moronic that something may be. Confused? Don’t be. The only “something” Boehner wants to get done is to pile another layer of elephant dung on a black President in order to shore up the Republican base’s intolerance and divert attention away from the party’s ongoing abhorrent Congressional do-nothingness. While the overall storyline of this immorality play entails […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free; The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, Tempest-tossed to me I lift my lamp beside the golden door! F*ck You, I Got Mine!
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Sure, I know it’s a question I’ve kicked around for years, but in light of Rep. Kantor’s election loss I’m willing to ask it yet again if only for its pure “irritation” effect. This time let’s direct it specifically to the real dolts within the Republican establishment (on the other hand, I suppose that description could aptly designate anyone within the Republican establishment these days), those hard-right oracles of lies, injustice and the un-American way; those so-called “influential” conservative media know-it-alls who profess to have all the answers so long as the questions don’t rise above the red-neck line. […]
BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY: Live From Wizard World
We duly deputized the gang from Panic Hour as our Geek Space Correspondents and sent them to Wizard World to ask the really hard questions nobody has the guts to ask anymore. No geeks were hurt in the making of this video. Special thanks to Scrapple TV/Woodshop Films, our partners in new media crime.
WHAT WE DO IS SECRET: Jason Fagone’s Excellent Profile Of ‘FOIA Terrorist’ Jason Leopold
Illustration by KRISTIAN HAMMERSTAD MEDIUM.COM: I first learned about Leopold’s work from Twitter. His profile picture showed him standing in front of the entrance to Guantánamo wearing a T-shirt from the punk band Black Flag. He called himself a “FOIA terrorist”—FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act. I started following him. The range of stuff that zips by on his feed is staggering and kind of thrilling: 140-character dispatches about guards and prisoners, spies and secrets, corporate intrigue, torture and war. Many of his tweets link to government documents he’s dug up. The documents regularly supply ammo to left and libertarian […]
Talking Guided By Voices w/ Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary, United States Of America
Photo by JONATHAN VALANIA EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally ran September 12th 2012. We present this encore edition to mark the news that Carney has just resigned his White House Press Sec. post, with a lengthy, never-before published exchange about 9/11 wherein Carney speaks at length about being on Air Force One as a reporter for TIME Magazine on that day. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Back in the spring, MAGNET’s collective jaw dropped when we learned that White House Press Secretary Jay Carney declared, in the middle of a briefing with the Washington press corps, that Guided By Voices was “the […]
EXCERPT: Brothers In Harms
\ MOTHER JONES: After eight years at MIT and a consulting firm, Charles returned to Wichita to learn the intricacies of the family business. Together, he and David would build their father’s Midwestern company, which as of 1967 had $250 millionin yearly sales and 650 employees, into a corporate Goliath with $115 billion in annual revenues and a presence in 60 countries. Under their leadership, Koch Industries grew into the second-largest private corporation in the United States (only the Minneapolis-based agribusiness giant Cargill is bigger). Bill, meanwhile, would become best known for his flamboyant escapades: as a collector of fine […]
ENDORSEMENT: N.A. Poe For City Council
Photo by LAUREN M. WAKSMAN Folks, we got trouble right here in Philadelphia. Trouble with a capital “T.” And that rhymes with “C” and that stands for CORRUPTION. All the major institutions in this city are wretched hives of patronage hires, hacks and shady backroom deals. There is zero accountability for the police, the unions, the politicians and don’t even get us started on the PPA. There is just one candidate running for City Council that aims to do something about it. His name is N. A. Poe and he is running on a platform of pulling back the curtains […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Robin Hood In Reverse
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Screw you! We got ours. Get your own. So spews the Republican leadership, and the major American corporations that keep them like Don Sterling f*ck toys, as they continue to defecate on any and all Democrat attempts to raise the standard of living of America’s working poor. Meanwhile, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer fires her just hired (15 months on the job) COO and provides him with a $58 MILLION severance package! You know, it’s sh*t like this that makes one wonder just how far this American plutocracy of ours is willing to go to prove it’s the most selfish, middle-finger-up-the-ass-of-the-less-fortunate, […]