FRESH AIR: Our guest today, Salon’s editor-in-chief David Daley, has a new book that he says began with a simple question. When President Obama won re-election in 2012 and a Democratic tide gave the party a big majority in the Senate, why did the House of Representatives remain firmly in Republican hands? The result was even more striking since voters cast 1.3 million more ballots for Democratic House candidates than Republican ones. The answer, Daley decided, was effective gerrymandering of House districts following the 2010 census. And it’s state legislatures that draw most of the congressional boundaries across the […]
Q&A With Nick Spitzer, Professor Of American Boogie & Host Of NPR’s American Routes
Illustration by ALEX FINE EDITOR’S NOTE: Like many of you, we were deeply disappointed to learn that WHYY-FM has elected to drop American Routes from their weekend programming, where it has been a fixture for more than a decade. (Boo-stink!) But fear not local lovers of Americana, WXPN has stepped in and offered American Routes a home on its airwaves. American Routes will air on Sundays from 3-5 pm starting Sunday June 19th. (Hooray!) To celebrate, we are re-running our in-depth 2009 interview with American Routes host Nick Spitzer. Enjoy!) BY JONATHAN VALANIA Nick Spitzer is a folkorist, ethnographer, professor […]
DJ SHADOW + RUN THE JEWELS: Nobody Speak
DJ Shadow’s new album The Mountain Will Fall drops next week on Mass Appeal Records. DJ Shadow plays the TLA on October 10th.
WORTH REPEATING: Praying Does Not Stop This
This weekend's mass shooting in Orlando is another perfect opportunity for Congress to ignore common sense.https://t.co/2myKeufZrn — Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 14, 2016 So get off your knees and vote the fuck out of office the odious gun lobby stooges we call Congress that relentlessly maintain the psycho-friendly status quo of our in-fucking-sane gun laws.
Win Tix To See Dolly Parton @ The Mann Center
There was a time in America, an awful time of bad clothes, bad drugs, bad presidents, and bad mustaches, known as the 1970s, when Dolly Parton was the living punchline to a running national joke about big boobs and dumb blondes. Four and half decades later, nobody’s laughing at Dolly Parton any more. Circa now, Dolly Parton is a country icon, a feminist icon, a gay icon, and a living testimonial to the Picture Of Dorian Gray-like power of plastic surgery, in the right surgeon’s skilled hands and on the right face, to do less harm than good. Long […]
THERE WILL BE BLOOD: Murder Inc.
NEW YORK TIMES: In the 1960s, under Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, the Pentagon bought vast quantities of the rifle, calling it the M-16, for American ground troops in Vietnam. The M-16’s firepower and reputation for lethality were necessary, in Mr. McNamara’s view, to counter the Kalashnikov assault rifles carried by the North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong. […] AR-15s that fire only on semiautomatic are generally legal in the United States, and are widely owned by assault-rifle enthusiasts. They are also sometimes used in crimes, and have been involved in some of the most deadly mass shootings in American […]
RIP: The Death Of Greatness
FRESH AIR: What a loss to suffer, even if for years you knew it was coming. Muhammad Ali, who died Friday, in Phoenix, at the age of seventy-four, was the most fantastical American figure of his era, a self-invented character of such physical wit, political defiance, global fame, and sheer originality that no novelist you might name would dare conceive him. Born Cassius Clay in Jim Crow-era Louisville, Kentucky, he was a skinny, quick-witted kid, the son of a sign painter and a house cleaner, who learned to box at the age of twelve to avenge the indignity of […]
#I’M WITH HER: Senator Elizabeth Warren Rips The Donald A New One, And It’s A Beautiful Thing
Elizabeth Warren says to Donald Trump’s fat orange phony fuckface what alleged GOP tough guys Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz were too goddamn pussy to say: the horrible truth. If she’d run in GOP primary, guaranteed Trump wouldn’t have lasted more than a month. Because thin-skinned racist bullies like him can’t take a punch.
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR: To an outsider, the start-up culture at Pied Piper, the fictional tech company featured in the HBO comedy series Silicon Valley, might seem a little odd. Not only do the company’s employees live and work together in an “incubator,” they also get into biting arguments about the nuances of whether it’s acceptable to type spaces instead of tabs when programming code. Alec Berg, who serves as showrunner along with creator Mike Judge, tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that the quirky details viewers see on the show are inspired by real life. “One of our writers texted a […]
CINEMA: Cum On Feel The Boyz
SLADE IN FLAME (1975, directed by Richard Loncraine, 86 minutes U.K.) OIL CITY CONFIDENTIAL (2009, directed by Julien Temple, 106 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC British rock gave us plenty of adorable mop tops and fey dandies but they also have a long tradition of rough and tumble r&b, rock and blues bands whose fan base ran strong beyond the sophisticated borders of London and into the wilds of the country’s midlands. This month’s double bill joins two rather different films about two different bands, navigating the wild waters of the 70s music industry. Slade in Flame […]
BERN OUT: California Screaming
CNN: Despite a night of disappointing losses, Bernie Sanders vowed Tuesday night to continue his campaign and to take his fight all the way to the convention in Philadelphia. While Hillary Clinton secured the delegates she needed Monday to become the presumptive presidential nominee, Sanders channeled the defiance of his supporters as he took the stage shortly before 11 p.m. PT. The crowd was on edge — angry with the press and worried that he would give in to the growing pressure from Democratic leaders to bow out of the race. But it wasn’t long before it became clear […]
BEING THERE: Roots Picnic 2016
DMX by DYLAN LONG The ninth annual Roots Picnic took place this past Saturday at Philly’s Festival Pier, sporting potentially one of the most buzzed-about lineups in its entire history. With headliners such as R&B legend Usher (backed by The Roots of course), Future, one of the don dadas in rap right now, and soul sensation Leon Bridges, one could wonder how this lineup could get any sweeter for hip hop and R&B fans far and wide. Lo and behold, The Roots succeeded immensely once again in gathering some of the most hot and groundbreaking artists in the game right […]