Fredlandia Everyone knows (and loves) funnyman Fred Armisen from Portlandia and SNL but few know how he got there. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, kid. How do you get to Portlandia? Trenchmouth. MAGNET goes to 30 Rock to walk a mile in the wing tips of The Nicest Man In Show Business and untangle his punk rock roots By Jonathan Valania “Do you have Questlove’s cellphone number?” Beyonce’s drummer asks nobody in particular. She twists around from her perch in the front seat of a black Escalade that NBC has sent to ferry us from a […]
Search Results for: why we can't have nice things
THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE: Q&A w/ Wendell Potter, Healthcare Executive Turned Whistleblower
[Photo by ROBIN ODLAND] PART II BY JONATHAN VALANIA This is the second installment of a massive, 30,000 word, three-part Q&A with Philadelphian Wendell Potter*, former mild-mannered Cigna health insurance executive turned whistle-blowing superman standing up for truth, justice and the American way. (You can read Part I HERE.) You may have seen Mr. Potter testifying before Congress or talking about the ills of the health insurance industrial complex on CNN or MSNBC or PBS, or in the pages of The New York Times, Wall Street Journal or Time magazine, to name but a few. Last year he published […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR David Carr joins Terry Gross on Fresh Air to discuss his Twitter usage, the future of newspapers, error correction, his own media consumption, religion and the accountability of social media. He says that he thinks of Twitter as a personalized “human-enabled RSS [feed]” that allows him to follow what his friends are reading and thinking about at any given moment. “It serves to edit what’s going on in the world, and it puts a human curation on this huge fire hose of data that’s washing over us all,” he says. “The question becomes where to look, and it’s […]
WELCOME TO THE TERRORDOME: A Conversation With Dana Priest Of The Washington Post
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Last December, The Washington Post published a multi-part investigative series by Dana Priest and William Arkin that attempted to quantify the astonishing growth of the security-industrial complex in the wake of 9/11 and found that the exact parameters of that massive expansion are effectively unknowable. The series, which has been expanded into book form and recently published as Top Secret America: The Rise Of The New American Security State, boils down to this: The national security state “has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many […]
PAPERBOY: Slow-Jamming The Alt-Weeklies
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]
PAPERBOY: Slow-Jamming The Alt-Weeklies
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]
PAPERBOY: Slow-Jamming The Alt-Weeklies
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR If high-school government class taught us anything, it was that getting bills passed through Congress was a game of numbers: The bills with the most votes win. Turns out it’s not that simple. These days, the polarized state of American politics means that major bills need at least 60 votes to avoid an inevitable filibuster by the opposition. Political scientist Gregory Koger‘s new book Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate addresses the institutionalization of the filibuster — and describes congressional loopholes by way of which fast thinking and hard work can beat the […]
PAPERBOY: Slow-Jamming The Alt-Weeklies
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Century Foundation fellow Maggie Mahar is the author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Healthcare Costs So Much, published in 2006. A former financial journalist for Institutional Investor, The New York Times, Barron’s and Bloomberg, Mahar writes the Healthbeat blog, a Century Foundation project. She has also contributed to Dartmouth Medicine, covering Medicare spending and the possibility of reform. Money-Driven Medicine argues that, over the past century, the history of U.S. health care has been shaped by corporate interests’ gradual encroachment on physician autonomy. According to Mahar, this has produced a system of costly and inefficient competition among […]
SURRENDER: Things 2 Do In Denver When You’re Dead
HUFFINGTON POST: The Clinton campaign issued a statement at around 9pm saying they will be hosting an event to announce her support for Sen. Obama on Saturday, as opposed to Friday: Senator Clinton will be hosting an event in Washington, DC to thank her supporters and express her support for Senator Obama and party unity. This event will be held on Saturday to accommodate more of Senator Clinton’s supporters who want to attend. Multiple news organizations reported early Wednesday evening that Hillary Clinton is expected to officially suspend her campaign and drop out of the Democratic race on Friday. THE […]
KILLADELPHIA: 4 More Dead Since U Went To Bed
INQUIRER: A pregnant Germantown woman who was shot in the head Sunday night died early this morning at Albert Einstein Medical Center, police said. Bobbi Booker, 26, was shot in her left temple as her live-in boyfriend exchanged gunfire with another man outside the couple’s Queen Lane apartment in Germantown. Booker, who was four-months pregnant, had been on life-support since the shooting. Doctors were not able to save her four-month old unborn child, police said. Booker had two other young children. Police charged her boyfriend, Michael Thomas, 26, and Lamar Johnson, 22, with two counts each of attempted murder, aggravated […]
THE TROUBLE WITH DEENEY: Philadelphia Weekly’s Coverboy Answers His Harshest Critics
BY JEFF DEENEY The Next Mayor blog has a couple substantial posts talking about Showdown on Hurley Street. I would suggest reading them and getting involved in the larger discussion about poverty, crime and violence that’s bound to get louder as the change over to the Nutter administration draws nearer. I figured that the article would spark some strong responses both positive and negative; a lot of what I’ve written has. Let me address some points raised. * Blogger Phil starts out by saying, “An article from today, The Showdown on Hurley Street, struck me as hysteria.” In the larger […]