THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT: CDC Study Says Teens Now Smoking More Marijuana Than Tobacco

CBS: A study from the CDC finds tobacco use among teens continues to decline, but there is some alarming news in this study.The government study shows more teens are smoking pot than are smoking cigarettes.The study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveys over 15,000 teens across the country looking at all kinds of risky behavior in 2011.And while only 18 percent of teens reported smoking a cigarette in the past 30 days, a higher percentage – 23 percent — say they smoked marijuana in the past month. MORE PHAWKER: ‘Alarming’? To who? RJ Reynolds? RELATED: Andrew Cuomo […]

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CONTEST: Win Tix 4 Jonathan Richman @ UT

[Illustration via EDGEART] If Jonathan Richman didn’t already exist, we would have never thought to invent him, which is a testament to both his originality and the shortcomings of our collective imagination. For more than 35 years, Richman has been a tireless advocate of hopeful romanticism, rugged individualism and unyielding optimism, travelling the world like some post-modern Jimmy Stewart with a guitar telling anyone that would listen that, despite all the hard-bitten cynicism that surrounds him, it’s still a wonderful life. He is, in short, the immaculate heart on the dirty sleeve of rock n’ roll. Years from now  – […]

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RIP: Ray Bradbury, Atomic Age Fabulist, Dead At 91

BY DAVID CORBO Ray Bradbury, one of America’s most prolific and talented literary figures, died Tuesday at the age of 91. In a writing career that spanned more than 70 years and birthed nearly 50 novels and 600 short stories as well as countless poems and essays, television and theatrical productions, Bradbury entertained the world with tales that plumbed the depths of human experience. He was the master of a writing style that was both literary and speculative but never short on popular appeal. Bradbury haunted us with the shades of lost civilizations in The Martian Chronicles. He warned us […]

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NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t

FRESH AIR Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s latest project — their first together in nine years — is an album featuring American folk songs and the tunes many of us learned as children, performed with grit, wit and a whole lot of electric guitar. Americana is a wild journey through the classic American songbook, featuring songs like “Oh, Susanna,” “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” and “Clementine” reinterpreted in a folk-rock style. Young tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that he got the idea for the album while working on a book about his life. Thinking about his childhood reminded him […]

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SIGUR ROS: Varúð

At The Mann July 29th & 30th. PREVIOUSLY: Sigur Ros To Blow Mann’s Mind x SIDEWALKING: The Man From Hopelandia Jón Þór Birgisson, Reykjavik, Iceland, 6;23 PM BY JONATHAN VALANIA RELATED: Let’s start with an understatement: things tend to move quite slowly in the world of Sigur Rós. This is true whether we’re talking about the glacial pace of their songs, the glacial pace at which they release them, or their artistic progression. In the 13 years since Ágætis Byrjunbecame the first and possibly only post-rock crossover record, Sigur Rós have edged closer to actual pop while still maintaining their […]

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Peter Nero Needs To Shut Up And Get A Real Job

Times are tough all over. A record number of Americans are on food stamps. Millions out of work. Millions more taking pay cuts and forced furloughs, holding onto what precious few jobs there are by the skin of their teeth.  The Philadelphia Orchestra, which is the mother ship of the Philly Pops,  has declared bankruptcy. Which, just to be very clear, means the Phily Pops is also bankrupt. As such, it has sought to re-negotiate the fat-cat contract of Philly Pops conductor Peter Nero, who currently pulls down more than a half million dollars a year for waving a baton […]

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MURDER IS MY BUSINESS: Q&A w/ Joe Kaczmarek

Photo by Jeff Fusco, all other photos by Joe Kaczmarek BY JONATHAN VALANIA As a kid, Joe Kaczmarek started scheming to get on the other side of the yellow police crime scene tape the way party people scheme to get on the other side of the velvet rope. He was born into it. His ‘nana’ listened to the police scanner like people listen to the radio. Soon he had his own police scanner and every night he went to sleep with the hiss, crackle and pop of police dispatchers calling all cars ringing in his ears. To Kaczmarek it was […]

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WORTH REPEATING: It’s Later Than You Think

  BLOOMBERG: Everybody blames the Internet for the decline of newspapers, but the Web is only the most recent of electric interruptions to have disturbed their profitability, which began with radio in the late 1920s and was followed by broadcast television, car radios, transistor radios, FM radio, and cable television. Newspapers were in so much advertising trouble in September 1941 that Time magazine ran a piece (paid) about their “downward economic spiral.” Press scholar David R. Davies argues in his 2006 book The Postwar Decline of American Newspapers, 1945-1965 that daily newspapers were in serious trouble by the mid-1960s, because, […]

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Win Tix 2 See The Dirty Dozen Brass Band Saturday

In 1977, the Dirty Dozen Social and Pleasure Club in New Orleans began showcasing a traditional Crescent City brass band. It was a joining of two proud, but antiquated, traditions at the time: social and pleasure clubs dated back over a century to a time when black southerners could rarely afford life insurance, and the clubs would provide proper funeral arrangements. Brass bands, early predecessors of jazz as we know it, would often follow the funeral procession playing somber dirges, then once the family of the deceased was out of earshot, burst into jubilant dance tunes as casual onlookers danced […]

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