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AD AGE: The common view that Facebook “likes” equate to brand engagement took a hit last month when the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shared some interesting data with us. Researchers found that less than 1% of fans of the 200 biggest brands on Facebook actually engaged. Their conclusion was based on a six-week study of Facebook’s People Talking About This metric, with researchers considering the number as a proportion of fan bases. Only 0.45% of fans engaged, if you subtract likes to isolate for more meaningful activity, including shares and comments. This confirmed something many readers already suspected: Facebook fan bases and […]

FRESH AIR Almost one year ago, the Fukushima nuclear disaster nearly led to a global catastrophe, if not for the efforts of a small group of engineers, soldiers, and firemen, who risked their own lives in the days after the disaster to prevent a complete nuclear meltdown. Investigative reporter Dan Edge wanted to find out what it was like for the workers who were inside the Fukushima Dai-icihi Nuclear Power Plant when the meltdowns began. His new Frontline documentary chronicles what happened to those plant engineers, as well as what happened to the small corps of workers who entered the […]

125th Street, NYC, 8:01 AM by JEFF FUSCO

Brown M&Ms from Van Halen on Vimeo. Van Halen plays a sold out show the Verizon Center on Monday.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The author is finishing up a two year hitch in the Peace Corps doing health counseling in rural Paraguay. He sends Phawker intermittent dispatches of his adventures whenever he gets close enough to civilization for Internet access. BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH SOUTH AMERICAN CORRESPONDENT Paraguay’s Chaco is a forbidding plain of mesquite, baking heat, and swirling dust. The last time I visited, I promised myself I would never return. But last month, after I heard about the Arete Guazu – a type of indigenous carnaval – I once again found myself spending eight cramped hours on a bus […]

[Artwork by WRIGHT SENARES] NEW YORK TIMES: Most of that attention has focused on his complaint that President Obama’s stated goal of making higher education accessible to all is a snobby one that assumes academic inclinations where they may not exist. But Santorum has also decried universities as enemies of faith, environments that leach some of the unquestioned piety out of young adults who are, in this new setting, being prodded to ask questions. He went so far as to call colleges “indoctrination mills” that ridicule and isolate young conservatives. […] If you couple the selectiveness and stridency of Santorum’s […]

SUMMARY: Wikileaks has published five million emails from Stratfor, an intelligence company based in Texas that, looking at their practices, appears to be America’s very own privately run CIA. According to Wikileaks, their deals would also include the use of privileged information to make money in financial markets. Stratfor’s clients are the US Government, other countries and military organizations, as well as private companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman or Raytheon. They have a global network of spies in governments and media companies, including “secret deals with dozens of media organizations and journalists, from Reuters to the Kiev Post.” According […]

DAILY NEWS: Mayor Nutter talked Fox 29 out of airing a video that captured him spanking the buttocks of a blonde with whom he drank and bowled at North Bowl (909 N. 2nd), say sources familiar with the situation. A Fox 29 viewer recorded Nutter and his female companion having a blast about 2 a.m. one day last summer, sources say. We’re told the cellphone video is of high-enough quality that you can hear the two butt slaps Nutter delivered to the woman, identified by our sources only as Andrea, as she got up to bowl. MORE MEDIA BISTRO: WTFX […]

Comedian Aziz Ansari brings Buried Alive Tour to Philadelphia with stand-up comedic performance scheduled on Saturday, June 23, 2012 at 7 p.m. in the Merriam Theater. Tickets go on sale to the public on Friday, March 2 at 10 a.m. Tickets for comedian Aziz Ansari are available at $35 to $45, and can be purchased by calling 215-893-1999, online at kimmelcenter.org, or at the Kimmel Center Box Office located on Broad and Spruce streets.

Gone are the days of enjoying life’s simple pleasures for pleasure’s sake. Twenty-first-century Americans are on a mission to cram every second of their earthly existence with significant accomplishments and momentous events. Even the most mundane undertaking must be approached with zeal, gusto, and expertise, or so the media persuade us to believe. Are we capable of doing anything casually anymore? In this first book-length treatment of media’s obsession with triviality, cultural critic Ronald Bishop calls into focus the role of media in the demise of scale—the amount of effort, intensity, and significance with which we live—in contemporary culture. Bishop […]

RELATED: Psych-rock kings the Flaming Lips did a shit-ton of collaborating in 2011, releasing EPs with Neon Indian, Prefuse 73, and Lightning Bolt. And they ended their year with another one, releasing an extremely limited-edition extended-player with a group of fellow experimental explorers, Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band. The group only pressed up 2000 copies of the EP, selling them all at their Oklahoma City New Year’s Eve show, which the Plastic Ono band opened. But thanks to the magic of the internet, we can still hear all four songs from the EP. Stream them HERE. RELATED: The Plastic Ono Band […]

JOHN F. KENNEDY: I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President — should he be Catholic — how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference, and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him, or the people who might elect him. I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where […]