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BY TONY ABRAHAM Anti-folk singer/songwriter Jeffrey Lewis has been beavering his way across the globe since the October release of his superbly idiosyncratic new album, A Turn in the Dream-Songs. Lewis’ music can appear bizarre and unsettling at first, but eventually his casually-voiced surrealistic ramblings suck you into his Technicolor comic book mind, where everything is animated and absurd, and nobody has thoughts, just thought bubbles. That is no coincidence, because Lewis doubles as a comic book artist, a visual storyteller, and a damn good one at that. He came up from the phantasmagorical mean streets of the Lower East […]

THE ATLANTIC: Congress is weighing a bill that would fundamentally change how the Internet works. It would affect even the most casual web user, who does no more than browse Facebook or watch YouTube videos or store photos on Flickr. Despite its importance, few people understand the legislation: It sounds complicated to outsiders. But don’t tune out! A quick primer is enough to grasp the high stakes, and there are two huge payoffs: 1) You can help save the Internet. 2) You can see beyond this specific bill’s flaws to the general error in thinking its supporters embrace. That’s important, […]

The Shrine / An Argument from Sean Pecknold on Vimeo. PREVIOUSLY: It is well known that the Fleet Foxes look like lumberjacks and sing like angels, but less known is that live, they play like a band that made a deal with the devil at the crossroads. If you loved their 2008 self-titled LP but were a little underwhelmed by the new Helplessness Blues, you should have been at the Tower Theater on Saturday night, because those same songs blared loudly with the kind of heat, friction, and true grit sorely lacking on the recording. The moral of the story, […]

SALON: The story of Robert Kennedy’s assassination seems deceptively simple. After winning the California Democratic presidential primary on June 4, 1968, Sen. Robert Kennedy traversed a pantry at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. A young Palestinian Christian named Sirhan Sirhan pulled a gun and fired. Kennedy died roughly 25 hours later. Five others were wounded. Sirhan was tried and convicted. End of story, right? Not so fast. A crime is like a jigsaw puzzle. You can’t solve the puzzle by forcing a piece where it doesn’t belong. The theory that Sirhan killed Kennedy is an ill-fitting piece not supported […]

PAUL KRUGMAN:  To those defending Obama on the grounds that he’s saying what he has to politically, I have two answers. First, words matter — as people who rallied around Obama in the first place because of his eloquence should know. Yes, he has to make compromises on policy grounds — but that doesn’t mean he has to adopt the right’s rhetoric and arguments. The effect of his intellectual capitulation is that we now have only one side in the national argument. Second, since Obama keeps talking nonsense about economics, at what point do we stop giving him credit for […]

FORBES: One year, six months, and three weeks after he was first jailed in a military brig in Kuwait, alleged WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning will have his day in court: According to a blog post Monday from his lawyer David Coombs, the Army private first class will have a pre-trial hearing in Fort Meade, Maryland on December 16th, a day before his 24th birthday, to examine the government’s charges and evidence and determine whether to proceed with the case against him. MORE RELATED:  Supporters will be present outside Fort Meade when he arrives on December 16 and as part of […]

[Portland Oregon 11/17/11] “The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” — Franklin Delano Roosevelt

INQUIRER: The death of Steve Jobs was followed by an avalanche of superlatives – brilliant, genius, and visionary among the more common. He was likened to Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Thomas Edison. But in the case of Edison, there was one significant difference that went unmentioned. For more than a century, just one of Edison’s inventions alone – the incandescent lightbulb – was manufactured at numerous locations in the United States, providing employment for millions of Americans across family generations. The Apple home computer, not at all. After only one generation, all the Apple manufacturing jobs in America […]

[Illustration by ALEX FINE] EDITOR’S NOTE: I have it on good authority that Terry Gross will be reading a passage from my Philadelphia Weekly cover story on Khyber-Barkeep-Turned-Mumbai-Terror-Attack-Planner David Coleman Headley and crediting me by name, which, as a long time superfan of Fresh Air, and a longtime NPR FOR THE DEAF, ahem, aggregator, this is sort of like Christmas and my birthday and an orgasm-on-heroin all at once. For the record, I have never tried heroin but I am told it feels a lot like having Terry Gross read an excerpt from a PW cover story you wrote to […]

ASSOCIATED PRESS: U.S. authorities declined to pursue a case against an “al Qaeda sympathizer” accused of plotting to bomb police stations and post offices in the New York area because they believed he was mentally unstable and incapable of pulling it off, two law enforcement officials said Monday. New York Police Department investigators sought to get the FBI involved at least twice as their undercover investigation of Jose Pimentel unfolded, the officials said. Both times, the FBI concluded that he wasn’t a serious threat, they said. The FBI concluded that Pimentel “didn’t have the predisposition or the ability to do […]

BY ZIVIT SHLANK JAZZ CORRESPONDENT Composer/drummer/bandleader/educator John Hollenbeck is a musician of indefinable mystique. He embodies the spirit of, say, a Dave Brubeck insofar as his ability to revive the jazz idiom with a creative, eclectic yet accessible approach all his own. His ingenuity and versatility, having worked in a myriad of styles and settings, are on prominent display through his most prolific baby to date, The Claudia Quintet, an ensemble that goes above and beyond the confines of the standard jazz quintet sound. Don’t bother trying to pin them down; just listen close and surrender to the beauty. Saturday’s […]