ITCHYCOO PARK: Pollen up close and sepia BY ELIZABETH FIEND LIVING EDITOR What do vaginal dryness, lousy driving, methamphetamine, cocaine, steroids and Kleenex all have in common? You guessed it: this article is gong to be all about seasonal allergies. Allergies are caused by a body’s misplaced, overblown reaction to something that in reality isn’t harmful. When this happens the culprit is called an allergen. Pollen is an allergen, though it’s a harmless substance, not poisonous in any way to humans. But for a growing number of people, pollen, mold, animal fur and dust mites trigger an unnecessary, and unfortunate, […]
Search Results for: junk science
MEET THE PHAWKERS: Yer Kids Too Fat? Piggyback Rides Breaking Your Back? Miss Fiend Can Help
Sure, it was fun to be the fattest city in the fattest nation on Earth for while, but the novelty is wearing, um, thin. All kidding aside, we are facing an unprecedented epidemic of obesity and diabetes. It’s feared that the current crop of school age children will be the first American generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents — due solely to poor eating habits. The smart solution? Don’t wait until it’s too late for these kids! Get kids invested and schooled in healthy eating from the get-go. Join Elizabeth Fiend in a series of cooking […]
FILMFEST SPOTLIGHT: Meet Elizabeth Fiend
At no time in recorded history have we possessed so much knowledge about health and nutrition, nor have we ever had such vast and effective machinery for disseminating that knowledge — and yet we live in hi-tech Dark Age with the vast majority of the global population essentially ignorant or confused about the basic facts of their own biology. How did this happen? Well, that’s whole six-part mini-series in and of itself, but the short answer is that the bottom line of many a multi-national corporation is dependent on that ignorance, and vast sums of money are expended to maintain […]
CINEMA: Paint It Black
EDITOR’S NOTE: To mark the eighth anniversary of Amy Winehouse’s criminally premature passing on July 23rd, 2011, we’re reposting our review of Asif Kapadia’s heartbreaking 2015 documentary, Amy. AMY (2015, directed by Asif Kapadia, 128 minutes, USA) BY JONATHAN VALANIA The fallen jazz singer Amy Winehouse was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. The new documentary Amy, which maps with the clarity of hindsight Winehouse’s fairly meteoric rise and precipitous demise, is not far behind. Directed by Asif Kapadia (Senna), Amy arrives barely four years after her ridiculously premature death at the age of 27 from a combination of […]
FROM THE VAULT: Hey, Mr. Spaceman
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story originally appeared in the November 2001 issue of Magnet and reported in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. We are reprising it here to mark the auspicious occasion of Spiritualized performing at The Fillmore Philly on Good Friday, in support of the new LP And Nothing Hurt. Enjoy. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Somewhere Over The North Atlantic, Sept . 25, 2001 Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space—35,000 feet above the Earth, to be exact. We’re on our way to Ireland to tag along on a Spiritualized tour. It’s gonna be fun, but there are some risks […]
CINEMA: The Clone Ranger
BLADE RUNNER (directed by Denis Villeneuve, 163 minutes, 2017, USA) BY CHRISTOPHER MALENEY FILM CRITIC Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, is without a doubt, one of the most visionary and influential science-fiction films ever created. Set in 2019 and released in 1982, Scott’s film uncannily predicted our current age some 35 years ago. While some aspects of the film’s vision of the future — flying cars, police ziggurats and android slaves known as replicants hunted down by bounty hunters known as Blade Runners once they reach their expiration date — still seem a ways off, others — the domination of humanity […]
REWIND 2014: The Year In Questions And Answers
If armies run on their stomachs, blogs run on their big fucking mouths. We’re no exception. But we’d like to think that, on a good day, we put all that hot air to good use when interrogating visiting dignitaries in advance of their triumphant arrival into the City Of Brotherly Love. We’ve never pretended to have all the answers but we do know all the right questions. And we’ve never settled for easy answers to hard questions. Sometimes feelings get hurt and sometimes new connections are made. Sometimes painful truths emerge and sometimes we actually learn something. And sometimes we […]
BOOKS: A Q&A With Punk-Noir Surrealist Charles Burns, The Edgar Allan Poe Of Right Now
Illustration by ALEX FINE EDITOR’S NOTE: Cartoonist/illustrator Charles Burns, master of the punk-noir macabre, will be discussing his work at the Free Library tonight. To mark the occasion, we sent him some questions about The Hive (Random House), the just-published second installment of his new graphic novel trilogy, his first major work since 2005’s Black Hole. However, before we get to the Q&A, there are 10 things you should know about Charles Burns. They are.. 1. Though born and bred in the high rainyland of the Pacific Northwest, Charles Burns has resided in Philadelphia — Northern Liberties, to be exact […]
SPECIAL REPORT: The Top 10 Drug Corners 2011
[Illustration by JAY BEVENOUR] EDITOR’S NOTE: The following report — the product of a partnership between Phawker and PW and funded by a grant from J-Lab and the William Penn Foundation — ranks the city’s 10 worst drug corners the way Philly Mag ranks pizza or bars or bikini wax salons. Sarcasm aside, the story is no joke, rather it is the product of six months of old fashioned shoe leather reporting, arrest statistics crunching, and and dozens of interviews with the police,academics, neighbors, drug dealers and drug buyers. The hope is that we can spark a new conversation about […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Desert Of The Real
SAM HARRIS: I should say, however, that there are psychedelic experiences that I have not had, which appear to deliver a different message. Rather than being states in which the boundaries of the self are dissolved, some people have experiences in which the self (in some form) appears to be transported elsewhere. This phenomenon is very common with the drug DMT, and it can lead its initiates to some very startling conclusions about the nature of reality. More than anyone else, Terence McKenna was influential in bringing the phenomenology of DMT into prominence. DMT is unique among psychedelics for a […]
REWIND 2010: The Year In Phawker Interviews
Talk is cheap on the Internet, but at Phawker it’s totally free, baby — at least for you, dear reader. Trolling through the vast and dusty Phawker archives, we have dug up fat sack of conversations worth re-visiting: the always prickish-but-worth-it Will Oldham on authenticity, Americana and his testicles; the inimitable Black Francis susses out Doolittle for us; graphic artiste extraordinaire Charles Burns on the darkness within; author Hampton Sides discusses the banality of Martin Luther King assassin James Earle Ray’s evil; Dave Bielanko discusses Marah’s last chance power try; folk/rock legend Richard Thompson discusses Fairport Convention and reuniting with […]
COCA COLA: Only A Fool Would Actually Believe All Those Ads Saying That Vitamin Water Is Healthy
HUFFINGTON POST: Now here’s something you wouldn’t expect. Coca-Cola is being sued by a non-profit public interest group, on the grounds that the company’s vitaminwater products make unwarranted health claims. No surprise there. But how do you think the company is defending itself? In a staggering feat of twisted logic, lawyers for Coca-Cola are defending the lawsuit by asserting that “no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking vitaminwater was a healthy beverage.” Does this mean that you’d have to be an unreasonable person to think that a product named “vitaminwater,” a product that has been heavily and aggressively marketed […]
IN DENIAL: It’s Raining ‘Rent Boys’
NEW YORK TIMES: Rekers is no bit player in the cultuer wars. Though he’s not a household name, he should be. He’s the Zelig of homophobia, having played a significant role in many of the ugliest assaults on gay people and their civil rights over the last three decades. His public career dates back to his authorship of a theoretically scholarly 1982 tome titled “Growing Up Straight: What Families Should Know About Homosexuality.” (I say theoretically because many of the footnotes cite his own previous writings.) And what did Rekers think that families should know? By Chapter 2, he is […]