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The end is nigh. Share this with everyone you know, before it’s too late! PREVIOUSLY: Internet users deserve far better, and we thought we were going to get it from a president who promised to “take a backseat to no one in my commitment to Net Neutrality.” Watch now as he and his FCC chairman try to spin tomorrow’s betrayal as another “mission accomplished.” Don’t believe it. This bogus victory has become all too familiar to those watching the Obama administration and its appointees squander opportunities for real change. The reality is that reform is just a rhetorical front for […]

  WABE: On May 11, 1987, NPR first broadcast a program that has become synonymous with public radio: “Fresh Air.” The interview and commentary show originally ran as a live, three-hour weekday broadcast, hosted by Terry Gross and airing only in Philadelphia. While “Fresh Air” is still produced by Philadelphia member station WHYY, NPR now syndicates it in a daily, one-hour national edition. According to WHYY, 6 million listeners tune in each week on more than 646 NPR stations across the country and in Europe. And in the age of streaming and downloading, “Fresh Air” is NPR’s most downloaded podcast […]

  BY BILL HANGLEY JR. Yes, Desus and Mero are stoners. But they’re not foggy wookie stoners. They’re rat-a-tat Bronx stoners who’ll snatch a sentence out of your mouth, run with it into the middle of the street, swing it around until it gets dizzy and then give it back to you upside-down and laughing. What results are some of the best interviews on television: The Daily Show as delivered by two smartass kids riding the subway all day when they should be in school. It’s not just that they ask the right questions, as in last week’s interview with […]

  The last time English shoegazers Slowdive released an album, I was in kindergarten, and Bill Clinton was in the White House weaponizing Wall Street with deregulation when he wasn’t busy paying for Monica Lewinski’s dry cleaning bills. I was learning basic arithmetic, or maybe the “clean up, everybody, everywhere” song, but I think the counterculture adults were mostly either flying the flannel on the grunge bandwagon or throwing down mad adlibs at coffee shop poetry slams. Daria, a cartoon that followed a feminist, critical-thinking teenager through the intellectual wasteland of a wealthy suburban high school, was one of the […]

  The United States Constitution, the global lodestar of liberal democracy, remains a work in progress. The first draft of the Constitution took over 100 days of furious argument and deliberation among the Founding Fathers to finally complete, and it has been amended multiple times since its genesis in 1787. Two hundred and thirty years later, constitutional lawyers, congressmen, Supreme Court justices, even the POTUS continue to debate the exact parameters and intended consequences of constitutional language such as “We the People,” the “Right to Bear Arms,” and “Equal Rights for All.” A new exhibit at the National Constitution Center […]

  NEW YORKER: Only one Administration is known to have considered using the Twenty-fifth Amendment to remove a President. In 1987, at the age of seventy-six, Ronald Reagan was showing the strain of the Iran-Contra scandal. Aides observed that he was increasingly inattentive and inept. Howard H. Baker, Jr., a former senator who became Reagan’s chief of staff in February, 1987, found the White House in disarray. “He seemed to be despondent but not depressed,” Baker said later, of the President. Baker assigned an aide named Jim Cannon to interview White House officials about the Administration’s dysfunction, and Cannon learned […]

  NEW YORKER: On April 29th, Donald Trump will have occupied the Oval Office for a hundred days. For most people, the luxury of living in a relatively stable democracy is the luxury of not following politics with a nerve-racked constancy. Trump does not afford this. His Presidency has become the demoralizing daily obsession of anyone concerned with global security, the vitality of the natural world, the national health, constitutionalism, civil rights, criminal justice, a free press, science, public education, and the distinction between fact and its opposite. The hundred-day marker is never an entirely reliable indicator of a four-year […]

  FRESH AIR: In February of 1974, Patty Hearst, the 19-year-old granddaughter of the wealthy newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a small, armed revolutionary group with an incoherent ideology and unclear goals. Two months after her abduction, questions concerning Hearst’s ties to her abductors arose after Hearst declared her allegiance to the SLA, denounced her family and was seen carrying an automatic weapon during an SLA bank robbery. Newspapers published a photograph of the heiress carrying a weapon and posing in front of the SLA flag. “You look at this photograph and you […]

THE INDEPENDENT: Father John Misty has released the bonkers new video…starring Macaulay Culkin as Kurt Cobain, the video sees him flagellated and crucified as Misty, who comes dressed as a sort of pirate clown with hooks for hands. MORE