London’s Evening Standard looks at the proliferation of closed circuit cameras in the city by focusing on the former home of George Orwell, where there are now some 32 cameras within 200 yards of the apartment where the author once lived. Citywide, there’s a camera for every fourteen people.

[Read more →]

Last week’s squib on net neutrality provoked replies from Ezra and my two favorite Caucasian Lees: Tom and Tim (no relation). First, I want to concur strongly with Tim’s general point: As Robert Frost reminded us, all metaphor breaks down somewhere. (Otherwise, one supposes, we’d call it “literal description.”) Certainly the history of common carrier […]

[Read more →]

Today’s strangely hypnotic timewasting widget: AIMFight. It’s stupidly simple. You type in two AOL Instant Messenger buddy names. The site then checks the population of users currently signed in to see who has been buddy-listed by the most people, out to three degrees, so you get more juice out of being listed by people who […]

[Read more →]

Via 27B Stroke 6, The Washington Post reports on documents uncovered in a civil suit brought by some anti-war protesters that confirm their claims, which police and the FBI had denied, that the protesters had been detained for wearing black (anarchists wear black!) and interrogated about their political views by FBI agents. (The official rationale […]

[Read more →]

Mike Pence has always struck me as one of the handful of members of Congress who generally have their heads in the right place on the role of government, but his normal skepticism about the efficacy of state power has not been much in evidence when it comes to Iraq, from which he’s now blogging. […]

[Read more →]

When Howard Beale vowed to kill himself during his evening news broadcast, it was a scandal, a ratings bonanza, an outlandish skewering of an amoral and sensationalist medium. But reality, to say nothing of reality TV, long ago matched the most fantastic satirical excesses Paddy Chayefsky’s imagination could conjure and, barely pausing to savor the […]

[Read more →]

The band, that is. They’re at Rock and Roll Hotel tonight; The Broken West is opening.

[Read more →]

Serenity beats out Star Wars for best sci-fi flick of all time. Addendum: Readers, please don’t use my comment section to tout your own blog posts on totally unrelated topics. It’s not really any less spam than the thousand daily comments about Levitra or Texas Hold-Em that MT junks automatically. If you think something you’ve […]

[Read more →]

Since this has been around for at least 48 hours—which is eons in Internet time—I’ll assume many of you have already seen this Alanis Morissette parody of the execrable, inexplicably popular Black Eyed Peas abortion “My Humps.” But the spoof nevertheless deserves an extra nod for managing to simultaneously be hilarious as a satire of […]

[Read more →]

So, I finally got around to listening to The 6ths, one of many intriguing side-projects to spring, Athena-like, from the mind of Magnetic Fields impresario Stephin Merritt. And in a way, what’s most immediately interesting is the way the Wasps’ Nests album prefigures so much of Merritt’s later, better known work. (For context, the conceit […]

[Read more →]