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 […]

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

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Verbal Hyperlinks: “Matt Yglesias’ little brother” — “BloggingHeads.TV” — “natural language” Addendum: Ech. Another argument against vlogging: I don’t have professional makeup and lighting people on hand.

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Via Ann at Feministing comes this article on Canadian research on the (apparently growing?) phenomenon of young women being pressured to share racy images of themselves online. Presumably these are intended for private viewing, but often end up circulating on the Internet. Obviously, this is incredibly sleazy behavior and a criminal breach of trust. But […]

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The recent flap over Choco-Jesus is stranger than the usual case of this type, since it seems that the usual outrage professionals have worked themselves into the requisite dudgeon without even having a clear sense of why they’re supposed to be offended. Bill “The Jews Run Hollywood” Donohue blusters: This is one of the worst […]

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Last week, Maggie Gallagher had been urging me to have a look at this Weekly Standard piece by David Blankenhorn, which is the latest attempt to persuade us that giving more people access to marriage will destroy marriage. Fortunately, I don’t have to do much here, since Dale Carpenter has taken it apart rather more […]

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Via MoJo Blog, a new Williams Institute study [PDF] calculates that cost to states of excluding gay parents from the foster care system nationwide would run to about $130 million. I wrote about the burgeoning war on gay parents back in 2005.

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