• It’s a bit early for year-end “Best of” lists, but Stylus Magazine is shutting down after today. So here’s their Top Films, Top Songs, and Top Albums of 2007 (so far). I’ll miss their inventive feature columns.

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    10/31/2007

  • An interview with Trent Reznor and Saul Williams on the eve of the online release of The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust!

    What do you think about OiNK being shut down?
    Trent: I’ll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often… If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now. iTunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me. I don’t feel cool when I go there. I’m tired of seeing John Mayer’s face pop up.

    Awesome. They also ask both of them how much they paid for Radiohead’s In Rainbows. Saul: $7; Trent: $5080.

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    10/30/2007

  • The current Washington Monthly has two articles about two differently nutty politicians: Rudy Giuliani and Lyndon LaRouche. The first article describes Giuliani’s power-grabbing tendencies when mayor of NYC as evidence that he would be the most likely presidential candidate to continue the Bush administration’s overreaching policies on executive power; the second describes the recent financial collapse of the political/personality cult of the eight-time presidential candidate LaRouche. I encountered several members of LaRouche’s Youth Movement at a Nader talk at Harvard’s JFK School of Government a few years ago, where they stood up and started singing an anti-Nader song in unison during the Q&A.

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    10/29/2007

  • Yet another story, this one at the Vancouver airport, about an innocent man being killed by police misuse of Tasers. I hope there’s an uproar in Canada about this, and that police everywhere begin to treat Tasers more like guns. (via bb)

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    10/26/2007

  • (thx, jbg)

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    10/26/2007

  • Errol Morris has posted the conclusion (and solution) to a massive three-part blog essay about his pursuit to answer a seemingly simple question: which of these two photographs was taken first? What makes it interesting is that the photographs were taken in the exact same spot, are over 150 years old (taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War), and that at least one of them was physically staged. Here’s parts one, two, and three.

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    10/24/2007

  • The invite-only OiNK, one of the world’s biggest and most efficient BitTorrent music sharing sites, has been raided and shut down. DJ /rupture, one of the musicians whose music was distributed on the site, has some interesting thoughts about what Oink meant to him. (thx, jds)

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    10/23/2007

Bill Maher kicks out 9/11 conspiracy theorists

Watching the live (but not on the West coast) Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO last night was more interesting than usual, when 9/11 conspiracy theorists from the audience started shouting in the middle of the panel segment. Bill Maher took matters into his own hands, shouting them down and helping security kick them out. Here’s the video.

(8) comments | Sat, 10/20/2007 - 12:00am

  • Speaking of the death penalty, did you hear about the judge in Texas who disallowed a death penalty appeal because it came in 20 minutes late? This happened on September 25th, the day the U.S. Supreme Court decided to take the lethal injection case, and death row inmate Michael Richard’s lawyers informed the court that they were throwing an appeal together. But a crashed computer prevented them from getting it in on time. Several judges were willing to stay late and receive the appeal, but Chief Justice Sharon Keller decided to keep strict 9-5 hours and disregarded the appeal. Richards was executed that night, and now newspapers in Texas are calling for Keller’s removal from the court.

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    10/17/2007

  • A drawn map of the siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian-Serbians that lasted for about half of the 1990’s. This interested me because I’m in the midst of William Vollmann’s essays about his time spent in the various warring areas of former Yugoslavia, depicted in Volume VI of his opus on violence, Rising Up and Rising Down. He spent time holed up with some students in besieged Sarajevo, and described the tanks upon hills literally surrounding the city. Now I see what he means.

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    10/17/2007

  • The trailer for Lawrence Lessig 2: Corruption was released yesterday. That is, he posted a one-hour lecture on corruption as a preview for what he intends to work on during the next ten years. It’s very good and aimed mostly at a lay audience. Watch it, give him comments.

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    10/15/2007

  • The New Yorker has a lengthy profile of David Simon, who recently wrapped filming of the fifth season of HBO’s The Wire , which premieres January. It also discusses his next episodic series in the works, about musicians who live in post-Katrina New Orleans. (thx, terry)

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    10/15/2007

  • An interview with Tony Kaye, the controversial director of American History X , on his upcoming documentary Lake of Fire about the abortion debate. He’s been working on it for over 16 years, and the 152 minute film features three actual abortions.

    [W]hat I was trying to do as a filmmaker, in a personal way, was to find out exactly what abortion was without taking any sides and without being judgmental.

    That’s an ambitious claim, and even if he succeeds, I doubt it will be perceived that way.

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    10/15/2007
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