December 2009
4 tags
The decade in talking about American politics
The myth about American political discourse is that it needs to be substantive. It does not. It just has to be healthy. We can argue about what “healthy” means, and we should, since it changes depending on the historical moment we find ourselves in. Maybe it means that most people’s voices are being heard, or that most topics are not considered off-limits, or that it reflects...
OMG the fourth hour of the Today Show
The Soup is not wrong. It is amazing. It’s like No Exit transformed into a talk show, a reality show about what would happen if three women who hate each other were forced to talk to each other in public for an hour a day until the end of time and could only communicate via passive-aggression.
The A.V. Club: The 15 best videogames of the ’00s →
In all this end-of-decade hoopla, I’m not seeing a lot about video games (videogames? copy editors?). This is not surprising, I guess, but it shouldn’t be overlooked by those interested in pop culture, entertainment, media, or art that this was an extremely important decade for the medium, and probably the one where it really came into its own. I’ve been trying to come up with...
I don't heart nostalgia.
unsustainable:
I hate nostalgia/it tries too hard/to remember/only the easy parts.
Item #1: With all the backwards looks at the ’00s banging around Tumblr, and all the ensuing links to the same retrospectives across this World Wide Web, not to mention every third conversation I’ve had since moving to New York a year and a half ago, I’ve just about had it with the EVERYTHING SUCKS NOW BUT IT WAS...
correlation versus causation
agrammar:
barthel picks up on Creed
^^ While I was composing the previous post, Barthel has picked up on this and sort of touched on something I was attempting to touch on: how finding criticism important is itself somewhat of a middle-class / bourgeois habit — how criticism is a “privileged” perch mostly among a specific class — how considering it an elite with responsibilities outside a given...
correlation versus causation
johnlempka:
And re the original post that spawned this: come the fuck on. Creed’s selling 42 million albums in four years was driven by a host of sociological factors. People don’t consume Creed albums in a vacuum. I’m sure tons of people are legitimately bananas over Creed and I’m sure there’s a billion others who want to have Chad Kroeger’s baby, and I personally think that’s largely...
“The Parks Department has declared today a “snow day” and opened...”
– NY1, “City Shovels Snowy Streets Clean”
Rachel: “The federal governent doesn’t think everyone has the right to health care, but New York thinks everyone has the right to sleds and hot chocolate!”
No take-backs. Stick a needle.
magicmolly:
I remember distinctly when I figured out the secret of tabloids, which is that tabloids are only interesting if you read them serially, and that the amount you read is proportionate to the interest they generate. Basically, you have full control over whether tabloids draw your interest. Knowing this, it is easy to not read tabloids and therefore to not want to read tabloids.
The...
MTA Mythbusting: back again « On Transport →
dyfl:
Via The Awl, a useful rundown of the facts behind the MTA’s persistent deficits.
For those of you in NYC, my in-house budget expert would like to draw your attention to the following:
Myth: The MTA could’ve had public hearings on this before they voted on the service cuts.
The MTA is mandated by state law to balance their budget prior to the beginning of the calendar year. Hey, that’s...
2 tags
“Thanks to reality television, every ethnicity will eventually have a Flavor...”
– Janine, on Jersey Shore.
My Decade in Music
This was the decade I became an adult. On the same July day in 2001 I turned 22, I worked my first day at my first real job, at a record company in New York City, something that seemed to make sense at the time (well of course, I was special) but in retrospect seems absolutely crazy. Who the fuck was I? Why would you let me do that? Three months and one day later, we (as a nation, and as an...
Pop review or spam text?
Not frailty of voice nor cast on leg nor uncomfortably tall duet partners could keep Justin Bieber, the pint-size, swoosh-haired 15-year-old pop moppet from Stratford, Ontario — that’s Canada, people — from his appointed duty at Madison Square Garden on Friday night: decimating the larynxes of thousands of tween girls.
Jon Caramanica, “20-Year-Old Fogy Cedes Audience to...
And we don't care who knows! →
aceterrier:
Sure, let’s use the opposition’s rhetoric against them to drive the point home and all that, but “sad shadows of humanity”? I don’t care for or about golf myself, but it’s one of the most-played leisure activities in the world. People caring about the best practitioner of a challenging but accessible game is just as valid as people caring about someone who has shrewdly managed to...
Hey Vh1
I know the picture of Rihanna’s face post-beating is on the Internet and all, but given that some of us had studiously avoided seeing it, could you maybe think twice about showing a full-screen shot of it during your fucking year-end wrapup special?
Billboard's Top 100 songs of the 00s →
agrammar:
tomewing:
I find this list - especially the top 40 or so - really fascinating, and not simply because I like about 2/3 of the records in it and adore a good half-dozen.
It’s interesting to me because of the idea - repeated so often I’ve come to lazily accept it without really thinking - that this decade has been particularly fragmented in terms of pop, the music people listen to,...
Irresistible Impulse
rendit:
I think what she’s implying is that Lady Gaga slept with James Chance as a zygote.
Here is my current position on Lady Gaga: Matthew made me listen to The Fame Monster, and it’s OK in parts, but when Beyonce comes in on “Telephone” I get this unmistakable feeling of “Ah, so that’s what’s been missing!” If I have to pin it on one thing,...
Things you shouldn't say in a classroom situation
“I was wrist-deep in this study.”
A dream someone had about me
They have to pick up their dry cleaning, but there are zombies at the mall, so they took me along, because I could protect them. I was able to produce a protective shield, and explained that the zombies could not see normal people, only fear, so as long as we weren’t afraid, we would be safe. I taught them how to control their emotions and we were able to pick up the dry cleaning without...
The Major Works of Counterintuitive Thought From... →
perpetua:
Alex Pareene’s round-up of popular contrarian stances of the 00s is kinda heartbreaking, if just because it shows that the Slate-ification of modern discourse is nearly complete.
agrammar has already responded to this and hit the major points (which Alex has replied to), but let me hit some minor ones. “Counterintuitive” is probably not the best term for a decent chunk...
WatchI imagine this was only funny to, like, 1% of the audience, but oh man was it on-the-nose. “Drag-racing PT Cruisers,” “your dad owns two Suzuki dealerships,” “who fed garlic knots to my pit bull,” etc.
Rachel has a saying
It is a way of explaining why she doesn’t like something, and it goes like this: “It’s pandering to me badly.” Which is to say that something is clearly targeted at my demographic and tastes—which is good, who doesn’t like that—but does so in an unpleasing way. And this is more annoying than if something had merely been bad, for all sorts of reasons: you...
I KNEW IT
Me: Isn’t there some other explanation for this besides oppression? Do they have to be doing this to resist the dominant culture? Cultural Studies Professor*: Like what? What do you mean? Me: Well, like…fun. CSP: Oh, Marxists don’t believe in fun.
* Cultural studies professors are Marxists, generally.
Sean Michaels' 75 best songs of 2009 →
Rachel Again
And that’s the point I think Rachel was making: any budget number is politically motivated, no matter where it comes from. Just because budget things are hard numbers, we tend to think they reflect some sort of objective truth. But they’re ultimately just guesswork, and while people who have the training can make valid assessments of the validity of that guesswork, those people are generally...
This is Rachel, not Mike →
andrewtsks:
barthel:
southpol:
[…]
[…]
That $1.2 trillion in ARRA funds was just as made up of a number as the $800 million, this is how these things work. The White House was negotiating with congress, and the initial offer was a high ball. Again, the Obama Admin pumped $800 billion into the economy, and most importantly to state and local governments. NYC government would be seriously...
This is Rachel, not Mike →
southpol:
The strength of Barack Obama’s young presidency has been its depressing realism about the limits of legislative achievement in the age of the filibuster and unrelenting partisan polarization. Health care might pass — and might is an important word there — because Obama didn’t try to do too much. Big as people think this bill is, it really only affects the insurance situations of 30 or...
