How to (Not) Read ‘The Economist’
Bet you can’t guess what the world’s most profitable magazine is. It’s The Economist, London’s dry yet essential highbrow standard bearer of news, analysis, and opinion. And with even celebrity journalism a non-starter in the era of Gawker and TMZ, it’s become the magazine American newsweeklies such as Time and Newsweek most aspire to emulate….
Carlos Santana’s Architects of a New Dawn
One of the country’s most socially active musicians, Carlos Santana is probably know best, at least philanthropically, as the founder of the Milagro Foundation, which provides grants to not-for-profit community organizations working with children in education, health, and the arts. Santana’s latest nonmusical project, Architects of a New Dawn, neatly combines his passions for the…
Remembering Tiananmen Square?
In China, the only people who apparently remember the Tiananmen Square massacre are the olds and the police. According to the New York Times, “China blanketed Tiananmen Square with police officers Thursday, determined to prevent any commemoration of the 20th anniversary of a military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters that left hundreds dead.” But as James…
HeadCount Seeks Conan O’Brian Twitter Tracker Love
HeadCount has a lively new Twitter feed, which we encourage you to subscribe to here. With any luck, Conan O’Brian’s Twitter Tracker will snag it on the “Tonight Show.” via Boing-Boing
Koko Taylor 1928-2009
The powerful blues singer Koko Taylor, who died yesterday after complications from surgery for gastrointestinal bleeding, never seemed particularly torn between the demands of Saturday night and Sunday morning. As she told Ben Manilla in Dan Aykroyd’s Elwood’s Blues, “Everyday I’d look forward to that 15 minutes on the radio listening to the blues. My…
‘Maybe So, Maybe Not’: A Phish Film
The past eight years have been rough on me, you, and pretty much everyone else – certainly not excluding our rock buddies Phish. But even the most skeptical fan couldn’t help but feel very optimistic on the evidence of last night’s solidly satisfying show at Jones Beach. Man, those cats can wail. And while the…
Obamas Bring Back the Arts With a Night on the Town
One of the more refreshing aspects of Barack Obama’s new message is his acknowledgement that even in times of financial crisis, we cannot let the arts fall by the wayside. Over the weekend he and Michelle Obama even practiced what they preached by taking in Joe’s Turner’s Come and Gone, a play about the experience…
New Orleans Shall Rise Again
Actor-author-musician-radio-host Harry Shearer, AKA Spinal Tap’s Derek Smalls and the voice of at least a dozen of your favorite Simpsons characters, has been a dripping faucet of bad news about his half-time hometown of New Orleans ever since, as he always puts it, “the failure of the federal levees” in 2005. In his latest Huffington…
RockforLife’s List of ‘Pro-Abort’ Bands
Like HeadCount, the right-to-life group RockforLife seeks to engage young people in politics through music. And while RockforLife condemns the murder of late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, who was gunned down Sunday while serving as an usher in his Kansas church, on its website, the organization still provides an alphabetized list of “pro-abortion bands.”…
The Great Music Bailout
Forget the greed on Wall Street. A new study indicates it may simply be the downloading habits of the average peer-to-peer user that toppled the global economy. According to a report commissioned by the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property, illegal file sharing in Britain costs the country 12.5 billion pounds ($19.4 million) and at…