When documents released by Edward Snowden revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) routinely hovers hoovers up metadata on telephone calls made and received in that country, officials first lied about the practice, then defended it on grounds the information obtained was trivial. President Obama insisted the gathering of metadata amounted only to "modest encroachments on privacy" and "a circumscribed, narrow system directed at us being able to protect our people." He emphasized that NSA was "not looking at content." A new, crowdsourced study shows that telephone metadata—information that includes the date, time, and length of phone calls, and the numbers called, but not the...

18 March, 2014

At Barak Obama's second inauguration yesterday, American Idol star Kelly Clarkson added a poignant chapter to the storied annals of America's least offensive patriotic anthem, My Country 'Tis of Thee. Seventy-four years ago, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let Marian Anderson perform at the association's Constitution Hall in Washington because the celebrated contralto was African-American. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her DAR membership in protest, and weeks of controversy ensued. On April 9, 1939, 75,000 people turned out to hear Anderson sing at an outdoor Easter Sunday recital on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Interior Secretary...

21 January, 2013

Yesterday, White House press spokesman Jay Carney kiboshed the idea of minting a platinum trillion dollar coin to get around the Congressionally imposed debt ceiling that Republicans are using to ransom deep cuts in medicare and social security. Some economists have urged President Barack Obama to exploit a legal loophole that would allow the government to print a single $1,000,000,000,000 coin, and deposit it with the Federal Reserve Bank, thereby enabling the US Government to pay bills Congress has already authorized. MSNBC Host Chris Hays summed up the case for the coin this way: If this seems surreal or ridiculous or magical to...

13 January, 2013

Shocking to realize how far we've come from will.i.am (with apologies to Gotye): [Video link] H/T: Stephen Puddicombe...

10 August, 2012

President Barack Obama at the White House correspondent's annual dinner and roast: It’s fair to say that when it comes to my presidency, the honeymoon is over...

01 May, 2011

Chris Milk, who has directed videos for Kanye West, U2, Courtney Love, and Barack Obama, is assembling a few thousand volunteers to complete an animated music video for Ain't No Grave, title track of the last album Johnny Cash recorded. The Johnny Cash Project invites participants to use custom drawing tools to create the 1,368 frames in the 2 minute, 51 second, video. Since more than one artist will end up submitting artwork for each frame, the video will look different each time it's played. Writes Milk: Strung together and relayed in sequence, your art, paired with Johnny’s haunting song, will become...

19 April, 2010

President Barack Obama has appointed visual data guru Edward Tufte (previously mentioned: here) to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. Tufte will advise on such things as the Recovery.gov website, where citizens can punch their zip code into a track-the-money map and see all the recovery projects in their area. Bob Garfield of New York public radio's On The Media interviewed Tufte about the appointment this week (audio embedded below; transcript here). GARFIELD: Tufte has inspired a generation of innovators with his ideas for the efficient, clean and rich presentation of information. He’s a fan of The New York Times website,...

04 April, 2010

Arch-conservative David Frum stiffed CBC Radio's flagship The Current this morning [see update below], failing at the last minute to show up for a heavily promoted interview on his reincarnation as a thoughtful moderate. The program was forced to recycle a dumpster diving documentary in place of what I fear would have been the latest in a series of fawning interviews. Let's hope this will, in Canada at least, slow the media juggernaut bent on canonizing Frum as discerning paragon of moderation. Frum, as the saying goes, was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. His father was a...

01 April, 2010

A photo recently added to the White House photostream on Flickr reveals a startling presidential penchant for meticulous editing: Ouch! The speechwriter who endured this grueling feedback, Jon Favreau, is the second-youngest in presidential history. The only man every to serve at a more tender age, Atlantic magazine writer and former Jimmy Carter speechwriter James Fallows, offered these comments on the photo: The volume of Obama's editing is unusual but not unheard of. The quality of his editing is exceptional for a public figure. Think of just one sentence in the shot above. The original says "This has always been...

27 March, 2010
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