Press critic Jay Rosen is amused that the Times public editor jumped into this controversy without seeming to realize that it's been debated for a long time. Here's his take on how we got here: Something happened in our press over the last 40 years or so that never got acknowledged and to this day…

Rat You are charismatic and intense. In the spring, despite your daily lotioning ritual, you will struggle against a mysterious case of adult acne. You will join a book club but quit after discovering it’s exclusively devoted to the bibliography-cum-drivel of Bret Easton Ellis. Ox As a member of the…

You may not be a fan of the wub-wub-wubbing musical genre known as dubstep, but it is increasingly taking center stage in American popular culture. For example, a recent NorthFace advertisement uses it while a snowboarder glides down a snowy mountainscape, Britney Spears and Rihanna have both…

Hanging the machine guns on the wall was a bad idea, but the burglary wouldn’t have happened if we’d just covered up the little decorative window over the front door. If you stood on your toes in the hallway and looked in through the little window, the guns were in plain sight. Almost everything was…

The cancelled HBO show bucked the trend of portraying men as bumbling, incompetent losers HBO HBO has announced that it is cancelling the comedy Hung after three seasons. This should not come as a surprise. Despite Hung's somewhat edgy premise—a well-endowed high school teacher from Detroit turns to…

Few people can take the fun out of something quicker than an over-zealous user experience nerd. Over the weekend, I came across Steven Wittens’ blog acko.net. If you read Steven’s About Page, you’ll discover that he’s a programmer who likes to “build and design cool pieces of technology.” And that’s…

Donald Williams is an eleven-year-old wannabe player. Nattily dressed in his pressed uniform shirt and navy slacks; he has ultra-confidence and a razor sharp wit. Even at four feet tall, his ghetto stroll is a refined dance that floats him from school bus, to school entrance, to cafeteria seat, as…

If fifty percent of marriages end in divorce (or sweatpants, as NBC’s Whitney would have us believe), then the vast majority of television shows are the bastard children of their narcissistic, money grubbing parent networks. Too harsh? Not when you imagine the numbers. To make the math simple, if in…

On the Welcome End of a Black Year At the beginning of 2011, all I wanted was a year of single-minded focus on our work at Simple . 2010 was a frenetic year for me, full of change and excitement, risk and commitment. I had made a number of life-altering choices in 2010 that I was eager to see…

Welcome back, D.C. commuters. 2012 is fast approaching, and I hope your winter holidays have been going well. AAA Mid-Atlantic recently announced that 2,075,000 Washingtonians will be traveling by car this holiday season of 2011 and pay more for gas than ever before in history. The average price of…

Contributors: Nate 6 Use this URL to share: Share on Tumblr Submit to reddi Share on Facebook Introduction Awhile ago I read about Nest , a newfangled thermostat with a color display and some interest

A personal case for taking the train in the age of full-body scans, runway delays, and other indignities of airplane travel. You may recall, early last September, my resolution to abandon air-travel. It is a work in progress, given how often I have to leave home. I took my first step last week,…