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Sports
August 22, 2008
'Her Hotness Was Rated As Volcanic'
Gymnast Alicia Sacramone may have cost Team USA the gold when she fell off the balance beam—but she appears to have landed in the arms of an adoring internet. The phrase "Alicia Sacramone is hot" found its way to the top of Google's trends list, rendering it "Volcanic" in the web giant's parlance. This led a pair of NBC announces to wonder what led to her popularity, noting that there's "something about [her] entire happenstance."
World
August 21, 2008
Williamsburg and the Fall of the West
Perhaps no subculture has ever been so self-loathing (if perhaps ironically so) as the postmodern hipster. As the very personification of liberal white guilt, the twenty-first century hipster has become the bane of urbanites everywhere, including—in what must be some kind of meta-ironic practical joke—hipster magazine Adbusters, which seems to believe they are the harbinger the fall of Western civilization.
Sports
August 20, 2008
A Phelpsian Windfall
Tuesday morning, courtesy of the CBS Morning Show, Phelps-a-mania came to an amazing crescendo. The smart money would have wagered that the Phelpsian epic would have hit its high mark somewhere in NBC's maudlin coverage of the Games— most likely during the Today Show, which has insisted on bringing groggy, bleary eyed America every second of every breath currently happening in Beijing. But no! CBS decided to follow coverage of a potentially devastating hurricane currently brewing in Southern Florida with an interview of Phelps, offering the immediate and unfortunate segue: "And now to a man who's like a hurricane…in the pool, Michael Phelps!"
Full article » | by Max Lakin
Media
August 20, 2008
Play What?
When the world champion Spanish national basketball team was massacred by Team USA by a score of 119 to 82, many suspected that something was amiss. Like the Virginian rodent of yore, Team Spain was, the rumor went, "playing possum."
Media
August 20, 2008
The Culinary Olympics
If you thought reporters at the Beijing Olympics were there simply to cover Michael Phelps, or China's human-rights abuses and pollution problems, you were wrong. There's all kinds of side stories, including biking the streets of Beijing with Olympians, and chronicling the confusion of a cab ride in the Chinese capital. But the most common kind of fluff story is served up with a side of scorpions on a stick.
Non-Motivational
August 20, 2008
The Non-Motivational Speaker Series Returns August 28
Popular Culture is the subject of this month's Non-Motivational Speaker Series event, returning to the Lower East Side on Thursday, August 28, at 8 p.m. Providing expert commentary on this topic are Sasha Frere-Jones of the New Yorker, the A.V. Club's Amelie Gillette, and New York Reality TV School founder Robert Galinsky.
Full article » | by Adam Rosen
Media
August 18, 2008
The Death of the Chicago Sun-Times?
The newspaper business here in Chicago—like that of the rest of the country—has fallen on hard times. The broadsheet Chicago Tribune apparently wants to turn into USA Today (or Maxim), though thankfully we haven't yet seen any evidence of a redesign. Meanwhile, the Chicago Sun-Times, the local tabloid, is solving its problems by rehashing old Mike Royko columns.
Internet
August 12, 2008
The Full 'Monty'
The Montauk Monster, that bloated, seemingly decomposing corpse of some creature that washed up on a Montauk, Long Island, beach last month, has been getting a lot of attention recently—perhaps too much attention when there are decidedly more important things going on, like simultaneous wars and the return of $2 Starbucks after 2 p.m. So why is a certain part of the online world abuzz about "Monty"? It's the pageviews, stupid.
Full article » | by Max Lakin
Media
August 11, 2008
How Not To Report on Wikipedia
In the August 4 issue of the New Yorker, Ben McGrath tells the story of Alan Rogers, a talented and thoughtful Army lifer who died in Iraq. McGrath's article explores whether the military and media intentionally covered up Rogers's identity as "the first known gay casualty of the Iraq war," and it makes for fascinating reading. But I was underwhelmed by several lively paragraphs in the middle where McGrath describes the "edit war" over Rogers's Wikipedia entry—a war fought over the inclusion of phrases like "he was gay and worked to end 'Don't Ask Don't Tell.' " I'll admit that this conflict forms an arresting journalistic image, but in choosing to focus on it, McGrath follows an easy, misleading path in the coverage of Wikipedia.
Sports
August 7, 2008
Is Peter King Brett Favre's New Agent?
The Brett Favre-Packers saga appears to have been ended by a trade of the unretired quarterback to the New York Jets. Though ESPN's Rachel Nichols can probably stop stalking Favre now, another, higher-profile, reporter is likely to continue to cover the story, which has now moved to within a couple dozen miles from his home: Sports Illustrated's Peter King, who looks to have acted as something of a go-between for Favre and his former team.
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