Culture and Society

The Bush team has joined the chat generation, beginning an ongoing series of email Q&A’s between the public and members of the administration last night with Andrew H. Card Jr., President Bush’s chief of staff. However, as the Washington Post cautions: Those who join the chat should not expect a …

Blogs are blooming with the spring like flowers and bloomy things and stuff. Slicing the bloggy pie into ever finer specialties, radio station KSDS (Jazz 88 San Diego, 88.3 FM) has a jazz blog: The hunt is on for people who are blogging about Jazz, Music, Art, and Radio! Each …

Harvard Ph.D. candidate Derrick Ashong thinks he has a better way: Ashong, a Ph.D. student in Afro-American Studies and Ethnomusicology, is also CEO of ASAFO Productions, a talent agency that represents new, up-and-coming musical performers – like the funk/harmony/R&B group Ashong himself sings with, Soulfege. But ASAFO Productions does more …

Dave Pell, an interesting if overly self-deprecating fellow, has switched his news links and commentary email newsletter to a web-based format, transforming himself simply by a change in technology, into a blogger, voila! His latest essay is a penetrating if somewhat meandering look at the meaning of his favorite reality …

Arik Hesseldahl has a cogent explanation of the various WiFi’s out there now and coming down the pipe in Forbes: Finally, down the road, Wi-Fi will likely have to speed up again–as there will come a day when 54 megabits per second simply isn’t fast enough. A new IEEE group …

AOL files five lawsuits against spammers: AOL, the nation’s largest Internet service provider, with 27 million subscribers, said the targets of its suits were responsible for sending its members an estimated 1 billion pieces of spam that resulted in more than 8 million complaints. The unsolicited messages contained such things …

Fred von Lohman, senior staff attorney of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and attorney for the Princeton student sued for billions by the RIAA, writes in the Daily Princetonian on the digital download miasma: Suing college students. Forcing ISPs to rat out customers. Petitioning Congress for unprecedented vigilante powers. Deploying armies …

Alan Jacobs’ essay on war reportage has the twin virtues of acknowledging the vital role in war coverage of blogs (Command Post, Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan), and of shining a spotlight on the passive aggressive journalistic habit of using “scare” or “sneer” quotes: reading Fisk’s account, I noticed something else, …

Zack Rosen provides an invaluable, brilliant analysis of the file sharing systems developed by the four college students sued by the RIAA for $97.8 billion, which is way more than I made as a radio DJ when I was in college. In fact, slacker that I am, I have yet …

Rapper, rocker, actor Ice-T to sell new album via Kazaa: Users of the Kazaa Media Desktop software (www.kazaa.com) can purchase a downloadable version of Ice-T’s new album, Repossession, for $4.99. The album contains 19 tracks by his band, Sex Money & Gunz. Ice-T also plans to sell physical CDs from …