Familiar vs. Novel – Everything is a Remix

First, if you’ve never seen Everything is a Remix, go watch it now. It’s a great primer on creativity, originality, and copyright. Recently Kirby Ferguson posted a new installment about the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens. Towards the end he makes a point about a sweet spot existing between the familiar and the …

Awareness | 99% Invisible

99% Invisible did a 20m piece on the AIDS Awareness ribbon last month. The ribbon was a project of an art collective, Visual AIDS. The story is well done and worth your time – and this is coming from the guy who hates “awareness.” Source: Awareness | 99% Invisible By the late 1980s, AIDS had …

“It Was a Good Day” Ice Cube and Politics

“It Was a Good Day” is rapper Ice Cube’s biggest hit — a solid rap song with a great beat, it’s easy to see why this record was so successful. What makes this song truly great, however, isn’t Ice Cube’s vivid description of his good day, but looming, omnipresent possibility of a much worse day. …

Beyond The Choir:: Climate scientists reaching beyond the choir & dropping the F-bomb VIDEO

reposted from BeyondTheChior A while back Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, offered some sound advice to climate scientists about “good climate communication”. Basically, if you’re a climate scientist who wants society to take your data seriously, you have to be something of a political scientist too. Mooney spotlights the Evangelical Climate …

Overcoming political polarization… but not through facts

Ethan Zuckerman has posted a beautiful piece that stitches together many of the ideas we deal with in How To Win and the Center for Artistic Activism. I can’t recommend it enough: Overcoming political polarization… but not through facts It ties together polarization, confirmation bias, the media, David Simon and The Wire, and the need …

Diggers: If you can act it out, it’s real.

We thought: culture is much more important than politics. Let’s just start getting people living the way they wanna live. You wanna live in a world where you don’t have to work? Let’s make it. You wanna live in a world where you can get food for free? Let’s make it. You wanna live in …

Imagine Peace by Yoko Ono

IMAGINE PEACE by yoko ono to the pebble people: start your own campaign! A butterfly is hopping from flower to flower. Oh, good. I think. The butterfly is busybodying as usual. We are like butterflies. We busybody ourselves every day for our survival as we think we know how. But the difference with us, is …

Miami's Community Avengers

Have No Fear the Community Avengers are Here! As the right wing mob mobilizes to shut down democratic debate on health care reform; as Van Jones is forced from the White House through distortions of the truth and plays on racial and political fears; as the recession deepens – the masked marauders known as the …

Seun Kuti

Seun Kuti was interviewed on PRI’s Sound of Young America a couple weeks ago. Choice excerpt typed below and you can listen to the whole program here: SK: Afrobeat is not pop. JT: Did you ever think that you would be – because afrobeat was certainly popular in Nigeria, it’s not *the* pop music of …

I’m Rubber, You’re Glue …

by Jonathan Alter Published Aug 23, 2008 From Newsweek magazine issue dated Sep 1, 2008 It’s hard to predict what will stick. ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ was a hand-scrawled sign hung in Little Rock. When NEWSWEEK reported earlier this summer that the McCain family owns at least seven houses, few outside the hothouse of politics …

Tropic Thunder – comedy is anarchy

…in comedy, context is everything. “Tropic Thunder”… doesn’t risk simply offending; at times the picture is almost appalling in its tastelessness — I watched parts of it agape. But Stiller and his ensemble… understand that comedy is anarchy. As much as we want our lives to be stable and manageable, comedy demands that we relinquish …