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This week's release of Grand Theft Auto IV provoked a frenzy of media coverage heralding the game's design, touting the record-breaking sales and of course, examining the threat the game poses to our children. But Lawrence Kutner has authored a new book suggesting violent video games do not create violent children.
Rushmore Drive is a new search engine designed to return results targeted to black people. CEO Johnny Taylor explains why segregated search makes sense and web entrepreneur Omar Wasow gives a status report on the state of the black internet.
65 years ago, Dr. Albert Hofmann embarked on the first intentional acid trip, when he ingested 250 µg and set out from his lab on a bicycle. On the occasion of Hofmann’s death this week, we rerun this interview with Acid Dreams author Martin Lee. He reflects on the uses and misuses of LSD.
Consuming the same media as your peers is what social scientists call homophily, better known as ‘birds of a feather flock together’. Ethan Zuckerman, blogger and internet theorist, has been trying to fight this instinct online. He offers techniques for surprising and challenging readers with news that they didn't know they wanted.
The story of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has been irresistible to the news media for weeks, with images of FLDS women living as though in another century. But now the sister wives are fighting back in a very 21st century way. Salt Lake Tribune’s polygamy reporter Brooke Adams reviews the narrative.
Rupert Murdoch has had several months to exert influence over his new property, The Wall Street Journal. Many see the modifications to the paper and his grab for Newsday as a direct attack on The New York Times but Slate's Jack Shafer says the speculation is overblown.
For a few years in the early 1960s, small, pornographic books called Stalags were a runaway success in Israel. The books were set in Nazi prisoner-of-war camps and featured a complicated mix of violence, sex and revenge fantasy. And according to Ari Libsker’s new documentary, "Stalag," they shaped, and even perverted, a generation’s feelings about the Holocaust.
In researching his New Orleans neighborhood, Times Picayune columnist Lolis Eric Elie stumbled across the story of the nation's first African-American daily newspaper, The New Orleans Tribune. Elie's new film shows how the paper thrived during Reconstruction and played a large role in legal challenges to segregation, culminating in Plessy v. Ferguson.
For over 50 years, outlaw American radio broadcasters exploited a legal loophole and aired powerful pirate radio from the Mexican side of the border. So called ‘border blasters’ - or ‘X stations’ - were true innovators whose influence continues to be felt today. OTM’s Jamie York tells the story.
