On last week's show and earlier this week on the blog, On the Media producer Sarah Abdurrahman talked about her "Go FOIA Yourself" project, which has her attempting to see how much information the federal government might be keeping on her. An eagle-eyed commenter on Sarah's last post pointed us toward an article by Erin Siegal in the Columbia Journalism Review which outlines the process of suing governmental agencies for refusing to release information requested through FOIA. More importantly, the article sheds light on just how costly the legal process can be.

It's pledge week at On the Media's parent station WNYC. Hosting this website and our podcast costs our producing station a sizeable chunk of change each year. If you’d like to contribute to WNYC to help keep us online and available to you whenever you want to listen, now is the time to do it. For a one time pledge of $60 you can get our popular ON [CAFFEINE] coffee mug which host Brooke Gladstone can be seen modeling below – follow this link to get the mug or to pledge at any level to WNYC (you can also see the other great thank you gifts on offer).

Normally for our pledge shows, Bob and Brooke spend the hour recalling some of our favorite segments, and talking about how great we are. But instead of tooting our own horns this time around, OTM decided to go to some of our favorite public radio personalities and ask them to tell our listening audience just how amazing, wonderful, and worthy of support we are. All week we've been posting segments featuring Brooke and Bob talking to folks like Terry Gross, Peter Sagal, and Deb Amos. In our final pledge show segment, Brooke talks to Radiolab's Robert Krulwich!

Don't forget to support us at https://pledge3.wnyc.org/epledge/desktop/otm/ or text OTM to 25383 to make a $10 donation via your phone bill. We're counting on your support! 

It's pledge week at On the Media's parent station WNYC. Hosting this website and our podcast costs our producing station a sizeable chunk of change each year. If you’d like to contribute to WNYC to help keep us online and available to you whenever you want to listen, now is the time to do it. For a one time pledge of $60 you can get our popular ON [CAFFEINE] coffee mug which host Brooke Gladstone can be seen modeling below – follow this link to get the mug or to pledge at any level to WNYC (you can also see the other great thank you gifts on offer).

Normally for our pledge shows, Bob and Brooke spend the hour recalling some of our favorite segments, and talking about how great we are. But instead of tooting our own horns this time around, OTM decided to go to some of our favorite public radio personalities and ask them to tell our listening audience just how amazing, wonderful, and worthy of support we are. In this segment, Brooke talks to Deb Amos, an NPR correspondent who covers the middle east.  

We still have one more segment from our pledge show to come, so check our blog again tomorrow!

It's pledge week at On the Media's parent station WNYC. Hosting this website and our podcast costs our producing station a sizeable chunk of change each year. If you’d like to contribute to WNYC to help keep us online and available to you whenever you want to listen, now is the time to do it. For a one time pledge of $60 you can get our popular ON [CAFFEINE] coffee mug which host Brooke Gladstone can be seen modeling below – follow this link to get the mug or to pledge at any level to WNYC (you can also see the other great thank you gifts on offer).

Normally for our pledge shows, Bob and Brooke spend the hour recalling some of our favorite segments, and talking about how great we are. But instead of tooting our own horns this time around, OTM decided to go to some of our favorite public radio personalities and ask them to tell our listening audience just how amazing, wonderful, and worthy of support we are. In this segment, Brooke talks to Fresh Air's Terry Gross!

Last week we did a story about a work of art called The Transparency Grenade, a grenade-shaped sculpture that will collect wireless information and audio when "detonated" and then post all of that information to the internet. While the grenade is a one-of-a-kind object, creator Julian Oliver said he had plans to make an Android phone app that would emulate the functionality of the grenade. Oliver said in our interview that he would be surprised if technology like this didn't already exist. Well, it turns out it does. Enter the Pwn Plug.

It's pledge week at On the Media's parent station WNYC. Hosting this website and our podcast costs our producing station a sizeable chunk of change each year. If you’d like to contribute to WNYC to help keep us online and available to you whenever you want to listen, now is the time to do it. For a one time pledge of $60 you can get our popular ON [CAFFEINE] coffee mug which host Brooke Gladstone can be seen modeling below – follow this link to get the mug or to pledge at any level to WNYC (you can also see the other great thank you gifts on offer).

Normally for our pledge shows, Bob and Brooke spend the hour recalling some of our favorite segments, and talking about how great we are. But instead of tooting our own horns this time around, OTM decided to go to some of our favorite public radio personalities and ask them to tell our listening audience just how amazing, wonderful, and worthy of support we are. First up, Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me's Peter Sagal!

Brooke appeared on the CBC show George Stromboulopoulos Tonight yesterday to talk about her comic The Influencing Machine. Check out the full interview below.

On the Media has followed legal standards around warrantless GPS tracking since October of 2010. In January of this year, the Supreme Court decided a case called US v. Jones, which dealt specifically with this subject. The Supreme Court decision was pretty nuanced, but George Washington University professor and Volokh conspiracy blogger Orin Kerr told us that the decision was a victory for privacy advocates.

Last week, reporter Anthony Shadid of the New York Times died in Syria of an asthma attack. Brooke remembered him on the show this week with a snippet from an interview we did in April of 2011 about the American media's short attention span for international crises and the dangers inherent to foreign crisis reporting. You can listen to the entire story here. Transcript below. 

Way back when we re-launched our website in July of this year, we did a Q&A with director Kirby Ferguson. Ferguson has been working on an ongoing series of videos called Everything is a Remix, about the culture of remixing that permeates just about every creative endeavor out there. Ferguson uses a couple of very famous examples (Star Wars, the ouvre of Quentin Tarantino, the innovations in the graphical interfaces in modern computing) to demonstrate that innovation is at least partly appropriation.

As part of Facebook's initial public offering yesterday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter that was included in Facebook's registration statement with the Security and Exchange Commission. Wired's Epicenter blog has an interesting breakdown of Zuckerberg's letter, but there was one section that stood out to us - Zuckerberg's pontifications on hackers and the term "hacker" itself.

On the Media has reported plenty on both our show and our blog about Righthaven, a company that buys copyrights on newspaper stories and images and then sues bloggers who repost them either in part or in full. They've had an incredible run of bad luck in the last six months, culminating in their assets being seized in order to pay off court debts, and an investigation by the Nevada State Bar. One of those seized assets was their website, righthaven.com, which was sold to a mystery bidder earlier this month for a paltry $3,300. The bidder is now a mystery no more.

Every Monday, the staff of On the Media talks about a few of their favorite things. Tell us what media you've been consuming in the comments!

Last week, asked Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett of Rifftrax and Mystery Science Theater 3000 for some pointers on the art of riffing in preparation for the launch of the 2012 iteration of our Media Scrutiny Theater. Today, we're proud to announce our inaugural video!

I'd say we get an email at least once a week from a listener asking us why Bob pauses when he says "edited...by Brooke" at the end of every episode. Even as a member of the OTM staff, that question will remain one of life's great mysteries, like the sound of one hand clapping, or why people dislike cilantro.

Comic artist Tyler Crook (you can find him on his website and on facebook) has obviously spent a considerable amount of time thinking about Bob's weekly pregnant pause and has drawn a cartoon imagining what happens in the studio during recording. It's pretty great.

This weekend, we will be airing an interview with Mark Lemley, who is representing a website called Rojadirecta that had its domain name seized by the US government for copyright infringement in February of this year. But several blogs are reporting today that the Justice Department, which has worked with the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on a domain name seizure operation known as Operation In Our Sites, has returned a mistakenly seized domain after a year of legal wrangling.

Last weekend was the weekend of my epic win - doing a lap around Prospect Park on my bike. This week Brooke and I did a sort of debriefing interview with Superbetter designer Jane McGonigal about my experiences playing the game to recover from being run over by a car. In the interview, I described my feelings about riding my bike around the park, but my comments didn't make it into the final cut. Brooke has entreated me to write a blog post about my ride to share with the people who have been following my progress over the past 6 weeks, so here it is!

It wasn't too long ago that On the Media interviewed Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The act, written in 1986, was designed to outlaw criminal computer hacking, but according to Hofmann, it is written in such a technically imprecise manner that it could be used to prosecute someone who violated Terms of Service for a site like Facebook. 

Six months ago, I was hit by a car while I was riding my bike, and spent months in and out of the hospital and recuperating from incredibly painful surgeries. Six weeks ago, I began using Superbetter, a game designed by game designer and theorist Jane McGonigal, with the express purpose of helping people recover from traumatic injuries and achieve health goals. This weekend, I will wrap up my 6 weeks stint using the game.