On April 5, 2004, a comedian who’d never existed did his last show at a dive bar in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Shecky Grey, a character invented by young comic Kliph Nesteroff, had become a star in the city’s small comedy scene, but Nesteroff was about to kill him off – literally, according to the pre-show hype.…
As mentioned on today’s radio show:
A newly released transcript shows she was prosecuted mainly for refusing to turn on her husband, Julius.
Source: The Meeropol Brothers: Exonerate Our Mother, Ethel Rosenberg – The New York Times
Here’s the story David Robb wrote for Deadline Hollywood about SAG-AFTRA’s attempt to cover up the revelations in An Open Secret, the new documentary about child predators in Hollywood.
EXCLUSIVE: SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director David White recently misled the union’s board of directors about the union’s attempt to whitewash An Open Secret, director Amy Berg’s explosive new documentary about the sexual abuse of child actors in Hollywood. He also misled the board about the union’s threat to sue her and the film’s producers.
As readers, we too often take for granted that the best books of the year are released by the Big 5 publishers. But the truth is that great works of academic writing many times outlast non-academic works when it comes to shaping a given conversation. With this in mind, here are ten must-read academic books slated for 2015, on themes ranging from Islam and liberalism to veterans’ and migrants’ rights.
Read more here 10 Must-Read Academic Books for 2015
It’s a fascinating, hour-long session in which Snowden articulates the case for blowing the whistle, the structural problems that created mass surveillance, and why it’s not sufficient to stop the state from using our data — we should also limit their ability to collect it. The Slashdot post by The Real Hocus Locus provides good timecode-based links into different parts of the talk.
Read more here Edward Snowden interviewed by Lawrence Lessig
WASHINGTON — The watchers are being watched.
For decades, opposition researchers have gone to great lengths to keep their names out of the public consciousness, preferring to let the fruits of their efforts — the location of a candidate’s primary residence, a gaffe caught by a tracker’s camera, a long-forgotten college prank — be the story.
But as some oppo research firms have increasingly come out of the shadows, they’ve suddenly turned their skills not on candidates of the opposite party — but each other.
Case in point: within hours of each other earlier this week Democrats and Republicans sent BuzzFeed News opposition research materials not about candidates, but literally about two opposition research firms: Democratic American Bridge and the Republican America Rising.
Opposition research can do real damage, and the two firms have produced that this cycle. A clip Rising uncovered of Iowa Democratic Senate candidate Bruce Braley dismissing a Republican senator as “a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school,” has dogged him for months.
Read more here No Kidding: Opposition Researchers Are Now Shopping Research About Each Other
