Consider this: according to Discogs.com, about 800 remixes were released in 1983. In 1990, more than 4,000; in 2000, almost 15,000. And in 2010, there were 22,750 remixes released, an increase of more than 450% in twenty years. Not surprisingly, as that number has leapt up, remixes also have come to represent a much larger share of what's being released: in 1983, they accounted for 2% of all releases; 7% in 1990; 17% in 2000; until, by 2010, a staggering 20% of all releases were remixes. READ MORE

Michael Walker was acting strangely. The 23-year-old Seattle soundman had just been re-introduced to Sara Merker, a college student a couple years older than he was, and the first thing he said was, "Can I take a picture of you for my blog?" READ MORE

Part of a series on collaborations that we now take for granted but initially made little sense. READ MORE

For all the political heaving to-and-fro that characterized our recent efforts to raise the debt ceiling, what President Obama signed on Wednesday wasn't really a piece of budgetary policy. Aside from raising the debt ceiling, cutting loans to grad students and capping the budgets of certain programs (like disaster relief), it didn't do anything to affect the debt. What the Budget Control Act of 2011 represents, rather, is the rulebook for an entirely new game. A special joint Congressional committee will meet in November and attempt to agree on $1.5 trillion in debt reduction. (The Congressional Budget Office will serve as the refs.) If they fail to come to an agreement, the consequences will not just be electoral or economic. This failure will also trip a "trigger" mechanism that will require automatic cuts in a whole host of programs dear to both parties. READ MORE

Wienerville, USA
Categories: Fast Food, Hot Dogs READ MORE

51. Pert Plus READ MORE

There are a lot of different ways to say that NBC’s "Parks and Recreation" is a very upbeat show. Willa Paskin classified the show as a “comedy of niceness.” Showrunner Michael Schur points out that everyone on the show is passionate about something. James Poniewozik talks about how the show is sincere where others are ironic. And at Splitsider, AJ Aronstein focused on the show’s optimistic view of politics. But here’s another way to say it: the show is twee. READ MORE

It's college graduation season, and with the blooming of the cherry trees comes that cherished annual journalistic tradition: telling new graduates they're screwed in a way that no one else in the history of the world has ever been screwed. When it's actual recent graduates doing this fretting, I can understand, since being forcibly thrown into a job search is always a scary situation. But for their elders to be doing this worrying—elders who presumably have found some success as they got on in life—it strikes me as petty, self-serving fearmongering. So from someone back in academia after a decade at an office job, here's some real talk. READ MORE

When I was fifteen, I prank-called a rape hotline. I called and asked if it was true that women who get raped are asking for it. This is maybe the worst thing I have ever done! But let me explain. While I was certainly the possessor of all sorts of sexist attitudes at the time (I was a 15-year-old boy, after all), I don’t think I actually believed that women who were raped were asking for it. The reason I even knew about rape hotlines in the first place was because I’d seen a number for one on a Tori Amos tape I listened to incessantly. I was a huge Tori Amos fan, in a trading-bootlegs, going-to-multiple-concerts, actively-participating-on-Usenet-groups way. When I got bored at basketball practice, I would start singing “Me and a Gun," a song that directly contradicts the question I put to the hotline. (“Yes I wore / a slinky red thing / Does that mean / I should spread?”) So, you know: It’s possible I believed this, but it seems unlikely. READ MORE

Apparently, if Facebook wanted to repair its reputation, all it had to do was seem like it was helping to topple an authoritarian regime. Now that the U.S. media is loudly pushing the idea that social media can change Egypt—and next, the world!—it makes Mark Zuckerberg's tendency to monetize every aspect of our online lives seem less important. READ MORE