.::News::. >> Pop Culture 
Mock the vote by Greg Beato
Move over, Britney and Lindsay—Hillary, Barack and McCain are taking over
Lindsay Lohan hasn’t carjacked an SUV in months. Nicole Richie’s formerly extroverted clavicles have taken refuge behind a discreet veil of subcutaneous tissue. Britney Spears is behaving so normally the gossip site TMZ.com has bee... >more
Pop Culture: No ifs, ands or ’bots by Greg Beato
Machines need to be put to use against irritating people, not bums
What hip-hop pioneer Melle Mel declared in 1982 is twice as true today: The city is like a jungle sometimes, and, hothouse flowers that we are now, so accustomed to filtering and fast-forwarding and fine-tuning our lives to our exact specifications, we find it nearly impossible to endure the disrupt... >more
The flowering of humanity by Greg Beato
Oprah encourages all of us to awaken the rhododendron within
All last week, in every country on the planet, people of all ages, astrological signs and income levels spent their leisure time stabbing each other, screaming at their kids, resenting their bosses, throwing gum wrappers on the ground, sucking on shotguns, beating their aging parents, taking too muc... >more
Pop Culture: The law of average by Greg Beato
Look out Brad, George and Leo: The ordinary Joe is making a comeback
Set in Hollywood, in a candy-colored casting loft that once housed a CBS studio, the 20th season of The Real World is the realest Real World yet. There are no passably attractive med students or newly minted accountants here; the aggressively telegenic guppies striking poses in thi... >more
Pop Culture: Sole survivor by Greg Beato
Converse defined the cultural rebel
There are no second acts in American lives— unless, like Hollywood celebrities and sneakers, you’re mostly made of rubber. This year, Converse turns 100, and to celebrate its heritage, it’s running an ad campaign that features a single token athlete, NBA superstar Dwyane Wade, amidst a dream team of... >more
Thugly Americans by Greg Beato
If only the Bush administration could take some lessons from martial-arts reality shows
There is only so much you can learn about a foreign country from sampling its indigenous spa-resort treatments and gamely chewing on whatever disgusting insects serve as the native version of a Snickers bar. To really get to know the character of, say, China or the Philippines, you have to beat up s... >more
Pop Culture: Cab fever by Greg Beato
Despite what you’ve heard, the most dangerous drivers are not celebrities
Recognizing that celebrities give and give and give, and rarely ask for anything in return, even when in dire need of assistance, rapper/actor/transportation engineer Diddy plans to introduce a high-end car service for plastered pre-hab A-listers eager to avoid a starring role in The Smoking Gun’s e... >more
Pop Culture: Beautiful losers by Greg Beato
Everything is sexier than it was “back then”—except us
When Sony introduced the original version of the Walkman in 1979, it was a compact brick of cool, a piece of the future you could hold in your hand, a million times sexier than its closest competitor in the domain of portable high-tech wizardry, the calculator.
Compared to today’s sensuously contou... >more
Pop Culture: Extreme make-under by Greg Beato
Disney’s new House of the Future: bigger and more opinionated
For the first time in more than 40 years, in the exclusive Tomorrowland neighborhood of the world’s most beloved gated community, striving suburbanites underwhelmed by giant rodents and rum-soaked pirates can seek enchantment in sleek tableaus of visionary domestic bling. In May, Disneyland is getti... >more
Pop Culture: Golden girls gone wild by Greg Beato
A month ago, in a convivial, comfy-chaired chat with host Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America, 62-year-old actress Diane Keaton showed exactly why G-rated adjectives do not sufficiently convey the extent of her charm, when, in the course of complimenting Sawyer, she exclaimed, “I’d like to... >more
Pop Culture: Insuring celebrity misery by Greg Beato
Tom Jones’ chest beard is just the beginning
Leather-throated lounge dinosaur Tom Jones is 67 now, which means his famous chest beard is at least 50, possibly 55. Cosmetically, it still resembles a pec thatch of, say, 30, but 55 is 55, and thus, when the U.K. tabloid The Daily Mirror recently reported that the hirsute troubadour had t... >more
[Killfest] Steroids and ammo! by Greg Beato
Rambo is back and making you pay attention to the war you want to ignore
First, John Rambo restored America’s faith in its ability to kick Third World ass. Then, he and his mujahedeen comrades drove the Soviet infidels out of Afghanistan, ushering in the era of death sentences for kite-flying and Osama Bin Laden summer camps. So it only seems fitting that he’s back again... >more
Pop Culure: Last candidate standing by Greg Beato
The road to the White House goes through Letterman
Perhaps you’re a seasoned veteran of Congress with a flair for bilateral coalition-building. Or maybe you’re a public-policy savant whose national health-care plan is so comprehensive it ensures that every pet in America is eligible for the same kind of free, first-class medical attention that poodl... >more
Pop Culture: Can snugglecore satisfy? by Greg Beato
Shame subsides in the addiction to cuteness
In the Web’s earliest days, when already-established media professionals had little interest in cyberspace and enthusiastic amateurs were left to fill the void, they hit upon a simple but potent solution: Poorly scanned photos of their pets. Look, there’s Colonel Fluffington rolling around on his ba... >more
Pop Culture: Body triple by Greg Beato
Hannah Montana’s body double raises critical questions about life as we know it
Fret not, guardians of authenticity! Bubbly, super-assured pop variable Miley Cyrus does virtually all her own lip-synching when she performs live in concert. All her own costume-wearing too. Her PR firm has assured us of this. Yes, there is that YouTube video clip that shows the 15-year-old star of... >more
Pop Culture: The lady and the tiger by Greg Beato
Britney and Tatiana both had a reason to flip out, didn’t they?
A few weeks after Britney Spears announced she was divorcing Kevin Federline and immediately turned into America’s favorite out-of-control party animal, another gorgeous, panty-free creature, Tatiana the Siberian tiger, tried to devour her keeper’s arm at the San Francisco Zoo.
Over the next year, ... >more
Pop Culture:I’ll poop with you by Greg Beato
The future of intimacy, tech-style
What comes after Flickr, after Twitter? What comes after every stranger on the Internet has studied your wedding photos more closely than you have, after business associates know details of your life you previously reserved for priests and bartenders and you’re left wondering how to establish a degr... >more
It (was) a mad mad mad mad year
Looking back at the accomplishments of pop culture heroes Britney, Paris and Sanjaya
Year in review extra
On 2007, a perfect storm of emotional flashers, ruthless panoparazzi and bored voyeurs killing time in cubeland all joined forces for a nonstop carnival of trivial tabloid newzak. Herewith, a recap of the year’s most memorable moments—most of which we’... >more
Water world by Greg Beato
Selling you down the pricey bottled-water river
Bottled water is one of life’s great dumb pleasures. Compared to unbottled water, it’s ridiculously expensive. Compared to unwatered bottles, it’s ridiculously expensive. What, its critics wonder, are we paying for? The opportunity to burn up fossil fuels transporting gallons of product from source ... >more
Give me a fat, pagey book by Greg Beato
Writers want leather-bound evidence of genius, not digital
devices
The Kindle, Amazon’s new wireless electronic reading device (WERD), is so intuitively designed even people who can’t read can operate it (except for the reading part). It’s twice as portable as the average Stephen King novel, way more booky than a cell phone, and, in the breakthrough that has put it... >more
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