TAN Kicks the Mad Styles, So Step Off the Frankfurter
Yo Gawk, you remember that routine. Then came Q-Tips, Mr. Clean, and pigeons. Good times! This weekend: ?uestlove saves magazines*, smart people discuss this heavily e-mailed NYT op-ed, and finally, a word on "!!!".
So yeah. How awesome is it that when Jimmy Fallon opens the National Magazine Awards with a line about Gawker, we have his house band The Roots on Gawker discussing — and so articulately! — the ongoing Great Magazine Die-Off? Granted it falls short of our president going crazy at a Little League WNBA Final Four game, but it's still pretty cool! And timely! Certainly a reason for Jimmy to keep not-not reading Gawker or whathaveyou! (more on those exclamation points later!)
And did you read this op-ed in the Times from Mark C. Taylor, chairman of Columbia University's religion department? You should, it's very provocative. Dude is all like: universities are retarded, buncha Bernie Madoffs and Hipster Grifters. And the commenters at the Times were all like: Yo, son! We are all in debt because of our investment in "higher education" so you better watch your mouth sucka. We will intellectualize you into a pulp right here in the comment section.
But there's some truth to it, right? A quick perusal of the "Shut Up, College" tag certainly reveals that something is wrong. I mean, $54K to protest in an NYU lunchroom? Since I'm only good for inserting that slick-talking give-me-some-skin jive I got some intelligent people to parse out the issues. Credits include: N+1, The New Yorker, NY Mag, and The Nation. Lots of "N's" in there if anyone was in need.
They all disagree with Professor Taylor, so if you want to see an intellectual gang-bang this is the spot in like thirty minutes.
And then there was this cool piece on exclamation points, and it does a pretty good job of digging into its usage. But it leaves out racism! Because white people (this includes assimilated white-ethnics) blog like this: So cool! Perfunctory, even! Seriously! And Black people are like, "What are y'all trying to prove with all the grammatical histrionics, son. Be easy." And I have questions — some theories, but mostly questions — about why.
All that adds up to a great show we've got lined up. So stick around, but before the commercial break we're gonna toss it to this week's band: hipstah darling Lykke Li, in a Black Cab, singing "I'm Good, I'm Gone"
*this indicates both a riddle and a mystery associated with the particular phrase. at some point in your life, maybe later today, maybe thirty years from now, you will realize the profundity of that asterisk. it's kind of like what JJ Abrams did in the print edition of Wired recently, but on a blog and infinitely deeper.