Media

The easy knock on Tarleton Gillespie's Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture is that it seems dated. In walking the reader through the many issues and arguments of digital copyright, Gillespie focuses on three seminal attempts at Digital Rights Management -- the Recording Industry Association of America's failed Secure Digital Music Initiative, moviemakers' somewhat more successful efforts to lock down DVDs, and the major television networks' push to require "broadcast flags" on digital television signals.

What would you do if a bully -- let's call him "Joey Giggles" -- kept snatching your ice-cream cone? OK, now what if Joey Giggles then told you, "If you pay me five bucks a month, I'll stop snatching your ice cream." Depending on how much you hate getting beaten up, and how much you love ice-cream cones, you might decide that caving in is the way to go. This is what's called a protection racket. It's also potentially the new model for how we'll buy and listen to music.

In the pre-Internet age, Raed al-Saeed would be punching above his weight. Last month, the 33-year-old Saudi posted a six-minute film on his blog that has thrust him into a millennial debate previously waged by only mullahs and popes: Can religion be evil? "My goal was not to make me or my blog famous," said al-Saeed.

If I didn't already prefer Ketel One vodka in my martinis, I might very well call for my own boycott against Absolut.

For the past year, twenty-something Washington Post reporter Amar Bakshi has traveled across the globe talking to ordinary people of his generation -- farmers, rebels, rappers, laborers -- whose primary experience of the United States has been with George W. Bush at the helm.

What he found was eye-opening. Having just returned to the U.S. this month, Amar will offer some new perspectives on the texture of pro- and anti-Americanism at the local level.

All right, I admit it. I sold out. Last Wednesday night, I went on "The Colbert Report," and I can't quite shake the feeling that I made a pact with the devil.

But did I?

I published a book four months ago, and everyone knows a sit-down with Stephen Colbert gives book sales a healthy bump.

So when a "Report" producer called last month to invite me to the show, I said what any author eager to sell more books would say: "Heck, yes!"

Six weeks ago, 29-year-old Culver City Internet copy writer Christian Lander started a blog, stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com, on a whim, thinking he'd poke fun at himself and fellow white people. Spending roughly two hours a day writing satirical posts about "stuff white people like," Lander had no idea how much his little inside joke would catch on. In the first week, the site received about 200 hits a day. The next week it jumped to 600, and then 4,000 the next. By last week, he was averaging 300,000 daily hits.

Primary-Palooza! (Brian Lehrer Live/New York Public Radio)

Director of the American Strategy Program Steve Clemons participated in a televised show with New York public radio host Brian Lehrer in a discussion about new media, blogs, Facebook, microjournalism and how it was changing the structural ecosystem of political organizing and participation.

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While the United States and Europe share much in common, they also exhibit basic differences, an "American Way" and a "European Way," that are diverging and had been leading to frequent clashes even before the U.N. rift over Iraq. In a globalized capitalist world, where all nations are seeking models of development that allow "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" for its people, this clash within the West is every bit as elemental as the clash with Arab-Islam because it is multidimensional -- economic, political, social, and international in scope.