“The “can women be funny?” pseudo-debate of a few years ago, ridiculous at the time, has been settled so decisively it’s as if it never happened. Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Amy Schumer, Aubrey Plaza, Sarah Silverman, Wanda Sykes: Case closed. The real issue, in any case, was never the ability of women to get a laugh but rather their right to be as honest as men.”
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Ready to Die turns 20 on Saturday, and even at a moment when hip-hop is particularly taken with such milestones, this is (fittingly) an enormous one. Ready to Die is not the greatest rap album ever made, and probably isn’t even the greatest rap album made in 1994—it sags at times with superfluous skits, some of its production touches have aged awkwardly (congrats to that whistling synth hook on “Big Poppa” for owing 20 years’ worth of royalties to The Chronic), and Sean Combs’ somnambulant hype-man routine only grows more irritating with time.
But it is quite possibly the most important, if only for the reason that its maker transformed the music like no rapper before or since. Biggie Smalls didn’t alter the hip-hop landscape so much as crater it, leaving behind an unfillable void and an unhealable wound. The Notorious B.I.G. is the greatest rapper who ever lived in the same way that Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player who ever lived: Some people may argue but they are usually Luddite classicists, incorrigible homers, or hipster contrarians. Seventeen years after his murder at the age of 24, he is of a piece with Miles, Dylan, the Beatles, Aretha, artists whose influence is so immense it ascends into a sort of fundamental sonic iconography, the never-ending soundtrack to everything. A world without KRS-One or Ice Cube or Jay Z would be unimaginably impoverished, but a world without Biggie Smalls is simply unimaginable.
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By appealing to white voters and characterizing Democrats as the party of the non-white, Republicans can hold onto the House. But the more they’re perceived to be the party of white people, the harder it is for them to win presidential elections. As we’ve seen time and again over the last couple of years, even when national Republican leaders would like to make the party friendlier to minorities, right now the GOP is defined by the one place where it holds power: the House.
One answer to the question of what the Democrats can do to make taking back the House a possibility is simple: They can wait. The demographic groups that make up their coalition are increasing in size as a proportion of the population, while the group that makes up almost the entirety of the GOP’s base is shrinking. It’s a slow process, but as whites become a smaller and smaller portion of the American populace, it’ll be tougher and tougher for Republicans to maintain their lock on the House. They may have it for a while yet. But it won’t last forever.
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The gap between staggering Democratic margins in cities and the somewhat smaller Republican margins in the rest of the country allows Democrats to win key states in presidential and Senate elections, like Florida and Michigan. But the expanded Democratic margins in metropolitan areas are all but wasted in the House, since most of these urban districts already voted for Democrats. The result is that Democrats have built national and statewide majorities by making Democratic-leaning congressional districts even more Democratic, not by winning new areas that might turn congressional districts from red to blue.
The best example may be Pennsylvania. President Obama won the state by five percentage points in 2012, thanks to a whopping 83 percent of the vote in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where Democrats combine nearly unanimous support among nonwhite voters with large margins among young and well-educated liberals. Mr. Romney didn’t win a single Pennsylvania county, let alone a district, by as much as Mr. Obama won Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The large Democratic margin in these cities allowed Mr. Obama to carry the state, but it did not translate to a majority of House districts.
The hundreds of thousands of wasted Democratic votes in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh typify the electoral challenge facing House Democrats, which has become more pronounced during the Obama years. Mr. Obama’s strengths among nonwhite and young voters allowed him to build overwhelming margins in heavily populated urban areas, wasting more Democratic votes. In fact, nearly all of Mr. Obama’s gains over Al Gore’s showing in 2000 came from 68 metropolitan counties that already leaned Democratic. The rest of the country, in the aggregate, barely budged.
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“As we pepper students with contradictory information and competing philosophies about college’s role as an on ramp to professional glory, we should talk as much about the way college can establish patterns of reading, thinking and interacting that buck the current tendency among Americans to tuck themselves into enclaves of confederates with the same politics, the same cultural tastes, the same incomes. That tendency fuels the little and big misunderstandings that are driving us apart. It’s at the very root of our sclerotic, dysfunctional political process.”
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Five years ago, the only successful television drama about a woman in politics was “The Good Wife” on CBS, and that was about the blindsided wife of a philandering governor. A few years before, ABC tried to make a go with Geena Davis as the first female president in “Commander in Chief.” That show fizzled and was canceled.
But what is especially striking is that in an age of deep cynicism about Washington, the new portraits of women in high office are painted in rosy shades of respect and admiration. While many of their more self-serving colleagues pursue ignoble agendas, network heroines in top positions are multitasking do-gooders trying to keep the nation safe.
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“The first group-stage opponent for the United States men’s national team was Ghana. In order to televise the game for its 25 million citizens, Ghana had to ration electricity and import 50 megawatts of power from neighboring countries. (That nations like Ghana can compete with a country like the United States on a level playing field remains an underrated Cup perversity. In fact, going into the contest, Ghana was justifiably viewed as a slight favorite. No one in the U.S. seemed to accept how crazy that was. This would be like the residents of Woodstock, N.Y., challenging the entire Houston metropolitan area to a game of softball, and every hard-core softball fan immediately assuming Woodstock would probably win.) In the end, the country with the most electricity prevailed, 2-1.”
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Many customers are already living with a virtual Internet brownout. Tier 1 Internet provider Level 3, which provides top-level “backbone” services that reach the entire world, has posted several scary updates on the state of affairs. General counsel Michael Mooney observes that the ISPs are playing a game of chicken by demanding content providers pay them before they build out any further infrastructure. “These ISPs break the Internet by refusing to increase the size of their networks unless their tolls are paid,” Mooney said. Worse, they don’t even use the capacity they have, artificially starving their customers and slowing down the Internet. (Which explains why Game of Thrones is always buffering on your HBO Go, for example.) Level 3 Vice President Mark Taylor provided evidence that five U.S. ISPs (and one European ISP) are refusing to upgrade their infrastructure despite their connection ports being saturated. In other words, these ISPs are intentionally letting their service degrade because they’re cheap, like a city not fixing potholes in its roads.
If your Internet connection and streaming seem to have slowed down over the last year (as mine certainly has), Taylor has an answer: “permanent congestion” that has been in place for “well over a year,” because your ISP “refuses to augment capacity.” These ISPs, according to Taylor, “are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfill the requests their customers make for content.”
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“The European Court of Justice ruled that an individual’s “right to be forgotten” was so strong that Google and other Internet search companies could be forced to remove links even if the information in question was itself accurate and lawful.
The court said links could be removed if they were found to be “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant.” But the ruling provided little guidance to lower courts about how to decide when links should be removed. As a result, it could open the floodgates for people living in the 28 countries of the European Union to demand that Google and other search engines remove millions of links from search results. Such a purge would leave Europeans less well informed and make it harder for journalists and dissidents to have their voices heard.”
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“Amazon has begun discouraging customers from buying books by Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Colbert, J. D. Salinger and other popular writers, a flexing of its muscle as a battle with a publisher spills into the open.
The Internet retailer, which controls more than a third of the book trade in the United States, is marking many books published by Hachette Book Group as not available for at least two or three weeks.
A Hachette spokeswoman said on Thursday that the publisher was striving to keep Amazon supplied but that the Internet giant was delaying shipments “for reasons of their own.””
shaun james bockert 