It’s Memorial Day, and while still using my day off to move to a new apartment, drink beer, and shop at Home Depot, I’m also going to pay respect to a friend of mine who was killed in action while serving with me in Iraq last year. Israel Candelaria didn’t have to serve. When he [...]

M.I.A has dropped a new track in response to Lynn Hirschberg’s controversial New York Times article that questions the pop star’s political effectiveness. Hirschberg was dismissive of M.I.A.’s intellectual ability to understand the complexity of the situation in Sri Lanka, among other things. Here are some choice excerpts: Unity holds no allure for Maya — [...]

Monica Potts notes that an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, introduced by Sen. Roland Burris (D-IL) will repeal a ban on abortions for servicewomen. The ban, re-instituted by Congress in 1995 (after Clinton rolled it back in 1993), prevents a servicewoman from obtaining an abortion on base, even if she uses her own [...]

America is, by all standards, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and yet, on a daily basis, the supposed benefits of living and being born into this standard of living are not felt by many of this society’s most vulnerable members. And yet, for all the talk by anti-abortion activists of how “pro-life” [...]

Quick hit via Metafilter: Duncan McNicholl has undertaken a really cool experiment. Tired of the pervasive philanthropy photos that depict the impoverished as incapable—i.e. “the teary-eyed African child, dressed in rags, smothered in flies,”—McNicholl is taking pictures of Malawians as they want to be seen. It’s really heartening to see someone address the systematic difficulties [...]

Admittedly, I am not a Sex And The City fan. Like many people, I’ve seen my share of episodes; like many women, I watched some of those with friends. But between the obsession with Cosmos and their utter ignorance of DSW — let alone the broadly-drawn caricatures of the “types” of women and the ever-present [...]

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, a newly completed, decades-long study shows that children who grew up in a home with 500 or more books stay in school three years longer than kids whose parents only had a few books, and that children whose parents have lots of books are 20 percent more [...]

One week after Virginia Heffernan announced the death of the open web thanks to the rise of app culture, Prism Comics’ Charles “Zan” Christensen took on Apple’s censorship of GLBTQ and Indie comics, which could destroy a struggling subset of the comics industry. If the iPad is the savior of comics thanks to its built [...]

Tomorrow I leave for an annual vacation I take with my friends to the middle of nowhere. It couldn’t have come sooner: as you may have noticed, I’m writing less frequently and I haven’t been particularly satisfied with the stuff I’ve managed to produce. Actually, vacation could have come much sooner. So I’ll be attempting [...]

Brett Schenker reports that the first comic-book convention of 2011 is going to be held in the misgoverned bigot-state of Arizona. Is the comic-book community really going to tolerate this? I see the creative team behind Invicible is scheduled to appear. Guys, Jan Brewer would ask for Oliver’s papers.