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Minus the Bear’s new video confirms to me that the ’90s are completely back. One part Toad the Wet Sprocket, one part Tripping Daisy, the video is a either great or terrible depending on your take on the ’90s. Personally, I grew weary of the weird-for-its-on-sake video trend that arced along that decade.
If (and this is a reluctant if) I want to throw back to the 90s, I think I’d prefer to do it like this:

Hulu went public today, offering free television shows streamed courtesy the major networks. The quality is decent, the interface is actually pretty slick and aside from some quirks (like removing episodes for some shows after a few weeks) it’s a great start on a single site to visit to watch all of your television online. Hulu’s been in private beta for ages, and it’s been steadily building a buzz for mostly the right reasons (and a few reasons that were just plain silly).
While the tv-viewing capacity of the site’s been widely touted, I was pleasantly surprised to by their “movies” section. Some of the fare is straight-to-video dretch, but amongst the few films offered are some enduring gems like Mulholland Drive, Requiem for a Dream, The Jerk and ¡Three Amigos! When I tried watching Sideways, I was hit with a warning that the film was modified to “fit this screen, to run in the time allotted and edited for content.” In that case, the film was apparently the version that airs 3p on rainy Sunday. Fullscreen, poorly compressed and awkwardly overdubbed it was less than stellar. But Titan AE looked pretty good with their hi-res version, in letterbox and played with no pre-buffer time. Of course, their hi-res version was only 480p which hardly counts as hi-res to me, but it’s a pretty remarkable achievement and far better than any other free streaming movie options around.
It’s still not as compelling as option as stage6 was, and the limited selection will be a deal breaker for many. But the iTunes store started with a limited selection and it’s doing alright, from what I hear.

Charley Harper called his illustration style minimal realism. Of his work, he said:

I don’t think there was much resistance to the way I simplified things. I think everybody understood that. Some people liked it and others didn’t care for it. There’s some who want to count all the feathers in the wings and then others who never think about counting the feathers, like me.

I wish more industrial designer, architects, web designers, hair stylists and cooks took that quote to heart.

Mr Harper died last June, after more than 60 years of art. More of his work can be found here.

I can hardly believe this is for real. So funny and so terrible at the same time.

Dave Eggers has truly written a heart-breaking work of staggering genius in What is the What, the semi-fictional story of Valentino Deng’s life in war-torn Sudan.
The review from the NY Times Book Review says all the things I’d like far better than I can. Francine Prose’s review also articulates the central paradox of the book:

The considerable appeal of Valentino’s personality and the force of Eggers’s talent turn this eyewitness account of a terrible tragedy into a paradoxically pleasurable experience.

Swirling rumors have hounded the Bush administrator for years regarding illegal, warrant-less spying on Americans. Today the Wall Street Journal revealed the enormity of the program.
To summarize the program, the government set up a surveillance network that can rapidly expand from monitoring an individual to an entire metropolitan area. Phone calls, web surfing, emails - all digital communication - can be immediately accessed without warrant. The program is a larger and less-regulated version of a program that Congress shut down in 2003 after a public outcry was raised.
The beauty of this arrangement is that it’s all been done in private, funded by $1b in re-appropriated funds at the National Security Administration (NSA).
That word - private - is really the crux of this whole issue.
The Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution explicitly gives all people (note this isn’t limited to citizens, or even permanent residents) the right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure. We have a right to privacy so long as our known actions don’t warrant investigation. Our right to privacy is sacrosanct - it’s a founding principle of American democracy.
But this is not simply a question of privacy breached - it’s a question about an executive branch that privately and secretly establishes programs that run explicitly contrary to our elected legislative branch. The executive branch is responsible for executing the will of the legislative branch - not the other way around. To operate outside of that scope is to violate the very nature of the government set forth by the constitution.
So revelation exposes both the degradation of the First and Second Articles of our Constitution (which govern the legislative and executive branches), as well as a violation of our Fourth Amendment rights. Worse still, our judicial branch is forcibly inert because the executive branch is withholding so many details that it’s nearly impossible difficult to bring suit. I can sue for a violation of my fourth amendment rights only if I know that they’ve been violated, and it’s unlikely that this administration will be confessing to that detail anytime soon.
And what has this gained us? There’s not quantitative justification - the administration simply offers that we should trust them. I suppose we don’t have much of a choice.

If you’d told me Justice could possibly follow-up their seminal D.A.N.C.E. video with anything even a fraction as catchy and cool, I’d have never believed it.