[Photo Credit: Jennifer S. Altman]

“Moving to Maine forced me to grow. People say that if you can make it in New York you can make it anywhere. I find the opposite to be true. If you can carve out some success in rural America, you have something that would be attractive to a lot of people.”

— Alex Carleton as quoted in “Rogues Gallery,” Maine Magazine, 2010

Press thus far:

• Stanley Cup To Visit Cornish On Sept. 28: Trophy To Be Displayed At Krista’s Restaurant [WMTW]
• Stanley Cup coming to Maine [Portland Press Herald]

Release:

Contact: Alex Steed || alexsteed@gmail.com || (207) 939-6188

STANLEY CUP TO MAKE APPEARANCE IN CORNISH, MAINE

CORNISH, MAINE — The Stanley Cup, the NHL ‘s legendary trophy, will be making a stop at Krista’s Restaurant in Cornish on September 28th.  Ever since word got out, Krista Lair, owner and head chef, has been receiving a lot of calls.

A lot of calls.

“I had to type up an information card for my hosts and servers so that they can answer all the questions people are calling with.  I would love to take the calls myself, but I’m busy cooking and working out other logistics!” laughs Lair.

With the Cup coming to a beautiful, sleepy town like Cornish, Maine, Lair says that she can’t blame people for being curious. As a part of Cup tradition, Stanley Cup winning team members and officials are awarded a day with the iconic trophy. When regular customer, friend, and Vice President of Finance for the Boston Bruins Jim Bednarek told Lair that he and his wife Susan wanted to host the cup in Cornish, specifically at her restaurant, she could not resist.

Krista’s will be hosting a private dinner for Bednarek and the Cup that evening. Krista’s will also be hosting an outdoor celebration and barbecue from 5:30 to 9:30 for everyone who wants to come and see the Cup, which will be marched through the crowd on a couple of occasions. There will be an outdoor beer garden provided by Sebago Brewing Company.

Finally, fulfilling both her and Bednarek’s desire to use the occasion to do some good, Lair is auctioning off a table for 8 for the dinner seating.  Proceeds from the auction, and partial proceeds from the outdoor celebration, will benefit MSAD #55 athletic scholarship.

“We could not be more elated about this,” explains Lair, who has run and grown her business in Cornish since 2004. “We’ve gotten a fair amount of attention in the past” — her restaurant has been profiled in a number of publications — “but this just feels huge.  People are excited, we’re excited, and we’re happy that we can use this awesome occasion to do a good thing.”

• Press Inquiries should be directed to Alex Steed at alexsteed@gmail.com or (207) 939-6188
• For updates and more information, check out Krista’s Facebook Page. RSVP for the Facebook Event and share it accordingly here.
• For more information on the auction, see below. To bid, email kristascatering@yahoo.com.

Auction Details: There will be a private dinner for hosts of the cup and their friends, and we are also auctioning a table for 8 to that dinner. All proceeds from the auction will benefit MSAD #55 athletic scholarship. You decide on the most that you are willing to bid on the table and email your name, your bid and your contact information to kristascatering@yahoo.com. Whoever has the highest bid will get the table.

• Bidding closes on September 25^th at 5 PM so don’t dawdle. This is “left bid” style, which means that if you bid $500 but the next lowest bid is $200, you will get the table for $250.
• Choices for dinner will be from a special, limited menu.
• The cost of dinner and drinks is not included in your bid.
• Bring your own cameras!
• Seating for this table begins between 8:00 and 8:30. As the night will be crazy, your patience will be a virtue.

1. Follow Friday posts are intended to shine a light on the Twitter presences of specific community clusters and cliques and to focus less on what they Tweet about and more on what said cluster and/or clique are responsible for producing outside of the Twitterverse. I might post an entry on podcasters one week (as I have here) and one about media literacy activists the next.
2. As is very, very often the case, I started to write about one crew—Heidi Moore, Marketplace Radio, Planet Money, and others—and ended up with an introduction about an entirely different crew—Paris, Ice Cube/N.W.A., Rage Against the Machine, Hip Hop Congress and others—that was able to stand as a post on its own. I look forward to profiling Moore and the gang next week.

As the global markets are in the middle of what appears to be a free fall, and with the New York Times reporting that a double dip recession may be upon us, there is probably no better time to shine a light on some of the people who inspired me to look at, interact with, and take seriously financial markets (as opposed to ignoring them and pretending that they don’t exist, which is typically what I do when I look at a sector and see that it appears to be dominated exclusively by megalomaniacal assholes).

Having grown up in a working poor household in rural Maine, the concept of better understanding financial markets and my place in them did not come naturally. Eventually becoming influenced by circles of punks and anarchists, I would come into contact with an influential (though relatively predictable) set of academics and intellectuals that inspired me to come to terms with the simple fact that understanding economics is essential for any activist. Noam Chomsky’s suggestion that the only way to get a sense of what is really going on is to read the business section—which was something my father had always told me— sparked in me the desire to explore how the markets are organized and to better understand local, national and global efforts that seek to criticize, challenge, manipulate, and engage them by way of reorganization. Giants like Howard Zinn, Karl Marx, Jose Bove, and Naomi Klein (who is on Twitter, by the way) were particularly influential at this time, but their influence did not resonate with my life experience.

In 2003, while working at a cart in the mall, I read this article about the rapper Paris:

Paris is releasing the CD himself. This has nothing to do with legal issues either. It has everything to do with the cover of the album, which few if any record store chains will carry. It depicts a jet about to slam into the White House. Making the album even less likely to appear on record store shelves is its title, “Sonic Jihad.”

“The reason I have that cover art is not to offend the families of the victims of 9/11 or anything like that. Nobody has profited from the tragedy of 9/11 more than the U.S. government, the Bush administration, defense contractors and large corporations,” [Paris said]. “So people can’t look at me and say I’m capitalizing on this horrible event. That’s not the case at all. In fact, I am using this as a means by which to reach people with the truth.”

Rapper Paris' "Sonic Jihad," 2003

As I had spent the previous year and a half outraged by the actions of the Bush Administration, this grabbed my attention. The article continued:

“A look at his Web site reveals a more complex character. A former stockbroker, he has posted a detailed money management and investment program, covering everything from setting up a 401(k) to creating a diversified portfolio.”

I had been really into Ice Cube as a teenager, and I very much enjoyed the militant tone of his early career. When I was a kid, it was controversial on both sides of the racial divide for white kids from the country or suburbs to listen to rap music. Out here in the sticks where the population is predominantly white, it was portended that the white kid who listens to rap or hip hop “wanted to be black,” which was occasionally reinforced by the occasional a Seth Green / Can’t Hardly Wait style character who exclusively listened to and dressed like Tupac. In black communities, and I only ever heard this criticism from afar via the mainstream media at the time, the feeling was that middle class white people were listening to black music because it was trendy to do so, and because listening to black music served as a safe and easy way to irritate white parents.

Again, I grew up working poor, not middle class, and at that time the popular music embraced by the white working poor—modern country—appeared to me to embrace the status quo. Popular music embraced by the black working poor—rap and hip hop—focused some of its rage toward the systems that created these conditions. For these reasons, I enjoyed Ice Cube and N.W.A. as, while they  largely discussed race, it was somehow clear to me that the underlying issue they were addressing was actually class. While I can’t believe that I am about to quote them in a blog entry, Sublime summed this up best in their song April 29th, 1992, in which they describe their take on the L.A. Riots:

Cause everybody in the hood has had it up to here
It’s getting harder and harder and harder each and every year.
Some kids went in a store with their mother
I saw her when she came out she was getting’ some pampers.

They said it was for the black man
They said it was for the mexican
And not for the white man.

But if you look at the streets it wasn’t about Rodney King
It’s bout this fucked up situation and these fucked up police.
It’s about coming up and staying on top
and screamin’ 187 on a mother fuckin’ cop.
It’s not written on the paper
It’s on the wall.

Rage Against the Machine, a genre mash-up gateway drug to hip hop for a lot of white people my age who grew up outside of the city, helped to point me in this direction very early on. Where Rage was part of the current that got me thinking about economics on a very rudimentary level (rudimentary not because they were over-simplifying, but because I was just 10 when I first heard them and 12 when I first began listening to them closely), Paris was the first artist that I encountered who suggested engaging with and better understanding the markets as a means of evading subvert forms of oppression (debt). The liner notes of Sonic Jihad served as a manifesto in favor of financial and market literacy.

Encountering Paris led to a series of other eye-opening discoveries. Through him, I came upon Hip Hop Congress, which at that time was holding workshops on financial literacy. The League of Pissed Off Voters—now the League of Young Voters—came to Maine not long after said encounter (I now sit on the Steering Committee of the Maine League) and served to educate me further. That organization had sprung from the brilliant mind of Billy Wimsatt, whose books Bomb the Suburbs and No More Prisons helped me to see politics from this Hip Hop perspective, and to take seriously the notion of better understanding the systems the working poor are being crushed by. And last but not least, Russell Simmons and Chuck D have long been advocates for financial literacy as a fundamental starting point for pursuing real independence, freedom and liberation.

To follow:

• Russell Simmons
• Tom Morello (of Rage Against the Machine)
• Naomi Klein
• Ice Cube
• Hip Hop Congress
• Billy Wimsatt
• The Maine League of Young Voters

Angioplasty Media's Nick Mavodones and Paddy Reagan Photo Credit: Matthew Thorsen

Angioplasty Media was awarded a Daysie (a nod from the readership of Seven Days, Burlington’s weekly rag) in the Best Independent Music Promoter category. I could not be happier for and more proud of Nick and Paddy for what they have built in the past four years.

From Seven Days:

If Burlington and surrounds have seemed just a bit cooler of late, it’s because of indie music promoters like Angioplasty Media. The little booking collective that could is responsible for bringing a staggering number of underground acts through the area, vastly upping the Queen City’s indie cred.

Read more here.

I started publishing zines when I was in high school (back in the late 90s). After graduating, sometime around 2002 or 2003, I worked with the mind-boggling talented Arielle Walrath to build Angioplasty Media, a brand that served to house the publication of new zines (on and offline), the organization and promotion of shows, and anything else I wanted to pretend was bigger than my own interests. Because I was a disorganized and occasionally manic shit show when I was in my early 20s, the project was very well intended—and thanks to Arielle, the aesthetic never failed to inspire awe—but it proved unsustainable under my direction. By the time I moved to Burlington for a short stint in 2007, Angioplasty was alive in name but dead in every other way.

Being from Portland, Maine, I had peripherally known of Nick Mavadones for a few years before finding myself living on his couch on and off for a few months when I was working for the Vermont Democratic Party in 2006. Over the course of the next year, I had a front row seat from which I could observe and admire his devotion to and enthusiasm for independent music, DIY culture, and everything I had hoped Angioplasty would stand for. By the time late 2007 rolled around, Tick Tick, the jaw-droppingly brilliant art collective Nick was working with, was disbanding and so I handed Angioplasty over to him and asked him to run with it. As I was quoted saying in this Seven Days article about its origins:

It was like that saying, ‘If you love someone, set them free.’ I knew Nick and I knew this group he was hanging with — the Tick Tick folks — and I was, like, Fuck, this dude is way more put together than I am to make this brand great. So I just handed it all over to him.

Since the transition, Nick and Paddy [Reagan] have killed it over and over again. Angioplasty’s roster of shows and events has been amazing and their enthusiasm and professionalism has consistently received praise. Proving that almost everything comes around full-circle, in less than a week they’re hosting a performance by Jeff Magnum, the genius of whom a beautiful and big-hearted girl introduced me to during the summer I was living on Nick’s couch.

(It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that Jeff Magnum somehow serves as a living le motif that connects me to many of the greatest things and people in my life.)

So while I am proud of Nick and Paddy for everything they have accomplished, I am simultaneously grateful to them for taking my vision and making it real and making it bigger. I look forward to seeing what’s next, boys, as you have never ceased to amaze. Bravo.

Love + Radio: The best podcast you've never heard

I can’t write enough good things about the podcast Love + Radio is. Upon discovering it, I listened to over 30 episodes (which adds up to the vast majority of its two year old catalog) over the course of the past two weeks.

If This American Life is the attractive Ivy League graduate / indie rock front-woman you’d like to [but never will] spend the rest of your life with, and The Sound of Young America is the good looking, moderately well-put-together woman your parents would like for you to hurry up and marry already, Love + Radio is the moderately (though not unsettlingly) rebel girl with a pixie cut and an appetite for speed and whiskey you made out with for 5 hours after meeting and [and talking to no end about Deleuze and Guattari, Genet and a mutual adoration for Night Court with] at a dive bar in Chicago and haven’t stopped thinking about since.

While you’re free to start anywhere, I recommend giving these episodes a try:

• Strip, Pt. 2
• The Wisdom of Jay Thunderbolt
• The List
• Aftermath
• Dirty Balloons
• Violent

Photo Credit: Eric Holsinger

I must underscore the fact that I know that when people sign onto appear on these types of shows, they make themselves vulnerable to heavy handed editing and narrative manipulation. These days, no one holds more responsibility over that than those who sign on the line. Further, I must reiterate that I have not seen one minute of this show, or the final episode in which Chrystie appears. I have no interest in doing so.

I have no idea why I did it—why I willingly walked into this minefield—but I went ahead and I did a Google blog search for Chrystie Corns. I knew that taking a look at how home television audiences were weighing in on her Bachelorette appearance online, but I did anyway and I saw everything I expected to see. 90% of commentators had been talking a lot of shit with a lot of certainty in their tones, describing Chrystie as a bitch, as someone clearly jealous of her sister’s attention, “ugly,” off-putting because of her tattoos, and so-on. All of this coming (ironically) from people putting their own inner ugliness on display by making and passionately sticking to judgements derived from the contrivance that is heavily-edited, prime time television drama.

I don’t know why I feel the need to respond, but here goes:

I met Chrystie Corns at a Maine Tweetup—a meet up for Twitter users from Maine—in 2009 and we have existed in similar, occasionally overlapping circles since. She is not a close friend, but we share close friends, and we are in touch with some degree of frequency. Chrystie is lovely, driven, giving, a hard worker, and one would be hard-pressed to find someone more striking in all of Northern New England. Underneath her tattoos, Chrystie’s elegance is heart-stopping; with her tattoos, which are beautifully designed and accurately representative of her individuality, Chrystie is a goddamn knock-out.

I have been friends with story editors of reality television shows who have explained to me that the basis of their job is to fabricate drama out of nothing, and to create dynamic, diabolical characters out of otherwise everyday figures. I imagine this is what happened to Chrystie last night, as the person these sad, sorry trolls are tearing down in order to feel better about their own clearly unfortunate plights does not match up with description of the person I know.

On several occasions in the past couple of years, I have organized charity fundraisers to which Chrystie has been a major donor. She is a single mother of two kids, she adores her beautiful children, and she works hard to provide for them. I don’t know one person who she and I mutually know who can’t find a dozen good things to say about her, and even those who are totally against the whole reality television show scene will go out of their way to highlight how nice she is. She’s a fucking peach.

That’s the Chrystie I know. Sad-sack haters can eat a bucket of Santorum.

"Strike the battle drum of the Great Leap Forward ever louder." 1959

Every couple of months I hear a political commentator or an enthusiastic progressive activist refer to the need for a “great leap forward” when proposing solutions for X, Y, or Z social and/or political ill. I just heard someone do this on today’s Diane Rehm show. Anyone who knows their history, or has the History Channel bundled into their cable package, or has graduated from middle school, knows that these people should stop doing this. ‎While I am sympathetic to the experimentation with and exploration and promotion of alternative economic models, I find myself in the camp of folks who believe that, despite its good intentions and achievements of some invaluable industrial progress, the millions of famine and violence related deaths caused by said leap kinda-sorta tainted the GLF’s brand.

And while I am not comparing the ideological intentions of these two government/social movements, I would similarly advise against referring to plans to slow the adverse effects of global climate change (or whatever) as a “final solution.”

From Left to Right: Me and Khadijah James and Danny of Red Hook Initiative [Photo Credit: Jones Franzel]

Samuel was the first person that I have heard discuss the otherwise over-hyped topic of so-called personal branding without sounding smarmy and inhuman. Drawing from his experience as Senior Producer at Black Enterprise, his editorship position at The Source and his time as Digital Content Director at XXL, he underscored the importance of consistency and discipline when projecting one’s professional self online. As consistency and discipline are both essential for finding success in the world of journalism, Samuel spoke from a place of experience. While his advice was not particularly flashy or edgy, or worth deconstructing any further here, it is precisely because of this—because his expertise was clearly not being used to sell a bigger dog and pony show—that I found his  perspective to be resonant and easy to stomach.

Mike Jones added additionally refreshing feedback to the topic. Jones, an accomplished, old school, [Twitterless and Facebookless] Producer/Engineer, reminded the audience of something personal branding evangelists consistently neglect underscore (as doing so would dilute their self-projected authority): At the end of every day, it is one’s body of work and the reputation for which it is generates that is at the core of one’s continued success. While this is something that Samuel addressed and of which he is clearly well aware, Jones underscored this point explicitly, eloquently, and without any air of smugness.

A small series of postscripts and side-notes:

• It was a radio nerd dream-come-true to be afforded the opportunity to spend the day at WNYC.
• Getting to spend some time around Generation PRX Director Jones Franzel was, as it always is, a gift. If you don’t know about PRX, know about them immediately.
• Many thanks to harvestworks, a “non-profit dedicated to bringing artists across the globe into the 21st century by providing a community of resources, people, and technology,” for giving us a tour of their amazing space.
• Finally, it was wonderful meeting Courtney Stein of Radio Rookies, Tony Schloss and the lovely Khadijah James of Red Hook Initiative Radio, and DC Vito and Katherine Fry of The LAMP, an astounding media literacy project based in Brooklyn.

In all it was an amazing event and I am psyched to have participated.

“MTV News. You hear it [doosh] [doosh] [doosh] [doosh] first.”

Kurt Loder:

Like millions of other folks this year, Michael Jackson moved into cyberspace.

The world wide computer network called The Internet has inspired more movies than any big deal technological fad since, oh, the CB radio boom of the 1970s… The Internet itself, however, is definitely exploding. What’s attracted many [Internet users] is the World Wide Web, the liberation of special interest truck stops called websites.

Some people would be strongly advised to avoid the Internet: the hyper-sensitive, the humor impaired and puritans.

… Common are websites devoted to homemade surrealism and out-there humor, existential contemplations of the lowly Twinkie, the legendary Godzilla site, and at last, a rotating image of R2-D2.

Coolio:

If you ain’t on the Information Superhighway, baby, then what is it?

Perry Farrell:

You can throw your name out and people will slag you all day long.

David Bennahum (“Cyber Journalist”) (!!!):

Of course there’s a lot of sex online; welcome to the human race.

In cyberspace, there ‘local community’ of 145 nations and 30 million people.

Check the video out for more commentary from Ozzy, Dave Matthews, Sandra Bullock, Moby, David Bowie as well as clips from The Net, Hackers, Strange Days and (my personal favorite of the bunch) Virtuosity.

I realize that I am totally a decade and a half late to the Slate game, but I am positive that I will very fondly remember this as the Summer I spent hours pushing a lawnmower and getting to know the online current affairs magazine. This is due to my obsession with Slate‘s podcasts, another medium discovery I am coming to super late. Earlier this year I discovered Jesse Thorn’s masterfully crafted The Sound of Young America, many episodes of which I have since devoured, a feast which was followed by my discovery and vociferous consumption of Nick van der Kolk’s brilliant Love + Radio. Shortly after all of this I somehow discovered Slate‘s Political Gabfest and Culture Gabfest. Slate‘s podcasts are not only entertaining, informative and masterfully crafted, they serve as awesomely effective extensions of their brand’s breadth of impact.

My politics don’t exactly match up with the politics of any of the regular staples of Political Gabfest (posted here every Friday) but hearing host [Slate Chief Political Correspondent] David Plotz’s 70′s style, sort-of-whiny-but-never-too-elitist commentary on—and analysis of—the week’s goings on are compelling and resonant even when I disagree with him. I very much appreciate [Slate Senior Editor] Emily Bazelon’s sometimes random and frustrated—though always heartfelt—complaints about Congress having more or less lost way more of its fucking mind than any of us expected it had been capable of losing. (Bazelon’s Twitter responsiveness is impressive: I recently corrected her about a differentiation between STIs she made on the show, to which she responded immediately.) And I now aspire to attain the zen-like temperament of the mind-blowingly astute [Slate Chief Political Correspondent] John Dickerson. Political Gabfest is a go-to as it serves as an ongoing, engaging conversation about what the Hell is happening in Washington, and why one should care.

The podcast’s production value and its sense of seriousness is maintained while also establishing an air of humor and humanness, a stylistic balance Slate has spent 15 years mastering. This helps the magazine maintain a recognition of brand that extends beyond its core content. While I don’t often direct people to Slate‘s website as it is rare that I end up there out of habit of readership, I often hear of a feature on the podcast, check out said feature out on the website, and then forward it, put it on Facebook, Tweet about it, and so-on. Slate‘s website gets in front of me by way of its podcast, a task that many other online politics and culture magazines don’t pull off very well, if at all. In this way, Political Gabfest helps Slate stand above online politicial news magazines to which I have already established allegiances of readership. (Ahem, Talking Points Memo…)

Where I came upon the Political Gabfest first and fell in love with it instantly, I encountered Culture Gabfest (posted here every Wednesday) a couple of weeks later and it took me a few listens to come around to it. I initially faded in and out of feeling that host [Slate critic-at-large] Stephen Metcalf might be a total dick. Metcalf’s passionate delivery occasionally transcends assertive and lands into the realm of overbearing. He once had what I can only describe as a mental break during one episode during which he somewhat arbitrarily challenged the greatness of Bob Dylan and then sort of backed down while simultaneously and awkwardly going out of his way to emphasize that he was not backing down.

(This occurs on the May 25th Gabfest and starts at 17:45. Metcalf mimics Pitchfork-style snobbery at it’s worst, which comes off as embarrassing. Guest host Jody Rosen responds in a measured tone, which offers Metcalf an even more substantial opportunity to further paint himself into a corner.)

Though, in the long-run, Metcalf strikes the listener as resonantly human, especially over the course of the last month and a half during which, on and off, he—sort of half jokingly—has made something of a to-do about blowing an opportunity to save a co-worker’s shoe from the water while at a work retreat in the woods. Metcalf, however, found himself out-manned (in a Butlerian emphasis on manned) by John Dickerson, the reportedly handsome, strapping and brilliant Political Gabfest staple.

The annoyingly heroic (and handsome... and measured... and brilliant...) Dickerson sandwiched between Bazelon and Plotz. Photo by Steve MacFarland.

I write “half-joking” because he and the crew continued to bring it up in something of a funny way, often to contextualize their advertisements for a search engine, but, and perhaps this is me projecting my own neurosis onto Metcalf (this is totally me projecting my own neurosis onto Metcalf, but this is sort of what podcast culture is all about), everyone (except, presumably, Dickerson) knows what it’s like to be put into situations in which one totally blows a chance to respond like an archetypical hero by way of wavering for too long, only to be outdone by someone who better fits the bill. We then, defeated, wish over and over, sometimes to the point of insanity, that we had the opportunity to do it again, but to do it right this time. (Especially if it was in front of a lot of people, and then broadcasted to thousands of listeners.) In this way, I actually find Metcalf endearing in spite of his occasional megalomaniacal tone.

(Regarding my parenthetical statement about Metcalf’s Dylan rant, Metcalf’s Pitchfork tone is also somewhat endearing and resonant as well. On more than, er, hundreds of occasions, I’ve gotten a couple of drinks in me and taken the same tone, which is likely why I am simultaneously critical of it and find that it is relatable without being detrimentally off-putting.)

Further, the podcast benefits from its wonderful staples [Slate Deputy Editor] Julia Turner and [Slate Movie Critic] Dana Stevens, both of whom serve as wonderful foils for Metcalf and his neurosis. They both handle the host’s occasional indignant self-righteousness with subdued grace.

These two podcasts have so become essential staples of my weekly existence—so ingrained into my psyche—that I occasionally confuse the hosts for each other here and there. In the opening of a recent episode, Political Gabfest host David Plotz discussed having gone tubing while on vacation and having banged up his arms . He proceeded to talk trash about the activity and thinking I was being cute, I made fun of him on Twitter and touched on what I perceived to be his anxieties about masculinity, which were completely out of left field as it was actually Culture Gabfest host Stephen Metcalf (in the context of his aspirations to be as badass as John Dickerson) I had in mind. Imagine how stupid I felt when it came to my attention that it wasn’t until learning the following week that said tubing accident resulted in a terrible Staph infection for Plotz and that he was being hospitalized accordingly that I realized I was (playfully) talking shit about the wrong guy.

(Bazelon reports that he is recovering just fine).

I bring up the Slate podcasts because there is so much they are doing right. The shows are great on their own: episode structures are more or less predictable, concise, entertaining and informative. The hosts are endearingly flawed.  From a branding and communications perspective, they have served to bring Slate into my universe, a universe it had otherwise not inhabited, and they have challenged me to explore the magazine further and to share the pieces of it that I like with my friends, networks and others. I highly recommend you listen, enjoy and to observe the role the podcast plays in helping to expand the reach, depth and resonance of Slate‘s brand.

And follow these great folks on Twitter:

• Culture Gabfest
• David Plotz
• Emily Bazelon
• John Dickerson
• Dana Stevens
• Julia Turner

Stephen Metcalf has a Twitter account, but he hasn’t updated in ages.

UPDATE (11-ish hours post publication):

This is a screen grab from my site stats. It suggests that someone found this blog (this post in particular) by way of searching for what was david plotz’s tubing accident. Brilliant.