Snoop Dogg and Napa Valley aren’t terms that usually go together, but the pairing made sense this weekend when the rapper made an appearance at BottleRock. Gabe Meline, KQED Arts’ music editor, was there and witnessed Snoop good-naturedly rolling sushi with chef Masaharu Morimoto (while making the requisite joint-rolling jokes) and “uniting 30,000 people in a singalong of love and positivity.” This is how our culture thinks of Snoop, as a charming, funny and harmless hitmaker. But that reputation isn’t entirely deserved.

The reception Caitlyn Jenner has received this week has been mostly positive, apart from some fringe people who just don’t get it. Surely, Snoop, America’s Rap Sweetheart, would offer his unconditional support and not say anything awful, right? Yeah, not so much.

Shocked? Well, you shouldn’t be. This isn’t the first time Snoop has said transphobic or homophobic things on social media. At the beginning of the year, Snoop posted a photo of Cortez Booze on his Instagram along with the question, “Who’s auntcle is this?” Booze, who works at a care home in Maryland, was then subjected to an onslaught of abuse from Snoop fans. One Instagram user commented: “That shemale ain’t gone win. U get wat u get if u choose to dress how u dress. Consequences for your choices so use some common sense.”

A few months before that, Snoop posted a photo of two men in bed with the following caption: “U n ya boyfriend since u like Jumpin on my page disrespectn bitch boy go f*ck ya man n get off my line f.A.G.” A fan commented: “Keep it Gangsta Snoop dez F*gs talk tooo much.”

People look up to Snoop. If he appears to be denigrating someone because of their gender expression or sexuality, his fans feel as though it’s acceptable and take it further. Lots of celebrities use the “I didn’t sign up for being a role model” excuse, but the reality is that, once you’re a notable person, people are following your lead, whether you like it or not. After 23 years in the business, one would think Snoop would know better than this.

It’s curious behavior from someone who claimed to the Huffington Post that he has “no issues with nobody. I live for me and I live my life doing what I do, so you should have the right to do whatever you want to do.”

In 2013, The Guardian asked him about whether he thought Frank Ocean’s coming out was a sign of progress in terms of acceptance in the rap world. Snoop had this to say: “Frank Ocean ain’t no rapper. He’s a singer. It’s acceptable in the singing world, but in the rap world I don’t know if it will ever be acceptable because rap is so masculine. It’s like a football team. You can’t be in a locker room full of motherf*cking tough-ass dudes, then all of a sudden say, ‘Hey, man, I like you.’ You know, that’s going to be tough.”

So gay men are incapable of being masculine, lust after straight men and cannot control their urges in locker rooms. Got it. Even when he’s trying to come across as accepting, he ends up revealing how ignorant he is.

Of course, the Snoop Dogg we know is nothing but a caricature crafted by Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. And he’s not alone: Many rap artists also play up heightened version of themselves. They redefine who they are; they change their names (Snoop Lion, P Diddy, *insert Prince symbol here*, etc.). The rap world deals heavily in the fluid nature of identity, yet, for some reason, some of its members can’t find the empathy to understand gender or sexual fluidity.

In a culture that’s become obsessed with public shaming (hi, Justine Sacco!), it’s odd that Snoop continues to exhibit homophobic and transphobic attitudes on social media with zero consequences and no change in his public image. Does our love of getting down to “Drop It Like It’s Hot” trump the need to stand up against intolerance? If we ever want to live in a world where we truly see each other’s humanity, no matter who we love or what gender we were assigned at birth or what color our skin is or what religion we practice, the answer to that question has to be no.

Remember back in April, when local lifestyle blog The Bold Italic suddenly called it quits? We all listened to Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men’s “One Sweet Day” for a while, looking heavenward and asking Why?! Well, turns out we kind of jumped the gun on all that grieving because they just pulled a Lazarus:

We have a lot of questions, such as:

Is this real life?

Has newspaper chain Gannett changed its mind?

Or will this be under the wing of a new company?

Will the former employees get some reward for surviving the whole You’re-unemployed-and-all-your-dreams-have-been-dashed-J/K! switcheroo?

Was this all a genius stunt?

We’ll update this post with answers to these questions and more, as they reveal themselves!

Update:

According to Broke Ass Stuart, Gannett has sold the brand to a new media company run by Sunil Rajaraman, a tech entrepreneur who stepped down as CEO of Scripted (a content farm company) earlier this year, and Sonia Arrison, a writer who covers technology. Neither worked on The Bold Italic‘s previous incarnation and currently no former employees are attached to this revival.

Jeremy Lybarger, the former managing editor of The Bold Italic, had this to say: “One of the sad ironies in local media is that a site that so often bemoaned the city’s loss of soul will now, at best, be operated by well-meaning “creatives” from the tech industry…or, at worst, be a content mill catering to self-consciously hip advertisers. ”

All I can say about this troubling turn of events is:

The day has finally come! After a seemingly endless string of ballot initiatives and court battles, marriage equality is finally the law of the land, thanks to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer and swing-vote Anthony Kennedy. Our friends at KQED News captured how the Bay Area is reacting to the news. But what about the internet, which is known to have a lot of feelings on, well, basically everything. Here are the best reactions from around the web:

This was the scene outside of the Supreme Court when the news was announced. Keep an eye out for the woman dressed up as Ruth Bader Ginsburg jumping up and down:

Vox created an educational animated gif that captures the progress of equality, starting with Massachusetts becoming the first state to legalize marriage for gay couples in 2003. It was the sixth jurisdiction in the world (after the Netherlands, Belgium, Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec) to do so. How far we’ve come!

Facebook created a tool that superimposes a rainbow over your profile photo. Visit their Celebrate Pride page to try it out:

The HuffPost UK eased concerns about what might happen now that gay people can marry in all 50 states:

George Takei pretty much summed up what it was like logging into social media this morning:

Ben & Jerry’s was more than ready for this moment, armed with a rebranded cookie dough flavor:

BuzzFeed used the infamous dress to make a statement:

Ian McKellen was pretty stoked and broke out the confetti.

But maybe not as stoked as Joe Biden:

Other celebrities also got into the celebration:

But not everyone was feeling the love. Many were wondering what Antonin Scalia, the court’s most outspoken member, would have to say about all of this. And he did not disappoint. He started out with a classic no homo clarification:

He went on to ask a lot of incredulous questions:

And then he instructed us to find the nearest hippie:

I looked into where that might be in San Francisco:

Slate went a step further and created a Scalia insult generator:

But let’s not allow him to have the last word. The only way this post can end is with a few Care Bear stares:

Happy Pride, y’all! <3

When INFORUM, the Commonwealth Club’s Innovation Lab, announced that they would be hosting Kim Kardashian, people freaked out, to put it mildly. The reaction was similar to the outrage many felt after her appearance on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, which this blog has covered pretty prominently. If there’s anything we’ve learned in the last two weeks, it’s that Kim Kardashian is a guaranteed conversation-starter. So with that in mind, two of us who attended the event went home, opened up Facebook chat, and had at it.

Gabe Meline: So Emmanuel! We saw Kim Kardashian at the Commonwealth Club tonight, and I think it’s safe to say that it didn’t go as well as we’d hoped!

Emmanuel Hapsis: Yes, definitely safe to say that. Adele singing “We could have had it aaaaallllll!” keeps playing in my head.

GM: It’s rare that she gets put in an interview situation like this, where the goal is intelligent conversation on smart topics. Knowing this, you’d think she, or at least her publicist, would have prepared a little more. But if this were her attempt at winning over the highbrow crowd, she really came up short. Shall we recount the missed chances?

EH: As painful as that will be, yes, let’s do it. Her publicist should totally just make her memorize an answer to expected questions. Like for “Do you consider yourself a feminist?”, she could have simply said “Duh” and then quoted Bell Hooks or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or Malala or Emma Watson or even Beyonce. Instead, she said, “I guess people would call me a feminist, so I guess you could, but I don’t really like to put labels on things. I’m not really one to say ‘I’m a feminist, and this is what I believe in so you have to believe in this, and, like, free the nipple!’ kind of person. I’m not that person at all.” My reaction to that moment can be best summed up with this Tyra Banks gif:

GM: Yeah. Like, come on, really? How controversial is it to just say, “Yeah, women should be treated fairly and have equal pay”?

And so many of her answers were like an eighth grader who hadn’t studied for the test, who “answers” with thinly veiled rewordings of the question. I’m paraphrasing here:

Q: How do you plan on having a conversation with your children about racism?

A: Well, we’re going to have a conversation with them about racism.

It wasn’t just the important questions, either; she even ducked frivolous questions.

Q: Tell me how to use lighting and angles to achieve the best selfie.

A: Oh, well, lighting is really important. And it’s good to get the right angle.

You know?

EH: And the platitudes. My god, the platitudes.

Q: What advice would you give a young female entrepreneur who’s trying to make it in a man’s world?

A: Be determined! Have a good work ethic!

Q: What would you say to a girl struggling with body image?

A: Have confidence! Be proud of who you are!

Q: What advice do you have for women facing discrimination and sexism in the workplace?

A: Stay focused!

It was all so pageant-y and safe. I loved when LaDoris Cordell (the interviewer) added “Lawyer up!” after Kim failed to give a legitimate answer to that last question.

GM: Kudos to LaDoris Cordell, who actually asked some pointed questions. Like about the famous Paper magazine cover: “Your photo was a recreation of a photo of an African-American woman, in the same pose, that was denounced as degrading or objectifying the black female body. Were you surprised at the reaction to that photo, and were you aware of the earlier photo of the black woman?” It’s pretty crazy for Kim to sit there and say, face-to-face with a respected black woman, “I can see how someone would think that, but that wasn’t my intention. The photographer, it was his idea.” And just leave it at that.

Or how about when the audience was able to ask questions, and one was simply, “Do you think you promote an unhealthy body image?” Kim’s answer was like, “No, because my makeup is inexpensive, and my new website coming soon is going to have a lot of tutorials on how to do your brows!”

EH: Kim so readily saying that she would absolutely pose for that Paper magazine photograph again, despite knowing the loaded history behind the image, seemed kind of selfish to me…which happens to be the name of her book of selfies! So maybe she bombed that question so I would call her selfish and plug her book?? Wow, she really is good at marketing!

GM: Ah, yes, her book, two copies of which were given out to each attendee in that bizarre-looking tote bag with a stencil of her face on it. Is this an appropriate time to note that due to low ticket sales, this event was moved from the Paramount Theatre (3,040 seats) to the Castro Theatre (1,400 seats)?

I imagine that Cordell also was strongly advised and/or forced via the mucky trenches of the celebrity-publicist industrial complex to ask about certain subjects, like the softball questions about Kim’s app (the developers, Glu Mobile, sponsored the event) or her work with the Children’s Hospital. That was a letdown.

But hey, enough wallowing. What did you *like* about the conversation? As someone with a Master’s Degree in Kardashian, what stood out?

EH: Wait, I need to get one more negative thing out or it will stay inside my body and slowly poison me until I drop dead days from now, while I’m innocently scrolling through Taylor Swift’s Instagram feed!

When she was asked about whether she was surprised about the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision, she said “It’s about time.” Yay, she got it right!, I thought. But she wasn’t finished: “I’m proud of Obama for getting it done.”

Maybe she missed the day in eighth grade when her History teacher explained how the three branches of government work?

But on the positive tip: I think she was charming, gracious and funny, for the most part.

I liked when she opened up about Caitlyn Jenner and how she has made her a less judgmental and more compassionate person.

I also loved that she brought up the need for stricter gun control laws, when asked to give an idea to change the world. It’s obviously a hot button issue in America right now so I appreciated that she stepped out of her safe stock answers and got a bit real with that one.

And her anecdote about being obsessed with eBay back in the day and making a profit off of reselling Manolo Blahnik Timbaland shoes from a J. Lo music video was like an early aughts time capsule. I loved that blast from the past.

GM: Yeah, there were a few moments where you were like, “Oh yeah, she’s actually a person with a family and a life.” My personal favorite part was when she was asked if she could interview anyone in the world, who it would be. And she answered, “Donda West.” (For those who don’t know, that’s Kanye’s mother, who passed away in 2007.)

I just realized I have one last gripe too. She talked about how Kanye advised her on her app, how he envisioned and supported her book, how he had all these creative entrepreneurial ideas. And when asked if she gives any advice to Kanye, she was all, “Yes, I tell him what to wear, and that we need more storage space in our kitchen.”

This all goes back to the question you mentioned, about if it’s realistic for young women to be successful in a male-dominated business culture, and I thought her answer was telling: “I see so much from social media. There’s this generation of girls that are beautiful, but I don’t see a strong work ethic.”

What I took away from that, and from her answers about body image and objectification of women in the media, is that Kim operates under the assumption that it’s not just her goal to be as beautiful as possible, but it’s *every girl’s goal* to be as beautiful as possible. They just have to work hard at it and they’ll be successful for their beauty — not their talent. Numerous examples of this cropped up, like her “I can’t code, I leave that to the developers, I just tell them that the dress in the video game needs straps” comment.

EH: Yeah, I was bummed when she kept being demure about her achievements and giving Kanye so much credit.

GM: There are a lot of reasons why I root for Kim Kardashian, and my favorite theory about her is that she helps young women accept their own bodies by showing, openly and publicly, just how much time, effort and money goes into maintaining her own body. More than any celebrity before her, she broadcasts the 24/7 work of her wardrobe and makeup team, and even her plastic surgeons. If I were a teenage girl, I’d look at the unattainable effort Kim Kardashian is putting into her look, and I’d feel a lot better about how I look after 10 minutes in front of the mirror.

But to reduce a woman’s role to helping dress her husband, or to assume all girls could be successful if they were just prettier is, to borrow a phrase from Antonin Scalia, pure applesauce.

EH:  Like you, I root for Kim. Anyone who follows this blog knows that, considering the posts I’ve written about the outrage that followed her appearance on Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! Despite her not sounding as smart as I’d hoped she would tonight, I still think NPR shows geared toward celebrities and comedy should feel free to have her on. I still think public radio is a place where people should be able to discuss Kim and other facets of pop culture in a thoughtful way. And I still believe that a lot of the negative attention she gets is fueled by sexism and slut-shaming.

While we’re on the topic of that whole NPR hubbub, Cordell asked her what she thought about it. Kim seemed like she had never heard of NPR before, which I think is hysterical. Here are all these people flogging themselves because they’re so upset that Kim wants to destroy their sanctuary and she’s like…who?

When pressed to give a response to why she thinks people freaked out so much, she said “I don’t know and I don’t care.” So there you have it, thousands of people who commented on the issue. And contrary to the opinion of some of my friends that my essay had gotten big enough that she had probably seen it, now we know that she has definitely not.

GM: At any rate, I think we can agree: there may be a whole college course to be taught on Kim Kardashian, but based on tonight, Kim Kardashian is not the right person to teach it.

EH: 

Oops, she did it again. Paula Deen, who has been off the radar since her 2013 admission of using the N-word and wanting to hire “slaves” to cater a pre-Civil War era wedding, shared a photo on social media that depicts her dressed as I Love Lucy‘s title character, alongside her son who is in full brownface as Ricky Ricardo.

For someone who has more or less lost her career over being racially insensitive, one would expect at least a smidgen of evolution on the issue, yet here we are, discussing why Deen deemed this photo appropriate for a silly #TransformationTuesday share.

It’s safe to assume that Deen employs publicists to keep her on brand and out of any more controversy. But there’s only so much a publicist can do to cover up the true belief system of their employer. If Paula Deen’s attitudes on race are problematic, they will bubble up in some form, no matter how many prepared statements she memorizes.

Take her 2014 apology tour, for instance. On The Today Show, Matt Lauer asked what she had learned. Deen decided to use the moment to plug her products:

“I’ve learned so much over the year; it’s going to require another book. We are working on a documentary that’s going to air on [my] network because I feel like everybody needs to know the whole entire story.”

After Lauer repeated the question, Deen snapped back: “I’m getting to that…Now I forgot what I was going to say.”

She eventually got around to saying: “It’s the power of words, I don’t care how old they are, words are so powerful. They can hurt, they can make people happy. Well, my words hurt people. They disappointed people, frankly I disappointed myself.”

And images can hurt people too, as she’s learning today.

Deen is part of a certain generation that’s not exactly known for its progressive attitudes (Donald Trump, who’s had a lot to say about Mexicans recently, was born six months before Deen). And she comes from the South, a region where racism is so rampant and unapologetic that black churches are still burned to the ground in 2015. It’s sadly not surprising that Deen felt comfortable enough to share those details about her plantation wedding idea in 2013. It didn’t occur to her that the history of slavery might be more than just an aesthetic palette she’s nostalgic for. That same flavor of ignorance also finds itself all over this latest faux pas.

Some people defend Deen by saying that she just can’t help it; she’s an older person from the South. It’s true that we all are products of how we were raised and where we come from, but it’s too easy to treat our origins as unalterable facets of who we are. We can’t blame Deen for being brought up in a world where racial epithets and offensive depictions of other races was the norm, but we can blame her for perpetuating that ideology and refusing to educate herself.

There is comfort in ignorance, in not admitting prejudice and how you might be contributing to it. That’s a comfort rich white people like Paula Deen and Donald Trump can afford…for now.

There are racists among us. Confederate flags still fly over government buildings. Mexican immigrants are stripped of their humanity and labeled illegal. But a new generation is rising up, climbing flagpoles to bring down racism and promote empathy. Progress can seem slow at times, but there’s no doubt that we’re on the move, and Deen serves as a reminder of where we’ve been and why we refuse to go back.

Passing through security at any airport is bound to be unpleasant. The lines are long, the space smells of damp socks and the pat-down process can feel pretty invasive. But what Morrissey says happened to him at SFO on Monday is next level.

On his blog, True to You, Morrissey writes that, after passing through the stand-up screeners with no incident, he “was approached by an “airport security officer” who stopped me, crouched before me and groped my penis and testicles.”

After being confronted, all the security officer in question had to say for himself was “That’s just your opinion.”

Morrissey writes about what that response symbolizes for him:

“Of course, what the airport security officer was saying was: your opinion will never count in the eyes of the law. The words “that’s just your opinion” volunteered themselves from this ‘officer’s’ mouth before he had even heard the question. He knew he could be confronted, but he also knew that he could never be challenged (even though the entire incident is most certainly on CCTV camera).”

Morrissey happened to be traveling with two members of British Airways Special Services, who urged him to file a complaint.  But Morrissey doesn’t think it’ll do any good:

“In the interests of imperishable bureaucracy my submitted complaint against this ‘officer’ will obviously be either unread or ignored because, as we all know, on matters of officialism it is not possible to be pleasantly surprised by anything at all. However, what is clear is that, should you find yourself traveling through San Francisco International Airport, you should expect sexual abuse from the so-called ‘security officers’ who, we are unconvincingly warned, are acting only for our security.”

And we thought air travel couldn’t get any worse.

Read Morrissey’s full account.

On the surface, baseball and ballet don’t seem to have much in common. But in a game against the Chicago Cubs yesterday, SF Giants pitcher Madison Bumgarner brought the two worlds together with a flourish, flying into a pirouette to make a play at first base:

His graceful move caught the attention of the San Francisco Ballet:

…which made us wonder what Bumgarner would actually look like at the barre. 30 minutes of Photoshop later et voilà! Feast your eyes on the newest member of the SF Ballet:

Bumgarner’s en pointe is on point.

Get a load of that limb extension!

He believes he can fly. He believes he can touch the sky. He thinks about it every night and day.

Dear reader! We find ourselves on a Friday afternoon before Labor Day weekend, perched on the precipice of three long days of freedom, cookouts and massive block parties.

You’re not doing any actual work, are you? Of course not. So there’s no time like the present to catch up on what you missed this week in pop culture.

1. American hero Robert Wright ran back into a burning building in Fresno, after making sure his family was okay, to save a rack of barbecued ribs.

“First thing, I got my kids, and I thought about my ribs. Like, I didn’t want my ribs to burn and stuff because I take pride in what I do, man,” said the West Oakland native and instantaneous worldwide role model. Something to think about at your BBQs this weekend.

2. Director/writer/producer/man responsible for all your childhood nightmares Wes Craven died this week at the age of 76.

Here’s a great video essay from RogerEbert.com, featuring audio of Craven speaking about his work and, naturally, what the filmmaker wanted on his gravestone.

3. Today, Sept. 4th, is Beyoncé’s birthday, otherwise known as #BeyDay, and the Internet is celebrating as only the Internet can: with photos, gifs, and think pieces until the end of time. 

Beyoncé returned the favor by releasing this super-heavy, slowed down remix of “Crazy In Love” — which is apparently on the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack, but that’s not her fault. It’s an interesting sound for her and the lyrics take on a new desperation. But we’re not gonna lie, Jay-Z’s chinchilla line really makes this song. Compare and contrast:

4. The soundtrack to Angus, a severely underrated coming-of-age film, will be re-issued on vinyl for its 20th anniversary.

This is excellent news for me and the maybe 100 or so other people in the world who firmly believe this to be one of the best soundtracks of all time. The thing is perfect. I have said this elsewhere. Tilt, the Muffs, Weezer when they were not-annoying, one of the most underrated Green Day gems from back when they were not-annoying: it’s just the sweetest gut-punch combination of adolescent ’90s angst, hope and heartache. It also has this excellent version of Love Spit Love’s “Am I Wrong?” with high school marching band horns and drums mixed in. Have I mentioned this album is underrated?

5. Indie-pop duo Diet Cig, who are from New York but recently signed to Oakland/Portland label Father/Daughter records, are playing the Hemlock Tavern tomorrow night.

But if you can’t make that, they’ll be at Different Fur studios in the Mission tonight for free at 7pm. Here’s a fun dancy video from this year’s Over Easy:

6. This here is an oral history of pie fights. 

Happy long weekend!

Hieroglyphics, the collective that in the early ’90s birthed Del the Funkee Homosapien, Souls of Mischief, and other mainstays of the fiercely independent sound that would come to define Bay Area hip-hop for decades, has always been under-celebrated on a national scale.

There are myriad reasons for this: a lack of corporate promotion, the sociopolitical atmosphere in Oakland at the time the Hiero guys were coming up (when police crackdowns on clubs left the East Bay with very few stages for musicians, period) — but it’s nearly undisputed, to the point that this permanent underdog status is woven into the scene’s mythology. It’s a source of frustration, and it’s a source of very deep pride.

Let all of that serve as color for the following: In 2013, Mayor Jean Quan named Hiero Day an official city holiday. If you had told anyone in 1993 that the City of Oakland would at some point formally recognize the positive contributions that hip-hop had made to the community — to youth, to education, to non-violence — they probably would have laughed in your face.

So what changed? In 2012, after a Souls of Mischief fan posted on Facebook that he planned to introduce as many people as possible to Hieroglyphics’ music on Sept. 3,  or 9/3 — in honor of the group’s iconic record 93 ’til Infinity — Hieroglyphics took it one step further and decided to throw a block party in downtown Oakland, with free music, food, beer, you name it. As many as 10,000 people showed up. There were babies, grandparents, and everything in between. It felt scrappy in comparison with larger corporate festivals, but wasn’t that kind of the point? Local hip-hop legends mingled with fans; the pungent scent of weed mixed with barbecue smoke wafted through the air. It was an “only in Oakland” kind of feeling. By 2014, attendance hit 20,000.

As for this year? The lineup was stacked, with The Coup, Tha Alkoholiks, Aceyalone, Compton’s Most Wanted, Luniz, Peanut Butter Wolf, Zion I, and a slew of other West Coast hip-hop luminaries packing three stages around 3rd and Chestnut in Downtown Oakland. But the discussion on everyone’s lips — okay, aside from the fact that unannounced guest Dru Down appeared to perform “I Got 5 On It” with Luniz — was that organizers were charging admission. Presale was $19.93; same-day tickets at the door were $35 — a relatively modest price for an eight-hour lineup of legends, but make no mistake: That’s a formidable expense for plenty of people, and there was no question it changed the feeling of the fest. (We’re still waiting on official turnout numbers, but it seemed more sparse than usual, especially early in the day.) Plus, the little gripes that are happily tossed aside when an event is free — not enough shade or water planned for a 92-degree day, overflowing trash cans and Port-A-Pottys — become more substantial gripes when organizers are charging, ostensibly, to cover the cost of preventing those very issues.

Still, as the blazing sun finally set in downtown Oakland and little ones were hoisted onto shoulders while the Hiero guys finally took the stage and performed “93 ’til Infinity,” you would’ve been hard-pressed to find a bad mood on the block. Backstage felt like a family reunion of the past 30 years of West Coast hip-hop; rappers and rappers’ toddlers ran amok in nearly equal numbers, with sweaty, happy hugs everywhere you looked.

If you haven’t heard, Oakland — still undersung, undercelebrated, and often misunderstood — is going through some changes lately. Its favorite holiday will probably keep doing that too.

Do politicians never learn?

Or, in the case of our collective crazy racist uncle Donald Trump, are they just so rich they don’t give a damn?

In yet the latest example of a presidential candidate using a pop song during their campaign without asking the artist’s permission, the walking toupée chose to use R.E.M.’s classic “It’s the End of the World” today in a stump speech he gave at an anti-Iran deal rally in Washington, D.C. This is notable, stupid and entertaining for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that Trump’s advisers almost certainly sat around trying to figure out how to show that he’s “with it” and “hip” and what they came up with was an alt-rock radio single from 1987.

Anyway, to precisely no one’s surprise, the (disbanded) band fired back within a few hours. First they released this official statement on the R.E.M. Facebook page, which asks — well, it basically asks if we can please not be petty enough to write this blog post about it:

And we might not have written one, if they had left it at that! But then Michael Stipe — sweet, Buddhist-leaning, vegetarian Michael Stipe — followed up with this, via R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills’ Twitter account: 

“Go f*** yourselves, the lot of you–you sad, attention grabbing, power-hungry little men. Do not use our music or my voice for your moronic charade of a campaign. — Michael Stipe”

That gets you a blog post, Stipey.

This is nothing new in politics, of course, but this makes Trump a repeat offender within a very short, ballsy span of time. In June, after he used “Rockin’ in the Free World” during a speech, Neil Young’s camp raised objections — because Young, who’s Canadian, is a fan of Bernie Sanders. Sanders picked it up the next week. 

Humble suggestion for The Donald: Maybe give Ted Nugent a call. 

Have you heard? Technology is moving forward so fast we can barely keep up with it. There’s smart new stuff all the time, and newer always means better, right? Today I received an email press release whose subject line read “This Companionable Robot is Equipped With Telepresence Arms.” I don’t know what that means and I didn’t bother to click to find out, but that’s beside the point. Whether it’s a groundbreaking new stylus for your iPad (I refuse to call it a pencil) or fascinating breakthroughs in medical technology, the sense that tech is speeding up exponentially is hard to shake.

Except. Except that some people really like old technology. Vinyl album sales have grown by 260 percent since 2009 in the U.S., and the resurgence show no signs of slowing; last year, Americans bought some 9.2 million records, up from 6.1 million in 2013. The next generation of typewriter enthusiasts (without whom these very stable typewriter repair shops would be dying) is well-documented. Nostalgia is a powerful drug, and its role in the marketplace is not to be dismissed.

So where do cassette tapes figure into all of this? If you’re an aesthete, they’re maybe less immediately sexy than vinyl, but they have their strong points: They’re durable as hell, as Jennifer Maerz pointed out in this sweet piece about rediscovering her high school boyfriends’ gifted mixtapes via a guy she’d sold her car to a decade ago. American Public Radio’s Marketplace pointed to the tangibility factor in this piece on labels like Burger Records issuing new music on tapes, as well as gimmicky one-offs from Metallica, movie tie-ins like the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack, and the so-quirky-it-hurts Cassette Store Day.

Long story short, people are still buying ’em — which means someone’s gotta make ’em. Bloomberg Business paid a visit to one of those few remaining someones, by way of touring the National Audio Company in Springfield, Missouri. NAC reports that sales are up 20 percent from last year — when they sold more than 10 million tapes. Check out their tour below.

Business lesson (as this literature major sees it): Even when it seems like everybody in the world has moved on to the next new kind of technology, there are always going to be people who quietly love the old ways. And there may be a whole different, quiet kind of treasure involved for the guy who sticks around to give the people what they want.

Now if only some enterprising soul would revive the Walkman.

Don’t trust anyone over 30, goes the old adage. By that age, the thinking goes, people are settled in their ways, more prone to social conservatism, to convention, to the rat race, man. Nothing rock ‘n’ roll about that.

Well, a certain black-and-white sticker turns 30 this week. You may remember it from your younger days, when it was ubiquitous at the record store (if you remember those). But by the aforementioned rubric, the Parental Advisory Label — that little, block-lettered afterthought in the bottom right corner of your favorite potty-mouthed CDs from 8th grade — has been a buzzkill from the bizarre moment it was born.

Picture this: On the afternoon of Sept. 18, 1985, a heated congressional hearing is underway on Capitol Hill. In a packed hall, Senator Paula Hawkins (R-Fla.) takes the podium with a magenta blazer and a stern edge to her voice: There’s a piece of evidence she wants her fellow legislators to see.

“I don’t watch much television,” she begins. “I’m not sure how many of my colleagues get much opportunity to watch any of the music video shows now available on cable and free TV. But I have brought along two videos from which to choose, which I believe are representative of the kind of presentation which have caused the furor.”

“We will show them,” she concludes awkwardly, glancing down at her notes. “The first is by the group, uh…Van Halen.”

And then a woodgrain television is wheeled out toward the front of the room, and the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee sits and politely watches the music video for “Hot for Teacher.”

The circus-like nature of the current primaries might seem unprecedented, but by all accounts, the situation in Washington 30 years ago this week was much, much weirder. Ronald Reagan had been sworn in for a second presidential term nine months earlier, having won one of the biggest landslides in electoral history. The religious right wielded incredible power, while the left grasped for some way to reinvent itself — and, by all accounts, they decided on a culture war. Never mind that the cards of the Iran-Contra affair were being dealt behind closed doors: In the halls of congress, Tipper Gore, wife of then-Senator Al Gore, was on a mission to protect American children  from Cyndi Lauper singing about the joys of masturbation.

Yes, sex-, drug- and occult-laced rock ‘n’ roll music was corrupting American youth faster than you could say Purple Rain, argued Gore, and it was the government’s job to stop it. Her newly formed Parents Music Resource Center pushed for the Recording Industry Association of America to establish a rating system similar to the one in place for movies, by which to warn parents when records were not suitable for young ears, and why: V for Violent, X for sexually explicit, and so forth. They also argued for lyric sheets printed on every scandalous record that made it to shelves, and incentives for record stores to simply decide not to carry records deemed explicit at all. (Wal-Mart eventually took this bait.)

“We’re not censors,” Tipper Gore told Rolling Stone at the time. “We want a tool from the industry that is peddling this stuff to children, a consumer tool with which parents can make an informed decision on what to buy. What we’re talking about is a sick new strain of rock music glorifying everything from forced sex to bondage and rape.”

Music industry veteran Danny Goldberg, then the head of Gold Castle Records, didn’t disagree that there were some unpleasant lyrics out there in the world of ‘80s rock music. But he did, like many others, recognize the huge potential for such a “consumer tool” to infringe on artists’ First Amendment rights.

“The primary trigger for movies [ratings] had to do with nudity, and four-letter words, these very tangible criteria. And a lot of the songs they were targeting — obviously there’s no nudity in a lyric, it’s an audio experience. And even then the songs they were targeting didn’t necessarily have four-letter words,” says Goldberg from New York, where he now heads Gold Village Entertainment.

Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” for instance, was the subject of very heated discussion thanks to the word “masturbate.” (He left the subtlety to Lauper, as it were.)

“Any time you have subjective criteria like that, you’re creating a climate of inhibition,” says Goldberg. “And that would just completely contradict the spirit of what popular music is about, which is the voice of teenagers, in a way. It would have caused an impediment to selling to people under 18, which was a large part of the audience for some of these artists. The way they demonized pop music was just not intellectually honest.”

Noting that the RIAA wasn’t designed to deal with such controversies — up until then, it had mostly dealt with copyright law — Goldberg called every label owner and band manager he could think of, and forged a partnership with the ACLU. A few press releases later, the controversy’s place in the media spotlight was sealed — even before the strangest of pop music’s bedfellows came together to testify on behalf of free speech. (The anti-labeling faction called itself the Musical Majority, in a nod to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, a reference of which, Goldberg notes, he was rather proud.)

In the weeks that followed, during what newspapers gleefully referred to as “porn-rock” hearings, Congress saw the testimonies of a typically meandering yet cogent Frank Zappa, a surprisingly eloquent (and Christian-identifying) Dee Snider, and — perhaps most shockingly — a staunchly anti-censorship and yet still squeaky-clean John Denver.

Over a period of two months (during which a pastor read lyrics about golden showers aloud in Congress, among other memorable testimonies), they and other free speech advocates argued the PMRC down to the program that’s been in place ever since: the little old sticker in the bottom right-hand corner of a cassette tape or CD denoting “explicit content” — which really just means profanity, which really just means five or six words. Individual labels and artists could choose which records got the stickers; retailers could choose whether or not they wanted to sell the explicit versions or the “clean” ones or both.

And henceforth, protected from pop music, no teenager ever wanted to have sex or smoke weed ever again.

Juuust kidding. So what kind of impact did the PAL actually have?

“I would say the program was mainly a failure based on what they were trying to achieve,” says Marc Weinstein, co-founder of Amoeba Music, whose first store opened in Berkeley in 1990.  “More often than not, from what I saw, it actually became a sales tool — it made it easier for teenagers to identify the cool stuff.”

“If we ever wound up with the censored version it was by mistake, and we would sell them for a dollar or so just out of disrespect for the program,” he adds.

In practice, the whole concept reminded Weinstein of a different failed program: The “Home Taping Is Killing Music” slogan adopted by the British Phonographic Industry in the early ‘80s.

“Obviously the [PAL] is a freedom of speech issue, but…they go hand-in-hand for me,” says Weinstein. “Just these silly ways the industry tried to deal with behavior that you can’t really regulate, which in the end is natural behavior. No one was getting hurt, and they’re spending time and money creating this program…I don’t know what they thought they were going to accomplish. It was just clueless.”

The RIAA, which updated its guidelines for the PAL program in 2006, disputes the notion that teenagers are actually drawn to the labels. “It’s not a PAL Notice that kids look for, it’s the music,” insists the organization’s website. Reached by email this month, representatives from the RIAA said they had no access to data that would point to the label’s actual impact on sales nor its success rate at actually keeping objectionable material out of the hands of youths. But the program is still very much in effect.

The kicker, of course, is the Internet.

“Each individual track that has potentially objectionable content is labeled ‘explicit,’ which stays with the track even after point of purchase [online],” former RIAA president Cary Sherman told NPR in 2010, explaining the program’s digital adaptation.

But ask any teenager how easy that is to ignore and, well, they’ll probably tell you they’ve never noticed it. In retrospect, the PMRC hearings represented the last time it even seemed plausible that adults or those in a position of power could control what young people consumed, for better or for or worse.

When Rolling Stone checked in with Tipper Gore last week to see how her thoughts had evovled, she had the following to say:

“In this era of social media and online access, it seems quaint to think that parents can have control over what their children see and hear. But I think this conversation between parents and kids is as relevant today as it was back in the ’80s. Music is a universal language that crosses generations, race, religion, sex and more. Never has there been more need for communication and understanding on these issues as there is today…All of the artists and record companies who still use the advisory label should be applauded for helping parents and kids have these conversations about lyrics around their own values.”

She did not, unfortunately, comment on the slew of imaginative art and performance inspired by the PMRC.

Otherwise: Fair ’nuff, Tipper. Maybe it’s because we recently turned 30 too, but we do think it’s a good idea to talk to your 12-year-old daughter about what, exactly, is happening in Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” video. Not because it’s going to corrupt her — but because she’s going to see it anyway. And because, while you might not like every word out of every artist’s mouth, you don’t want the government, or any other organization, telling Minaj when and where she can and can’t sing about her butt. It’s the very silly-seeming beginning of a very serious and slippery slope.

So happy birthday, PAL. We’d like to think we learned something from you. Such as: It’s over 30, sure, but the First Amendment doesn’t care if you like it. And that’s about as f***ing rock ‘n’ roll as it gets.

How do you know Yogi Berra was one of the greats?

He was a Yankee, and San Francisco Giants fans still love the crap out of him.

Yes, the idiosyncratic Hall of Famer died at his home in New Jersey today, according to multiple news outlets. He was 90 years old.

Berra, who helped the Yankees win 10 World Series championships between 1949 and 1965, was a formidable opponent in the batter’s box: Of the 75 World Series games he played in, Berra struck out only 17 times.

But the slugger is perhaps best known — certainly among the under-50 set — for his way with words, both on and off the field. Whether Berra actually spoke every malapropism attributed to him out loud has been the subject of much speculation — but there’s no question the simple brilliance of some of his seemingly stupid lines came to define the player.

Here are 10 of our favorite Yogi-isms.

1. “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

2. “You can observe a lot just by watching.” (Berra allegedly described his strategy as a manager this way.)

3. “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” (As San Francisco Chronicle writer Peter Hartlaub tweeted today, this first appeared in a Chronicle story in 1963.)

4. “Baseball is 90 percent mental and the other half is physical.”

5. “Make a game plan and stick to it. Unless it’s not working.”

6. “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”

7. “Never answer an anonymous letter.”

8. “It was impossible to get a conversation going. Everybody was talking too much.”

9. “Always go to other people’s funerals. Otherwise they won’t go to yours.”

10. “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”

But maybe the sweetest quote we’ve seen today comes from this 1999 interview Berra did with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer. When Lehrer asked Berra what baseball advice he would give Lehrer’s son, who had just turned 7, Berra said:

“Play hard, and work at it. And it don’t matter who wins – you’re not playing for your life out there. You have fun, that’s the thing.”

Can’t argue with that. A tip of the cap to you, Yogi.

Until just a few days go, Kimberly Morrison wasn’t really a political activist. For years, she’s been known more for playing in several popular Seattle bands, including The Intelligence, the Fallouts, and The Dutchess and The Duke, whose songs appeared on shows like Entourage. 

Morrison is also a person who once had an abortion, and she has no regrets about it. She’s never shied away from stating that her decision to have an abortion was the right one, which is why she had long planned on starting an “abortion zine” with her friend Amelia Bonow that would collect reflections from other women who underwent the procedure.

But after Congress attempted to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood earlier this month, there was a change in plans: Morrison and Bonow launched #ShoutYourAbortion as a Facebook page, after Bonow wrote her now famous #ShoutYourAbortion post. They also posted an equally powerful photo as the page’s profile pic: Morrison’s hairy armpit, accompanied by her tattoo, which reads “F*ck the Patriarchy.”

Due to overwhelming harassment from abortion opponents, the page has since been taken down. And the armpit photo garnered a startling amount of negative comments, some even from supporters who believed such imagery was “disgusting and would turn people off from the cause,” says Morrison.

I found the image so powerful that I had to talk to Morrison about it, and, since we’ve known each other a long time, she obliged — despite the fact that she’s been trying to keep under the radar, due to the fact that Bonow has had her safety threatened and her personal information posted online multiple times. Here are Morrison’s thoughts on the ordeal:

How are you doing?

It’s hard to say.

Why is that? It seems that you’ve been able to avoid the harassment that Amelia has been experiencing.

So far, but I also believe it’s just a matter of time.

How did #ShoutYourAbortion come together?

Amelia and I had been talking about starting a zine for quite a while now where we were going to talk to a bunch of our friends and have them tell their stories about having abortions. This came after Amelia and I realized, while talking about abortion, that we had both had positive experiences with them. There’s this stigma that we’re supposed to hide it and feel bad about it…to mourn and feel ashamed, and neither of us felt that way at all.

It was meant to be a paper ‘zine until Congress was working to defund Planned Parenthood, and that’s when Amelia posted her statement, which was shared on social media by Lindy West (former Jezebel writer and Guardian contributor). A bunch of her followers reposted it, and it just blew the f*ck up.

Shannon Perry, a local tattoo artist and friend, does these “flash days” where she’ll draw tattoos that fall under a certain theme. One day the theme was “womyn” and she had written on a sheet, “F*ck the Patriarchy.” It wasn’t even intended to be a piece of art that someone would get as a tattoo but I just thought it was hilarious.

I told her I wanted to do it around my armpit and she said, “Why don’t we shave your armpit so we can see how we can get it on there,” and I said, “No no no, we’re not going to shave my armpit. That’s the whole point of the tattoo. We’re going to put it around my hairy armpit. I haven’t shaved my armpits in over 10 years!”

How did the picture of your armpit come about?”
 

Then she took a picture after the tattoo was done, posted it on Instagram and we were laughing about it; we just thought the whole thing was funny. Flash forward to Lindy sharing Amelia’s post with the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion and I’m talking with Amelia, and though we didn’t want to use Facebook initially, we just felt time was of the essence. After we were done, I literally ran home, grabbed my computer and made a Facebook page, making Amelia and Lindy admins. Amelia and I were talking about what the main image would be and I joked that we should use my armpit picture. And she ended up using it.

It’s such a powerful image, challenging so many taboos in such a simple way. But it’s also received a lot of harsh criticism.

There were so many comments on that image that were like, “OH MY GOD, you could braid that sh*t!” and “This is revolting — how could a woman have such long armpit hair?” There are so many more important things you could be caring about right now than my body and what I choose to do with the hair on it.

Can you tell me about your abortion experience?

I never planned on getting an abortion, but I also never planned on getting pregnant. The idea of something living and growing inside of me elicited more internal comparisons to the movie Alien than thoughts of the Cleavers or the Brady Bunch. Having kids seemed to me like something other people did. I was, much to my annoyance, told over and over again that I’d change my mind, or had sentences directed at me that began “Well, when you have kids…” These instances baffled me. I could not believe that because I possessed the parts to do so, it was assumed I would eventually procreate.

[When I got pregnant,] I was younger and dumber and partying too much. I had a relationship with someone young and dumb who also partied too much. I didn’t have the wherewithal then to identify how profoundly dysfunctional our relationship was. By the time I noticed how unhappy I was, I’d been conditioned to believe that it was all my fault. I wanted to leave, but didn’t know how. He was possessive, controlling, angry, unstable.

He was mad at me and wanted to have sex, so we did. I told him I was ovulating, and not to come inside me. So he did. I expressed my disbelief. He smirked and pulled himself off of me.

Somehow I managed to put the incident out of my mind for a bit. It’s hard to explain, but things were so truly f*cked between us that I was just trying my hardest to act normal; to survive. In my head, I repeated “Sh*t happens every day” like a mantra, the way some would recite positive affirmations in front of a mirror. I thought about how much worse it could be and tried to be happy that it wasn’t “that bad,” even though I was miserable and dreaded going home.

Staying at a friend’s place after yet another blowout fight, I was at Walgreen’s and for some reason purchased a pregnancy test for the first time in my life. On some level I guess I already knew, but the evidence in front of me didn’t make the pill any less bitter. I called Planned Parenthood and scheduled an abortion before letting him know.

I felt so stuck and so stupid. I thought this was something that happened to teenagers. I thought I was too smart to get pregnant. I thought I had a deal with my uterus. I felt, overwhelmingly, that my body had betrayed me.

If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have told him at all. Of course he tried to get me to keep it and he tried to make me feel awful about the situation. He demanded I share the few pills I’d been given for pain, and was predictably outraged when I opted to have an IUD inserted during the same visit.

Because of the stigma associated, I didn’t really know who to turn to for support. The few people I talked to, I told with trepidation, the words hanging awkwardly in the air while I waited with my breath suspended, hoping I hadn’t entrusted my secret with the wrong person. No one was outwardly hostile, but it seemed understood that I was not to express my happiness or relief that I’d had an abortion. Abortion was a dirty word, and not a cause for celebration. I was supposed to feel guilty, ashamed. But I didn’t. For me, there was nothing to grieve. I was so grateful to not have to be tethered for the rest of my life to a person who acted as though they owned me. I knew then and know now that I absolutely made the right choice, and I am so thankful the choice was mine to make.

And to be clear, I don’t hate children — just the idea of having my own. In fact, I worked as a nanny for 10 years. I coo at the occasional baby on the street, and love my niece and nephew in a way I wasn’t sure was possible. Parenthood just isn’t a hat I need to try on.

Critics have accused the movement of “bragging” about your abortion, but from your story I don’t hear that.

It’s not like, “I had a bigger abortion than you.” It’s not a competition. We’re saying that it happens and let’s talk about it so the stigma can go away. One in three woman will have an abortion.

Listen to how many times I’ve said the word “abortion.” You don’t hear that word because people don’t want to talk about it. It’s considered a dirty word. And, in these past few days, I’ve heard that word said more than in all my years on this planet.

I’m getting so many messages from people saying, “I’m so in awe of what you’re doing and I would want to be a part of it but my family would disown me.” Women have said, “I really want to join your cause and I really want to help you but I’m looking for a new job, and I can’t have that attached to my name right now.” It’s 2015!

I’m not naive enough to think that we just de-stigmatized abortion. There will always be people who think it’s wrong. But if we can even have a conversation about it, that’s the first step to getting somewhere. And before we shut down our Facebook page, those conversations were happening, with both sides involved.

Well, I’m really glad you’re doing this. If my daughter had to have an abortion for any reason, I wouldn’t want her to feel horrible or guilty about it.

[Crying] That’s such a huge part of this. I’ve heard from so many fathers saying “Thank you for fighting for the rights of my 5-year-old daughter.” I don’t want anyone to feel sad about it.

Back in February, when Saturday Night Live held a rather self-congratulatory three-and-a-half-hour marathon of a 40th anniversary party for itself, one of the most hotly anticipated moments was former cast member Eddie Murphy’s return to the stage.

Finally, after a sweet intro by Chris Rock, Murphy came out and…did absolutely nothing. Like an uncomfortable amount of nothing. This video cuts out before the truly awkward part, but what you’re missing is just more dead air. Later, fellow former cast member and underrated genius Norm MacDonald explained that a plan for Murphy to resurrect his famous Bill Cosby impression for the “Celebrity Jeopardy” skit had been canned because Murphy felt uncomfortable “kicking a man when he [was] down.”

Well, something apparently changed in the last eight months.

While accepting the Kennedy Center’s prestigious Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Washington Oct. 18, Murphy not only performed stand-up for the first time since 1987, he came out swinging with a dig at the legendary older comedian (and now-notorious serial rapist).

“You know you f**ked up when they want you to give your trophies back,” said Murphy of Cosby, who was honored with the same award back in 2009. At that time, it’s worth noting, more than a dozen women had alleged sexual assault by Cosby over the course of the previous three decades — though the media furor wouldn’t reach a fever pitch until another comedian, Hannibal Buress, called Cosby out publicly during a stand-up set in October 2014. 

Here’s a clip of the awards ceremony that includes the Cosby impression (Murphy takes the stage around 2:20):

Those in attendance say his full set lasted about seven minutes; PBS has since issued a statement promising that the network will air Murphy’s entire speech, unedited, when the ceremony is broadcast on Nov. 23.

So what made Murphy change his tune? This is an interesting about-face, because I don’t exactly think of Eddie Murphy as a champion for feminism or anything. On the contrary: Throughout most of his early (and highly lauded, brilliant-in-many-other-ways) comedy, you’d be hard-pressed to find a five-minute clip that doesn’t contain a truckload of casual sexism, misogyny or homophobia. And then there was that whole denying-he-was-the-father-of-his-child-with-Mel-B thing in the mid-aughts.

So: Is it the sheer number of women who’ve come forward in recent months that turned the tide for Murphy, or did sticking up for Cosby just become too unpopular of a position to take while trying to still maintain a popular public persona, a la Whoopi Goldberg?  I find it hard to imagine Eddie Murphy’s sitting around thinking about his bankability in that way. The bit also comes days after Ebony magazine caused a stir with its November issue’s cover, which features a shattered image of The Cosby Show’s nuclear family — depicting the revelations about Cosby’s wildly different public and personal lives as indicative of something like the shattered American dream.

As Buress proved just a year ago, comedians have a very real platform for swaying opinion on a controversial or overlooked issue; it remains to be seen if and how Murphy (who’s arguably still among the most beloved comics of the last half-century) will use it re: the Cosby situation going forward.

Either way, I guess we’ll call it a victory that there is a wall a beloved figure can hit — let’s say “51 women repeatedly publicly describing horrible, traumatic things that happened to them for the sake of hopefully finally holding the extremely powerful perpetrator accountable in some small way” — after which you lose respect from even those most likely to stand by your side. Here’s hoping we won’t ever get another chance to see this particular boundary tested at all.

Have you been missing Jon Stewart recently? Yeah, me too. Have you spent many days staring out your window looking up at the sky wondering where he is, while singing “Somewhere Out There” from An American Tail? Oh, just me? Whatever; we all cope with loss in our individual ways.

No matter how you express your I-miss-Jon grief, you’ll be happy to hear this breaking news: Stewart just signed a four-year deal with HBO! He won’t be embarking on a new Daily Show-esque project just yet, but he will get things started by producing short videos that “view current events through his unique prism” for HBO Go and HBO Now (better make sure you sister/friend/ex hasn’t changed their password!).

Stewart had this to say about his new gig: “Appearing on television 22 minutes a night clearly broke me. I’m pretty sure I can produce a few minutes of content every now and again.” We can’t wait to savor each meager minute of it!

It’s been a while since we’ve posted a depressing map about how bad the Bay Area rental market has gotten. You might remember the one that charted where you could find an affordable one-bedroom along BART (spoiler: basically nowhere). There was also the one about San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose being the top 3 worst cities for renters. Not to be outdone by the report that said you’ll never own a home in the Bay Area. And now we can add another depressing map to the mix.

Trulia, a real estate listing service, crunched some numbers and put all their upsetting findings into a fun interactive map. San Francisco, not surprisingly, is right at the top of the list of U.S. cities with horrifyingly high rent prices. According to Trulia, the median rent for a 1-bedroom in SF is $3,200 and the most expensive neighborhood to live is Fisherman’s Wharf (there’s no accounting for taste).

Click around the map, if you can stomach it:

Some days, you wake up and the swirling black hole that is Mother Internet has nothing but bad news for you: Natural disasters, gun violence, confirmation of the unholy sexual union between Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton.

And some days, presidential hopeful Ben Carson’s campaign team releases a minute-long rap song about Ben Carson.

According to ABC News, the Carson campaign spent $150,000 for the ditty — which is called “Freedom” — to air as a radio ad for two weeks on “urban” stations in Miami; Atlanta; Houston; Detroit; Memphis; Birmingham, Alabama; Jackson, Mississippi; and Little Rock, Arkansas.

The rapper urging young hip-hop radio listeners to “vote” (and, upsettingly, to rhyme “Carson” with “awesome”) over a flute riff and in between clips of Carson’s stump speech is a guy by the name of Aspiring Mogul. The MC’s website indicates that he’s a youth minister and young black Republican, as well as an “original unique force within the GOP, one whom God has gifted on multiple levels of communication and political leadership.” His hometown is #INTERNATIONAL. But nevermind Aspiring Mogul. Aspiring Mogul: This is not your fault.

Setting aside the hilarity specific to this situation — “I know, let’s take a candidate whose predominant idiosyncrasy is that his speaking style seems like he might be falling asleep and use his speech to make a rap song” — this is really just the latest in a long line of politicians who are neither hip nor young attempting to pander to hip young #Millennial voters and instead mainly succeeding in making us all want to stuff cotton in our ears and hide beneath our desks for the rest of the day in embarrassment. And under that vast umbrella of pandering: Mega-pandering to young minority voters via allusions to and/or attempted uses of hip-hop that most likely made Tupac roll over in his grave.

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane, shall we?

Our first stop is an inexplicable rap song about Newt Gingrich that played during a Gingrich campaign stop in Florida over the course of his 2012 presidential run. (And henceforth, everyone thought of Newt Gingrich as a super-cool, urban — wait, nevermind.)

Sample lyric: “N to the E to the WT/Newt Gingrich taking over these streets/Is you ready for it yet?/I don’t think so, where you at?
Obama ’bout to step out the White House/Gingrich gonna get in the White House/He gon’ have his wife, his spouse/Yeah, you know without a doubt.”

Here’s former Bush II Advisor Karl Rove, transforming into “MC Rove” at the 2007 Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association Dinner. Dare you to make it through the whole video!

Here’s Mitt Romney referencing a then-12-year-old novelty rap song on a campaign stop in 2012 for no apparent reason (other than that he’s meeting young black people?).

Hillary is no stranger to young people-pandering, of course — especially in this election cycle, which finds her on a desperate quest to prove that she’s not literally made out of wood. Thus far her tactics include associations with hip young persons Katy Perry and Lena Dunham. And yet: this “whip/nae nae” attempt from Ellen a few weeks ago is the one that really sends us scrambling for cover.

Back to 2008: If someone hasn’t looped John McCain saying “Thank you, Daddy Yankee” and used it on their own song yet I will eat my hat.

And last but certainly not least: This clip of Jeb Bush helping Jimmy Fallon out with a “Slow Jam the News” segment isn’t technically hip-hop, to be sure — but it more than makes up for that when it comes to making us want to gouge our eyes out rather than having to look at a politician’s meaty, vacant face in the background while Fallon makes sex jokes!

So, what have we learned here today?

Yes, President Obama has managed to make hip-hop references and still come off cool.

Obama is Obama. He is actually friends with Jay Z.

Everyone else? Might want to actually, you know, work on coming up with stances that young people can objectively weigh against your competitors’ stances, for the purpose of deciding which policies would, if enacted, fall in line most closely with our own goals, beliefs and values. Imagine for a second that we’re still people — simply people who were born later than you.

In the meantime: brb, hitting play on that Carson song again. It doesn’t sound like the candidate will be responsible for racking up any listens himself.

The day after Thanksgiving is all about leftovers and lounging. But for many Americans, it’s also all about stampeding toward the mall to buy stuff no one actually needs just ’cause it’s on sale. One would imagine the sad existence of an enormous floating island of trash in the Pacific Ocean would make us think twice about buying more junk, which we’ll then discard within the calendar year, yet Black Friday persists.

What if, instead of following up a day of gratitude with a day of gross consumerism, we got some perspective by feasting our eyes on redwood trees that predate the U.S. and then some? The Save the Redwoods League just made it easier to do just that by sponsoring a Free Friday in the Redwoods, a day of free access to 49 California redwood state parks on November 27, 2015. So give your credit card and our planet a rest this Black Friday and let Mother Nature show you that the most majestic things in the world can’t be bought.

Note: Make sure to print out your pass before heading to the park; you won’t be able to get in for free without it.

Yes, Serial fans — amateur sleuths and broadcast journalism geeks alike — our wait has come to an end. The second season of the wildly successful podcast, a longform spinoff from This American Life, debuted today. You can download the first episode right here.

Unlike the first season, in which host Sarah Koenig and her production team selected a little-known and nearly cold murder case from a Baltimore suburb as the subject of their investigation, this season revolves around the well-known controversy of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier stationed in Afghanistan, who walked away from his base one night in 2009 and wound up living as a hostage of the Taliban for five years. The Obama Administration successfully negotiated for his release in May 2014, trading five prisoners from Guantanomo Bay in return — a move that was highly criticized by the GOP.

Since that time, the soldier has found himself at the center of a heated debate: Was he a deserter who endangered his fellow troops with his actions, as Sen. John McCain, among others, has argued? Or a would-be (if confused) hero, who set out to warn top Army officials about serious problems within his platoon, as Bergdahl himself insists in the podcast’s first episode? Bergdahl is currently awaiting a ruling on whether his case will go before a court-martial; found guilty of all charges, he could face life in prison.

In putting together the new season, Serial producers used some 25 hours of recorded conversation between Bergdahl and Hollywood screenwriter Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty), who reached out to Bergdahl a few months after he was released from captivity in the hopes of eventually turning the soldier’s story into a movie.

“I’m going, ‘Good grief, I’m in over my head,'” we hear Bergdahl say in the premiere episode, recounting the first moments away from his base. “Suddenly, it really starts to sink in that I really did something bad. Or, not bad, but I really did something serious.”

We’ll be covering the sure-to-be-addictive story as the season continues, but for now: Get listening! Initial discussion points include a new theme song and advertisers other than MailChimp. Whatever happens, you’ll want to be able to trade theories about it around the water cooler.

Meanwhile — if you had any doubt about the high-profile podcast’s potential to actually change the course of subjects’ lives — recall that a Maryland judge recently reopened the case of Adnan Syed, the subject of Season 1, which could cut short the life sentence Syed is currently serving for murder. Watch this space for more.