the aughts Even as the Tiger Woods story has evolved from one about a sporting hero injured in a late-night car crash to a far more tawdry tale of booze, drugs, porn stars, nudie pics, massive infidelity and millions in hush money, its themes and symbols have been instantly appropriated and re-purposed for all kinds of pop-cultural fun. Almost immediately after the story broke, someone produced a picture of Woods and his wife Elin standing side by side American-gothic style, with Woods sporting a photoshopped black eye and broken tooth. Next came the insta-computer game, a little bit of flash animation where the player gets to control Tiger Woods in his Escalade as he runs away from his golf club-wielding wife. And of course there are the jokes, the thousands of one-liners dumped onto comment boards from one end of the internet to the next. All, of course, were widely circulated and linked on Twitter, Facebook, and countless blogs. By the current standards of cultural commentary, this is completely unremarkable. (more...)

Last week, The New Republic posted a provocative essay by open-information guru Lawrence Lessig, making a case to which he would seem to be antithetical: that we must temper our headlong rush into universal government transparency. (more...)

DEVELOPING Even his biggest fans probably wouldn't argue that Keith Olbermann is a transcendently non-partisan journalist. Like his right-wing counterparts on Fox News, Olbermann has carved out a niche for himself as a righteously indignant voice from the left, and he's upfront about that. Earlier we asked if Olbermann was crossing the line by appearing in a political ad, and it turns out that he did not give permission and MSNBC is asking Change Congress to stop using it in their ad. (more...)