soundbite

“But don’t underestimate the deep reservoirs of public disgust. If there is a double-dip recession, a long period of stagnation, a fiscal crisis, a terrorist attack or some other major scandal or event, the country could demand total change, creating a vacuum that only the tea party movement and its inheritors would be in a position to fill.”

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No iframes? View this map. This little yellow line, moving southwest to terminate in a small bulb, is 92.85 kilometers long, or about 57.69 miles. It's less than the distance between New York City and Philadelphia; slightly more than from San Francisco to San Jose. 57.69 miles won't even get you from Austin to San Antonio. That line, after hundreds of additions to our Mediaite Census map tracking people's moves between 2000 and 2010, also represents the net movement of our contributors. Moves of 17,000 kilometers from Great Britain to Australia and moves of less than two within a single city all combined to show the decade's total movement: less than an hour's drive southwest - albeit in a boat on the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere off the Delaware coast. (Want to know how this was generated?) (more...)

New Year’s resolution: More columns about cyborgs for Mediaite. Learn Wordpress. And maybe get a black belt in Karate...and maybe a dog.

I have inadvertently learned a lot about cyborgs by becoming one recently. It started when I damaged my right eye after shooting a pile of cow crap with a shotgun when I was nine. Over the years the eye got worse and I ended up getting it removed four years ago. Yes, I have seen A Christmas Story and, yes, Ralphie’s mother was right – you'll shoot your eye out. (more...)

video Aw. It's nice that in 2010 we can still get excited about a female singer whose entire body is covered from the neck down. Well, except that the singer is Jennifer Lopez and her body was covered in a sparkly skintight semi-see-through bodysuit that clung to her every famous curve. So 2010 — and so 2000, and so everything in between. Last night on "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve," J.Lo sang her back-to-back decade closers "Louboutins" and "Waiting For Tonight," but what people are talking about today is the bodysuit, so much so that it's trending on Google as "jennifer lopez new years outfit" and "j lo new years eve outfit." Well, good. Let 'em notice, she's 40 and just had twins and practically invented the stunt outfit. Like today's trending Google topics are an accident. This is J.Lo — a mother, a wife, and laying low these past few years but come on: she knows what she's doing. (Okay, props to Cher on the stunt outfit thing, but still — J. Lo's Grammy 2000 dress is still a high-water mark. No doubt Lady Gaga was watching as a 13-year-old kid somewhere and thinking, hmmmm).) So ten years later, don't be fooled by the rocks that she's got, because she's still she's still Jenny from the Block, and also, where would she hide those rocks anywhere? On that famous booty? (Say thank you, Kim Kardashian.) Clearly, er, not. There are others to say "thank you" to J.Lo after her truly astonishing decade. She's receded quite a bit from view in the last few years, but wow has her influence been felt over the past ten years. People forget that talk of an upcoming Jennifer Lopez album was largely met with lukewarm not-really-caring (what? The chick from Anaconda?) and that Out of Sight had been her career high-water mark, in a completely different area. Then came "On The 6" — and that cover shot, which right away made headlines itself, followed by a few perfectly danceable songs with videos that wouldn't look out of place today. (When I think of Y2K-era videos, I think of her — remember her as a sultry cyber-seductress in "If You Had My Love?" Yes, I know "On The Six" came out in 1999, but the set-up was all 2000s.) Then she one-upped it by being in the news every single day with Puffy (back when Sean Combs slash P. Diddy was Puff Daddy) and wearing that Grammy dress — and that was before she became J.Lo and invented a whole new nomenclature for nicknames (say thank you, BriWi). Then she worked with a Rolodex of rappers and released an album entirely of remixes and somewhere in there launched a fragrance called "Glow" that was marketed based on her shimmering naked body. She had the number-one album and the number-one movie in the same week. She was officially J. Lo, Inc. Then she dated Ben Affleck and was on the cover of Us Weekly pretty much weekly. The Onion ran a story: "No Jennifer Lopez News Today." (Also, remember that "Bennifer" predated "Brangelina"). She also did all of it entirely while in her 30s — and was part of a pretty crucial generation of women who refused to phase out of being hotties (I wrote about this phenomenon back in 2003). So she did Gigli. Big deal. They're still talking about that, too. (And her scenes with Affleck in Jersey Girl were genuinely affecting.) Thinking back on J.Lo this decade — and to be honest, this is the first time I have, which is maybe another reason why she brought it so fiercely last night, or maybe she just wanted you to forget that fall at the AMAs — I really realized what a trailblazer she was for those who came after her. Beyonc&@##, Miley, Gaga, any actress who's ever released an album — they are all standing on the shoulders of J.Lo. She was a true triple threat — actress, singer, dancer — who brought it all and brought it all over the place, and packaged it sometimes outrageously but always sexily (redoing that iconic Flashdance scene - genius). She was also a fashion icon, and made the velour sweatsuit look ridiculously hot (say thank you, Juicy). I may have seen the ridiculous Wedding Planner on a plane, but I did watch it (and I wasn't on a plane for Maid In Manhattan, what can I say). But in the background, there was always Out of Sight. I'm still trying to think of someone hotter with George Clooney. So yeah. Jennifer Lopez. J.Lo. It took a decade for me to realize it, but I sort of love her. p.s. "Fitting end" was a wholly unintentional pun. Video below.
Jennifer Lopez: Skintight Sexy on New Year’s Eve Jennifer Lopez' New Year's outfit; singer stalks into 2010 in a glimmering skin tight catsuit (Pics via Just Jared; there's a photogallery there, too.)

the aughts It was just like most Sunday nights: I was procrastinating, reading about politics online. That night, I was checking out rising star Marco Rubio, who is challenging Gov. Charlie Crist for the Republican Florida Senate nomination Senate: his story, his policy proposals, and his advertisements. An ad criticizing Crist’s response to the economic crisis came on. I instantly realized that I had seen that ad somewhere. But where? And then it dawned upon me. I went straight to write about it on my blog, my Facebook, and course, my Twitter. (more...)

I’m trying really hard this week to say “Twenty Ten.” When we do a story looking back at 2009, I typically say “Two Thousand Nine.” And when 2010 comes up in a script my first instinct is to continue the pattern and say “Two Thousand Ten.” But it’s time for a format change. There is, of course, no governing body to make this decision for the world. And it's not like "Two Thousand Ten" is horrible. But we've got to think ahead on this so we can get back into the pattern that leaves us with easy historical references like the "Summer of '69." The example set by the media in the next few days will be a critical one. Whether it’s Ryan Seacrest and Dick Clark on “Rockin’ New Year’s Eve” or Anderson Cooper on CNN, anybody who’s on the air this week will have to figure out how to react to the number 2010. (more...)

the aughts If the 60s were the decade in which Bob Dylan showed how rapidly he could evolve, every subsequent decade illuminated puzzling and contradictory sides of his talent and persona (family man, arena rocker, born-again Christian, hit-or-miss songwriter). By contrast, the Aughts were a decade in which Dylan stuck mostly to one character and one sound, with well-lauded results. (more...)

the aughts Wow. That is what you think when you look through some of the 667 reader images the NYT selected to showcase this decade, and impart its events and its impact. It's an extremely meta feature, summing up the inexorable switch to interactivity of the last ten years — All The News That's Fit To Print used to be about picking what readers should see and know, and now readers are not only deciding for themselves, they're making the content themselves, too — but also, on its face, is just an amazing collection of images that are beautiful even when they are heartbreaking (photos of September 11th smoke against a blue, blue sky will always have a terrible beauty to them) and far-flung in their origin, subject matter and the stories they have to tell. (more...)

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I’ll take any decade over one in which the mention of being Latino prompted immediate “Livin’ la Vida Loca” (1999) jokes or (worse) someone trying to dance the “Macarena” (circa 1996). As far as artificial time measurements go, the Aughts had an easy chance of beating the Nineties in terms of Latino cultural penetration into the United States. (more...)

DeadMalls.com is celebrating a decade of recording the death rattles of American shopping malls. Chronicling the nasty and brutish lives of malls throughout the fifty states with pictures and anecdotes, the site launched in 2000 and celebrates its first ten years next month. It seems a remarkably appropriate tenure. (more...)

How did people act during The Aughts? Well, they were snarky. Sometimes dead? And gay! But almost all of it happened online, according to a Harris Interactive poll which put weekly internet usage at a whopping 13 hours in 2009. That's almost twice as many hours as in the year 2000, which was already a lot of hours. It's because of the blogs. Or Facebook? (more...)

slideshow Remember, early on in this innocent decade, when it was a big deal when Bill O'Reilly started criticizing rap music? Now, it seems to happen all the time. For someone opposed to the immorality and hedonism that he sees embraced in rap lyrics, O'Reilly knows how to start a hip-hop-style feud with some of the big names in the industry, including Ludacris, Nas, and Cam'ron. Eight notable beefs between O'Reilly and rappers, starting off with Ludacris (semi-NSFW): >>>First up: O'Reilly vs. Ludacris (more...)

It may or may not come to pass that 2009 was the year "real" journalism died (at least as we've come to understand the definition). Despite the plethora of hard news stories in 2009: the inauguration of our first black President, the economic collapse, health care reform, the Iran election, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. (forget about a big decade, it's been a big year) it does feel like all the big news stories we actually recall in our year-end lists have been a bit...hollow (or bogus, depending). Says Salon's Joan Walsh: (more...)

video Now that 2009 is slowly, finally coming to an end, Sarah Palin is getting her comeuppance in the inevitable end-of-year lists. Sort of. Yesterday Politifact.com, a fact-checking website, selected "death panels" as its number one lie of the year: "Of all the falsehoods and distortions in the political discourse this year, one stood out from the rest." (more...)

The New York Post has listened to my cry for a covers archive! Sort of. The Post is currently running a feature on its website allowing you to vote for your favorite New York Post cover of the decade. Talk about an embarrassment (sometimes literally) of riches. (more...)

the aughts 2009 is probably feeling a bit abashed, counting down the minutes until the infant 2010 is born. Starting with John Updike's January death, it's been widely decried as the Year of the Celebrity Death. Well, what good is the Internet if not to second-guess the specious claims of people trying to sell newspapers? (Or blog ads?)

Those who are familiar with my pieces on Mediaite may have noticed that I'm a bit of a data nerd. So I took this analysis a step further, grokking every important death listed on Wikipedia and crunching the numbers. (more...)

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"I think this has been a wonderful decade for civility. And anyone who disagrees with me can gargle my man-sack."

--Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report, to guest Tom Brokaw, the former anchor of NBC Nightly News. The two were discussing the highs and lows of the previous decade when Colbert dropped this take on both civility and what to do with his "man-sack". The moment comes in the following clip at 4:45.

the aughts "Thus, regular readers of a Hearst paper would find other newspapers insipid, destitute of the racy detail to which they were accustomed. Conversely, a reader of the sedate New York Times, on turning to a Hearst sheet, would be apt to shudder at the discovery of a frantic world he had not dreamed existed." --W.A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst

As you may have heard, Gawker was recently named the blog of the decade by Adweek. Three other Gawker Media blogs, Gizmodo, Deadspin, and Lifehacker, were finalists. Adweek noted that Gawker itself was only number seven among Gawker Media properties in terms of traffic, but proclaimed it "the template for what a blog should be" -- a quote eagerly snatched up by Gawker's advertising department. Leaving aside the question of "should," Gawker has undeniably set the template for what the blogs of this decade aspire to be. (more...)

As the decade we've dubbed The Aughts winds to a close, many magazines are celebrating with giant interactive features that attempt to encapsulate ten years of tragedy, victory, controversy and beyond. Newsweek, for example, has dedicated an entire website to The Decade In Rewind and endless content flows, from videos to think-pieces. Mediaite, too, has a section designated for The Aughts. It's an exciting time, and the nostalgia washes over us all.

But to praise (or denounce, right Time?) the end of the decade with a magazine cover is truly a special sort of honor -- and oddly enough, it's rare. So far, not too many titles have given the early 2000s the newsstand treatment, so we figured for the final edition of Cover Wars this year (and this decade!), we would celebrate those commemorating The Aughts. That means New York vs. Time vs. Rolling Stone vs. New York. See below for the winner, and as for Cover Wars, see you next year! (more...)

the aughts Ten years ago today, I lived in a somewhat odd Melrose-style apartment building (with the pool in the middle that was never used, at least not for sexy young hipster soirees) in Northern California, where I'd lived for about five months. I was getting used to the climate, the city, and the fact that it wasn't going to snow, no matter how much I wished it would. I left there three years ago, another eternity in my life. I've lived multiple places in New York City since, and the thought of the young me, new to California, seems so foreign as to be imaginary. Ten years, in other words, is a long time. In ten years, bookmarked by two Censuses, millions move for millions of reasons. We thought, therefore, that the end of this year was a good opportunity to encourage reflection on those reasons and those moves. Below is a map, centered on the United States — but scalable and movable — that shows the moves of visitors to this website (you!). Feel free to add your own - just use the tool under the map to enter the city where you lived in 2000, and where you live now; optionally, you can tell a little bit about why you made the move. (more...)

The Aughts With the end of the year, the end of the decade, and the end of President Obama's first year in office all fast approaching there is likely to be a bit of a battle of the listicle coming our way (the first wave of which has already arrived). (more...)

Among many others, I picked up one particularly pernicious bad habit in college: shaving my hair to a quarter-inch length, by myself, using clippers. It saved money in more ways than one - few women accept dates from six-foot-tall eagle chicks. I stuck with the look longer than I really should have, transporting a 1950s style into the new millennium. Today, I look different. And, not coincidentally, am married.

Few of us, we are all pleased to report, look the same way we did ten years ago (with some notable exceptions). Likewise our favorite brands; the past ten years provided a surfeit of logo redesigns, each documented, critiqued, lambasted and praised on the internet. (more...)

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...)

the aughts Just as great men stand on the shoulders of giants, so too is history built on what came before. This now-elapsing decade — The Aughts, or whatever you want to call them — has been a decade of change not only compared to the decades before it, but because of them. That said, historian Paul Starr notes an important distinction: “We are seeing a whole series of events in which journalists became important actors themselves. You can’t tell the story of what happened without them. You can write about any other period in history and you don’t have to mention journalists at all. You can’t do that for this period, because journalists were critical actors in those changes.” Perhaps that's why now, more than ever, it's important to remember how we got here. (more...)

“So this Dec. 12, I mark a sad anniversary, and wonder, among so many other things, what “Catch-22’s” author would have had to say about President Obama’s accepting the Nobel Peace Prize shortly after ordering 30,000 more Americans to war.”

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the aughts This week, the New York Times Magazine was dedicated to their newly traditional Year In Ideas thinkpiece. It's always a fantastic collection of new discoveries, shifts in ways of thinking, and products that we're likely to hear more about in years to come. It tries, in many ways, to be predictive; to isolate still-germinating concepts that will shape the world. I thought, therefore, that it made sense to see how they did. In the spirit of the end of the decade, I looked back at their first Year In Ideas released in December of 2001. Heavy on concepts that emerged following the terrorist attacks (such as "American Imperialism, Embraced") and the Internet ("Populist Editing"), the series was born at a fascinating moment in American history. (more...)

When the decade began, the gay community was recovering from its unrequited love affair with the Clinton administration and worried about the culture war being waged by religious conservatives. By the end of the decade, the same people were dealing with their unrequited love affair with the Obama administration and, well, you know where this is going.

But the decade was not without its highlights. It's hard to imagine that in 2000 that many would think same-sex marriage would be the law of the land in five states, that 12 states and the District of Columbia would add transgender rights provisions, and that you couldn't turn on the television, glance at the computer or open a newspaper without seeing openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people staring back at you.

So, on to the gayest moments of the Aughts. (more...)

The Aughts Congrats are in order for our office-mates Downtown Records. Gnarls Barkley, masters of disguise and Downtown artists, are responsible for making the best song of the decade, according to Rolling Stone. "Crazy", Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse's wonderful pop/soul/rock/hip-hop collabo from 2006, tops the magazine's list of the top 100 songs of the decade. "Crazy" united people in a musically-fragmented decade, "packed a career's worth of genius ideas into three minutes", and was loved by everyone "from your mom to your ex-girlfriend's art professor." (more...)

the aughts Back in 1996 I was a young and eager media aspirant, only a couple of years into Silicon Alley and all of its promise. Somehow, I found myself with the title "executive producer" for SPINonline, where I was charged with developing their website (and leading the then-relevant music magazine into the digital age). Alas, a sexual harassment case against then-owner (pornographer's son) Bob Guccione, Jr. led to an eventual sale of the magazine - and more importantly for me - a dearth of money to develop their website. This gave me a lot of time to surf a brand new web, and think futuristic (and perhaps pot-fueled) thoughts. (more...)

the aughts The decade got off to such a nice start, didn’t it? At the stroke of midnight, as the nines turned into zeroes, our millennial fears were allayed by magnums of champagne and an army of Silicon Alley wizards. Cities around the globe twinkled with the light of an infinity of camera flashes. It was all so beautiful. Who could have guessed what catastrophe awaited, and how pivotal architecture and design would be to the coming decade’s grim narrative? Our world is fundamentally different than it was ten years ago. That change has been shocking, painful, and paradigm-shifting. In that time, architecture and design reframed our world in ways we could hardly have expected. Here are a few signal moments in that recent history. (more...)

the aughts This new decade has snuck up on us. It's mid-December and only just now has the media world seemed to have awoken to the fact that, wow, we're about to enter a new decade. I myself had not even realized it until I got an email from Newsweek inviting me to participate in their end-of-decade package. What a difference from ten years ago, when a millennium was drawing to a close and we lived in fear of the havoc to be wrought by Y2K even while we were partying like it was 1999. (I was dreaming when I wrote that.) By contrast, this year has been so crazy that just chronicling the madness of 2009 has seemed like more than enough work, let alone reflect on the past decade. But part of the import of a passing decade being so overlooked lies to in how un-unified it seemed. The 90s were a big deal because they were so different from the 80s and so different from the 70s. And when we left the 90s behind, we left them for...what? (more...)

The Aughts Oh, I know you love a good scandal. How do I know this? Because everyone does. A good scandal amuses us, indulges our schadenfreude and distracts us from other more ‘real' and depressing news stories. And as someone who studies trends and fashion news all day long, I can tell you the fashion world has some good ones. So as the first decade of the 21st century comes to a close, I decided to make a list of my top 10 favorite fashion-related scandals. I’ve included any story involving clothes or relating to the fashion industry. Many of these stories were ridiculous, but they got the headlines and we couldn’t get enough of them. And the decade’s not even over — we've got a few more weeks to discover this decade’s own ‘blue dress’! (more...)

There was a day when magazine covers could make or break a career, or a magazine (remember pregnant Demi Moore's cover for Vanity Fair? Of course you do, that was 1991). Those days are mostly long gone. I can barely remember a magazine cover from the last three years (with the possible exception of last year's Obama New Yorker cover) let alone pinpoint those that came out in the last 12 months. We are too relentlessly inundated with images for any one thing to make that much of an impact. Unless is it real life, and even then it's a challenge to hold anyone's attention for that long. (more...)

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As the face of media evolves, it's important to honor the figures who helped define, shape and set the standards in their industries. These are some of the most prominent members of the media who passed away over the past 10 years.  Take a look back with some snippets from their respective New York Times obituaries.

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the aughts I have a fun little project for you. Why don’t you try condensing 10 years of movies you love into 1 column? Go on, I dare you. In the meantime, here’s my list for you to dwell on and inspire you. Now to be clear, this is not my list of what I think are the 10 best movies of the decade. You can look to Roger Ebert and his brethren of critics to inundate you with such lists between now and the end of the year. Instead, this is a list of the movies that I know I will still be watching and re-watching 10 and 20 years from now whenever they show up on cable. Oh wait, apparently cable TV won’t exist anymore in 10 years, so let’s just say these are the 10 movies that I will beam directly into my brain when I want some 00’s nostalgia and just want to be entertained and captivated by a movie. So here we go. >>>FIRST UP: "Superbad"

The Aughts As writers scramble for their last-ditch efforts to name this decade, attention has landed on Time Magazine for their proposed name: "The Decade From Hell." But what's more interesting is to consider what Time suggested - and today's editors subsequently neglected to revisit - in their first issue of the decade. (more...)

We are about to head into six weeks of non-stop, end-of-decade countdown and highlight lists. Newsweek got a head start on the competition with their much passed-around the decade in seven minutes, but that is no doubt just the tip of the iceberg of what's to come between now and December 31. Granted it's been a helluva a decade. Or, according to Time 'The Decade From Hell,' which is the moniker they've opted to give it. (more...)

The Aughts Rotten Tomatoes has unveiled what it deems its Worst of the Worst, those movies of the past decade that received the worst reviews.

Not surprisingly, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever was the number one worst movie, with a grand total of 0% good reviews. The cast was promising: - Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu - so why so bad? Do you really want to see it to find out? That goes pretty much for all the movies on the list — from Glitter to Swept Away to The Hottie And The Nottie. Which prompted a natural follow-up question: what directors and actors had the worst results on Rotten Tomatoes from 2000-2009? Thanks to computers, we have the answer. (more...)

video We're less than two months from the end of the decade and up to now, the media has been suspiciously quiet about it. Maybe it's going to be a surprise party, but it wouldn't have been unreasonable to believe that the retrospective coverage would have been wall-to-wall for the entire second half of the year. There's always December! (more...)