Matthew Newton

We didn’t just shop there. We communicated with people there. Before there was social media you actually went out and talked to people. The mall played an intricate part of that process in our society.

As new events take place, it seems to alter, for better or worse, a person’s view of the past.

On April 24, 1964, while campaigning in support of his War on Poverty initiative, President Lyndon Johnson traveled to Inez, Kentucky to show the American public what life in rural Appalachia looked like.

There’s a certain sense of guilt associated with dragging children into a strange house to look through the belongings of people who are most likely dead, infirmed, or in some state of personal or financial distress.

Maybe you’ve heard, Saturday is doomsday. Family Radio founder Harold Camping says so, though his Judgment Day math has been wrong in the past. Regardless, Family Radio’s publicist Tom Evans is working the angle hard, hoping for the worst. To mock such a terrible prediction, however, feels a bit like tempting fate. What if Camping and his sandwich-board believers have insider knowledge on Armageddon?

When the FBI raided Ted Kaczynski‘s remote cabin in the woods of Lincoln, Montana back in 1996, they found “a wealth of bomb components, 40,000 handwritten journal pages that included bomb-making experiments and descriptions of the Unabomber crimes; and one live bomb, ready for mailing.” Since then, Kaczynski has resided at ADX Florence, a supermax prison in Colorado.

Watching the promotional video for Envoy, a real/unreal digital service that claims to specialize in reanimating the Facebook profiles of deceased users, you hope that it’s a hoax. “Two certainties in life exist: You are born and you die,” says Envoy’s Max Doughherty. “We know this is fact, yet when a loved one passes it’s still very distressing.

Maybe you’ve heard, Osama bin Laden was killed yesterday. The People of Twitter told me so. Or at least, told me I should step away from my computer and sit back down in front of my television to watch a press conference. But the press conference didn’t air when they said it would, so I started losing interest and flipping channels, distracted long enough to miss half the President’s address. Though I knew the gist: Jihadist #1 was dead.

According to such reputable sources as CBS News and the Today Show, videos of girls fighting girls is kind of a thing now. (At least that’s what a few keyword-centric Google searches have led me to believe.) My interest in the topic grew (and almost immediately vanished) after watching this video by Belgium’s Cum Collective…

When Cathy finds Tom sitting in the park, sipping on a Slurpee, she seems happy to see her friend. But what she doesn’t realize is that Tom has recently experienced lousy times on the Internet. “I was surfing the net last night, and I saw some things,” Tom tells Cathy. And his expression tells the story of things not easily unseen.

For decades cartoons have thrived in a strange, violent, and often Utopian unreality. Considering their distance from reality, it’s odd how cartoons have been used as teaching tools to warn against bad habits such as drug use, alcohol abuse, and — most commonly — smoking.

As the Rebecca Black saga continues to run its course, critical mass looms. Like any respectable meme, parodies and remixes have helped push “Friday” (74 million views!) into the Annals of Internet Infamy. But for the most part, such tributes have been forgettable. This remix by Cynical Mass, however, aptly transforms Black’s $4000 vanity track into a masterful audio-visual creepout.