There are certain stereotypes associated with folks who turn out muscular, blues-inflected roots rock as the Blasters do. These stereotypes converge around the vision of the roadhouse, where boozy weekend warriors escape to play sturdy late-model rock & roll like their lives depended on it. Blasters frontman Phil Alvin defies such stereotypes, having maintained a notable musical career while also working in mathematical semantics—two fascinations that have often proven difficult to reconcile.

Read the rest at the Santa Cruz Weekly

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They are lifestyle-marketing events. I’ve had very few musical epiphanies at events like that—20,000 teenagers standing on a baseball diamond is not the ideal way to consume music, and I don’t want to spend six months of my life making that happen.

Read the rest at the AV Club.

And for the SF Weekly, a bunch of new blurbs on writers Taylor Plimpton and Angela S. Choi, comedy by Alex Koll and The Denial Show, and the Gallery Hijinks Inaugural Exhibition.

I’ve been previewing a lot of literary and arts events for the SF Weekly, including authors David Mitchell and Tony O’Neill, and street artist David Choe. Over at Shareable, I’m working on a series of posts about social news sites, and have posts up about the iPad app Flipboard and Google Reader’s new social features. I’ve also written recently about the intersections between crypto-forestry and guerrilla gardening.

Many of us share a creeping sense that our gadgets fund atrocities and injustices on the other side of the world. We read about suicides at Chinese manufacturer Foxconn, or about the conflict minerals in our devices that have funded genocide in the Congo, register a brief sense of disgust, and move on. Every major technology company uses the same supply chain, sourcing conflict materials that are hewn into hot gadgets by people working in conditions that would be familiar to Upton Sinclair. The market solution would be to vote with our dollars, but that’s difficult when there isn’t really a choice.

Read the rest here

Upon the release of his divisive 2008 book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky was besieged by media professionals: “what will happen to our careers in the brave new world of amateur media?” they asked. As a struggling freelance writer, I empathize. But as Shirky argues in his latest book Cognitive Surplus, that’s not the crucial question before us. In fact, the problem he poses is so critical, it’s counterproductive to approach this book from a defensive point of view. Shirky is concerned with a much more fundamental societal challenge: will we harness the publishing, sharing and collaboration innovations the internet offers to enrich the commons, or settle for Facebook updates and lolcats?

Read the entire review here

A fresh take on the Bukowskian milieu of dirtbags, drunks, and drifters is rare, but Joshua Mohr accomplished it with his debut novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me. More improbably, O, The Oprah Magazine named it one of the best books of the year. Credit Mohr’s voice for bridging these two seemingly irreconcilable extremes.

Significant Objects: The Secret History of Products: Can an unwanted, discarded item of consumer kitsch be imbued with new value by the simple act of telling its story? And what if that story was completely fabricated? This is the question that Significant Objects poses.

Crowdsourcing Disaster Response: As oil continues to pour into the gulf, many of us feel overwhelmed, unable to respond usefully in the face of such devastation. Much has been made of the power of social media and mobile phones to organize people and spur fundraising efforts during times of crisis, but SMS donations only go so far.

Community Solutions to Food Deserts: One of the most confounding issues confronting urban planners, activists, and health food advocates in recent years is the Food Desert phenomenon: low-income urban areas in a city where fresh food is difficult to obtain.

Gadget Lust vs. Good Enough: When last year’s blazing tech becomes today’s e-waste, rendered obsolete by an ever-shortening hype cycle, when will we ever have enough?

Open Cities, Open Data: How do we get closer to a more shareable future? One promising route is the Open Data movement, initiatives to leverage the sheer bulk of data collected from city institutions and services and make them available to citizens who will leverage that data in innovative ways.

Is American Exceptionalism A Myth? Conventional wisdom states that individualism is coded within the very DNA of the American people. Since Ralph Waldo Emerson’s exceptionalism manifesto "Self-Reliance," the American character has defined itself by its iconoclasm. But are Americans actually uniquely individualistic in practice?

There’s a unique confidence to Emily Jane White’s songwriting: it’s at once sympathetic and tough-minded, reflective and unsentimental. Her work has been described as folk, which is reductive, considering how orchestrated her full-band arrangements are. While the music creates a contemplative space reminiscent of folk, White’s subject matter and musical touchstones transcend the woman-with-acoustic-guitar label that is inevitably applied to women with acoustic guitars, whether or not it fits.

Read the article at santacruz.com

Can Diaspora* Take Down Facebook? With over 500 million users, Facebook isn’t merely ubiquitous–it’s the connective tissue that binds you to your friends, family, professional contacts and once-forgotten acquaintances. It’ll take a compelling challenger to take down Facebook. Four NYU students are stepping up, announcing Diaspora*, a fully open-source, privacy-minded alternative.

The Ecological Footprint of eBooks: As the iPad and Kindle become a growing concern, the debate over the environmental effects of print versus digital are again coming to the fore. The argument in favor of digital books makes intuitive sense: compared to a stack of dead trees printed upon using toxic chemicals, e-books must be greener. But in truth, things are a bit more complicated.

48 Hour Magazine: A Shareable Publication: A group of online media mavens resurrect the all-hours crunch of print publishing, while re-imagining the process for a shareable digital age.