A world-class city boasting outsized political and economic influence, a vibrant tech community, and an intense commitment to civic participation, Chicago points the way to the peer-to-peer cities of tomorrow. Shareable Chicago is my week-long series exploring the city's burgeoning open data, civic tech, and P2P communities.

The first feature documents last weekend's DataKind DataDive, and explores the many challenges facing developers, data scientists, and social organizations who want to leverage civic data for lasting social change.

Follow the posts on the Shareable Chicago page, or at #shareablechi on Twitter. Looking forward to your thoughts, leads, and responses!

It's a recipe for a systemic failure of civic institutions — or an opportunity to rebuild cities as more representative and peer-to-peer entities.

Tiltshift photo of Chicago by Michael Baird on Flickr

It's an imposing task. With cities still weathering the effects of the recession, making the pitch for innovation and transparency to budget-conscious city officials can be difficult. Compounding the issue is that citizens embittered toward civic institutions may not see or understand the benefit of such initiatives.

Image by opensourceway on Flickr.

At the "Cool Like You: Gov Private Sector Envy" (#COOLGOV) panel at this year's SXSW, Julio Gonzalez of Open Austin noted that this crisis of confidence can directly damage efforts to fund open government initiatives. "Don’t submerge the public investment,” he said, citing the percentage of Americans who don't think of services like Medicare as government entities. "It’s important for people to know when civic data platforms are public programs paid with public dollars," he added.

Among the many civic hackers I've met and chatted with over the past month — the policy wonks, data hackers, IT managers, civic-minded app developers, data journalists and civic-minded designers who populate the flourishing community — I've observed a recurring set of intertwined challenges, articulated in different ways depending on the speaker:

• How can these efforts more effectively create citizen engagement?
• How do the privileged individuals who largely comprise the community connect with and empower those from different racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds, and ensure that these efforts address social inequality rather than perpetuate it?
• How do you energize, inspire, and include the many citizens who consider all government institutions to be ineffective, corrupt, and irrevocably broken?

As with all questions of governance, civic engagement, and social justice, there are no easy answers. But addressing them will require a more diverse representation of citizens, people who can hack at much more than just civic data and code. The hacker ethos must be applied to community outreach, grassroots organizing, public policy, and how we tell and understand the stories of our cities.

“Ask not what your city can do for you. Ask what you can do for your city.”

An inclusive definition of "hacker" informs the Code for America Brigade, announced by CfA founder Jennifer Pahlka during her SXSW 2012 keynote speech, "Coding the Next Chapter of American History." The Brigade builds upon the momentum established during Code Across America, a hackathon for the public good held in cities across the country on February 25.

In CfA's words:

The Code for America Brigade is an organizing force for a growing community of civic minded developers, designers, data scientists, and community leaders who will contribute their talents towards addressing the problems we see everyday. The technology that we’ll develop together and deploy locally will form a new Civic Web.

Visual notes of @pahlkadot's #SXSW keynote by @imagethink. #opengov #gov20#SXSWi twitter.com/digiphile/stat…

—  Alex Howard (@digiphile) March 13, 2012

During the #coolgov panel, Kevin Curry, Program Director of the CfA Brigade, spoke about its goal to establish “hacking as a civic duty,” defining “hacking” as more than banging out code and diving into data, but rather a mentality that can be applied to any level of civic action. "Ask not what your city can do for you," he said, evoking JFK. "Ask what you can do for your city." CfA is looking for more than data scientists and Python developers to volunteer for their respective city’s chapter, though those skills are certainly needed. They’re looking for anyone with the skills and the desire to hack the civic process.

Broadening the Coalition: Addressing Social Inequality Through Open Government

The need to diversify the open government and civic data movement was emphasized by Gonzalez during the panel. Noting that “it’s a very technocratic scene right now,” Gonzalez stated that the existing communities must “broaden the coalition” of citizens involved in these efforts, to better address social justice issues surrounding race, class and the digital divide. He stressed the need to partner with community outreach organizations, data journalists, and the administrative city workers “who live in an Excel world rather than a PHP world.”

Context is Key: Who Do Crime Maps and Civic Apps Serve?

Diversifying this "very technocratic scene" is essential: civic datasets tell stories, and when not properly contextualized, those stories can do more harm than good. Infographics and data visualizations can only serve the public good if they provide the proper context. Otherwise, they risk perpetuating existing prejudices, further marginalizing disenfranchised groups.

Crime maps are an increasingly common target of critique: since police report datasets are often relatively accessible and regularly updated, crime map overlays are often the earliest civic apps to appear in a city. Speaking of the dangers of decontextualized data in a February interview, Chicago CfA fellow Ben Sheldon said to me, “we can’t just keep putting out crime maps…You have to ask, ‘how is the media framing the data, and how can the community contextualize it itself?’

Stamen founder and creative director Eric Rodenbeck aired a related set of concerns when he spoke at the first Big Data for the Public Good seminar in January. The design team behind the next-level crime map apps Oakland Crimespotting and San Francisco Crimespotting (along with a host of other innovative interactive maps and civic data visualizations,) Rodenbeck emphasized that context must be a key design component when building civic data apps, stating that "narrative is critical" and warning that there's a danger of apps and visualizations spreading and perpetuating misconceptions due to unshared cultural contexts between the people building them and the people using them.

Big Data for the Public Good | Seminar 1: Data Visualization | Eric Rodenbeck from Code for America on Vimeo.

The question of who is being served by these apps was also raised by Jake Porway during his talk at the second CfA Big Data for the Public Good seminar on Monday, March 19th. Noting that in the age of the mobile web, "everything creates data," the founder of Data Without Borders and data scientist for The New York Times emphasized that we must "leverage this data to serve more groups than the people building the apps." In other words, more apps for social justice, less bar finders for hip urbanites.

As a counterexample, Porway pointed to the work Data Without Borders has done with the New York Civil Liberties Union to map racial profiling by the New York Police Department. By analyzing data on "stop-and-frisk" incidents committed by the NYPD in 2010, they were able to map clear trends of profiling across race and socioeconomic lines. Speaking to the data scientists in the room, Porway emphasized that while doing this may seem elementary to them, the implications are transformative for social justice organizations who often lack the money, technology, and skilled staff to do such analysis. "This is about more than maps and visualizations," Porway said. "This is about empowering these organizations."

Ratio of racial composition by census tract and precinct - Data Without Borders/NYCLU.

Spatial clustering of incident counts by precinct - Data Without Borders/NYCLU.

To provide much-needed insight and context to the torrential influx of real-time data, the community of civic hackers must diversify on many fronts: as Porway urged in his talk, the sphere needs more data scientists to volunteer their efforts and apply scientific rigor to deep data dives. Meanwhile, social justice organizations have enormous caches of valuable data but neither the staff nor technical resources to leverage them.

It also requires connecting with the people and groups who are concurrently addressing these issues at the ground level. Both data journalists and hardened beat reporters who have an intrinsic understanding of a neighborhood could provide skill sets, knowledge and critical approaches others may not bring to the table. And there also needs to be a place at the table for emergent organizations and movements that are addressing related issues on a grassroots level, such as Occupy Research and Chicago's Read/Write Library.

It's All Data: "Community is not read-only, and it already has a voice"

Read/Write Library is a Chicago-based organization and space that aims to serve as "an all-inclusive collection of Chicago-specific media, produced by and for the community." During her talk at SXSW, founder Nell Taylor advocated for a radical rethinking of the role and relative value of both print and online media. Read/Write Library considers zines, vanity publications, poetry chapbooks, art books, community newspapers and many other materials to be data worthy of being archived.

"Community is not read-only, and it already has a voice," she told a room of attendees of SXSW Interactive, stating that "we need to change the cultural context so we rethink what is worth keeping. "People already have a voice," she said, adding that disenfranchised communities in particular have a long history of self-publishing. The marginalized voices who have traditionally expressed themselves through self-publication add new layers to the cultural and socioeconomic map of a city's history when archived and viewed in aggregate. Otherwise, the small-scale publications the library has collected over the past five years risk becoming data exhaust, a danger Porway warned against in his talk.

In the case of the Read/Write Library, the collection of the materials is often done in the field, and relies on building networks and egalitarian relationships with socioeconomically diverse groups offline and on. They call this process of collection "controlled crowdsourcing," through which they actively seek out contributions from the community.

Once archived, this physical data can be leveraged by to introduce, in Taylor's words, "a cultural layer to civic technology." The Read/Write Library is aiming to fill in the socioeconomic gaps in Chicago's cultural memory in part by collaborating with members of the city's vibrant open government and data hacker communities. Taylor said, "The questions we're asking are: how do you get this data into a mappable flow? How do you connect this print material with apps that are being built in hackathons?" To this end, the Library's existing space will double as a hackerspace in the months and years ahead, to serve as a nonprofit space that facilitates the sort of serendipitous connections and diverse collaborations that Code for America, Gonzalez, and Porway have articulated the need for.

The Beginning, Not The Finish Line

Photo by Marc Buehler on Flickr.

This post is an embryonic, discursive attempt to encapsulate many of the disparate but related conversations I've heard and taken part in during the past few month; not so much a call to arms as a call for conversation and connections that could lead to new collaborations between disparate groups.

In his Monday talk, Porway articulated a number of related issues, noting that "data and skills have been silo'd from one another" and that the "top-down world of big silos is breaking down to a bottom-up world where we're nodes in a connected society."

Code for America Brigade, Data Without Borders, the Read/Write Library, and a number of other nascent projects are pointing the way to potential models for diversifying the community, increasing engagement, and making civic data efforts better represent and serve the communities they hope to help.

But bridging cultural and socioeconomic gaps to create a more diverse, representative community of civic hackers who can more richly contextualize the data is merely the next step. The beginning, not the finish line.

Detroit population change, 2000-2010. Visualization of Census data by Stephen Von Worley at DataPointed.

To build resilient, peer-to-peer cities the precarious economic times demand, these conversations and collaborations need to be facilitated top-down, ground-up, and between every other decentralized community node that can contribute to weaving a diverse tapestry of a city's political, cultural, historical, and socioeconomic data. This vision was perhaps best encapsulated by Howard during the SXSW panel he moderated, "Shaping Future Cities with Mobile Data". Storified on his blog at govfresh, Howard envisioned "a future of cities fueled by citizens, open data and collaborative consumption."

I find this vision, and the ongoing convergence of these disparate groups, immensely inspiring. I want to help facilitate this conversation in the weeks and months ahead, here on Shareable, on Twitter, and elsewhere. I've joined the Austin chapter of the CfA Brigade, despite my limited coding knowledge, to see what connections, skills, and contexts I can contribute to the city's open data community, play a role in facilitating these conversations in the city, learn more coding skills, and most importantly, hopefully give back to the city. I'll be documenting this learning process and drawing connections I observe in a series of upcoming posts on Shareable.

To those of us who don't think of ourselves as hackers but find ourselves applying that ethos to other trades — journalists, community organizers, field researchers, social justice activists, lawyers and policy wonks, and many more groups — let's join the conversation, contribute our skills to the civic hacker community, and see what we can build together for our cities.

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Since the rise of Napster and file-sharing, it seems like every single music fan, tech pundit, opinion columnist, and blogger has an opinion on what's wrong with the music business, and how things should change. There's been a lot less conversation about how the technology shifts have actually affected the many professional independent musicians who have not been the subject of "future of the music business" trend pieces.

Cooper McBean of The Devil Makes Three joins Paul at Casa de Gato for a conversation about how technology and the Internet have transformed the lives of professional independent musicians for better and worse, the shady corners of the music business the Internet hasn't disrupted, connecting with fans online, those "future of the music industry" trend pieces, whether bands using Kickstarter are enterprising or lazy, and Cooper's advice for aspiring musicians.

During Breaking News, Cosmologist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein joins us to discuss the latest Cylon (military drone) news, the case of Bradley Manning, microagressions and Shit White Girls Say To Black Girls, why science is the 99%, and the enigmatic case of the Lesbian Bigfoot hunter.

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Show Notes:

Breaking News

• Motherboard: The Cargo Chopper That's Hauling Drones to War
• Danger Room: Marines Want iPads to Control Robo-Copter Brains
• Danger Room: Almost 1 In 3 U.S. Warplanes Is a Robot
• Motherboard: Are Drones Collecting Too Much Information
• New York Times: Judge recommends Manning charged with all counts
• Wikipedia: Daniel Ellsberg
• Shit White Girls Say To Black Girls: blog.franchesca.net
• Microagressions
• Scientific American: Science Is the 99%
• YouTube: Neal Degrasse Tyson on Bill Maher
• Cryptomundo: Out Bigfooter Speaks Up For Lesbian Tolerance
• San Diego Gay & Lesbian News: Lesbian Biologist on Cult Hit Finding Bigfoot Spills the Beans

Cooper McBean Interview

• Danny Barnes: How To Make A Living Playing Music
• The New York Times: Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog
• The New York Times: Frustration and Fury: Take It. It's Free.
• Techdirt: Amanda Palmer Talks About Record Labels, Art, Commerce & Retiring To Open A Juice Bar
• Crowdfunding Nation: The Rise and Evolution of Collaborative Funding
• Wikipedia: Jeff Mangum
• Wikipedia: Brian Wilson
• Mule Train

About the Guests

Cooper McBean is a member of The Devil Makes Three, which recently released the live album Stomp and Smash: Live at the Mystic Theatre and will be touring with Flogging Molly in early February. He also fronts the country and folk band Cooper McBean and the Vested Interests. Originally from Vermont, Cooper now calls Austin his home, and can be found on Twitter @thecoug.

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a cosmologist holding a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her first postdoc was a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellowship in the Observational Cosmology Lab at Goddard Space Flight Center. Find her professional work online at cprescodweinstein.com and her non-professional blog at chandapw.tumblr.com.

Episode Markers

00:02:39: Breaking News with Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
00:51:19: "Bangor Mash" by The Devil Makes Three from the album Longjohns, Boots and a Belt
00:52:15: Interview with Cooper McBean
01:24:18: "Over The Gates" by Cooper McBean and the Vested Interests
01:54:02: "Black Irish" by The Devil Makes Three from the album Stomp and Smash: Live at the Mystic Theatre
02:20:19: "Gracefully Facedown" by The Devil Makes Three from the album Do Wrong Right

Credits

Radio Free Ruin art: “As Things Fell Apart (Jewelers)” by Carrie Sieh
Radio Free Ruin theme: “FT2 Theme” by Phil Manley from the album Life Coach used with the gracious permission of Thrill Jockey Records

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• No iPhone, iPad or computer in bed. (Kindle okay, and computer allowed at foot of bed for Netflix viewing.)
• Read at least 30 books. (There's no way I can do 50 in one year, much less 55.)
• Eat less brown food. Eat more green food.
• Write more. Remove all unnecessary modifiers. Use more precise language.
• Don't second-guess people's intentions, and assume arguments are made in good faith, unless that is clearly not the case.
• Finally record and release this goddamn album I've been talking about for five years.
• Do not presume that I have any idea how things will turn out.
• Be less afraid:
  "Fuck concepts. Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to stay permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen." - George Saunders, "The New Mecca"

Photo by HoundCat on Flickr.

In the middle of the last decade, there were bright hopes that podcasts represented a new form of citizen broadcast media. But over the past few years, that promise seemed squandered, as rebroadcasts of public radio shows dominated iTunes’ top 10 lists, crowding out independent efforts. It’s understandable: producing a quality podcast with consistently great content and high-quality audio is a time-consuming process, and requires more equipment, commitment and charisma than starting a personal Blogspot or posting funny pictures to Tumblr. And while here were some podcast-native successes, it seemed they required a geek-centric focus (Leo LaPorte’s TWiT network) or dogged determination (Jesse Thorn’s Maximum Fun mini-empire) to succeed. For people such as myself, who were inspired and encouraged by the promises of DIY broadcasting that podcasting promised, this was a disappointing fate for the medium.

Those trends reversed in 2011, the year podcasting came into its own. Buoyed by the success of WTF with Marc Maron, and the rush of mainstream attention garnered by the resulting New York Times profile, nearly every stand-up comic in the United States launched his or her own show, and comedy podcasting got its own network in Earwolf. This certainly drove wider interest and awareness, prompting a more mainstream audience to venture outside of the iTunes top ten list or finally figure out what the hell a podcast was. But outside of the comedy scene, there were other encouraging signs. Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 network hosted numerous alternatives to the dominant tech podcasts, serving as the public radio-style analogue to the Howard Stern-esque approach favored by TWiT and the Cnet podcasts. The form matured to the point that longtime podcaster Jim Harold was even able to launch a successful network of paranormal news podcasts offering just the right balance of skepticism and belief.

As the form matures, it faces its own problems: the community is overwhelmingly white, male, and straight, and most political commentary is either dispiritingly partisan or comfortably centrist. The barrier to entry is high, and while there are a few examples of success, there’s a huge gulf between hours spent recording, producing and promoting podcasts and reaping any notional compensation. For the many people who have yet to figure out how to put music on their mobile device, listening to podcasts still seems an arcane science. And the success of comedy podcasts may pose its own problems, distracting from the breadth of topics that are out there.

Still, it’s been an encouraging year for fans of truly DIY broadcasting, for those like myself who find that broadcast media that doesn’t speak for us or use our language, who are alienated by shock jocks and partisan talk radio and NPR hosts who treat the culture of sub-sexagenarians with anthropological remove. There is a lot of space for podcasting to grow in the year ahead, to speak to new, underserved audiences, and reach the many people who have yet to download a podcast, but will soon.

The best podcasts of 2011:

WTF with Marc Maron

It’s hard to describe precisely what Maron does. It’s not journalism per se—no one with a J-School background would put as much of himself into interviews as Maron does—but in this context, it’s more effective. Whether by luck or design, Maron has landed upon an utterly unique approach to getting his guests to open up in remarkable ways, displaying an emotional honesty and openness that demands the same of his guests. As a result, Maron gets the sort of conversations that make you wonder if you’re really hearing what you’re hearing, whether it’s his call-out of the homophobic gags Gallagher tosses off mid-watermelon smash or getting Ira Glass to swear, talk about bad hangovers, and generally act like a human rather than a public radio automaton. WTF can be an exhausting listen, and Maron’s explications of his personal demons sometimes distract from the guest, but that messiness and off-the-cuff quality is also its greatest asset, and at its best—a height WTF reaches with remarkable consistency—it’s an exhilarating and gripping listen.

Radio Dispatch

If you were to create a demographic portrait of the average podcast host, it would probably look like this: white, male, probably straight, approaching middle age, center-left on the political spectrum. During this year of the Occupy movement, most political podcasts never seemed more out of touch. Radio Dispatch is a refreshing alternative, an unapologetically radical podcast airing three times a week hosted by the activist/comedian duo of siblings John and Molly Knefel. It has its flaws—the show sounds as if it’s been recorded on a Skype connection from within a steel drum, and the hosts are still honing their broadcasting skills—but those problems are made effectively irrelevant by the show’s sharp analysis of radical politics, wealth inequality, and feminism, its on-the-ground reports from the occupations, and interviews with activists, academics and comedians.

The Field Negro Guide to Arts and Culture

Flanked by guitar god Vernon Reid, wickedly sharp political comic W. Kamau Bell hosts an entertainingly rambling discussion of radical politics, music, comedy, and sci-fi, with occasional interviews with the likes of Alfre Woodard, Hannibal Buress, Fishbone and Ernie Isley.

How Did This Get Made?

Lazy, unwarranted snark is the coin of the Internet realm, and only grows more draining. (So sayeth Onan about his seed.) It’s not really necessary to search it out, but worth it when the snark is as entertaining—and the targets as deserving—as on How Did This Get Made?. Hosted by comedians Paul Sheer, June Diane Raphael and Jason Mantzoukas, the podcast is a celebration of shitty cinema. Their explication of the cult favorite The Room may be the last word on the subject, while an episode on Punisher: War Zone featuring Patton Oswalt and the film’s director Lexi Alexander evolved into a fascinating discussion about filmmaking, violence in movies, and the bullshit women directors have to contend with in Hollywood.

Hypercritical

There’s no more astute critic of the massive shifts underway in the tech industry, and the business, design and implementation decisions driving them, than John Siracusa. While Hypercritical is ostensibly an Apple podcast, Siracusa isn’t a blinkered partisan, and his critiques of Jobs’ empire are as sharp as his takes on Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. A coder by trade, Siracusa brings a software engineer’s exactitude to his analyses, but unlike many of his peers, he understands and respects the significant role human irrationality plays in the development, marketing and end-user experience of technology.

Reasonable Discussions

Pop culture podcasting is a shitshow. There’s the barely-tolerable Ivy League-grad snobbery displayed on the Slate Culture Gabfest and NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, or the amateurish fanboy rantings of countless podcasts you and I have never heard of. Relaunched this year, the AV Club’s podcast is the rare bright spot: smart, critical analysis of music, television, film and other pop culture artifacts with an affable. Hosted by fellow Punk Planet alum Kyle Ryan and featuring a rotating cast of AV Club editors and contributors, Reasonable Discussions not only investigates the latest in pop culture but also features thoughtful reflection on the role of the critic.

Star Talk

Hosted by Neal Degrasse Tyson, the closest heir to Carl Sagan’s mantle as the Space Expert of the People, Star Talk is an entertaining look at the latest science news and the mysteries of the universe. Tyson is a gregarious host with a gift for explaining theoretical science concepts to a lay audience. He’s also a big comedy fan, and often invites marquee comedians on the show to discuss typical comedy topics such as astrophysics, general relativity and multiple dimensions. It’s an inspired combination, and the two-part live show with Kristen Schaal, Scott Adsit, Eugene Mirman, and Alan Alda serves as an irreverent and educational entry point.

The Incomparable!

I’m an enthusiastic, but exceedingly picky, consumer of sci-fi and genre fiction. There’s a handful of TV series and films I love, I enjoy even fewer genre novels, and my tastes are admittedly idiosyncratic and persnickety. (To wit: X-Files, BSG reboot, Blade Runner = good, anything in the Whedonverse = bad.) Despite this, The Incomparable, a round table discussion show featuring a crew of smart and affable genre fiction nerds, is an ever-engaging listen, even when it focuses on books, films, tv shows, and comic books I’ve had no previous interest in.

Don’t Worry About The Government

While it suffers many of the flaws shared by too many political podcasts—it’s predominantly white and male, its politics reside closer to center-left on the spectrum—the twentysomethings on Don’t Worry About The Government set themselves apart through thoughtful analysis, deep knowledge of foreign policy issues, and a keen appreciation for the absurdity of world stage. In a year full of significant events in the Middle East and the Eurozone, the podcast provided a real service with its in-depth analysis of these seismic shifts in world politics and how they would potentially affect the United States. And while the political exits of Blago, Silvio Berlusconi and Kim Jong Il may take some wind out of their sails, there’s no lack of ridiculous political figures for them to skewer in the year ahead, as the cast of buffoons chasing the Republican Presidential nomination demonstrates.

The Bugle

A sad recommendation to make. Whether fed up with Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver’s skewering of the phone hacking scandal, the hosts’ unbridled lust for Florence Nightingale, or the infinitesimal profit margins in podcasting, the Rupert Murdoch-owned British newspaper The Times pulled the plug earlier this month on the self-proclaimed “Audio Newspaper for a Visual World”. This is British satirical humor at its best: scabrous wit, a keen eye for hypocrisy, high absurdity. With favored whipping boy Berlusconi stepping down, it may be an opportune time for the Bugle to similarly exit the stage, but many more years of Zaltzman and Oliver would be preferable. The hosts are looking for a new home for the podcast, and updates can be found on their new website and on Twitter at @hellobuglers.

One benefit to digital media is that it's much easier to collect lists of all you've consumed over the year. As a result, this is possibly an overly-exhaustive list of the books, writing on the web, music, and television I enjoyed to varying degrees in 2011. I'd like to think this sort of exercise serves some purpose other than self-indulgence, though it's certainly a manifestation of that; there's value to getting a broad view of what you've been reading, watching, listening to, and thinking about over the year, and sharing it with others. It's so damned easy to get consumed by the endless news stream of the Twitter news cycle that such reflection may be more important than ever. If nothing else, it's a worthwhile personal exercise. Hopefully it'll send you in some new directions as well.

(All listed in no particular order.)

Books

Books Read in 2011

• Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World • Trevor Paglen
  A fascinating road trip narrative and journalistic feat that offers a rare glimpse into "Black" America—the clandestine military installations, extraordinary rendition (torture) sites, and military satellites hiding in slightly-obscured sight.

• A Visit From The Goon Squad • Jennifer Egan
  Egan's novel hit me in such a viscerally emotional place that it's tough for me to engage with this one critically. One of the most generous considerations I've read of the staunch principles of youth, and how they give way to necessary compromises or bind individuals into a state of arrested development.
• The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires • Tim Wu
  Sobering look at the historical precedents for how previous revolutionary communication technologies such as radio became corporatized, consolidated and controlled.
• The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop • Dan Charnas
  An engaging, comprehensive history of hip-hop, a genre that has rarely shied away from the tightly-intertwined relationship between artistic expression and the business of music.

• Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter • Tom Bissell
  Interesting investigation of the problems of narrative in video games—why do attempts to impose a ludic, film-style narrative on games always fail? What do MMORPG's and sandbox games say about the future of narrative? What are the narrative constraints of the platformer? Does Grand Theft Auto take on a different meaning when experienced high on coke in Baghdad after the siege?
• The Dream of Perpetual Motion • Dexter Palmer
  An enchanting sci-fi world undermined by the book squandering what seems to be an implicit feminist critique with a disappointing conclusion that only serves the fantasy-world of the despicable male lead  character.
• The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise • Michael Grunwald
  Engaging look at the 100+ year effort to "civilize" the Everglades, a region that serves as a strikingly effective microcosm of so many of America's historical ills—Manifest Destiny, genocide, ill-considered development, predatory lending, environmental destruction, and the tenacious commitment to remaining in wars where there is no winner.
• Steve Jobs • Walter Isaacson
  Isaacson didn't seem to please anyone—Jobs' critics, curious observers, or die-hard Apple nerds—with his unfocused biography, but it was still an interesting read, for its unusually critical view of Jobs (given that it was an authorized biography) and the brief glimpses it provided into the thinking of an idiosyncratic world-changer whose figure looms large over Cupertino, the town I where I spent my teenage years.
• Dignity • Ken Layne
  The editor of Wonkette and one of our finest contemporary voices of righteous moral outrage gets (even more) serious in his fiction debut, a collection of communiques between members of co-op outposts established in foreclosed-upon McMansion parks throughout California in an all-too-plausible, totalitarian near-future America.

• America Pacifica • Anna North
  A captivating debut novel set in an impoverished, libertarian dystopia established on a tropical island in a near-future where the United States has been besetby a new Ice Age.
• Unfamiliar Fishes • Sarah Vowell
  I've never been able to stomach Vowell on This American Life, but I increasingly suspect that may have to do with TAL's own shortcomings and overly-precious, ingratiating tone than any particular contributor. A brisk overview of America's misadventures in Hawaii, from pious missionaries to drunk, skirt-chasing sailors to the political opportunists who convinced a somewhat-reluctant United States to annex the islands.
• Radiohead's Kid A (33 1/3) • Marvin Lin
  Not particularly interesting when it focuses on long-shopworn debates over authenticity and artistic influence, but when Lin situates the album within its political and technological contexts, it's a fascinating read.

Currently Reading

• The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom • Evgeny Morozov
• American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900 • H.W. Brands

In The Queue

• Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution • Sara Marcus
• Sunnyvale: The Rise and Fall of a Silicon Valley Family • Jeff Goodell
• Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh • Anne Elizabeth Moore

• Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City • Greg Grandin
• Follow Me Down • Kio Stark
• American Colonies: The Settling of North America • Alan Taylor
• Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's Facing Future (33 1/3) • Dan Kois

Best Writing I Read on the Web This Year

• Dear Congress, It's No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works • Joshua Kopstein
• No Ludo: The Illogical End • Jason Johnson
• Our Siri, Ourselves • Whet Moser
• Once, We Were (Not) Troy Davis And Then We Were Something Else • Roxane Gay
• Rebecca Coriam: lost at sea • Jon Ronson
• How to Draw Comics the New 52 Way: Women Get "Fridged" Again • Anne Elizabeth Moore and Mardou
• OWS and the Downfall of the Smartest Guys in the Room • Sarah Leonard
• My Advice to the Occupy Wall Street Protesters • Matt Taibbi
• Nearly Beloved: How to Celebrate the Day You Don't Get Married • Jen Girdish
• Condo at the End of the World • Joseph L. Flatley
• Arrington, Race, and Silicon Valley • Hank Williams
• Steve Jobs, Enemy of Nostalgia • Mike Daisey
• Artists, Institutions, and the Decline of Public Discourse • Polly Carl
• Andy Rooney, Joan Didion, and the Aging Cultural Critic • Amanda Hess
• The Week Social Media Broke My Heart • Manjula Martin
• Shoplifters of the World Unite • Slavoj Žižek
• The Failure of the Occupy Movement or the Emergence of a Living Systems Organization? • Vanessa Miemis
• What Does the Bonus Army Tell Us About Occupy Wall Street? • Brent Cox
• What People Don't Get About My Job: From A(rmy Soldier) to Z(ookeeper) • Derek Thompson
• How Teen Rap Group Odd Future Turned a Posse of Nerdy White Male Critics Into Rape Apologists • Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
• Postmodernism Is Dead • Edward Docx
• Deeply Embarrassed White People Talk Awkwardly About Race • Jen Graves
• The Work of Art in the Age of Googled Reproduction • Rob Walker
• Still Holding the Leash • Matt Wood
• Voluptuous Corruption • Will Schofield
• When Alan Met Ayn: "Atlas Shrugged" And Our Tanked Economy • Maria Bustillos
• Standard Gawker English • Matt Pearce
• Atlus' Catherine And Gender Stereotypes • Eric Caoili
• The Internet Intellectual • Evgeny Morozov
• What's Really Pornographic? The Point of Documenting Detroit • Willy Staley
• Consensual Hallucination • Sally Adee
• Conrad Schnitzler (1937–2011) • Geeta Dayal
• Depression, Burn Out and Writing Code • Lance Cameron Kidwell
• The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science • Chris Mooney
• A Rough Guide to Disney World • John Jeremiah Sullivan
• Bad Education • Malcolm Harris
• How the Internet Gets Inside Us • Adam Gopnik
• The Hard Edge of Empire • Charlie Stross
• The Ten Stupidest Utopias! • Jeremy Adam Smith
• The Influence of Anxiety: The Modern Writer’s Neverending Race • Amber Sparks
• Confessions of a Black Gentrifier • Shani O. Hilton
• Permanent retro: How now is then • Michaelangelo Matos
• The myth of 'American exceptionalism' implodes • Richard Wolff
• Aftershocks: Welcome to Haiti's Reconstruction Hell • Mac McClelland
• Unlimited Creations: Filipino Mobile DJs of the Bay Area • Oliver Wang
• Pop In The Age of the Atomic Bomb • Jon Savage
• This Is Your Brain on Metaphors • Robert Sapolsky
• Chicago on the Yangtze • Christina Larson
• Hot for Creature: William Dranginis saw Bigfoot • Eric Wills
• Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading • Ursula K. Le Guin

Television

• Fringe
  I'm still on the fence about this season—my opinion's going to hinge on how the new alternate reality resolves with the previous realities, and I'm really hoping against a LOST-style "purgatory made of love" resolution. But Fringe's third season, much of which aired in 2011, stands with the best televised sci-fi ever for its delirious risk-taking and willingness to throw it all in for the small but loyal viewership that remains.
• Parks and Recreation
  Everything about this show is pitch-perfect: the Entertainment 720 subplot, Amy Poehler's impressive ability to humanize a character that Often risks broad caricature, the manic Rob Lowe and droll Adam Scott, the withering April Ludgate, and of course, Ron Fucking Swanson. Leaves me cackling like a child who just heard his first dirty joke.

• Downton Abbey
  A sumptuously-directed Upstairs Downstairs for this class-conscious age, in which the class sympathies have been inverted. Maggie Smith gets all the best lines as the Dowager Countess Lady Grantham, as it should be.
• The West Wing
  I wrote The West Wing off as centrist-Democrat wish fulfillment while it was on the air, which it is. But at its best, it harnesses Sorkin's better demons and puts that prodigiously-verbose dialogue into the mouths of actors like Martin Sheen and Allison Janney who can actually say that shit.
• Ken Burns: Prohibition
  Somehow Ken Burns was able to subdue his greatest flaws—plodding earnestness, self-seriousness, grandiosity—long enough to produce this entertaining three-part PBS documentary about one of the more puzzling episodes in the nation's history.

• The Hour
  It was a long year without any new Mad Men, but this engaging BBC knockoff helped fill in the gap.

Music

New Music I Enjoyed in 2011

• Civilian • Wye Oak
  Layered, nuanced, adult songwriting that belies Jenn Wasner's years, with a tight grasp of dynamics that brings to mind early PJ Harvey.
• Wild Flag • Wild Flag
  Carrie Brownstein takes a break from roles as a NPR commentator and performer in the hacky side-project of an SNL player to remind us why she's one of the greatest rock gods of my generation.
• Smother • Wild Beasts
  Grown-ass English men do the unprecedented: record an enveloping indie rock album about grown-ass male sexuality.
• House of Balloons • The Weeknd
  R&B act draws inspiration from contemporary rock music, as R&B acts have done for decades, bloggers and music critics mistake this for being a new phenomenon and freak out. Regardless, great pharmaceutically-addled sex jams for the Percocet set, with nods to Portishead and, less probably, Beach House.
• Within and Without • Washed Out

• The Rip Tide • Beirut
  Beirut's blog buzz era is long gone, but Zach Condon continues to prove himself as one of his generation's best songwriters, and matures sufficiently to release an album of relatively-upbeat songs.
• Dive • Tycho
  Gauzy ambient electro, like Boards of Canada minus the aphasia.
• Nine Types of Light • TV On The Radio
• Strange Mercy • St. Vincent
  Probably the most muso-nerd album I've ever enjoyed, Annie Clark tempers her Berklee College of Music provenance with real, and real great, songwriting chops.
• Raven in the Grave • The Raveonettes

• Let England Shake • PJ Harvey
  The most alive-sounding thing she's recorded in years?
• Life Coach • Phil Manley
  He of Trans Am and The Fucking Champs fully indulges his Krautrock tendencies.
• Mariachi El Bronx (II) • Mariachi El Bronx
• Hurry Up, We're Dreaming • M83
  It's bloated and unfocused, but there's a single great album buried in there. Would earn a spot on here for "Midnight City" alone.

• Player Piano • Memory Tapes
  Ignore the "chillwave" albatross: this is some of the most incandescent synth-pop in recent years.
• C'mon • Low
  As unlikely as it may be, late-period Low (The Great Destroyer and on) is far more interesting than early-period Low.
• King of Hearts • Lloyd
• Watch the Throne • Jay Z and Kanye West
  It's great. Or at least, 3/5 of it is. Jay Z is back, after a long vacation.

• The Big Roar • The Joy Formidable
  A fierce contemporary reformulation of shoegaze, Britpop, and noise-pop.
• 101 • Keren Ann
• The Hood Internet • The Hood Internet
  The closest thing we're likely to get to an "album" by the Chicago mashup demigods, a collection of remixes and original "covers" they've recorded.
• Sound Kapital • Handsome Furs
• Ceremonials • Florence and The Machine

• Gravity the Seducer • Ladytron
  Ladytron's chilliest, most teutonic, and potent album to date.
• Looping State Of Mind • The Field
• I Am Very Far • Okkervil River
  The rare band that starts out mediocre and somehow ends up great mid-career.
• Hiding From Our Time EP • Computer Magic
• Metals • Feist
• Take Care • Drake

• Last Summer • Eleanor Friedberger
  None of the Fiery Furnaces' many annoying traits—the forced, studied experimentalism, the ersatz slam poetry-by-way-of-riot grrrl lyrical detours—are in evidence on Friedberger's solo debut, which is instead a tight collection of economical indie-pop in the traditional style.
• Zonoscope • Cut Copy
• Rapproacher • Class Actress
  Sex, drugs, privilege, numerous Madonna nods, more sex. Your mileage may vary.
• Salt for Salt • Brown Bird
• Halo • Blackbird Blackbird

Older Music I Enjoyed That Was New To Me in 2011

• La Roux • La Roux
  Soaring vocals, seductive production, taut and emotionally resonant songwriting—case study in what great dance-pop can be.
• Trunk Muzik 0-60 • Yelawolf
  2010: The year a second great white MC emerged.
• Flockaveli • Waka Flocka Flame
• Epic • Sharon Van Etten
  I don't usually enjoy singer/songwriter music, except when the singer and the songwriting are this excellent.
• The Knot • Wye Oak
• We Are Young Money • Young Money
• Hands • Little Boots

• InnerSpeaker • Tame Impala
  Psych-rock that doesn't forget psychedelic's long relationship with pop.
• Still Night, Still Light • Au Revoir Simone
• Love 2 • Air
• HaHa Sound • Broadcast
• Voodoo • D'Angelo
• Past is Prologue • Tycho
• Entire Belle and Sebastian catalog
  Never too late?
• Always, Sometimes, Seldom, Never • Tears Run Rings
• Station • Russian Circles

Old Music I Enjoyed Years Ago That I Rediscovered in 2011

• Zooropa • U2
  Rule of thumb: the more Brian Eno fingerprints (and Johnny Cash!) on a U2 album the better.
• Soul Food • Goodie Mob
• Ruthless by Law • RBL Posse
  Not a single subpar song on here.

• In The Wee Small Hours • Frank Sinatra
  The Chairman's most elegant and subtle set.
• Entire pre-Reveal R.E.M. catalog (particularly: Automatic for the People, Out of Time, Murmur, Document)
  I listened to enough R.E.M. in high school and college to last a lifetime, but the band's long-overdue breakup this year had me digging them out of the dusty corners of my 1 TB hard drive. Despite playing all these albums to death from 1992 through (roughly) 1998, they make for great late-night road trip music, and the sophistication and maturity of the songwriting allows the albums to hold up better than the music of most of their contemporaries, while revealing new layers for adult listeners.
• Too Far To Care • Old 97's
  See Ruthless by Law.
• Kid A • Radiohead

• Outer Perimeter • Presage
  Schizophrenic instrumental hip-hop with a healthy dose of pre-Millennial paranoia via Coast to Coast AM.
• Dots and Loops • Stereolab
• Trans-Europe Express • Kraftwerk
  I've long "liked" Kraftwerk, but only this year really came to appreciate the glacial chill and the metronomic rhythms that make their music so iconic.
• The Hot Rock • Sleater-Kinney
• Music Has The Right to Children • Boards of Canada

• No Need For Alarm • Del tha Funkee Homosapien
  The möbius strip flow and dusted production on this album could sustain an entire career. Unfortunately, they did.
• Aquemini • Outkast
  They never again reached this peak, but god, what a peak.
• Musik von Harmonia • Harmonia
• Queens of the Stone Age • Queens of the Stone Age
  Nowhere else is the influence of Kraftwerk and Krautrock on Josh Homme's songwriting as apparent.
• Radio Ethiopia • Patti Smith
  Sounds like a collection of arcane incantations to a faded era of decadence.
• Moon Pix • Cat Power

Other assorted media I enjoyed in 2011

• Bombay Beach
  A transfixing experimental documentary film by Alma Har’el about the denizens of Bombay Beach, near the Salton Sea, the epically-failed attempt from the ’20s through the ’50s to establish a resort in the middle of the desert.

• Sin and Punishment: Star Successor (Wii)
  At this point, I have little patience for a video game that demands close attention and revels in complexity. If I'm going to think, I'd rather read a book or catch up on my long Instapaper queue. Sin and Punishment: Star Successor is precisely the type of game I'm looking for, and one rarely made these days: a twitchy shooter that envelops the player in its inventive world.

• This Has To Be Funny • Marc Maron
  I was a bit dubious about Maron's first comedy album in years: as loyal a listener to WTF with Marc Maron as I am, Maron's neuroses, mom (and dad) issues, and fear of commitment are often the least engaging elements. But Maron's a pro, and that's evident in this tight, wickedly hilarious, emotionally excoriating set.

Now that Yifan Lu has jailbroken the Kindle Touch, it should be interesting to see what applications hackers come up with for the devices other than reading and giving money to Amazon, both things they do very well.

Daria is starting in on Downton Abbey season two. She reports that Maggie Smith (Lady Grantham AKA the Dowager Motherfucking Countess, if you're nasty,) is as wonderful as ever. Here are some of Lady Grantham's greatest burns, a few via Vulture.

"Why does every day involve a fight with an American?"

"What is a weekend?"

Lady Grantham: "You are quite wonderful the way you see room for improvement wherever you look. I never knew such reforming zeal."
Mrs. Crawley: "I take that as a compliment."
Lady Grantham: "I must've said it wrong."

Doctor: "Mrs. Crawley tells me she has recommended nitrate of silver and tincture of steel."
Lady Grantham: "Why, is she making a suit of armor?"

Lord Grantham: “We better go in soon or it isn’t fair to Mrs. Padmore.”
Lady Grantham: “Oh, is her cooking so precisely timed? You couldn’t tell.”

"Edith, you are a Lady, not Toad of Toad Hall!"

Mrs Crawley: “What should we call each other?”
Lady Grantham: “Well, we could always start with Mrs Crawley and Lady Grantham.”

Lady Grantham: “So, that’s Mary’s replacement. Well, I suppose looks aren’t everything.”
Cora: “I think she seems rather sweet. I’m afraid meeting us all together must be very intimidating.”
Lady Grantham: “I do hope so.”

"Last night! He looked so well. Of course it would happen to a foreigner. No Englishman would dream of dying in someone else's house."

Cora: "I hope I don't hear sounds of a disagreement."
Lady Grantham: "Is that what they call discussion in New York?"

"I couldn't have electricity in the house, I wouldn't sleep a wink. All those vapors floating about."

I'm watching Bombay Beach, an experimental doc by Alma Har'el about the denizens of Bombay Beach, near the Salton Sea, the epically-failed attempt from the '20s through the '50s to establish a resort in the middle of the desert. The area now ranks among the most impoverished areas in Southern California.

It seems there is something uniquely Southern California about a site like the Salton Sea. Land speculation, promises to transform a desert into a verdant playground for the rich, wild ambitions of hucksters and the wealthy that are destined to fail, leaving the impoverished denizens to deal with the wreckage...it's like a pitch-black, tragic parody of the entire region's economic and housing development cycle circa 1930-2008 and the...shall we say "complicated"...relationship those hucksters have with the region's ecology, not to mention empirical facts. I'm sure others have made this observation, the parallels are so obvious.

Bombay Beach doesn't take this tack, though. It's a hybrid documentary/tone poem/collection of vignettes full of powerful material—languorous shots of this ecological disaster site people call home, unflinching video essays of the lives of the small handful of residents who are bound together by little more than their proximity, as well as some really lovely choreographed amateur dance vignettes starring the members of the community. Despite all this, the film mostly avoids succumbing to cheap disaster porn tropes. I rented it on iTunes, and within 30 minutes I went ahead and bought it as well. (Added bonus: the soundtrack is by Beirut.) It's available to rent or buy on all the big digital platforms, it seems. Highly recommended.