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Although the cover of Vanity Fair portraying an elderly handicapped McCain with his pill-hoarding wife inside the Oval office never did make it to print, the magazine made this image available online as an open reaction to the now infamous cover of The New Yorker depicting Barack Obama and his wife in a negative light. The odd thing about this entire ordeal is that both Vanity Fair and The New Yorker are properties of CondeNast, essentially meaning that at the cost of satiric political commentary, we can all rest assured that Mr. Si Newhouse and family (who own Advance Publications which in turn runs the Conde Empire) have profited generously through magazine cover sales, while the rest of us sit here wondering what exactly is the point of this meaningless contrivance. →

During my visit to NYC last week, our EM contributor, Emily Baines, sent me a link to a limited edition Barbie doll from Mattel, the Purveyors of Amerikitsch and anatomically incorrect role models. Presumably to celebrate the 45th anniversary of Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds , the corporation is releasing a doll this Fall that is modeled after Tippi Hedren in a memorable scene: where the lovely blonde sylph runs for dear life, shielding her perfect face from a murder of crows. →

From Hip Hop’s inception in the South Bronx in the late ’70s, the experience of living as a marginalized class fit well with what Hip Hop had to offer in terms of its ability to express oneself. The concept of sampling and cutting time to create a holistic new experience was something no genre of music or culture for that matter could do. Sure Jazz was indeed a fusion of Creole tradition intermixed with the French immigrants in New Orleans, yet what Hip Hop offered was something so bold, so defiant →