Cultural Capital: media

My Art of Listening column this week is on the Simon Cowell-produced single for Haiti, "Everybody Hurts". The charity single, especially in Britain, is one of those things that we supposedly love to hate, an attitude summed up by the Guardian's Esther Addley in a piece about the enjoyable awfulness of such things: "You can't knock the sentiment -- so I won't even try."

But this time, there does ... read more

Congratulations to the NS contributor William Wiles for unearthing a fascinating copy of the Observer magazine from 1989. It imagines what the London of 2010 might look like: trams (check), the "Thatcher Museum of Commerce" at Bankside (almost -- except we call it Tate Modern) and "crystalline telecommunications spires" (er, not quite).

Read all about it on Will's own blog.

If you're still in a reflective mood after that, make ... read more

We're delighted, of course, that Stephen Morris's scoop about easyJet withdrawing the latest issue of their in-flight magazine after pressure from the New Statesman should have been picked up by so many news outlets. But we're perplexed that two of the more venerable organs to have run with the story should apparently only just have happened upon it, almost a week after Stephen first broke it on newstatesman.com, ... read more

At this year's American Music Awards (22 November), Adam Lambert, the openly gay American Idol star, shared an on-stage kiss with a male keyboardist. According to the BBC News website the incident -- if you can call it that -- received more than 1,500 complaints, and the show was roundly dismissed as "vulgar" by the self-appointed US media watchdog Parents Television Council (PTC).

But Lambert was right when, interviewed ... read more