“Officials Say The Darnedest Things” blogs quotes from politicians with just enough context to make you roll your eyes.

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The Atlantic Wire counts four reasons why Obama is probably hand-wringing over his reelection chances.

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Horacio Castellanos Moya on what it’s like to be a writer in exile.

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“The discussion page for the article on ‘Toilet Paper Orientation’ is 2x longer than that for the Iraq War.” That nugget comes from a wastefully informative infographic that presents everything you never needed to know about the different ways to hang your toilet paper. Let us ask, Over or under?

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Bookforum ponders what the Bestseller List would look like if authors could only make the list once in their careers.

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GOOD magazine examines The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle. Was yours worse than “Fink Ployd” or “principalrichardbelding”?

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Jorge may have earned a PhD in the United States, but he’s still an illegal immigrant with a bleak job outlook.

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It’s Poop Week at the birding and conservation blog 10,000 Birds. Boy, is it ever. 

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What are you doing this summer? Please come to Washington and help stop a massive oil pipeline, say Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry and other green leaders.

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Fukushima who? Nuclear power supporters get back to business as usual.

You may have noticed that our website has a new look. Last week we launched a redesign of utne.com, with the hope of giving you a better experience with the site. You probably have better things to do than read about a website redesign process, so I’ll save all the behind-the-scenes details. I would, however, like to highlight a number of things that are new, and hopefully helpful to you.

First and foremost, we’ve stripped the site down to the essentials, letting you get to where you want to be faster. There is less clutter; we’ve taken out all the extraneous parts and let each page breathe a bit more.

Next, you’ll notice the new left-hand navigation, highlighting the categories we cover, as well as our two editor blogs, Wild Green and The Sweet Pursuit. The top navigation now serves to allow you to separate content into blogs and articles from the current issue (archive content is available through this current issue page—the “Magazine” tab at top), while the new left-hand navigation gives you all the content—both blogs and magazine—in each category.

Also on the left you’ll notice “Alt Wire.” Alt Wire is a social-curated real-time magazine based on a software platform provided by Sociative, Inc. Described as “The Best of Utne Reader’s Alternative Sources (and the sources they follow),” Utne Alt Wire creates an organic online magazine that continuously changes, bringing to the fore content from the web that is the most popular and most discussed among influencers we chose, as well as the people who influence them. Seeing is believing with Utne Alt Wire, and we invite you to dive right in, explore, and undoubtedly discover and uncover stories you would have otherwise missed.

So, there you have it: A cleaner, more user-friendly, and more navigable website that contains all the great content you’ve come to expect from Utne Reader—both from the print magazine and the blogs—as well as news from the real-time web via Utne Alt Wire. We approached this redesign attempting to look at it from the user’s perspective and ultimately the user experience was the reason behind it. Hopefully we succeeded in making it an easier and more relaxed website for you. We looked to the design of a number of our favorite websites for guidance in the process. The clean category pages of High Country News and Guernica; the innovative handling of categories by GOOD and feedly that broke our long discussion about how best to present all the topics we cover; the splashes of  color on otherwise clean, black-and-white pages at Mother Jones; the large image on the home pages of all of those sites, allowing the extraordinary art that appears in our print version to shine on the website. So, thanks to all those who worked on these sites and the many others that influenced our decisions here.

This new utne.com is not the final version you’ll see. Expect some tweaks and improvements. (You learn a lot during the process of redesigning.) With that in mind, we’d love to hear what you think of the new site versus the old—what did we do right, what did we do wrong, what’s missing, what needs improvement, what do you miss? Again, the redesign was done with the intention of making the overall experience better for you. Hearing from you will let us know if we accomplished what we set out to do and allow us to make it even better in the future. So, leave a comment below or let us know on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr what you think.

Thanks for reading!

Image by bjornmeansbear, licensed under Creative Commons.  

Animators bring poetry to life at the Billy Collins Action Poetry project.

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Bikes are the hot prop in retail displays. 

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Say what you want about Sarah Palin’s vocabulary, but your assumptions about her use of language are about to be refudiated: Mama Grizzly’s recently released e-mail correspondence proves she’s a remarkably lucid prose writer.

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Summer is here, and so are daring girls on longboards.

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Peter Jackson shares the first images from his Lord of the Rings prequels, the two-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit.

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How’s that CSA box coming along? Good gives us 10 ways to reduce food waste.

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Have you ever wondered what happened to the baby on the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind album or the twins on Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dreams? Wonder no more.

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It’s gettin’ real in the Whole Foods parking lot. 

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The third “Everything is a Remix” video has been released, and this time it tackles creativity and technological innovation.

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A notable headline from Miller-McCune: “’Gaydar’ accuracy varies with women’s fertility cycle.”

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The Byliner is a new online aggregator for long-form writing.

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The planet’s health and human health are inextricably linked, says a pioneering doctor.

Image: Screenshot from Billy Collins Action Poetry. 

The Internet is boundless, yet we’re trying our best to fill it with words. Successful news, gossip, opinion, culture, and music websites have one thing in common: traffic. Google Analytics is the gold standard and online publishers have caught on. Blog publishing deadlines are shorter and more frequent. (We at Utne Reader are experts at taking our time.) The “stories” are shoddily fact-checked and often poorly edited. Content farms proliferate. But with all the thousands of words flung our way each day, it’s easy to forget that there’s a person behind every hastily-written, superficial article. And that person is probably getting paid peanuts.

Oliver Miller was one of those content mercenaries, that is, until he got fired by AOL Television. He recounted his grueling work experience in the content mill and his disenchantment with a contemporary writer’s life in a recent essay for The Faster Times. Miller’s tell-all is reminiscent—just as unbelievable, just as maddening—of the 2008 award-winning New York Magazinefront-lines account of Gawker Media and its hard-driving mogul Nick Denton by Vanessa Grigordiadis.

Miller worked late into the night, often assigned to write articles about popular television shows like “The Simpsons” and “Law & Order” in 30 minutes or less. The pressure to churn out stories made him push the boundaries of ethical reporting (he and his fellow employees were “actually instructed to lie by our bosses”) and suffer in health (“I had panic attacks; we all did. My fellow writers would fall asleep, and then wake up in cold sweats . . . One night, I awoke out of a dead sleep, and jumped to my computer, and instantly began typing up an article about David Letterman. I kept going for ten minutes, until I realized I had dreamed it all”).

The problem is systemic; a writer’s boycott of AOL or Huffington Post or Gawker, despairs Miller, won’t solve the larger issue at all:

I disliked my job, but I dreaded being fired from it, and with good reason; it’s been five months since my firing now, and I’ve run through my savings, and I still haven’t found another full-time writing gig.

And, as much as I need the money, maybe I shouldn’t. AOL is among the most egregious offenders—but then, this isn’t just an article about AOL. This is an article about a way of life. “The AOL Way” doesn’t simply stand as a pattern for a major corporation; it’s the pattern of the Internet as a whole. The Internet has created more readers than ever before in the history of the world. And yet, perversely, the actual writer is more undervalued than ever before. Every news site that hopes to survive, The Faster Times included, thinks about whether their titles will show up in search engines. In the age of Internet news, Google “keywords” matter . . .Regular old words, not so much.

Source: The Faster Times

Leaked: Target Corporation’s anti-union employee training video, “Think Before You Sign.”

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Media Matters has compiled a long history of Fox News’ race-baiting and racially charged commentary.

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Eight delightful essays about positively awful travel experiences.

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A collaborative, online sketch with 1 million illustrators (you could be one of them).

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Your inner narcissist may wonder, “Does anything matter?” Well, some things do, and ethicist Peter Singer explains why.

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The jury has made its decision, reports ArtInfo, pole-dancing is not art.

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Fathers-to-be, kick back and pour a shot. Heck, it’s your “dadelor party.”

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Bucking the trends to downsize (or close altogether), the independent L.A. used bookseller the Last Bookstore just upgraded to a 10,000-square-foot downtown retail space. Recognize the bookshelves? They scavenged them from a defunct Borders megastore.

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Just when you thought companies had exhausted all advertising platforms, Gilette carves an ad on a strand of hair.

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Wired goes deeper into the comparison of basketball to jazz, explaining the mental labor that goes into inventing “beauty in real time.”

A new Tumblr blog compiles headlines that read like they were lifted from the front page of the satiric newspaper The Onion—except they weren’t.

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Pressure drop: A 9-year-old came up with an ingenious idea for everyday water conservation.

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Is “I would have loved to piss on your shoes” the best exit-interview line ever? Slate collects the best kiss-off notes from fired or resigned journalists.

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Did you walk through Central Park in 2005 and experience artist Christo’s epic installation The Gates? See what he’s up to now at the Arkansas River . . .

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The Art Newspaper asks, “Do street art gallery shows encourage graffiti?”

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A travel writer discovers that the only way to fit in in Berlin is to get naked.

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Hackers have developed a taste for a caffeine-packed tea drink—and of course they’re sharing it via open source.

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Raise the gas tax, many greens have been saying for years. Now even General Motors’ CEO agrees.

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The unhealthy ties between doctors and Big Pharma in the form of an infographic.

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From Reason: “Three arrested for attempting to feed the homeless in Orlando; face up to 60 days in jail.”

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Sarcasm boosts creativity? Yeah, right.

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Listen to 62 CDs-worth of electroacoustic music for free.

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A slow-motion landslide is dismantling a small town in New York square-foot by square-foot.

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Social critic and provocateur Barbara Ehrenreich on our complicated relationship with animals, enigmatically titled, “Man is Not Cat Food”.

The word seminal is thrown around a lot these days. A seminal band, a seminal book, a seminal figure, a seminal work—it’s easy to attach this adjective to a noun, particularly in arts writing, to give the subject a sense of groundbreaking importance, even if none actually exists. But to me, seminal conjures mostly one thing: semen.

That’s the root of the word, you know. Seminal is the adjectival form of semen. Maybe, as a word person, I simply know too much about the roots and origins of language, but every time I see the overused term, I picture an anatomical illustration from my junior-high human sexuality class that also includes terms like vas deferens and loop of Henle. To me, it’s not poetic or descriptive or eloquent, just clinical.

Can we take a break from the ejaculatory locutions, please?

To be sure, the dictionary does back up those who intend the word to mean “creative” or “original”—this is the second definition, after all, following “of, relating to, or consisting of seed and semen” in Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. But even this doesn’t quite capture what most writers seem to mean, which is more like “pioneering,” “groundbreaking,” or “influential.” Why not just use one of those less, um, loaded terms?

In any case, many writers who employ the word seem not to consider its implications. Certainly, the Wikipedia author who wrote about feminist artist Judy Chicago did not. Chicago, the bio states, “co-founded the Feminist Studio Workshop, located inside the Los Angeles Women’s Building, a seminal feminist art teaching and exhibition space.”

A seminal feminist space! Who woulda thunk it? I suppose the same people who have called Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique a “seminal feminist text,” or former L7 singer Donita Sparks, whose own website refers to the all-female group as “a seminal rock band.”

Even to a penis bearer like me, it seems awfully retrograde to suggest that the font of life springs entirely from the loins of human males. After all, it does take more than semen to make a baby—this I learned in that same junior-high class.

Rock critics and their corollaries in music publicity are some of the worst serial offenders. I can’t get through my e-mail day, which includes a healthy blast of music PR, without a reference to some “seminal” band I’ve never heard of. The Facebook page “Girl Rock Critics for the Eradication of the Word ‘Seminal’ ” attests to a small but already fizzled backlash: Its last posted comment was in 2008.

Well, I’m willing to take up the futile cause. After all, I still haven’t made my peace with anal as a synonym for fussy or detail-oriented. Which I suppose makes me kind of—oh, all right—anal. 

Image by Apokolokyntosis , licensed under Creative Commons .  

Save for the country’s top executives, almost everyone working in American business is doing more with less. So when serious journalists—an inherently cynical lot in the first place—grumble publicly about budget cuts, story quotas, and the pressure to blog or tweet, it makes sense that people outside of the industry aren’t moved to sympathy. Not only that, but we are bombarded with so much information online, in print, and over the airwaves, that it sometimes feels as though the world would keep spinning if, in a worst-case scenario, a few reporters had to find another way to make a living.

The problem is, more and more journalists and college graduates are forgoing the trenches to pursue a different career path. Instead of reporting the news, they’re working to help manipulate it as public relations specialists. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in fact, in 1980 there were .45 PR people and .36 journalists per every 100,000 workers. As of 2008, that number had shifted radically. There are now .90 PR people per 100,000 workers and just .25 journalists. As Columbia Journalism Review reports in its May-June 2011 issue, that’s a ratio of more than three-to-one, better equipped and better financed to influence what the public sees and hears.

“I don’t know anyone who can look at that calculus and see a very good outcome,” communications professor Robert McChesney, who recently co-authored The Death and Life of America Journalism, tells the bimonthly magazine. “What we are seeing now is the demise of journalism at the same time we have an increasing level of public relations and propaganda. . . . We are entering a zone that has never been seen before in the country.”

“True Enough: The Second Age of PR,” written by former New York Time reporter John Sullivan and copublished with ProPublica, explores the ways that corporations, the government, and other well-funded entities are able to influence news coverage, especially as fewer journalists have less time to report deeply on fast-moving stories. For instance, Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, tells Sullivan that in order to compete with their peers, editors and publishers put an even higher premium “on time, on speed, on getting the first bit of information up quickly. Often that first bit of information is coming from government agencies or public relations.” What’s more disconcerting is that even when reporters eventually do go back and flesh out a story, it’s the initial headline that’s quickest to spread and leave the most lasting impression.

Public relations agencies have also become adept at getting news outlets to treat corporate representatives and other sources with a clear agenda to act as sources. For precedent, just consider the number of former military personnel, many of them working for think tanks or weapons-making companies, who are tapped to opine about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Not only are they biased, but viewers perceived them to be more credible, since they are now independent of the government and media.

So, whether or not you feel sorry for those ink-stained wretches at your local paper, consider this: “Journalism,” CJR opines, “the counterweight to corporate and government PR, is shrinking.” 

Source: Columbia Journalism Review 

Image byfreddthompson, licensed under Creative Commons 

Our current issue has a number of stories on narcissism. Well, in that spirit comes the Museum of Me, “a new Facebook app from Intel that turns your life into a virtual gallery exhibition.” Look at me! Look at me!

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What makes a new product a successful sell for the Lady Gaga Generation? Remember rule number one: “Everyone is Awesome.”

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A petition to end the war on drugs in the next 24 hours.

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Biblical prophecy and Michelle Bachmann.  Mother Jones dissects the politician’s relationship with Olive Tree Ministries, an evangelical Christian organization with an eye on the end times.

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In case you hadn’t heard, populist playwright David Mamet is now a born again conservative. Kurt Loder chronicles the conversion in the current issue of Reason.

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Do the Kennedys stop media portrayals of their family that they find objectionable? That’s the claim from Richard Bradley in Boston Magazine.

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Yet another logical article about taxing the rich instead of cutting necessary programs. This one from Mark Engler at YES! Magazine.

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How some species stick around despite drastic changes to their environment.

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The lineup for TEDGlobal 2011, which starts in Edinburgh on July 11, is set. Among the over 75 artists, inventors, theorists, and activists slated to appear live and via international webcast are anti-extremism activist Maajid Nawaz, rational optimist Matt Ridley, and Debunker Ben Goldacre.

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I scream, you scream, we all scream for amphibious ice cream.

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A trip around the solar system, in pictures.

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Randa Jarrar, who has written previously for Utne Reader, guest-edited the fiction section for Guernica Magazine this month.

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Fans of HBO’s Treme—which chronicles life in New Orleans post-Katrina and if jam packed with native musicians and superstar cameos playing bounce, jazz, funk, and bluegrass—should check out this weekly water-cooler conversation, which tells you who is playing what.

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If you’re looking for some summer reading, you’re in luck (or not): Glenn Beck is launching his own publishing imprint with Simon & Schuster called Mercury Ink. The imprint will feature fiction and nonfiction books that reflect Beck’s interests.

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The Atlantic is doing just fine without blogger Andrew Sullivan, thank you. When the blogger extraordinaire left for The Daily Beastearlier this year, there was concern that the mag’s revitalizing online growth would take a hit. Instead, the site hit 10 million uniques in May.

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What happens when a violent criminal enrolls in a Ph.D. program for “homicide studies”? He becomes an academically-trained serial killer.

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Did you ever wish you had a twin? Mental Floss presents some of the charms and quirks of unusually close twins.

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Molly Jong-Fast—whose mother, Erica Jong, is famous for writing about women and sexual liberation—wrote an essay for Salon about living a (relatively) prude life.