Why couldn’t a pop song also contain an enormous, barn-burning guitar solo? Why couldn’t a dance hit verge on Afropop? Why did a creamy ballad about human nature have to sound like humans were singing it? Pop has in no way exhausted all the questions he and Quincy posed.

Michael Died Today: Sasha Frere-Jones: Online Only: The New Yorker

This is where everyone I knew first saw the moonwalk, and if you weren’t there or didn’t watch it or maybe weren’t a kid at the time, you cannot imagine what a big deal it was. I was in middle school, and I think we all tried it. You can hear the crowd scream when he does it here — it’s not a scream of recognition, like it would be when he did it later. It’s a scream of shock.

NPR: Michael Jackson: The Moment That Made Him The King Of Pop

One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is “Where are you going?” and the answer should be something like “Southsoutheast, in the middle distance.”

Edge: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? By Lera Boroditsky, my new hero. I’ve long been fascinated by the question, but I had no idea there was a history of debate about this — I was plain shocked to learn that most people thought language does not affect the way we think. It just seems so obvious to me, and I love the research Lera Boroditsky has done to demonstrate the many ways it’s true. See also: NPR: Shakespeare Had Roses All Wrong.

It has been a journey with many twists and turns along the way, but Judaism is the language of my soul, and it’s what resonates with me

1st black female rabbi spent years searching - washingtonpost.com

“Though a white gentleman, [Brown] is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.” — Frederick Douglass.

Happy birthday, John Brown. (Thanks, Arthur.)

Tiana is the first Disney princess in more than a decade, and the first ever to be black. … Prince Naveen, for the record, is neither white nor black, but portrayed with olive skin, dark hair and, need we state the obvious, a strong chin. The actor who plays him, Bruno Campos, hails from Brazil.

Disney Introduces First Black Princess, Tiana, in ‘The Princess and the Frog’ - washingtonpost.com

Women started grabbing me and throwing my whole body backwards into the crowd. I was shocked. All I was trying to do was throw my panties.

Loiterer About Town: Tom Jones at the Warfield: Culture/Entertainment: SFAppeal

… there was no choice. I was totally broke. So I didn’t have time to sit around pondering or thinking all this through. It was just done on a basic pure survival level. I did what I had to do.

Van Morrison on ‘Astral Weeks’ — you’ve got to hear it from him.

…We were building a brave new world where the Chinese made things out of plastic for us, the Indians provided customer support when these Chinese-made things broke, and we paid for it all just by flipping houses, pretending that they were worth a lot of money whereas they are really just useless bits of ticky-tacky.

ClubOrlov: Social Collapse Best Practices. Caution: depressing.

I know you don’t want to see any pictures of George Bush any more but what about if it is pictures of him crying?

You mentioned our President Elect. What do you see in his chart?

He’s got Aquarius rising, and in this coming year, Jupiter and Neptune and Chiron (a comet that in astrology charts symbolizes a deep wound and efforts to heal that wound) are all going to be passing over and around his ascendant, which is, I think, a sign of tremendous vitality and the ability to lead in ways that instigate vitality. It’s tricky, because the presence of Neptune says that whatever work he does has to have a spiritual angle. It can’t just be practical. It can’t just be materialistic. It has to have some invocation of people’s spiritual nature, and as you probably know, although he doesn’t advertise it in the same way Bush does, Obama is a deeply religious person. And I think that’s among the most interesting challenges. How does he do that? How does he play to the people’s spiritual longings at the same time that he is re-inventing the economic system?

Astrologer Rob Brezsny in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Think of the well-meaning ecological designer at a green architecture firm, for instance. How can this person begin to think creatively outside the box, when he wakes each day to the digital pulse of an alarm clock, sits for eight hours a day in a cubicle, within a square building, staring into a squarish monitor? If there is music playing in the background of this scene, chances are it is in 4/4 time—yet another box. His body experiences nothing but the box, and in this box, it becomes very difficult for him to experience that flow of creativity and innovation which science itself has recognized to be the basis for evolution and change. We’ve known for decades that it isn’t hip to be square, now we must make sure that we design a way out of the box.

I really enjoyed NalaWalla’s “Reclaiming the Body: The Bodybased Arts as Center of the ‘New Village’” (PDF). Lots to think about here.

“Sniff sniff,” she chirps in a singsong voice. “I made a stinky!”

Baby Dolls Raise a Stink In More Ways Than One - washingtonpost.com