Founded 1983: Liberal Mindset; Conservative Morality

April 2, 2026

The Face on the Building: America’s Palazzo Braschi Moment

In 1934, the Fascist Party Federation draped the facade of Rome’s Palazzo Braschi with an enormous sculpted face of Benito Mussolini, surrounded by the word “SI” repeated in cascading rows. The building sat between Piazza Navona and the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, in the heart of a city that had been shaping political identity through architecture for two thousand years. That face functioned as an instruction. Citizens who walked beneath it understood, whether they could articulate it or not, that the state had claimed the visual field, and that to exist in public space was to exist under observation and under obligation, holding the urban semiotic.

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March 9, 2016

Autopsy of a Viral Tweet

On December 4, 2015, my Social Media world got tossed as I innocently, but rightly, Tweeted the astonishing fact that MSNBC had doxed someone — revealing identifying information about a living person — on live television during an impromptu terror tour of a suspect’s home. The person in question was Rafia Farook — mother of San Bernardino terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook. Rafia lived in the same townhouse as her son, his terrorist wife, Tashfeen Malik, and the couple’s six-month-old baby girl. Here’s an image of the Tweet I sent after my photographic capture of the MSNBC live feed:

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September 29, 2010

Shit My Dad Says: But Did Sam Halpern Say it or Not?

When people ask me the point of Twitter, I have often pointed to the Twitter stream created by Justin Halpern in which he posts things that his father has said, verbatim.

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February 4, 2010

Banning the Celebrity Baby Wave

Today, I propose the immediate ban on any celebrity using a “Baby Wave”
— the slow opening and closing of spread fingers closing into a fist with the palm facing you — that red carpet fame carpetbaggers like Paris Hilton and Penelope Cruz and many others routinely use instead of a proper, flat-handed, wave that pivots on the wrist from a visible elbow anchored to the side of the body. In the image below, we have the perfected example of a proper Baby Wave — from Heath Ledger’s daughter Matilda— and since the Baby Wave is from a celebrity baby, we’re fine its flexing and extension.