NPR's much beloved Radiolab finds itself at the heart of a controversy about the treatment of its Hmong guests, who charge the show with racism.

Race may play a role, but the controversy also highlights the changing nature of media. While traditional...

One hundred and forty characters provide a powerful weapon in the hands of 17-year-old Chicago rapper Chief Keef. But then again, so does his music.

With social media emerging as the weapon of choice these days, the young gangsta rapper finds himself in the center of two...

Marketplace's Queena Kim makes the case that "Gangnam Style," the viral video made by K-pop star PSY (short for "Psycho"), is part of a broader conversation in Korea about its growing income inequity.

On the face of it, the video seems simple enough: a guy dressed in ostentatious...

I interviewed Ray Bradbury at his knick knack-filled home in 2010, where he spoke about his writing, among other random things, like dating Bo Derek.

At the time, I was co-producing a tech segment for Southern California Public Radio. And I'd recently seen a beautiful adaptation of Bradbury's...

In the interest of full disclosure, I've met Trent Arsenault, the now famous sperm donor, and he's a really nice guy. So maybe I have a dog in the race, but I think the media is misunderstanding what lower and middle class single women, lesbians, and infertile men go though...

October 7, 2011 marks the ten year anniversary of our involvement in Afghanistan, the longest war in U.S. History. So, one full decade, many lives and a few trillion dollars later, are we winning?

Yes. Kind of. Well, it depends on how you define victory....

I've poked fun at the cult of Steve Jobs over the years in multiple formats: print, radio and video. Nevertheless I did find myself tearing up for the tech profit/prophet when I heard he'd died.

I wasn't crying for the man himself, who I...

On August 13th we launched Decade911 on Southern California Public Radio show Off-Ramp.

Decade911 is a participatory web-umentary about the decade of global change since 9/11.

For the past few months we've been taking to the streets with our cameras to record everyday peoples' thoughts,...

Music composer David Wittman made a really funny MP3 poking fun at himself as a kale-eating Prius-driving Whole Foods shopper. "Take it easy man, I try to calm myself. I've been on edge ever since they took Kombucha off the shelf ... Now I'm ... looking at my...

Remember the good old days in 2010, when Steve Jobs proclaimed the iPad a "revolutionary" new device that was going to fundamentally change personal computing for good? The problem was that the iPad couldn't do anything your computer didn't already do and there were tons of things your computer could...

There's an ancient Chinese proverb that goes like this: "He who owns your data owns your soul." That's a rough translation, but you get the point.

The official data-grab begins -- who gets to own more of our souls, Google or Facebook?

Isn't it...

It's a funny time in media history when our performers are the ones doing the real reporting. (Jon Stewart has my vote in the 2012!)

Case in point: Compare the coverage of Foxconn in performer Mike Daisey's one-man show The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve...

With the announcement of the iPad 2, fellow CyberFreak Molly Peterson now has official bragging rights. On our pop + tech podcast panning the iPad when it first came out, Molly said, "Those first adopters... always get screwed by Apple."

Well, according to

This week on the pop+tech podcast CyberFrequencies, we hashed over the virtues (or lackthereof) of Facebook and the movie about its creation -- The Social Network. We had Dylan Wittkower on the show. He's the author of Facebook and Philosophy, and...

The L Word creator Ilene Chaiken is launching The Real L Word on June 20 for Showtime. I personally thought the fictional L Word was realistic enough -- I mean isn't every UPS girl who knocks on your door a scantily clad lesbian who...

My friends, it all started a year ago. Through a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, administered by AIR, CyberFrequencies, our sci-tech podcast that airs on KPCC, was born.

As our way of saying thanks to Uncle Sam for...

These harrowing pictures of birds covered in oil are so totally depressing it's hard to imagine this spill is going to be our nation's wake up call. But that was an idea posited on KCRW's Which Way...

Fast Food is so addictive that when poor little rats were stuffed with the crap for 40 days, and then deprived of it and put on a healthy diet they "refused to eat, starving themselves for two weeks." In fact, according to That's Fit, junk food is as...

Two days before the LA Marathon, I went down to Homeboy Industries to interview a guy named Alex Diaz who, at 17, was hit in a gang-related shooting and has been in a wheelchair ever since.

The doctors told Alex he wouldn't walk, but with the help...

This weekend JPL has opened their house to the public. Their casa es tu casa. It's like a science Disneyland -- complete with all the long lines and crappy food. But the good news is it's all free and the seemingly random guys hanging around the exhibits are...