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Macleans.ca

Canada’s magazine

American idol, American idolatry

The highlight of last night’s American Idol was a contestant’s performance of “Footprints in the Sand”, a song that hit big for Leona Lewis as a charity single in 2008. Many viewers were probably surprised to learn that Simon Cowell, a man famous for his no-nonsense, unsentimental persona, actually had a writing credit on this piece of sentimental nonsense.

What’s the saving throw against a chaotic-evil digithief?

Speaking on the first day of the World Newspaper Congress in Hyderabad, India, Rupert Murdoch’s US leader accused the press of being the “principal architect of its greatest difficulty today”. …”We are allowing our journalism—billions of dollars worth of it every year—to leak onto the internet. We are surrendering our hard-earned rights to the search engines and aggregators, and the out and out thieves of the digital age.” [link]