Welcome to a new weekly feature on Is Greater Than, a roundup of interesting items I’ve come across over the past few days:

“The Tea Party, in this sense, is not a new development so much as it is part of an ongoing migration of the perpetually petulant, a political phenomenon grounded in a demographic one: the creation of a class of baby-boom retirees who have been deprived of meaningful work but given personal computers as Christmas presents.” – Tom Junod on the Tea Party as Sore Winners

Grain Edit features typographically-minded poster artist Jon Contino

“Myself, I’m inclined to think that if they prove to be right, what will really be proven will be something very sad; and not about Singapore, but about our species. They will have proven it possible to flourish through the active repression of free expression. They will have proven that information does not necessarily want to be free.” – A fascinating William Gibson piece from ’94 about Singapore’s repressive IT state

“We know the consequences of this instinctively; we feel them. We know that having two thousand Facebook friends is not what it looks like. We know that we are using the software to behave in a certain, superficial way toward others. We know what we are doing “in” the software. But do we know, are we alert to, what the software is doing to us? Is it possible that what is communicated between people online “eventually becomes their truth”? What Lanier, a software expert, reveals to me, a software idiot, is what must be obvious (to software experts): software is not neutral. Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible.” – Zadie Smith considers Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook and The Social Network. A sophisticated take on how software is not agnostic from an avowed tech neophyte, that echoes some of Brian Eno’s thoughts on the built-in biases of software.

OK Cupid’s stats-obsessed OK Trends blog, an incredibly roundabout form of marketing.

“Yes, this election might be fearful enough to betray the polls and no one in America could plan the new direction until the last vote as counted by the last heeler in the last ambivalent ward, no one indeed could know until then what had happened the night before, what had happened at three o’clock in the morning on that long dark night of America’s search for a security cheaper than her soul.” – Norman Mailer considers the cult of Kennedy in 1960

“If you tell an average person you love freestyle music, you’ll likely have them scratching their heads, or possibly asking you about the art of rapping off the cuff. But to a large amount of Latinos and other club-going people who grew up in New York City and Southern Florida during the mid to late 1980’s, freestyle music was an unavoidable part of pop culture.” – A history of freestyle, the nearly-forgotten dance phenomenon of the ’80s

A Q&A with Bloom County creator Berkeley Breathed, the man most responsible for my general sensibility

The AV Club recaps the finest hour of TV the X-Files ever produced