For the listeners on KCNW in Canada who just heard Deirdre and me talk about retrosexuals and fretrosexuals, here are the links to our stories. (And for our local readers, we'll post the link to the audio stream just as soon as we can!)

Here's Deirdre's piece on retrosexuals.

And here's mine on fretrosexuals.

Thanks for listening!

Wired has the story of a man we first heard tell of from Portland anarchist Paul McCarrier after the G-20 protests: a man who used Twitter to communicate and help protestors rally against an organization he believes is a threat to human rights.

No, this isn't those Twitter-fueled Iran protests, which the State Department famously asked Twitter to delay site maintenance to support.

Jonathan Lethem seems the ultimate New Yorker: Born and raised in Brooklyn, the 45-year-old writer first earned literary cachet with his 1999 crime fiction novel, Motherless Brooklyn. His 2003 The Fortress of Solitude is a semi-autobiographic work, also set in Brooklyn. Now, Lethem's touring to promote his newest New York novel, Chronic City, in which narrator Chase Insteadman (a former child actor) befriends an eccentric, marijuana-pumped culture writer named Perkus Tooth.

UPDATE!: Download a podcast of the entire forum, "The Wire at Harvard," featuring Kima, Bubbles, and Omar

William Julius Wilson, the legendary Harvard sociologist and a giant in the field of African American studies, has a thing for The Wire. "Superfan" doesn't quite capture it. Last year, on the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King's death, Wilson welcomed The Wire creator David Simon to Harvard for a public forum bringing together cops, community activists, and academics to discuss the show's impact.

Showalter (left) in Wet Hot American Summer (2001).

"I'm OUTTA heeeerrrrrrre" - Doug

"I want you inside me!" - Gerald "Coop" Cooperberg

The above two quotes represent one of two likely possibilities for people's first impressions of MICHAEL SHOWALTER, who comes to the Wilbur Theatre this Friday along with his friend and frequent collaborator, Michael Ian Black.

Yesterday, Obama signed a bill making it a federal crime to assault a person based on their sexual orientation, or gender identity. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act expands upon already present hate-crime laws that already protected people targeted due to their race, ethnicity, religion, or national origin.

Scientists in Ireland have found eating Indian food can help prevent esophageal cancer, pretty much anyway. Cancer cells studied in a laboratory started to die within 24 hours of exposure to curcumin, a chemical in the tumeric spice--widely used in curry dishes to give it that bright yellow color, revealed the Cork Cancer Research Center in Ireland.

I’m not sure why my colleagues and I have been tirelessly hustling and sleeping as few hours as citywide candidates this election season, since the public seems to not give a damn. This past evening’s debate at Faneuil Hall was not even televised, yet the auditorium was literally half-empty. (Maybe the masses tuned in to the WTKK broadcast, though, to quote Boston’s greatest furniture commercial of all-time, “I doubt it.

Back in 2006, the The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices -- who advises the federal government on immunization policies, advised that the HPV vaccine Gardasil be given to all 11, 12-year-old girls. But now, the same committee is not pushing for the same vaccine to be given to boys. The reason is cost effectiveness, claims the commitee.

Photo by Boston Book Festival via Flickr

It was hard not to feel cheerleaderish during Saturday's inaugural BOSTON BOOK FESTIVAL, which crammed 90 authors into 40 or so hour-long programs in and around Copley Square, and drew lines-around-the-block crowds for . . . well, people talking about and reading from books.

^{Malcolm McDowell at Rock & Shock 2009}

Starting tomorrow, metal worshipers will be descending on the House of Blues for two nights of "mind-throttling chasm-fording riff salad" (as Daniel Brockman so elegantly put it in last week's show preview) with High on Fire, Mastodon, and hometown-pride-instilling acts Converge, legendary hardcore heavies from Salem, MA, and Dethklok (the essentially fictional but wholly brutal cartoon band fronted by Berklee/Comedy Studio alum and Metalocalypse creator Brendon Small).

As a grad student at Boston University’s College of Communication (COM) five years ago, I wrote an op-ed for a campus newsletter called The Muckraker about inconsistencies in alumni relations practices. In particular, I criticized their celebrating Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s BU degree while at the same time pretending that Howard Stern never went there.