Welcome to "Meet the Mayor," a segment in which we interview local Foursquare Mayors in their natural habitats.

Eric Andersen

Why are you so competitive?
I enjoy Foursquare. It’s a way of sharing my daily life with people, and they’re sharing with me. I mostly only connect with people I know on Foursquare, so I’ve had lots of cases where I saw someone checked in nearby, texted them, and we hung out.

Remember back to the glory days of 2009? Sure, the economy was in deeper shit than the kid from Slumdog Millionaire and all that boring stuff. But at least the world made some kind of sense. We had a new president who promised to bring about change. We knew Kanye was never going to stop being a douchebag. We knew that Oompa-Loompas never left Wonka's chocolate factory.

A more recent work by Martha Rosler, whose '60s-era work goes on display at Tufts this week in "Seductive Subversion"

Boston Bikes Update | Nicole Freedman, director of the Boston Bikes Program, discusses city bike initiatives | Boston Public Library, Rabb Lecture Hall, Copley Square, Boston | January 27 @ 6:30 pm | 617.

The sentencing memorandum filed by Boston federal prosecutors last week, seeking between 33 and 41 months incarceration for convicted former Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner, is no ordinary document. (Today, Judge Douglas Woodlock imposed a sentence of 36 months.)

From the first line, the memorandum reads like the coked-up rant of a paranoid regime, infuriated that any of its subjects would dare speak against it.

It's not online yet, but the February edition of WIRED magazine -- a special issue devoted to the underworld -- has a long piece about Mohan Srivastava, a "geological statistician" who used some very simple math that exposed a major flaw in certain types of scratch tickets. The gist of it is that by reading what's on the outside of an unscratched card, he can tell the winners from the losers.

There are far too few advocates in the world for teenagers navigating the difficulties of dealing with shit IRL, and even fewer who give a shit about how teens actually relate in digital spaces. As for researchers who manage to make sense about the way real life and digital life interact -- well, there's pretty much only one must-read digital ethnographer, and that's Boston's DANAH BOYD

With the publication of his 2004 book "We the Media," Dan Gillmor established himself as one of the most important thinkers in digital journalism. Because of that book, Gillmor, a former technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, is often described as the leading advocate for citizen journalism, though he would be the first to point out it's more complicated than that.

Utah & Ether's street art book Probation Vacation

"Art of the Comic Book: A Crash Course" | With Adam Tibbetts | Parker Hill Branch Library, 1497 Tremont St, Roxbury | January 20 @ 4 pm | 617.427.3820 or bpl.org

Ugly Duckling Presse Translation Reading | With notable translators Barbara Siegel Carlson, Stephanie Sandler, and Matvei Yankelevich | Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St, Brookline | January 20 @ 7 pm | 617.

Welcome to "Meet the Mayor," a segment in which we interview local Foursquare Mayors in their natural habitats.

Drink
Graham Wright

EXPLAIN WHAT YOU ORDERED!
I asked for a hot toddy. Here, they don’t have a cocktail list. They kind of improv things. So I didn’t ask for anything specific, just the style.

You may recall Travis Corcoran, erstwhile blogger and founder of the online comics store heavyink.com, the guy who saw fit to post some advice to would-be assassins immediately after the Giffords shooting. Under the title "1 down, 534 to go" Corcoran wrote (on his now-defunct blog):

It is absolutely, absolutely unacceptable to shoot “indiscriminately”.

Welcome to "Meet the Mayor," a segment in which we interview local Foursquare Mayors in their natural habitats.

Great Scott
Joshua Smith

I understand you promote concerts here?
Yeah, Great Scott's kind of my favorite place to book shows. It's the place bands play their first show, then maybe move up to bigger venues and blow up.

Ari Up of the Slits at Coney Island in 2000

"Lowell Lecture Series: Boston's Best" | With conductor Keith Lockhart | Boston Public Library, Rabb Lecture Hall, Copley Square, Boston | January 13 @ 6 pm | 617.536.5400 or bpl.org

Meetup Game Nite 8 | Socialize and play Apples to Apples, Settlers of Catan, Trivial Pursuit, and other games | Prudential Center Food Court, 111 Huntington Ave, Boston | January 14: 6:30-9:30 pm | mgn.

Whenever something really appalling happens -- the kind of thing that ought to shock us all out of our petty factions and unite us in horror and grief -- somebody always has to step up to show us how cool they are by being an asshole about it.

This week, that asshole is Travis Corcoran, a/k/a tjic, founder of the Arlington-based heavyink.

Updated 3:20 pm
What we're reading today. [Got links we should see? Tweet them @bostonphoenix or add in the comments.]

Accomplice theory ruled out: "second" man was innocent cab driver. [NYTimes Caucus Blog]

According to screenshots of his MySpace Page, alleged assassinator Jared Lee Loughner appears to have been a fan of prog-hardcore band Fear Before the March of Flames