A Swedish couple has put together a vast repository of annotated Madonna pics in chronological order on their site, MadonnaShots. From baby shots in 1958, through school, first nudes, early career, and the image wanderings of the chameleon once stardom struck in the early ’80s, Madonna has never been camera-shy. …

For a guy few outside of the British Navy know much about, Samuel Pepys is getting a lot of play these days. He is the subject of a new biography by Claire Tomalin, reviewed last week in the NY Times, and his daily diaries have been turned into a blog …

Yesterday you could have turned your TV on at 1pm and happily left it on broadcast TV until the 10pm news, with Fox being the big winner. CBS had the early NFL playoff game yesterday between the Browns and the Steelers, Fox the late game between the 49ers and Giants; …

When I am in the mood for an introspective, crystalline-voiced singer-songwriter, I very much enjoy Rosie Thomas’s When We Were Small: intimate, musical, emotionally honest without wallowing, her voice a lovely but not derivative combo of Sarah McLachlan and a young Emmylou Harris. This morning NPR speaks with Thomas and …

A new Harris poll confirms what most of us already knew: computer users are are really, really sick of email spam: The survey, conducted Nov. 22 to Dec. 2 on 2,221 adult Web surfers, finds that people detest spam by larger numbers than they did in March 2000. Eighty percent …

Movies had an amazing year in the theater and in the home as DVDs had another record year: A preliminary survey of the home video industry shows that DVD sales saw a 65% increase to an estimated total of $8.9 billion last year, compared with $5.4 billion in 2001. Although …

Hard core rap has a bad name – it’s about to get worse: Money laundering and drug dealing on the road are at the heart of a federal probe into hot-rising rap label Murder Inc. – home to such stars as Ashanti and Ja Rule – law-enforcement sources said. A …

Jane Black in Business Week on digital privacy: entertainment industry’s honchos will once again journey to Capitol Hill when Congress convenes a new session later this month to ask lawmakers and the Federal Communications Commission for more protection. However, if Hollywood has its way, consumer privacy — not piracy — …

Familiar terrain to regular readers of Blogcritics, but the NY Times’ Amy Harmon takes a reasonable look at the state of digital media regarding copy protection and resultant consumer issues: Lying dormant in virtually every digital cable box in America is technology that can prevent viewers from recording certain programs …

Though I am 100% certain that regime change in Iraq is our only viable course of action, that does not mean I do not see the physical and moral dangers of American power imposing itself afar. In today’s NY Times Magazine Michael Ignatieff presents the most complete, logical, balanced, informative, …