The new writers just keep on coming – this time, in the form of Stephanie Mannis, a chronic Yelper who won us over when she sent us a bit of marketing collateral she wrote for work about an American answer to the Beatles. Welcome aboard, Stephanie! Here's the buzz in the 215 blogs this week: Jeff Deeney over at Phawker sang the praises of author Susan Jacoby, who in turn railed against the dumbing down......

The Drexel women (15-11, 10-5) were looking like contenders after three straight wins, including a spanking of William & Mary. But then reality set in, in the form of #10 Old Dominion. The men (11-18, 4-12) didn't have to worry about being exposed as mediocre–everyone knew they stunk. But apparently they still felt compelled to show everyone, in the form of losses to William & Mary and Fairfield. Their regular season will sputter to a......

A tall, icy glass of our favorite internet junk, just for you. Even though Will Arnett's performance as the voice of K.I.T.T. in the upcoming Knight Rider TV movie was already done and in the can, he's now been replaced with Val Kilmer due to a conflict of interest: Arnett has done voicework on GMC truck commercials for over a decade, and K.I.T.T. is a Ford Mustang. This sounds like a joke, but it's apparently......

The Drexel Lady Dragons (11-9, 6-3) split their games this week, losing at Northeastern before coming away with a solid road win at Hofstra. In both games, the Dragons got a big contribution from sophomore forward Gabriela Marginean, who was named Colonial Athletic Association Player of the Week for her efforts. The men (9-14, 2-9) went 0-2 (again) this week, dropping games to Georgia State and Northeastern. The two losses brings the Dragons' losing streak......

We're kicking off a new regular feature today, and here it is! "Can't Miss This!" should be going up every weekday for the foreseeable future and, as you may have already guessed, it'll feature a handful of events going on that day in and around the city that we think are so cool you should make sure not to miss them. Hope you enjoy it! Monday is a difficult day for most people. Also, the......

The Drexel hoopsters had a rough week. The men (9-12, 2-7) dropped an overtime game at home to William & Mary last Wednesday, then got whooped by VCU on the road. The women (10-8, 5-2) saw their nine-game winning streak come to an end with an overtime loss of their own, against Towson. Then they couldn't seal the deal against William & Mary, and ended up giving up a late lead to lose their second......

Drexel's Lady Dragons (10-6, 5-0) ran their winning streak up to nine games with a win over UNC-Wilmington on Sunday. They'll visit conference co-leading Towson tomorrow night, then host William & Mary on Sunday. The men (9-10, 2-5) spit their past couple matchups. They beat last-place Georgia State but then dropped their home game to Hofstra. Hopefully, they'll have a better showing at home tonight against William & Mary. And then they get to go......

Drexel's Lady Dragons (8-6, 3-0), led by Colonial Athletic Association Player of the Week Narissa Suber, extended their winning streak to seven games, beating Delaware and George Mason on the road. Now they'll look to keep up the winning ways at home, hosting Northeastern tomorrow night and UNC-Wilmington Sunday afternoon. The men (8-9, 1-4), on the other hand, look to stop their three-game skid as they face a couple of their fellow CAA cellar-dwellers at......

Dear Penn: Merry Christmas. (Or, perhaps more appropriately, happy belated Chanukah.) You get some nice gifts this season? Maybe an endowment or two? A couple of mentions in The New York Times? Some national accolades coming your way? That's nice. I'm happy for you. What's that? You want to know what I got for Christmas? A couple of very thoughtful gifts, and a couple of checks from family members who figured that I'd rather......

What's new and/or interesting in Philly theaters this weekend Most Likely to Suck & Most Likely to Rule: Alien vs. Predator: Requiem - The sequel to Alien vs. Predator picks up right where the last one ended, with the Predator spaceship, secretly infested with Aliens, leaving Earth. Of course it crashes right back down on our planet almost before the opening credits are over, no doubt leading to the deaths of many attractive young people.......

The big story around these parts continues to be the arrest and imprisonment of CBS3 anchorwoman Alycia Lane. The Daily News has an article about the incident, focusing on Lane's call to the governor from prison, which she apparently made in order to "make sure he knew her side of the story because he is an opinion-maker and runs around in influential circles." A 4-year-old in Southwest Philadelphia shot himself once in the throat......

A steaming hot pile of our favorite things from around the internets. As we did in our news post, let's get all the holiday-related stuff out of the way first: just in time for Thanksgiving, Cinematical finally announced the winners of their Halloween costume contest (definitely not our favorites, but we never got around to voting, so we guess it's our own fault). They also have a list of Seven Movie Characters They'd Hate to......

The best of the internet, squirted out in flavorful neon globules, just for you. Sad news: a special effects technician working on Dark Knight has died after his 4x4 vehicle crashed into a tree during a dummy film run. Zack Snyder has posted a little video greeting describing what the first week of filming Watchmen has been like ("challenging" and "crazy," but also "great" and "amazing" - apparently everybody there loves the source material and......

Seattlest watches as a S.L.U.T. is born and Seattle Flickr users go nuts over a local art installation. A restaurant critic demands a Diner's Bill of Rights over a gnat next to her drink, and, in lieu of a Portlandist, Seattlest debates with itself over the identity of the Northwest's crown jewel. Seattlest also joins the guys from Fantagraphics for an ill-fated gun party in the woods. Bostonist got a crash course in what not......

What's new and/or interesting at Philly theaters this weekend. 2 Days in Paris - Julie Delpy wrote, directed, and starred in this romantic comedy about a couple - Marion and Jack (Delpy and Adam Goldberg) - who are stopping in Paris to visit Marion's parents after a "romantic" vacation to Venice that ended up driving them further apart. After meeting Marion's parents, her friends, and innumerable exes on the streets of Paris, Jack begins to......

There's so much going on across the Ist-a-Verse that it's almost impossible to keep track these days. Fortunately, we do it so you don't have to! Londonist took a walk through Oliver Twist's London, thanks to a gorgeous map layer for Google Earth. They also caught up with modern-day fictional London, with the Fantastic Four and 28 Weeks Later. It was a week of insanity over at DCist. They started the week off with......

You've heard the statistic: every eight seconds, men think about sex. But that doesn't automatically make them perverts. In fact, a new study conducted at Harvard and reported by CNN reveals that it's perfectly normal, if not to be thinking about sex, to be thinking about something. Anything. If a person is given a job to do, he will usually turn his full attention to it. But when left without tasks or deadlines, "the......

Since the success of The Passion of the Christ, studio execs have worked overtime to figure out how to get evangelical money back to Hollywood where it belongs. You could see it in sub rosa marketing campaigns for any number of Hollywood movies: Aslan was Jesus. Superman was Jesus. Even King Kong was briefly Jesus. Then some smart Harvard grad thought to himself that perhaps Jesus would make an appealing Jesus, and thus The Nativity......

Okay. So elephants are one of Phillyist's favorite animals, and we're excited to finally get to show you a picture of them. We decided that we needed to be pachyderm-friendly in our headline too, and we were going to go with Groucho Marx ("One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know. "), but then we discovered this old Russian saying: "No matter how much......

The Penn and Drexel Cycling Clubs are co-hosting The Arkema Group Schuylkill Challenge Bicycle Race in Fairmount Park this weekend. (Note that the title of that last page we linked to predicts the winner as Penn - we wonder if the folks at Drexel, not to mention the other schools, have noticed that yet.) It's actually a series of bike races and time trials taking place in various places and at various times on Saturday......

Phillyist knows you're probably sick to death of hearing about labor relations; however - it's good to remember that this isn't an issue unique to our time (or transit system). In that spirit, the GET-UP Film Project starts this week at iHouse, with it's thematic look at Labor Relations in film. The festival starts tonight with Fritz Lang's famouly distopian Metropolis, continues with a series of documentarites (Occupation: The Harvard Sit-In, Where Do You......

We've pimped them before and we'll pimp them again: the Quake kids, led by our very own Jessica Haralson, are hosting a preview party this evening for the first issue of their new erotic literary magazine, the first of its kind at Penn. The magazine follows in the footsteps of Harvard's infamous H-Bomb and Boston University's Boink (read an interview with Boink co-founder Christopher Anderson at Bostonist). Tonight's launch party will feature readings from the......

It looks like Junior Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is trying to pick a fight with Boston -- over the Catholic priest/molestation scandal. Brian McGrory, a Boston Globe columnist, had this to say this morning in response to a 2002 article wherein Santorum blames liberalism and Boston for priests wanting to diddle little kids:So I asked a Santorum spokesman whether the senator still believed what he said about Boston. I mean, guilt might be our greatest......