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When Douglas Rushkoff asks you to chat, you say yes. We’ve spoken to the visionary media theorist a dozen times over the years, and each opportunity always yields fascinating new results. These days, Rushkoff is peddling Team Human. What began as a weekly interview show with a wide range of subjects is now a book — a kind of manifesto for socializing in particularly bleak times. Along with uncanny predictive powers, the author has long been a champion of the transformative potential of technology. But Team Human finds Rushkoff bemoaning the isolating nature of ubiquitous technologies and late-stage capitalism. In all this, however, he remains ever an optimist for mankind’s resilience — too rare a quality in his chosen field. Having finished the book, Rushkoff describes his current crossroads, determining what his career will look like, going forward, and the role he can play in helping more voices be heard.

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After years of writing about music, Taleen Kali decided to create it. She began performing live sound collages, before heading in a more rock oriented direction with the quartet, TÜLIPS. Last year, the musician released her first solo record, Soul Songs on local Los Angeles label, Lolipop records. She also keeps busy as a yoga teacher and the driving force behind the literary publication Dum Dum Zine. On a recent trip to L.A., we sat down with Kali to discuss the city, self-publishing and the drive to create.

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In 2012, Georgia Webber stopped talking, save for 15 or so minutes a day. The act of vocalizing had simply become too painful. A year later, she began to serialize Dumb, the story of her struggles as a vocal abuser (the official diagnosis). The work follows the young cartoonist as she struggles to adjust to living without speech, concocting methods for communicating with friends and family and otherwise coming to grips with a newfound fact of life. Initially self-published, the book would later be collected by Retrofit Comics and, ultimately, as a single volume by Fantagraphics, which debuted over the summer.  These days, when she does speak, Webber takes a measured approach,  choosing words carefully. In this conversation, the cartoonist discusses the insights her struggles have given her into the ways in which we chose to communicate.

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You’d think you’d have your fill of a man with four concurrent podcasts. And yet, John Roderick always seems to bring something new to the table. The Long Winters frontman has made a second career of sorts as podcasting’s great indie rock raconteur, cohosting Roderick on the Line, Road Work, Omnibus and Friendly Fire. The medium has proven an ideal fit for an entertainer happy to impart personal stories and knowledge, balancing the personal with the universal. For his third appearance on the podcast, the singer delves deep into stories of sobriety, bipolar disorder, transience and the Long Winters record he’s been putting off for a decade. It’s a rich conversation, that’s both idiosyncratic and deeply relatable for anyone who’s ever had difficulty getting over the creative hump.

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One of the more memorable spots in recent memory, "Wu Tang In Space Eating Impossible Sliders” does pretty much what it says on the tin. The web series created to promote vegetarian burgers at White Castle eschews the traditional ad trappings, in favor of a genuinely entering series of videos starting the RZA, GZA and Ghostface Killah. It’s the latest in a long line of high profile collaborations for director Sam Spiegel. In addition to creating ad spots and other videos with his production company, Squeak E. Clean, Spiegel is also a prolific music producer and has served as music director for artists like Karen O and Kanye West. Spiegel paid RiYL a visit on his most recent trip to his hometown of New York to talk about inspiration and the joys of collaboration.

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It’s a familiar refrain. The 15-year itch. It’s the perfect time to look back and how far a group as come — and wonder aloud how much gas is left in the tank. The More I Sleep the Less I Dream is a 15-year album. The fourth LP from a band whose lineup has remained remarkably consistent since forming to perform at a high school talent show. It finds the group searching for the magic that helped catapult their 2009 debut These Four Walls up the indie chart. Thompson admits that the group spent a couple of records hunting down chart success, but adds that this latest finds WWPJ working with something far more authentic and organic.

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