I see all these people out here talking about how the presidential election this year "now appears to be a dead heat." Yeah right. You go right on ahead with that, Sherlock. Feed that one into the computer, good plan.

Washington, D.C., is 56% African-American and one of the epicenters of hip-hop culture. The Washington Post newsroom, it's safe to say, is not.

Ring the alarm: the paper of record is treating rappers separately and unequally! In a surprisingly fresh piece of analysis, the Columbia Journalism Review unearths the NYT's sneaky tendency to "birth-name" rappers more than other musicians. (They also coin the term "birth-name," which I like, although for the sake of hip hop consistency they should say "government-name"). That means, for example, that RZA gets second-referenced as "Robert Diggs," but Marilyn Manson gets to keep his stage name throughout Times stories. That is so foul! Government names are nerdy. Plus, culture editor Sam Sifton gives a nonsense nilla explanation for the discrepancy: