...the Anne Frank Fund has spoken out about the importance of safeguarding Frank’s legacy: “[She] has become incredibly commercialized—Anne Frank has become a brand, separated from the real person and her identity.”

Drake and Blake and LeBron and Jay Z aren't endorsing brands; they're helping brands exist via the stars' stated or assumed core beliefs and surrounding aura. This is possible now because hip-hop's influence is at last a true and not merely an ancillary currency. It's not just the Grammys, and it's not just the games—life itself is to be touchdowned and home-runned, slam-dunked and Spotified. The game is always on. And it's to be won.

Indian sports logos and nicknames may also have harked back to the Indian-only boarding schools, which excelled at collegiate sports. The Carlisle School’s football team, the Indians, was among the best in the nation. When Carlisle closed down in 1918, other (non-Indian) college programs were more inclined to use Indian names and symbols.

There’s no question that men who take controversial positions in the media come in for loud and vigorous criticism. Women who do so, however, can expect rape threats. They can expect to be told that they are too fat or ugly to have a valid opinion on anything. They can expect the suggestion that instead of speaking, they might prefer to fellate their male readers. If they are nonwhite, they can expect other, racialized forms of abuse. So while controversy can be a rough-and-tumble game for some male commentators, for women it’s a decision to put their mental health—and sometimes their physical safety—on the line. For a female journalist, doing careful, reasoned work that raises interesting questions—and waiting till you have everything ironclad before you publish anything—can be a lot safer than taking strong, brash stands right out of the gate. Women who do this may not be able to avoid harassment entirely, but they’re more likely to escape the worst of it.

...will.i.am explains when there is a problem with logos.

...This new kind of celebrity is the ultimate costume ball, far more exclusive and decadent than even the most potent magnates of Hollywood’s studio era could have dreamed up. Their superficial diversity dangles before us the myth that in America, anything is possible—even as the American dream quietly dies, a victim of the calcification of a class system that is nearly hereditary.

...a look at another long gone and forgotten format—the cardboard cereal box record.

Fans of the street-lit imprints see them as a...marriage of entrepreneurship and a cultural aesthetic. Critics—and there have been many—say that the books often feature racially stereotypical characters, are badly written and eat up the shelf space of more serious writers...[Troy] Johnson of the African American Literature Book Club said his concern about street lit was that it emphasizes marketing and celebrity more than good writing. “...the urban fiction imprint is an easy way out,” he said. “They seem to be encouraging the reader to connect with the brand instead of the writer.” Asked about such criticism, [Johnny] Temple of Akashic wrote in an e-mail, “There is obviously no single black experience in America (or anywhere else).”

...a wonderful evolution that transforms the well-known wordmark into something that feels similar but definitely looks (and reads) better, even keeping the quirkiness of the “I."

...skate-inspired clothing brand Supreme built a cult following for its tweaked versions of famous logos. It’s mostly gotten away with this sampling of intellectual property, so it was especially ironic that when Supreme found itself embroiled in a trademark suit this year, it was the one doing the suing.