Last week, after a video of Gaga – real name Stefani Germanotta – belting out the Edith Piaf classic La Vie en Rose on stage in Switzerland was posted on YouTube, US culture critics speculated that Gaga's embrace of apparent middle-of-the-road showbiz makes normalcy the "new transgression".
There would always be some new transgression that would outrage me as a proud South-East Asian, as a liberal, as a Muslim, as an artist, as an educated member of the urban middle class, as a lover of justice and a hater of cruelty, or simply as a human being.
For certain, it was good journalism — by The Guardian most notably — that revealed the scope of News International's transgressions in the first place.
Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms of perception and expression.
Now Gaga has fashioned a comeback: not with a new act of overt transgression, but singing jazz standards with Tony Bennett, embracing red-carpet Hollywood style, and broadly rejecting the excess of the past.
Alas, the anxiety is that the transgressions of News International will prompt a bout of media regulation that will impinge on press freedoms in the wrong way, making it harder to expose the wrongdoings of companies like News International rather than protecting us from them.
All you new artists obsessed with transgression and finding new ways to define humanity should watch this right now and get back to us when you've realised the error of your ways.
But a new study suggests that our transgressions are peanuts compared to natural oceanic cycles, at least for loggerheads.
This week, however, skinny jeans have committed their latest, perhaps most egregious transgression: bending wearers' new iPhones.
On the official White House Web site, a blog called Reality Check provides a running tally of transgressions by Fox News.
