Starting this month, the venerable music podcast “Song Exploder,” which has been hosted and produced by the musician Hrishikesh Hirway for the past five years, will have a new host: the appealing Thao Nguyen, of Thao & the Get Down Read More …

I went to my first protest at the age of eighteen. I joined a group of around forty-five people on a summer day, in 1986, just outside of Amarillo, Texas. We gathered a hundred yards back from a thin gravel Read More …

The hottest publication at recent comics conventions wasn’t a graphic novel or a mini-comic but a good old-fashioned tabloid-size newspaper publication—a throwback to the underground presses of decades past. In LAAB, Issue No. 0, “Dark Matter” (officially out next month), Read More …

“Flack” (Pop) stars Anna Paquin as the most valuable employee of the world’s most dastardly P.R. firm. Sidney Falco Publicity is its lodestar of ethical conduct, the office of Sarah Sanders its only rival in mendacity. The company attends to Read More …

At the time of his death, in June of 2009, Michael Jackson was in the middle of working on an album. The project was to be his first in nearly a decade. “Invincible,” from 2001, had been the subject of Read More …

I grew up in libraries, or at least it feels that way. My family lived in the suburbs of Cleveland, about a mile from the brick-faced Bertram Woods Branch of the Shaker Heights Public Library system. Throughout my childhood, starting Read More …

Saturday television in the nineteen-eighties was an hour-by-hour journey toward maturation. You would start at 8 A.M., a mere child watching “Super Friends.” When you were old enough to still be watching TV around noon, the pleasures of “Wide World Read More …

At fifty-three, Brett Kavanaugh is an adult now, or at least no longer young, but after Christine Blasey Ford came forward to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had pinned her to a bed, drunk, when they were Read More …

In the immeasurable history of people talking about food, has there ever been a single statement more raw and moving and real than Oprah Winfrey, sitting before a television camera, flinging her arms emphatically forward, narrowing her eyes with fevered Read More …

On the night of July 22nd, an eighteen-year-old black woman named Nia Wilson and her older sister Lahtifa were exiting a BART station in Oakland, California, when a man suddenly approached and stabbed both sisters in the neck with a Read More …