I think it overstates those themes to the point of cartoonishness, though. There's no nuance. As is so common with this sort of thing, it presupposes "conformity" as not itself composed of individual people… it buys wholesale into the illusion of the monolith without stopping to consider that that monolith cannot…

I think one of those three things, yes. (It's the one about Snowden — and even that is more about his attitude and the way he went about things than anything he did.) I don't think "everything is fine with the system," certainly. And of course "government infringement on human rights" is a thing, but the kind of…

Face blindness. I struggle with it too, especially with shows with large casts.

I'm well aware of all that irony, yes.

Exactly. It's semi-meaningless to treat "The Twilight Zone" as a coherent series — it's more like a magazine, where some of the stories are far better than others, and they're all trying to do different things.

Eh. It's a load of paranoiac fluff.

Or as dated as "Macbeth" must have seemed in a united Britain, or "The Iliad" to audiences hundreds of years after the fall of Troy.

"Ladri" is definitely plural.

I mean, I wouldn't say any of them was a fully formed album in the way, say, Odelay was. They all contain interesting stuff. Then again, I can certainly see why they were released as three separate albums, even if quality control slipped a bit… not sure you could take the best 1/3 of each and meld them into anything…

Seems to me that, whatever they have in prime time, CBS has a history of giving their late night hosts a fair amount of leeway to be smart. I mean, you've got Letterman, Ferguson, even Tom Snyder years ago… I wouldn't call any of them constrained, at least not as compared to other networks' hosts.

Hosted by Wilson Pickett!

aka the source of 90% of the information I'm going to use to process this episode.

It's a half season… the next one will at least be out this year.

Oh, I've got one. Steven Wright. 30+ years, two albums. (Plus the 1991 special "Wicker Chairs and Gravity," which I'm not sure actually exists.) That's an absurdly high quality-to-quantity ratio… though if we count misattributed Internet jokes, it flattens out a lot.

I just remembered that someone asked me this question a few years back, and I said the Beastie Boys. Depressing.

One more _album_. He's said he's going to look more into distributing singles digitally after that. Who knows what will actually come to pass? (At the very least, wouldn't it make sense to compile those singles?)

They've said Peep Show is ending?

You have heard the first AC Newman album, right? I mean, I like the New Pornographers in all their forms, and don't consider their later albums THAT different from their early ones… but I'd say "The Slow Wonder" is at least as close to the first two as "Twin Cinema" is.

Elvis Costello has gone through a couple phases like that. Obviously, the first impulse is to say what if he had made 20 more This Year's Models. But then I also want to hear what 30 years of the guy who did Imperial Bedroom would have sounded like.

He also came out with three in 1994 alone. (Though quality varies.)