I'm pretty sure I'd heard the album version before, but the first time I heard the live version of this song, I knew there was something magical about it. You could hear the urgency right away: "There's been a lot of talk about this next song. Maybe — maybe too much talk. This song is not a rebel song. This song is…

Hold on. You ain't heard nothing yet. Make sure you stick around for the last song.

I had four fits of Trump rage today, and I may be working myself into a fifth one. It's going to be a long four years. The deception, the lies, the half-truths, the unwillingness to answer questions — it may cause me to rupture a blood vessel one of these days. But worst of all may be the whitewashing and normalizing…

Let me be clear that it is a very good thing that 800 or 1,000 Carrier employees in Indiana will get to keep their jobs. But most of the jobs are still leaving. Instead of being punished, as Trump said would happen to companies that sent jobs overseas, Carrier got a sweet deal from the state of Indiana. There's no way…

Here's an excerpt from the column:

Gail Collins of The New York Times interviewed Jill Stein for her column yesterday. Of Clinton and Trump, Stein said, "I don't regard one candidate as preferable to the other." She — the nominee of the Green Party — also said, "In my view they're both lethal to the environment."

Your experience may have been unfair, and you're free to criticize the punishment this guy appears likely to get. But he didn't murder anyone. Murder has a specific legal definition — it has to be intentional or premeditated. It's one type of homicide, but there are other types of homicide that aren't intentional, and…

I know nothing about One Direction, except that they did some song about a girl who's better-looking than she realizes. They didn't do a Social Distortion cover by any chance, did they?

Hey, we could get that heart attack I've been rooting for. Or maybe a stroke, which might be just as good.

Everybody Hates Chris. A terrific, overlooked show that ended somewhat abruptly, I thought. There seemed to be more stories to tell.

I don't know what happened in New Hampshire with that law specifically, but it's not uncommon for laws that are unconstitutional to remain on the books. (These are known as dead-letter laws.) I doubt New Hampshire continued to enforce it. If it did, maybe no one affected by it challenged it. More likely, the…

It's probably a function of my age — I fell in love with them as a high schooler, too — but I didn't realize U2 snobbery was a thing until I started coming here. That's not to say everything the band has ever done has been great; I've loved comparatively little of what they've done since Achtung Baby (although there…

To answer your unanswered question, Thomas, the Supreme Court in 1947 held in Everson v. Board of Education that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . .") does apply to the states. (This is done through the legal doctrine of…

I hate to pop the little balloon of hope you have, but they called Michigan today. Trump won by about 10,000 votes. And there's apparently no real evidence of any fraud or hacking. For this to be real, there would have to be a coordinated effort across three different states; that's the same sort of outlandish…

Happy Birthday!

I read that and thought, "Finally. Someone gets it."

The Washington Post reports that Trump, by his own choice, has only had two classified intelligence briefings since the election. (Pence has set aside time for them almost every day.) These are the daily briefings that the President gets. Trump — who you may have noticed knows a bit less about foreign affairs than,…

Trump might have realized that it doesn't work if he'd talked to McCain at any point. But McCain got captured, so Trump didn't like him. Impeccable logic, as always.

Is the "Stay on target" guy still staying on his target?

Seriously, thanks for the knowledge. This old print journalist had never heard of the phrase "bounce rate," but I'm pretty sure I get what it means. There must be a point of diminishing returns, though, or else they could write articles with each paragraph (or sentence or word, if we want to take this to ridiculous…