Yeah, agreed… except that Acrobatic Tenement is terrible, so I would never recommend listening to that, hah. Also I think for people who are pickier than I am about vocals, the vocals prior to Vaya or maybe even RoC could be a little hard to take.

For most bands I know well, I would not appreciate this kind of reductive advice, but if there were ever a band for whom it was true, this is it. I might go, RoC, Vaya, then In/Casino/Out, but yeah.

Caro is not one for brevity. His The Power Broker, about Robert Moses, who is not a figure most non-New Yorkers even know at this point, is a great read as well.

I don't know if Goldwater looks all that good right now. Goldwater is proto-Cruz basically, and I'm not sure that Cruz isn't ultimately a more potentially dangerous candidate than even Trump.

There's an interesting segment in a This American Life episode where Starlee Kine gets advice on writing a breakup song from Phil Collins. The story has some very cringe-y moments in a New Sincerity kind of way, but it's a fascinating piece.

CSN literally would not sound like CSN without Crosby. He is a vastly better harmony singer than almost anyone in the history of rock music. He also wrote some of the best songs both of those bands ever released, he just wrote less of them.

I guess most people already know this, but the best part is that that story is true and is in David Simon's non-fiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.

But let's be real here, that might be the most unintentionally funny line in all of procedural drama history.

We really need a new word for that former category though, because those people definitely exist in much higher numbers among the college-aged of today than they did ten years ago when I was in college, and it's a problem. I know, Old Man Yells at Cloud, but I'm in academia and I see it firsthand.

Agreed. I had several 1 year plus droughts in my twenties. It's not a huge deal unless you make it one.

This is not good news for any potential studio material, since Izzy co-wrote most of their best songs.

I don't know, I think Darmok is a really lovely depiction of the challenges of cross-cultural communication and the value of striving for that even when it's difficult. I honestly am shocked to discover that there are apparently people like this guy below who like TNG but who don't like Darmok, because that's sort of…

Whenever I'm trying to make my nerd-case for TNG to the non-nerds, this episode and The Inner Light are my go-tos. It's a really beautiful piece of fiction. Of course, I'm preaching to the choir here.

No, they're all democratic. Only the Democrats are Democratic. Although I agree in that specific context that Democrat would have sounded better, I generally am not fond of this line of argument.

I have a hard time calling anything Nile Rodgers is involved with an abortion. I wouldn't go so far as to call it good, but it interesting and it was one hell of a spectacle.

I think it's the combination of raging misogyny and it being a terrible lyric and that that combination has been present in a non-trivial number of Kanye songs.

I guess I get why someone would say this, but it's much easier to control confounding factors in a virtual environment. The only way you could get that much control over a "real" environment would be to build one (because something built for another purpose is highly unlikely to enable you to control everything you…

You beat me to this point by 23 minutes. And I didn't even go to Bard, but one of my former bands played there once.

"beta"

You'll never get elected to office that way! At least not if you're a Democrat!