I miss the Louise Mensch-mania of last summer. Not only was she usually good for a laugh, but it was instructive to see which of the otherwise seemingly reasonable people I follow took her seriously enough to retweet.

Right. And as much as Pulp Fiction operates in the whole “Le Samurai” mode of the impeccably-dressed, super-cool hitman, if you’re a Marcellus Wallace, do you really trust the muscle guys you send to whack people to also be able to conduct delicate diplomacy with jumpy guys in Studio City, or to carefully dispose of…

There’s nothing cool about hard drugs, and the idea that teetering near death with a smack habit is some sort of prerequisite for coolness and artistic integrity is a bullshit myth that’s killed lots of people and needs to go away forever.

She kind of had the bad luck to try selling out right at the tail end of the last period where selling out was something that actually bothered people. If she’d waited ‘til 2007 and made a terrible album with Timbaland or something, I doubt she would have gotten even a fraction of the backlash.

Awesome. I feel like “Exile in Guyville” is one of those albums like the Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa” or Eric B and Rakim’s “Paid in Full” where the very things that made it so revolutionary at the time were the exact things that hundreds of people tried to copy immediately after, which makes it hard now to hear how…

Not that the situation really needs any explaining, but imagine showing up for a job interview at McDonald’s, seeming unfamiliar with the concept of hamburgers, and telling them you’re excited to put your online bartending degree to good use. Now imagining doing that at an interview to become McDonald’s CEO. Now…

I feel like this album is definitely an acquired taste — dreamy-optimist-David Byrne is strangely more off-putting than jittery-paranoiac-David Byrne — but I kinda love it.

A year later, and I still haven’t grown the slightest bit tired of the Fyre Festival. I need there to be books, oral histories, Lifetime movies, manga comics, Broadway musicals about it. I’ll spend money on all of them.

Whoa. That’s terrifying. Everything I’ve read about him makes him seem like some real-life Keyser Soze.

Someone posted this on Genius a while back — an extensive, if maddeningly poorly organized, gallery of the various NYC gangsters whose lives intertwined with Biggie, Tupac and Jay-Z back in the day. (I imagine the author of the thread is either living under an assumed name in Panama by now, or else somewhere at the…

Few things in life lift my mood more reliably than watching old Mitch Hedberg clips on YouTube.

I, for one, feel great to know that the passing whims of a 20-year-old reality TV personality can erase a billion dollars worth of wealth from the market on whose stability most of the global economy relies.

I’ll be perfectly honest: the first time I ever attempted to cook with shrimp paste, I nearly threw up when I opened the jar and got this explosion of fermented shrimp fumes. It was among the most pungent things I’d ever experienced, and absolutely NOT an aroma I’d grown up with in kitchens. I was like, “am I really…

The position is basically that the Democrats are too weak and soft and dysfunctional to run the country publicly, but also so insidiously brilliant and well-organized that they can alter the very fabric of reality from behind the scenes.

I remember a piece in Billboard from several years ago where they had a lot of off-the-record interviews with RRHOF voters and members, and one of them really stuck with me. He said, basically, you have to keep in mind that most Hall of Fame voters still think of the Cure and Depeche Mode as these weird, swishy guys…

I would never cast myself as any sort of Fergie defender, but while this was definitely not good, I didn’t think it was particularly memorable or noteworthy in its badness. Our national anthem is kinda dull, and watching pop stars solemnly mumble their way through it until they get to the glory note is one of my least…

Two coffee shops that I patronize (both with plentiful outlets and functional WiFi) have pretty reasonable solutions:

After a childhood filled with unsuccessful attempts to get various friends and bandmates to understand why I listened to so much hip-hop, by the time I got to high school a little bit of weed and a stereo playing “Respiration” finally did the trick. (“Aquemini” rounded up the stragglers.)

Has anyone else gone back and listened to classic Smashing Pumpkins recently? I used to be a big fan, and recently did a revisit. I can still dig on the hits and a couple of others (Geek USA., Thirty Three), but man, time has not been kind to a lot of their material.

I feel like I’ve finally moved on from just listening to the music I loved when I was 13, and started getting more into the music I pretended not to like when I was 15 because it didn’t jibe with the niche subculture I was trying to bluff my way into.