Here is a mystery: why is the album art so strongly suggestive of Band of Gypsies? It seems like an odd choice.

He looks a lot like Alfred E. Newman, although that may be your point.

From what I understand, a bench trial may very well have come out differently. Getting an appellate court to overturn a jury verdict is usually an uphill battle, though. Unsympathetic defendants should avail themselves of bench trials more often, in my opinion.

I hate to break this to you, but popular music is nothing but cultural appropriation, and pretty much always has been.

I have it on CD, so it must have been. I believe it's on Smithsonian Folkways, oddly enough.

Night Soldiers, definitely.

Maybe, but I think the magazine changed too.

A yardbird is an inmate: someone loitering in the prison yard.

For being such a good writer and reporter, David Remnick is kind of lukewarm as an editor.

I've been getting it for a little more than 20 years (it was the first joint thing my wife-to-be and I got when I moved in with her - pretty exciting, right?), and I can probably count the issues I've read straight through on two hands. For no good reason, I almost never read the fiction, although I almost always…

What ho!

Haxan is pretty great, although overripe is definitely apt. The static tableaux used in movies of that era could be incredibly effective. I think Mephisto looming over the city in Munrau's Faust is powerful in a way that movies with modern special effects can't seem to match.

Or, you know, just for the hell of it

As great as bourgeois decadence is, it doesn't have a patch on old-world decadence.

Plus, I think demonizing one's political opponents is counterproductive. Governing requires consensus. Just because one side has decided to behave like spoiled teenagers doesn't mean both sides should. Somebody has to be the grownup, or the government will just become more dysfunctional. I recognize that this is…

It is exactly a form of fundamentalism, without qualification. That's what fundamentalism is: an appeal to the original (albeit translated in the case of the Bible) text.

Bright lines make sense in statutory law. One thing I did agree with Scalia about is that you shouldn't have to be a lawyer to understand whether or not you are breaking the law.

He was a fantastic writer, unlike, say, Breyer. His book on advocacy was also excellent. I disagreed with him at least 90% of the time, but damn he was smart.

I like True Stories a lot: both the record and the movie. It came out right in what I think of as the "uncanny America" sweet spot, in which I'd also include Blue Velvet, Raising Arizona, Something Wild and Pee Wee's Big Adventure, among others. Plus, interstitial music by Terry Allen.

How many bands can lay claim to two indispensable live albums in less than ten years? I deeply regret not seeing Talking Heads live. David Byrne is great, but it's not the same.