I just don’t wanna be out there. I don’t matter. It’s nice to be any / every / nobody. –Breakmaster Cylinder, in an interview with Exolymph Conor and Will are sitting at a pair of microphones in a mid-budget recording studio, recording their commentary on Reply All. Conor: There you have it: the whole animal […]Read This
On Our Turntable: “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” Bob Dylan
Blood on the Tracks is the album where the sprawling milieus of Highway 61 Revisited finally solidified and started to resemble narratives. This is evident on “Tangled Up in Blue,” but it’s even clearer on “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.” For all the complications, its story of marital infidelity is pretty easy to […]Read This
The Faith of an Infidel [5]: The Council of Salzburg
Part of an ongoing series on religion and philosophy. Read Part 4 or view all the posts. Sometimes life seems like the set-up to a bad joke. Last week in Salzburg, at the end of Ramadan, I ate an enormous meal prepared by a professional Syrian chef now living in a refugee camp on the […]Read This
Somebody you were hoping I might be: BoJack Horseman and the burden of fame
Like the show as a whole, BoJack Horseman’s third season features plenty of scenes of its titular Hollywood star mired in existential dread. But the episode that reveals the most about BoJack’s neuroses may be the one where BoJack cannot stop smiling. “Love and/or Marriage” opens on a high note for BoJack; after decades of […]Read This
Re: Best Reply All Episodes
Conor: Will, how have we been writing this blog for a month and a half without doing a Reply All article? Will: That’s a great question. A group of geeks who find nerdy things to talk about and share them with an internet-savvy audience? We should have murals of PJ and Alex in our bedrooms. […]Read This
Early Tracks [2]: The Hidden Track
The crisp cold of a St. Louis winter. The thin feeling of my khaki pants against the car seat. The white of half a foot of snow. And a short harmony breathed over the last folksy strums of an acoustic guitar. Whether or not I experienced any of these things at the same time, I […]Read This
Breaking the game is fun
I cannot say I am remotely scared by anything that happens in this game now. But the pressure to be perfect… —Markiplier Between the ages of four and six, there’s a shift in the way most children play games, psychologist Alison Gopnik argues in Radiolab’s “Games” episode. Four-year-olds tend to prefer open-ended, creative games (e.g. […]Read This
On Our Turntable: “Francis Forever,” Mitski
Ever since I heard Marceline cover this song in Adventure Time‘s most recent episode, “The Music Hole,” I’ve been obsessed. The melody is simple—hypnotically so—as are the lyrics. Yet it’s never boring. I still feel deflated every time “Where you don’t see me” comes around, and I still get a rush of energy every time […]Read This
The Rail Gaze CD Club: These Changing Skies, Elephant Revival
If you listen to pop radio today, you might get a rather narrow impression of folk music: banjos, unrequitted love and rousing choruses. In truth, the genre is more expansive, as Elephant Revival will be the first to remind you. Their regular instrumental lineup falls on the traditional side: an acoustic guitar, a banjo, a […]Read This
Early Tracks [1]: Beginning in Earnest
“Well, what do you think?” my dad asked when it was over, looking straight at me, his glee seeping into the question and causing his final syllables to shoot up in pitch. I was in seventh grade, it was my dad’s birthday, and my mom had advised me to get him Jackson Browne’s new live […]Read This