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Book Review: Pistonhead by Thomas A. Hauck

Although I don’t watch the show, the concept behind American Idol strikes me as a microcosm of music in America today. The general auditions attract “tens of thousands each year, a few hundred might get to audition for the judges, a couple dozen might be “semifinalists” and the show then winnows them out with some […]

Weekend Edition: 8-15

Blog Headline of the Week

Teen Prodigy: Smart Enough to Go To Law School at 19, Dumb Enough to Go To Law School

Bookish Linkage

This is probably how I would end up using a Kindle.

The Browser offers a selection of books on Burma. (Via.)

A children’s novel, Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, won […]

Favorite Film Friday: The Great Escape

I was just shy of seven years old when The Great Escape came out. I’ve watched it perhaps more times than any other movie and loved the book on which it was based almost as much. And in the course of three months this summer, it’s received some manly recognition: it not only made a […]

Free expression or religious disrespect?

When it comes to First Amendment concepts, I’m pretty close to an absolutist. But decisions like the one made this week by Yale University Press pose one of those conundrums that can arise if you believe strongly in free expression and freedom of religion.

Later this year, Yale University Press is publishing The Cartoons That […]

Midweek Music Moment: Bill Chase

You have to be of a certain era for the name Bill Chase to mean much. And it actually could mean something to you in two different contexts. Yet both contexts have an untimely limit. Bill Chase died in a plane crash on August 9, 1974, near Jackson, Minn..

One context is a pure jazz […]