you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, Olivia Rodrigo, ★★★★★ 5/5

It took me several listens to truly understand what Rodrigo is doing here. I initially thought her other albums were better. But after repeat spins, opener “drop dead” gives the clue, “you know all the words to ‘Just Like Heaven.’” It should have been obvious with The Cure’s Robert Smith duetting on a later track. And another song called “the cure.” The whole thing has an ‘80s wave vibe, but it’s bigger than that. While Taylor Swift frequently funnels the indie-rock past, Rodrigo goes all in, and makes one of the greatest indie-rock records of all time.

CONFESSIONS II, Madonna, ★★★½☆ 3.5/5

Once the icon left her ‘80s pop behind for ‘90s dance, I kind of lost the thread. While this one is more dance than ever and some of the auto-tune and synthesized beats feel beneath an artist of such stature, songs like “One Step Away,” “Bring Your Love,” “Danceteria,” and some of the slower and spacier ones at the end, are among my favorite Madonna tunes ever.

WHACK’S MUSEUM, Tierra Whack, ★★★★☆ 4/5

The Philly rapper’s third album keeps her serious winning streak going, with a melodicism and playfulness arguably unmatched in today’s hip-hop and rap landscape.

Dandelion, Ella Langley, ★★★★☆ 4/5

I wanted to resist this album because I suspected the megahit “Choosin’ Texas” was so big because it was cheesy Top 40 country pop, but that and another half-dozen or so songs here got trapped in my head, like a collection of ultra-catchy, and not cheesy, hits by the likes of Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, and Kacey Musgraves.

Ad Astra, Ash, ★★★★☆ 4/5

My favorite Northern Ireland power poppers are back with their tenth album, complete with space-age cover art and a flurry of songs that would be right at home on a Green Day greatest-hits compilation. Always uplifting and a great workout record to boot.

New Wave Graveyard, Josh Da Costa, ★★★½☆ 3.5/5

I had never heard of this New York artist before but was sent a record-company promo to review, and I’ve been digging the mix of The Cure and power-pop bands like The Cars and The Records. Very catchy and dreamy.

Mutiny After Midnight, Johnny Blue Skies & the Dark Clouds, ★★★☆☆ 3/5

This probably would have been a big hit if it were released during the disco-pop late 1970s. Normally, that is one of my favorite eras, and while most of Sturgill Simpson’s latest is ok to listen to, none of it is that memorable, except for the leadoff track.

Year of the Monkey, Fucked Up, ★★★½☆ 3.5/5

This isn’t so much a disappointing release, it’s more like an uncategorizable one that doesn’t have any idea what it wants to be. In some ways that’s a great thing. There are blasts of true powerful majesty sprinkled throughout, and none of it is bad at all, it’s just that the album consists of four approximately 25-minute songs that are all over the place. If it were a double album of 25 or 30 songs, I would absolutely love it. I’m adding this to my library because anytime I’m in a “Fucked Up” mood, this will supply the ammo endlessly, and confoundedly.

Roses, Widowspeak, ★★★½☆ 3.5/5

I hadn’t returned to this Brooklyn band since its 2011 debut, which I ranked #48 on my favorites list that year. Looks like I’ve got some back-catalog listening to do because this new one is a laid-back joy.

aethermead, Of Montreal, ★★★★½ 4.5/5

By my count, this is Kevin Barnes’ 23rd album fronting this wild band. He is sneakily prolific and this is arguably my favorite of them all, with a heavy dose of psychedelic pop beauty and the required dose of freakishness.

I Built You a Tower, Death Cab for Cutie, ★★★★☆ 4/5

The band’s 11th album is powerful and it lands in the conversation of best records by DCFC. Nothing will ever top 2003’s Transatlanticism for me, but this is at the very least a pleasant surprise.

An Eraser and a Maze, Modest Mouse, ★★★★☆ 4/5

I didn’t think these Pacific Northwesters would ever surpass their amazing three-album run of the 1990s, but 2021’s The Golden Casket and this one are pure weirdo uncategorizable comebacks. “Speak ‘N Spell (or Not)” is a party-banger highlight among a lot of inspired indie rock.

American Stories, Rostam, ★★★½☆ 3.5/5

I’ve never been into this artist’s records since he left Vampire Weekend, but this one sounds a lot like his old band, with a tropical, loose, and mellow vibe. The first three tracks are my standout picks.

Welcome to Music City, City / Music City, ★★★★½ 4.5/5

This Dublin born-London based artist is one of my favorite finds of the year, offering power pop that sounds like a great lost LP from the likes of The Knack or The Records before closing out with three gorgeous ballads.

Dream Chaser, Willie Nelson, ★★★★☆ 4/5

The only problem with Willie never gives us enough time to have truly absorbed his last work before the next one arrives. But I’m not sure it really matters, since everything he creates, including this mellow pleaser, turns to instant cowboy-country gold.

Be Sweet to Me, Violet Grohl, ★★★½☆ 3.5/5

This debut album has a lot of songs that are slow growers, but then it also has immediately lovable numbers like “Bug in the Cake,” which is a straight descendant of Nirvana and Foo Fighters, and “Big Memory,” which sounds like it could have been the biggest smash hit ever from Courtney Love and Hole.

I’ve long been one of the many “haters” of Novak Djokovic. I love watching him play, and I do not think there can be much dispute left over whether he is the greatest tennis player of all time. But I almost always watch him hoping he will lose, hoping the fire he calls up from inside will backfire rather than spark him to another unreal victory.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what I find so unlikeable about the legend, and I was hoping the new Amazon Prime documentary, Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter, would dissuade me from my continued distaste. Instead, it makes a strong case for why Djokovic became so great, while never fully erasing my view that his self-belief slides too much into selfishness.

The title comes from the wolf, Serbia’s national animal, and the film opens with Djokovic joyfully howling into the wilderness. It is not subtle, but it gets at the movie’s main idea: Djokovic sees himself as a survivor, a lone competitor, and someone who has had to fight from the beginning. The documentary, directed by Jason Hehir of The Last Dance, has impressive access and includes interviews with Djokovic, his wife Jelena, his family, Rafael Nadal, Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras, Boris Becker, Jim Courier, and others.

His wife describes him as soft and gentle, but also angry, an anger that stems in part from growing up in a Serbian generation that did not get to play enough as war raged around them. Agassi says Djokovic is the best of all time and does not get as much credit as he should.

Djokovic’s parents ran a ski resort, and during the summer, people played tennis there. Novak started playing at a very young age and, while he enjoyed skiing, felt the love of tennis in his heart. He watched tennis on TV and was inspired by Agassi and others.

The family had to take out loans to pay for tennis, and many of the people they had to deal with were criminals. His early development came amid the Yugoslav wars and the NATO bombing of Belgrade. His coach, Jelena Genčić, trained him despite the danger, sometimes moving practice around the city according to where bombs had hit. At 12, Djokovic also went to Germany to continue developing his game, becoming more stern after leaving his family and moving to a place where he did not know the language. But he convinced his father that it would be worth it, and he became completely dedicated to becoming the best player in the world.

The documentary makes a good case that Djokovic’s public image was always going to be complicated. Some people liked his celebrations and his joking impressions of things like John McEnroe-type tantrums, Rafael Nadal’s butt pick, and Maria Sharapova’s hair flicks. Others did not like the way Djokovic added humor and big emotion to a game that had taken itself very seriously for most of its history. And still others got upset with Djokovic’s frequent injury timeouts, including Andy Roddick, who half joked in a press conference that Djokovic would probably next complain about having bird flu or SARS.

Djokovic says he did not get much chance to express his emotions as a kid, and that is why he let them out in public, amidt the more bottled-in emotions of rivals Federer and Nadal. That seems like a fair explanation, even if it still doesn’t make his behavior more appealing to me.

Novak continued to build a reputation as the sport’s villain, but January 2022 was when he became hugely vilified. He arrived at the Australian Open amid intensive COVID-19 restrictions after a social-media post made it clear that he was not vaccinated. His wife had tried to discourage him from making his statement public, but he unfortunately did not listen. Djokovic says, in retrospect, that he believed he had the freedom to choose whether he wanted to be vaccinated and that, as a healthy athlete, he did not need it. For me, he does not come out of the movie looking any less selfish than he did before. He still seems convinced that he was not a threat to anyone else.

There is also a long segment on the 2025 Australian Open, when Djokovic rolled through the competition until his dramatic quarterfinal against Carlos Alcaraz. Alcaraz won the first set 6–4, but Djokovic was dealing with a left-leg injury and took a medical timeout. He came back with a completely aggressive edge to win the match in four sets. Then, after losing the first set of his semifinal against Alexander Zverev, he retired because of the injury. Even after winning 24 Grand Slam singles titles and clearly being hurt, Djokovic was booed as he walked off the court.

That sequence is probably the documentary’s best illustration of Djokovic’s strange career. He is driven enough to fight through pain and beat a much younger star, but he remains so polarizing that even an injured exit from a major semifinal turns into another argument about him.

The movie ends with Djokovic saying he may play one more year or may play 15 more. As he howls to the sky, he knows he is his own No. 1 doubter, and he wants to prove himself wrong.

While the movie builds great drama and suspense, leading me toward a better appreciation of how Djokovic’s mind and beliefs work, the evidence eventually piles up too high for me to fall in line and worship someone who really should be worshipped. The Wolf in Winter explains the fire behind Novak Djokovic better than it softens him, and that is what makes it both a compelling documentary and a must-watch for diehard tennis fans.

★★★★☆ 4/5

Baseball has long played a warm role in my life. I loved playing Little League and excelled at first base all the way up until high school, when I was accidentally cut from the junior-varsity team my freshman year and then cut again for real the next day. I coached my son’s teams for years and loved and cherish every moment.

Now I live far away from St. Louis and do not get to see my beloved Cardinals play very often, but I keep in touch through the news, an occasional game on TV, and my fantasy baseball squad. But on top of all that, every couple of decades, I like to take a deep dive back into baseball’s extremely colorful history by revisiting what may be Ken Burns’ greatest history documentary, Baseball. I recently rewatched the first three episodes of the original nine-episode arc and was reminded by some of my favorite nuggets how the game retains its larger-than-life presence.

• Baseball’s “inventor” Abner Doubleday was a hero at Gettysburg, but he was never in Cooperstown, New York in the summer when baseball was said to have been invented. He was at West Point and apparently knew nothing about the game. The Doubleday origin story was promoted much later as part of an attempt to give baseball a neat, purely American beginning.

• All through the 1800s, early versions of the game, including “town ball,” were played. But baseball really took off in New York City in the 1840s, when many of the modern rules began to take shape.

• Baseball is the only game in which the defense has the ball. That is one of the sport’s most basic and oddly profound differences from football, basketball, hockey, and most other major games.

• The Dodgers were originally known as the Trolley Dodgers, named after the bustling and dangerous streets of Brooklyn, where pedestrians had to dodge streetcars. The team played at Ebbets Field from 1913 until it left Brooklyn after the 1957 season.

• The era of big business arrived in 1869 with the introduction of the Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first fully professional baseball team. Its players were paid salaries, sometimes as much as seven times a working man’s wage, and the team traveled the country on the recently completed transcontinental railroad. The venture eventually failed financially, but it changed the sport forever. The 1869 Red Stockings also went 57–0 in official games, an undefeated season that remains one of baseball’s classic early achievements.

• Baseball was not always completely segregated. Black and white teams played against each other in the 1860s, and Black players appeared on integrated clubs at different levels of the game. But in 1887, owners and league officials established an unwritten “gentlemen’s agreement” to stop signing Black players. That color line lasted until Jackie Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. One illustration by Burns of how cruel the era was is the tidbit that some white players wore sharpened or “sliding” cleats with the hopes of gouging their Black teammates.

• During that era, John McGraw was legendary. He hit at least .321 for nine consecutive seasons, including a .340 season in 1894, and fought, tripped opponents, and nastied his way through his early career with the Baltimore Orioles. One brawl involving McGraw helped lead to a fire that destroyed Boston’s South End Grounds in 1894. He had a long managing career after his playing days, most famously with the New York Giants, and became one of the sport’s original strategic geniuses.

• Comedian and actor Billy Crystal is interviewed and says baseball is everything that is America. It is played on grass, in fields, and in streets. You walk through the tunnel toward this huge open space, holding your dad’s hand, to watch grown men play this “little boy’s game.”

• Other sports were starting to grow, and even though there were baseball players whose names every household in America knew, a new generation was needed to rekindle the sport. “By 1900, Ty Cobb, Casey Stengel, and George Herman Ruth had been born.” That is how Part 1 cliffhangs.

• Honus Wagner was a gangly, unsightly, bowlegged shortstop who could run like the wind. He spent 18 seasons with Pittsburgh and hit above .300 in 15 straight seasons. Many of his records stood for decades, and his famous T206 tobacco card has regularly been regarded as the most valuable baseball card ever.

• In 1903, the owners dubbed an epic nine-game championship series between the Boston Americans, later the Red Sox, and the Pittsburgh Pirates “the World Series.” It set the pattern for the American League and National League champions to meet at the end of the season. The first World Series was not technically a permanent annual arrangement yet, but it became one soon enough.

• Walter Johnson and his astounding 417 wins for the Washington Senators made him arguably the greatest pitcher of all time, and, to me at least, far greater than New York’s Christy Mathewson during that era. The only batter who seemed to figure him out somewhat was Ty Cobb of the Detroit Tigers. Cobb hit roughly his usual career level against Johnson, which is extraordinary considering how helpless almost everyone else looked against the Big Train.

• Cobb’s mother shot his father back home in Georgia, apparently mistaking him for a burglar. Cobb played his first major league game just three weeks later. He would not have been a great athlete by today’s standards, but his determination to succeed was perhaps unmatched. He claimed that the mental part of his game added 50 points to his lifetime batting average, which ended up at .366 or .367, depending on the statistical source. He instilled pure fear in opponents.

• Despite A.G. Spalding’s quest to prove baseball was an American invention created by Doubleday, the truth is that there is no single origin story for the sport. It evolved from a collection of earlier bat-and-ball games, and nobody truly knows precisely where it came from.

• Famous newspaper columnist George Will notes that he grew up between Chicago and St. Louis and made a horrible mistake. All his friends grew up liberal and happy and cheered for the Cardinals, while he grew up conservative and miserable and cheered for the hapless Cubs.

• In 1913, the New York Highlanders fully became the Yankees. The team moved from Hilltop Park to the Polo Grounds, where they shared a stadium with the New York Giants until moving into Yankee Stadium in 1923.

• A big chunk of the third episode revisits the Black Sox scandal. The scandal involved the 1919 World Series, when eight Chicago White Sox players were accused of conspiring to throw the championship to the Cincinnati Reds. They were acquitted of criminal charges in 1921, but new commissioner Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis banned all eight from baseball for life anyway.

• Most of the Black Sox players may have been, as the documentary portrays them, dumb fanboys who did not know much about finance. But the scandal also had a larger backdrop: White Sox owner Charles Comiskey had a reputation for being cheap, and the players were vulnerable to gamblers who understood how to exploit their resentments and financial frustrations.

• The white-haired Judge Landis became the game’s first commissioner and forced the owners to follow him in cleaning up the mess. Joe Jackson lost his livelihood, lived for another 30 years, and ran a liquor store.

• Soon entered Babe Ruth and all his home runs. He would bring the fans back and turn baseball into something bigger than it had ever been.

It is tough to believe there can ever be a world without Dolly Parton, but sure enough, she has passed away at age 80 after a brief battle with cancer. Parton was not just a country icon; she became a rare crossover figure whose songs, movies, philanthropy, and larger-than-life spirit made her feel like a permanent part of American life.

Although “Jolene,” which Billboard recently named the top country song of all time, “9 to 5,” and “Islands in the Stream,” written by the Bee Gees, are arguably Parton’s most famous songs, for my money, “Here You Come Again” is the most representative of her joyful and optimistic country-pop. It is the kind of song even the most jaded hipster could not possibly dislike. When you hear it, you just know Dolly is strutting your way.

She was already a country icon when, in 1980, she starred in 9 to 5 with Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, launching herself into a household name and flat-out sensation. She later used that status to open Dollywood in East Tennessee, near the Smoky Mountains. I visited a few years back and, not only were the rides exceptional, but the place was the cleanest and best-run amusement park I have ever seen.

Alongside Dollywood, Parton contributed in many ways to the betterment of society outside of the arts. She helped get millions of books into children’s hands across the world and also funded research that ended up going into the creation of the COVID-19 Moderna vaccine.

Alongside Ray Charles, Hank Williams, and Jimmie Rodgers, she stands among the rare artists honored by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Country Music Hall of Fame, and Songwriters Hall of Fame.

My nine favorite Dolly Parton songs:

9. “Love is Strange” (with Kenny Rogers)

8. “I Will Always Love You”

7. “Me and Bobby McGee” (with Kris Kristofferson)

6. “Please Please Please” (with Sabrina Carpenter)

5. “A Better Place” (with Glen Campbell)

4. “9 to 5”

3. “Jolene”

2. “Islands in the Stream” (with Kenny Rogers)

1. “Here You Come Again”

Nimrods is a movie about dumb kids who love rock music and will do anything to live the ethos. It’s a love letter from Green Day to all of us who have ever had those rock feelings.

I’ve had a lot of them: playing dumb shows opening for an over-the-hill Supertramp, jumping into a drum set before getting ejected from the former Cicero’s in St. Louis, and starting a dumb grade-school group called Starfire that played only “air” instruments.

Some of the best times in my life.

The antics in this new film are clearly representative of what the pre-Dookie life of big and fun failures was like for Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tré Cool. The band got the film made with the help of director Lee Kirk, who has directed an episode of The Office and the 2016 Armstrong vehicle Ordinary World.

Mason Thames, who starred in The Black Phone horror movies, leads his band out of the halls of their high school and onto a road trip with the belief that they have been offered an opening slot at Green Day’s Los Angeles New Year’s Eve concert. From there, the lovable dumb trio gets into a wide range of road-trip mishaps and endearing situations.

There are a few moments in the middle of Nimrods when the idiocy almost becomes too much to endure. But all is forgiven as the story hurdles toward a climax that is too enjoyable, especially for Green Day fans, not to love. It has the warmth of a story that clearly exists somewhere in the realm of what the real band must have faced early in its career.

★★★★☆ 4/5

Also on the comedy screen

Your Friends & Neighbors, Seasons 1 and 2

This is the Jon Hamm I’ve been craving ever since the end of my favorite TV show of all time, Mad Men. Andrew “Coop” Cooper is probably about as close as Hamm can get to another Don Draper-type role, but with a clever premise all its own.

Hamm plays Coop, who loses his high-flying finance job and decides there are other, more fulfilling ways to keep up with the neighbors in his 1-percenter New York City suburb. The first season is a masterwork as Coop lays out his strategy. Season 2 is only slightly less compelling, with James Marsden entering as the mysterious and vulgarly wealthy Owen Ashe.

Amanda Peet, Olivia Munn, Mark Tallman, Lena Hall, Hoon Lee, and Corbin Bernsen round out a tremendous ensemble cast behind Hamm.

★★★★★ 5/5

The Dink

I’m a sucker for anything in pop culture that promises a battle between pickleballers and tennis players and also features a couple of my all-time favorites, John McEnroe and Andy Roddick.

Unfortunately, the two of them and their admirable but borderline acting skills are about the best things in this Apple TV movie. Jake Johnson of New Girl fame plays a pickleballer with a grudge against life who, in an Adam Sandler-type setup, befriends Mary Steenburgen’s character.

But Johnson is no Sandler, and the supporting performances are no Sandler supporting performances. I’m not sure whether it is the writing or the acting, but normally reliable players who faceplant their bit parts include Ben Stiller, Fortune Feimster (although she might be the best bit part), Ed Harris, Patton Oswalt, Aaron Chen, and Chloe Fineman.

All that said, they do not make these kinds of comedies as often as they should anymore, and it is my favorite genre, so I appreciate the effort.

★★★☆☆ 3/5

Ted Lasso, Seasons 2 and 3

Oh man. Ted Lasso is where it’s at.

Three years passed, and I had not even finished Season 3, so I scrambled to do that now that Season 4 is out. It was amazing to get back in that locker room and hear Ted inspire his troops.

I love that he tells them to avoid all the junk that is passing through our lives all the time, like the whirlwind that was Zava, and find what they love in their hearts and minds as a way to do the thing the team wants: win again.

This is an undeniable TV treasure.

★★★★★ 5/5

When I was growing up, one of my most anticipated items to get in the mail was Rolling Stone. The rock journalists whose names I knew by heart from their bylines seemed almost mythical to me. I rarely knew what they looked like, except for the ruthless self-promoter types like Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O’Rourke, but their opinions helped shape how I understood music.

That’s why it’s sad to see that a familiar name has passed away, at age 76. Dave Marsh was a true pioneer of rock writing. He helped launch Creem from his hometown of Detroit, wrote regularly for Rolling Stone, including the magazine’s first cover story on Bruce Springsteen, and authored more than 25 books. Among them:

• Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story

• Before I Get Old: The Story of the Who

• The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, and

• Rolling Stone Record Guide.

Marsh could dole out negative reviews as easily as positive ones. He blasted bands like Queen, Aerosmith, Journey, Air Supply, and Kiss, even though I think each of those groups had their moments. More controversially, he called Led Zeppelin’s legendary drummer John Bonham “clinically incompetent,” said Freddie Mercury’s voice was just OK, and called the Grateful Dead the “worst band in creation.”

I can almost always find writing by famous rock journalists somewhere in my bookshelf collection. Here are a few Marsh nuggets I found, with the first two from Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay and the third from The Best of Rolling Stone: 25 Years of Journalism on the Edge.

Bruce Springsteen and Live/1975–1985

Back in the early days of massive box sets, Marsh took on Springsteen’s Live/1975–1985 and proved adept at getting the Boss to describe what many of his songs were about. In the end, as only a minor fan of Springsteen, I was not that absorbed in the article. But for true Bruce believers, Marsh really knocks it out of the park. He determines that all Springsteen is really trying to find out in his songwriting is whether love is real or not. Marsh, and the article, determine that the answer is yes.

★★★☆☆ 3/5

“Louie Louie” and the FBI

In 1963, there was a conspiracy going around that the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” featured dirty words, if only you played the single at 33⅓ instead of 45 RPM. Even J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI showed its cluelessness about the birth of rock ’n roll, conducting a 30-month investigation that accomplished nothing other than cementing the song’s legendary status.

Marsh writes: “America needs to foster panics like the ones over ‘Louie’ and Pee-Wee from time to time in order to have a way of releasing the tensions caused by so many self-consciously tightened sphincters, artificially dehydrated vulvas, and willfully suppressed erections.”

A hilarious slice of American history.

★★★★½ 4.5/5

Patti Smith’s Early Legend

Marsh reminisces about the first time he saw Patti Smith dancing in a New York City nightclub. She “grew up in a tougher part of New Jersey than Bruce Springsteen” and looked like Keith Richards without the rotting teeth.

The author does a really good job of describing Smith and how we would all come to know her legacy as an artiste’s artist, with quirky tales of her dreams about Brian Jones and adventures with Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard, John Cale, and others. It feels like Marsh helped make her legend with journalism that was cool and truly “on the edge,” a style that has always heavily influenced my own writing.

I have never been much into Smith’s music, but I love this Marsh sample.

★★★★½ 4.5/5

In other RIP news:

Other recent RIPs

Glen Hansard was an Irish musician who often made deeply moving, Dylanesque folk-pop. My favorite songs of his include “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” and the classic “Falling Slowly,” both with Markéta Irglová, along with “My Father’s Daughter” with Olivia Vedder and Eddie Vedder. Hansard died in a motorcycle crash near Dublin at 56.

Frank Beard was always highly memorable because he was the only non-bearded member of the Tex-Mex rock stars ZZ Top. The drummer died at 77, five years after the band’s bassist Dusty Hill left us. Beard provided the unmistakable shuffle that propelled classics like “La Grange,” “Tush,” and “Gimme All Your Lovin’.” It may be an unpopular opinion, but my favorite ZZ Top song of all may be “Rough Boy,” which is by far the band’s most ballad-like track. Beard’s drums are so cool and unique in holding it down over the five minutes.

Ben Jones, I mean, how do you not know Ben Jones? Probably if you are 40 or younger. But, I mean, we are talking Cooter here. What’s a Cooter, you say? Uh, the mechanic in The Dukes of Hazzard, that now-entirely-racist mega-hit show that all the kids, or at least boys, of my generation adored. Even the obits out there retain a bit of their racist touch, like Deadline’s mention that Jones “died of a massive heart attack while ‘resting in his favorite chair waiting for the Braves to come on and whoop the Yankees.’” In all seriousness, he was a fine person and fought for all kinds of good causes later in life. Jones died at 84.

Hayden Panettiere was an actor I became aware of when she played a superhero cheerleader in Heroes, a show that retained my interest for a short bit. She also starred in the 2009 film I Love You, Beth Cooper, which was not very good but was based on a book I loved and for which I got to write a review for a small, long-gone publication. She was sadly only 36.

Reggie Bannister was that weirdo who always seemed to have an excruciatingly large weapon in one of my favorite old horror-film series, Phantasm. He died at 80.

Tommy John was a guy I mostly knew from the stack of baseball cards I had featuring him in Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees uniforms. But the world knows him because of the type of elbow surgery pioneered on his arm, which spurred an awesome career post-knife. John died at 83 as the pitcher with the second-most wins since 1900 not to be elected to the Hall of Fame. He had 288.

Don Nelson amazingly has the second-most wins in NBA history. He coached the Milwaukee Bucks, Golden State Warriors, and New York Knicks and actually held the record for most wins before Gregg Popovich passed him in 2022. He died at 86.

This is an excerpt from the pop-culture memoir I’m writing.

I think most creative people would tell you that it’s difficult to turn an idea into an extended, coherent piece of work, especially if the work is supposed to be good. I’ve started many artistic endeavors in my life that were never finished, as well as several things that were finished and then quietly tucked away, hidden from civilization where they could do no further harm.

Still, I have completed a handful of projects that I’m proud of. Many of my various rock bands — Monotremes, Birmingham Squadron, Fine Wine, Funny Boy, The Sprogs chief among them — have released actual albums. For some reason, releasing music with a band has always seemed fairly manageable to me, though I understand it probably sounds monumentally impossible to many people, especially the ones who don’t know how to play any instruments.

Writing something of significant substance on my own and then publishing it feels harder. That is strange, considering that I have written thousands of articles since starting my blog in 2009, along with, back in childhood, dozens of homemade magazines, comic books, and other publications about sports, television, movies, and whatever else had temporarily seized control of my brain. But putting together something longer, something that resembles a memoir, or even a book with a spine and a purpose, remains something in the realm of intimidating, if only because I’ve had such a tough time just simply doing it.

One other project I finished, and one that sits pleasantly outside my usual territory, was a musical comedy I wrote with an old friend. Wiener Sausage: The Musical! ran for five nights during the 2008 D.C. Fringe Festival. The Washington Post called it “popular and tasteless,” which were the two qualities we had most pursued, there in the booths of the old Fox and the Hound tavern near Dupont Circle, with the discipline of Olympic athletes.

We eventually had bigger ambitions for the show. We imagined taking it to Chicago or some other city that appreciates wildly off-Broadway productions involving secret societies, megastores, apocalyptic dread, and, inevitably, sausages. Those plans did not materialize. But spending five years writing a musical and then actually putting it onstage remains one of the most gratifying accomplishments of my life. It is also a reminder that occasionally, against all statistical probability, an idea can escape my head and take grand physical form.

At the time, I was interviewed by The Washington Examiner about what it was like to have “a wild barroom dream of producing a musical” come to fruition. The reporter asked: “Wiener Sausage is an intriguing title, but what’s it about?”

I responded:

“Very hard to explain. It’s about everything and nothing. There’s an overwhelming philosophical message conveyed through a comedy about sex scandals, politics, war, death, secret societies, megastores, the media, the environment, and the Apocalypse.”

Looking back, that sounds a lot like the blog I have written over the years. We were apparently trying to pack every subject we cared about into a single 120-page musical script, while my blog, despite the traditional advice to keep blogs focused to a single topic like parenting or naked horseback riding, scrambles all over the map to be about books, movies, TV, music, sports, tennis, communications, transportation, politics, history … I could go on, but you get the point.

The story of Wiener Sausage did not begin with a grand plan to write a musical comedy. It began, as many ill-advised creative endeavors do, with cocktails at our afore-mentioned beloved grungy tavern during graduate school.

My friend and I were debating how to pronounce the word “smock,” the garment I had worn in my younger days while toiling at Walmart. We Googled it and somehow landed on a paper, I kid you not, by Dr. Uwe Schmock about Brownian motion and Wiener-sausage pathways, a perfectly serious concept in probability theory. A “Wiener sausage” is, in fact, the region traced out by a moving Brownian path, which is less funny than it sounds until you are two cocktails in and trying to pronounce “Schmock” with scholarly authority.

That was our moment of revelation. We named our master mad scientist Professor Schmock, and we decided he had invented the Wiener Sausage Derivative: a mysterious mathematical breakthrough capable of explaining the entire history of time. This seemed highly plausible to us then. It still seems only slightly less plausible than several things that have actually occurred in American public life since then.

The production was staged at Chief Ike’s Mambo Room, the beloved, since-closed Adams Morgan dive bar and dance club in Washington, D.C. There, in a performance space that may or may not have been designed for theatrical metaphysics, we attempted to solve the nation’s problems. Our show proposed, among many other things, that the mainstream media would stop doing a bad job, politics would stop being corrupt, and true love would always win in the end.

Once an idealist, apparently always an idealist.

We never revived the musical in the meaningful ways we had imagined. But in 2017, we did create a short-lived podcast loosely based on it. Listening back now, I find it wildly funny. I realize I am not an unbiased source on this question. Still, I think we were onto something.

I think I may be onto something with this blog too. That is why I hope that looking back over its years of articles about music, books, television, movies, sports, media, politics, history, and miscellaneous obsessions has produced an entertaining collection of stories, ones that tell us a little bit about who we are and where we’re headed as a society, and also who I am and where I’m headed. Hence the memoir part. A memoir achieved via reflections on our collective pop culture.

All my lit teachers in college would be rolling over in their graves, but I’m just not that into the iconic mid-1800s writer Nathaniel Hawthorne.

As I wrote back in 2011:

One of the things about Nathaniel Hawthorne, like with other authors such as William Faulkner and James Joyce and David Foster Wallace, is that it never feels like there's enough time in life. Ernest Hemingway is short and to the point. So is F. Scott Fitzgerald. But Hawthorne fills his writing with diversions into the deep thoughts of his characters and interruptions in story flow for his own speculations on motives and the narrator's interactions with the reader, like an 1800s version of TV's The Office.

That said, I had to admit that “The Scarlet Letter is one heck of a story.” Hawthorne certainly deserves his spot near the top of the pantheon of great writers, if only because he, as a resident of Salem, Massachusetts, helped document the story of the Salem Witch Trials, albeit a century-and-a-half after their conclusion. He had some right to continuing their legacy, as his great-great-grandfather John Hathorne was a judge in the trials and was the only one who never apologized for his role in the executions of young women suspected of being evil.

Even as books continue their arguably declining impact on our society, Hawthorne remains an influential figure. For one, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick was dedicated to him because Melville so cherished the author’s work.

He has a sway in pop culture too. Taylor Swift sings “we show off our different scarlet letters. Trust me, mine is better” in her song “New Romantics.” The Scarlet Letter also heavily influenced the screenplay of Emma Stone’s 2010 movie Easy A.

So, with all that hype, I decided to finally explore beyond Hawthorne’s greatest work. Unfortunately, I failed to truly enjoy any of the four Puritan-era short stories widely considered among his best.

“Young Goodman Brown” (1835)

The title character is a New England Puritan who finds his neighbors performing a satanic ritual in the woods. This leads him down a path of believing that humans are inherently evil and depraved. The description of life around the Salem witch-trial period is pretty great, but Hawthorne’s flowery language pulls down any hope for a truly page-turning plot.

★★★☆☆ 3/5

“The Minister’s Black Veil” (1836)

Reverend Hooper begins wearing a black veil for all his sermons and other occasions, which freaks out his congregation and leads them to think it represents their own evil nature. Other than again getting a nice representation of the fascinating period of Puritan New England, I mostly could care less about this story.

★★½☆☆ 2.5/5

“The Birthmark” (1843)

This one is relevant to today’s somewhat frivolous obsession with looks, image, and human perfection. A scientist becomes obsessed with removing a hand-shaped birthmark from his wife’s face, but it turns out that it is not a great idea to operate.

★★½☆☆ 2.5/5

“Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844)

This one is my favorite of the four stories I read and probably Hawthorne’s most praised work in the form. It takes place in Padua, Italy, in the garden of a medical researcher who grows poisonous plants. His daughter tends the plants and becomes immune to their effects, but she also becomes poisonous to other people.

Some have analyzed the father as God and the daughter and her suitor as Adam and Eve. Like the other three stories, I thought this one was written in such floral and poetic language that it could indeed be beautiful to some. To me, though, it was still a bore.

★★★☆☆ 3/5

I’ve read The Scarlet Letter twice now, and if I ever feel the need to read Hawthorne again, that is what I’ll turn to. Tried and true, and, after my latest round of further reading, quite possibly the lone monument to his legacy.

Long gone are the days when I embark on 1,000-page novels. But I made my way through one this summer that truly deserves a shout out. My journey began when I was recently reading a review that mentioned how Swan Song by Robert McCammon is an apocalyptic horror story that raises the bar on Stephen King’s The Stand.

Now that’s a heady pronouncement in my book. The Stand is always in my conversations about my favorite novels of all time. But Swan Song, released way back in 1987, is indeed somehow better. I have no idea how I had never heard about the book until now. My only knock against The Stand is that King didn’t really stick the landing, but Swan Song has no trouble offering memorable vignette after memorable vignette over the course of the epic tale and then punching a perfect conclusion.

The book begins with the United States and the USSR entering into a power struggle that quickly escalates into each of them bombing the other into oblivion. A nuclear winter sets in and we get the intermingled story of the packs of survivors struggling with each other and a host of other threats throughout the U.S.

The main characters are former wrestler Josh Hutchin, a girl with mystical powers named Sue “Swan” Wanda, a homeless woman with a magical glass ring named Sister Creep, Roland Croninger and Colonel Macklin who have survived in a fall-out shelter, and a shape-shifting villain very much in the vein of The Stand’s Randall Flagg.

Swan Song is basically a tale of the battle between good and evil. It tied for the 1987 Bram Stoker Award with, fittingly, Stephen King’s Misery. There are so many great scenes that the TV-series adaption in the works by Greg Nicotero, who directed dozens of episodes of The Walking Dead, should be ripe with inspiration.

★★★★★ 5/5

Bonus Review:

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

A sidenote is that I got perhaps overly ambitious and attempted to read another long novel right after finishing Swan Song. While The Secret History only reaches to about 600 pages, I had to bow out around 100 pages in. The premise intrigued me because I love stories of college kids, in that wonderful era of life when we all try to find ourselves. And my son is leaving soon for college in Vermont, where this novel takes place.

But I couldn’t get into the overly intellectual main characters who are focused on studying Greek and the many rambling side stories and schizophrenic style of Tartt’s writing. I kept giving it a chance, but it didn’t seem like it was going to go anywhere.

Spoiler alert, because this 1992 debut novel is sometimes considered a classic, I was able to find the synopsis online. We know from the first few pages, as reported by the student narrator Richard Papen, that he and his group of friends will murder one of their own. Later in the book, it’s discovered they do that deed because they need to cover up their separate murder of a farmer that occurred during a secret ritual.

The dark story unfolds how it all went south for the smitten Californian Papen, the brilliant Henry Winter, the volatile Bunny Corcoran, the twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay, and the wealthy Francis Abernathy, under tutelage of their professor Julian Morrow. I just didn’t have it in me to finish, but if I would have, I can image giving it:

★★★☆☆ 3/5

Here we are halfway through 2026. Usually, at this time of year, my “new albums to listen to” list in YouTube Music only has about 200 songs. That’s not too much to catch up to. But at the moment, I’m near 500 songs behind in my listening. So I will likely be playing catch up for the rest of the year, which is looking like another fruitful, maybe even exceptionally fruitful, year in rock. Here’s what I dug into throughout June.

The Boys of Dungeon Lane, Paul McCartney, ★★★★½ 4.5/5

The master’s latest gives a master class on how to combine classic Beatles and modern Taylor Swift to provide something still altogether new, with the first 10 songs being near perfect and the rest a little less immediately lovable, in a “Your Mother Should Know” kind of almost-still-great vibe.

Crawlspace of the Pantheon, Guided by Voices, ★★★★☆ 4/5

Doug Gillard’s big guitars seem as big as they’ve ever been throughout this latest GBV release. Leader Robert Pollard’s songs aren’t all great here, but openers “Lost in the Sun” and “Out With a Theory” show that the band, supposedly recently retired from touring, still intends to seriously rock in the studio. Other highlights include The Who-like “We Outlast Them All” and the ominous “Advance Without Dropping.”

Philadelphia’s been good to me, Kurt Vile, ★★★★½ 4.5/5

I’ve lost track of how many albums this artist has released, but this one is a lovable and gorgeous ode to his hometown and if you like the voices of Neil Young and J. Mascis, this might just be the formation of a perfect trifecta for you.

Graceful, Touch Girl Apple Blossom, ★★★★☆ 4/5

These Austin twee merchants, one of whom was in the excellent Hotline TNT, have produced a cute and shining debut album.

Distant Lands, Zzzahara, ★★★★☆ 4/5

The slacker indie-rock gems aren’t quite as plentiful as they were on 2025’s Spiral Your Way Out, but this L.A. songwriter is still bringing the bouncy fuzz that makes this music contagious.

Every Single Muscle, Bug Club, ★★½☆☆ 2.5/5

This Welsh duo was quickly becoming one of my favorite bands with its releases Rare Birds and Very Human Features. The Club has always had some misfires amongst its otherwise jaw-droppingly inspired Pavement pop, but the gems are few and far between here. Grab “Make It Count,” “Look Like Me,” and “All My Clothes Fell Off,” then leave the rest of these penis jokes for the bugs.

Anthology, The Clean, ★★★★½ 4.5/5

Many have claimed Pavement’s legendary sound hails most obviously from Wire, but my money says The Clean is the closest kin. For one thing, I love New Zealand’s The Clean much more than Wire, and this 46-track collection originally released in 2003 is essential proof.

I had forgotten why I was such a huge fan of Bad Company. In fact, there was a short time during my classic-rock phase in high school when Paul Rodgers was my favorite singer. But then I read a great article about the band in Mojo Magazine’s May issue that reminded me that these were “fugitives from legendary, fractious groups – Free, King Crimson, Mott The Hoople – yet would outsell them all with the help of notorious Led Zep manager Peter Grant.”

I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to dislike their best songs like “Can’t Get Enough,” “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” and “Shooting Star.” Bad Company’s catalog goes deeper, but if it went even further, it could almost compete with the likes of Led Zeppelin, Wings, and Big Star for my favorite bands of the 70s.

Anyway, here are some other interesting items I relearned from the article:

• In Free, Rodger’s and drummer Simon Kirke knew their band was doomed the night their gifted but wayward guitarist, Paul Kossoff, passed out and was writhing on the floor at Newcastle’s Fillmore North. The gig was cancelled, Kossoff was rushed to the hospital, and the venue’s manager told the audience that the guitarist had “tripped over some wires.” Really, he’d had a seizure brought on by withdrawal from the powerful sedative Mandrax. Kossof passed away in 1976.

• When Rodger’s and Kirk formed their next band, they were determined to learn their lessons, despite hitting it big with the song All Right Now,” from the many trials they endured in Free. Between 1974 and 1982, the original Bad Company (which included guitarist Mick Ralphs and bassist Boz Burrell) was signed to Led Zeppelin's Swan Song Records and managed by Zep’s handler Peter Grant.

• Mott The Hoople had recorded Ralphs’ “Ready For Love/After Lights” on 1972’s All The Young Dudes album, but had passed on another of his songs, “Can’t Get Enough.” Rodgers said, “Mick said he’d done it with Mott The Hoople, but I didn’t care, I said, Let’s do it again.”

• The original Bad Company’s final album, Rough Diamonds, received a lukewarm reception in August 1982. “Rough Diamonds was exactly that – rough apart from two or three tracks,” concedes Kirke. “Tempers were fraying and, in the end, it was Paul who decided to split.”

• “The death of [Zeppelin drummer] John Bonham and general exhaustion made me want to pull back before something in our camp gave way,” explains Rodgers. “Also, I had young children and was missing so much of their lives. We were flying too close to the sun.”

• Soon Grant went into seclusion. Rodgers made a solo album, 1983’s Cut Loose, before teaming up with Jimmy Page in the short-lived supergroup, The Firm. A redux Bad Company (with just Ralphs and Kirke) released six albums.

• Burrell died of a heart attack in 2006: “With a vodka in his hand, and a joint in the ashtray,” reports Kirke. In 2016, just days after playing London’s 02 Arena, Ralphs experienced a stroke. “Mick spent the last eight and three-quarter years of his life in bed and unable to walk or use his hands,” reveals Rodgers. Rodgers’ own health problems (including several strokes) meant he couldn’t fly to Los Angeles for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2025, and sent a message via video.

All the factors lined up nicely for me to really enjoy The Invite. First, it would be pretty tough to go wrong with a cast that includes Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton. Second, it is a dialogue-heavy play/movie in the style of one of my favorite directors Woody Allen. Third, it is always a pleasure to watch a film at the AFI Silver in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Rogen and Wilde play a bickering and bitter married couple who have loud-sex neighbors Cruz and Norton over for dinner. The focal point of the evening is a great idea for a script, and it brings into the light a topic not often discussed much in public: what if two people supposedly committed to each other no longer have sex? I think the script may be a little too much for many people to emotionally handle, but I loved the movie.

The players changed considerably over the course of production, as Amy Adams, Paul Rudd, and Tessa Thompson were originally cast, but then Wilde took over as director and star. And it is no wonder there is an Allen vibe, since it is dedicated to Woody’s main muse, Diane Keaton.

★★★★☆ 4/5

Louie C.K.: Ridiculous

I used to love the comedy TV show Louie before it was suddenly ripped off the air because of its star’s off-camera issues. But the world, or at least Netflix, has decided to give Louis C.K. a second chance, and his schtick is back in pretty good form with this often uncomfortable stand-up performance.

He offers stories on a litany of taboo topics such as AIDS, the Holocaust, breastfeeding from his mother, and happily putting his father in a nursing home. I also went back and watched some of his really early stand-up performances, and I was surprised at how much funnier I think Louis C.K. is now compared with then.

★★★★☆ 4/5

Rooster, season 1

When last I saw Steve Carell, he was suffering through a broken relationship in The Four Seasons. The former Office leader and Daily Show correspondent has truly upped his game as a dramatic actor while retaining the laughs that are on display in this great show.

Carell’s character, Greg, gets sucked into life at a New England college by his professor daughter and the dean, played excellently by Charly Clive and John C. McGinley, showing the quirkiness he displayed in Scrubs. Phil Dunster from Ted Lasso is also part of a great cast overall. For anyone looking for a show about life in college or the professor experience, it does not get much better than this one.

★★★★½ 4.5/5

Shrinking, seasons 2 and 3

Apple TV really has the best entertainment going lately, and this show starring Jason Segel, Harrison Ford, and Jessica Williams might be the best of it all. Ted McGinley, who I thought was same guy who played Monroe in Too Close for Comfort (but he’s not, that was Jim Bullock) also steals every scene he is in as the lovable and semiclueless husband and dad next door.

Each episode is a powerhouse of comedy and rigorous emotion. I think this is one of the greatest documentations of friendship that has ever hit the small screen.

★★★★★ 5/5

The Pitt, season 2

I was gripped by season 1, and the stranglehold continues with the hospital drama’s latest episodes. Noah Wyle deserves another Best Actor Emmy for his role in keeping his hospital staff in the emergency room together through an awful day of July Fourth fireworks mishaps and much more.

The ensemble characters continue to develop more fully this season, and if there was ever a hospital show I could strongly recommend, it is this rolicking one based in Pittsburgh.

★★★★★ 5/5

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael

This is an odd movie from 1990 that I had originally missed. Jeff Bridges is just fine as a pseudo-grieving widower of sorts. But the real revelation, not unexpectedly, and the draw for me in trying it, is Winona Ryder.

She was in her era when it was impossible for me to take my eyes off her edgy and mega-talented gift for acting. It is a bit of a pre-reality-TV story in which hometown girl Roxy leaves to become a star and becomes something somewhat less than a true celebrity, a little like what reality-TV stars are now. The mystery lies in what will happen when Roxy returns to town.

It is a very sweet coming-of-age story in many ways and worth a watch if only for Ryder.

★★★☆☆ 3/5

As a former student at the London School of Economics, it is no surprise that Dave Kendall was perhaps the most intellectual voice of all the MTV video jockeys. More importantly, he helped define one of the most important eras in music television by giving alternative rock a national stage at exactly the right time.

Kendall passed away this month at age 63, but he leaves behind a storied legacy as the creator of MTV’s 120 Minutes, which ran from 1986 to 2003 and was a must-watch show for me for most of those years. He was also the host from 1986 to 1992. I watched more religiously during the later Matt Pinfield-hosted years simply because I liked college rock a lot more in the few years after ’92 than I did in the years before it, when I had left behind my earlier indie roots for my hair-metal-pop phase.

I digress. Kendall played an instrumental part in the moment when rock history shifted, when he announced the September 29, 1991 world premiere of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video.

Kendall and later Pinfield, and MTV by extension, played a major role in expanding the popularity of the kind of music I loved, like the Replacements, R.E.M., Dinosaur Jr., Teenage Fanclub, the Lemonheads, Pavement, Guided by Voices, Sebadoh, Pixies, Sonic Youth, Jane’s Addiction, and countless others. This was a time, at least prior to Nirvana, when you could almost count the number of college-rock radio stations on two hands, and the fact that these guys were giving it a spotlight on national TV, albeit cable, is pretty mind-blowing in retrospect.

Some of the bands the Welsh-accented Kendall, whose taste was relatively different from mine, loved to feature included the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Ride, and Lush. But we definitely shared a passion for the Jesus and Mary Chain, and it was very cool how he helped share this second wave of the British Invasion with American ears. Kendall also helped provide a path to success for countless record labels, including 4AD, Creation Records, Rough Trade Records, and Sub Pop, that might not have lasted without MTV exposure.

After leaving the channel, the VJ continued as a fixture in the alterna world with frequent appearances on radio, podcasts, and live events, and as a freelance music writer, a SiriusXM host, and a correspondent for the Bangkok Post, reporting on environmental causes. He recently lived in Thailand and Indonesia.

My 5 favorite MTV VJs, ranked

1. Martha Quinn. Without a doubt, one of my major childhood crushes, and I tried to almost never miss her when she was on air.

2. Matt Pinfield. He kind of stumbled and blubbered as a public speaker, but he no doubt knew his alternative-rock facts and was a true musician’s VJ.

3. J.J. Jackson and Mark Goodman, tied. They were less rock-star-like, but both were smart and engaging.

4. Dave Kendall. He defined 120 Minutes and arguably should be tied with Pinfield higher on this list.

5. Alan Hunter and Pauly Shore. This rounds out the list to be somewhat fully representative of MTV, between the very knowledgeable pioneer and the idiotic but lovable and entertaining one (who surprisingly VJed for a whopping five years).

Other recent notable RIPs in the pop-culture world

Wilford Lloyd “Bud” Baumes, who developed one of my childhood favorite ABC TV shows, The Love Boat, passed away at 86. To envision the show, he combined the ideas of Love, American Style and real-life cruise director Jeraldine Saunders’ 1974 memoir The Love Boats.

Bonnie Tyler was all over MTV when I was a kid with her Meat Loaf-like, catchy but arguably overly long power ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” She passed away at 75 due to complications from surgery and a subsequent coma.

Dave Stimson, a co-founder of the punk zine and record label Touch & Go, has passed away at an unknown age. I rank Slint’s Spiderland as my favorite album ever on that label.

Sam Neill was known globally for his role as a paleontologist in the Jurassic Park movies. He had a long acting career and passed away from blood cancer at age 78.

William D. Zabel was a lawyer who got a bunch of the money back for the victims of the Bernie Madoff mega-swindle. He passed away at 89.

Lindsey Graham was an incredibly lame, flip-floppy politician who has passed away.

I’ve been traveling to the Outer Banks in North Carolina just about every year since I was five years old. In the early days, my parents and two older brothers would hop into the station wagon and bounce around in the far back, hanging out the windows. Highways and backroads were the thing, as completely connected interstates between Southern Illinois and the Atlantic Ocean weren’t around yet.

Some of my favorite memories included camping in the Smoky Mountains on the North Carolina-Tennessee border and gazing out the window, imagining what life must be like for the people in the houses throughout the South and in the mountains. One time, my oldest brother was driving and jumped a set of railroad tracks at such a speed and angle that the car flew through the air like a scene from Smokey and the Bandit. We landed with a flat tire. Another time he stepped in dog poop, got in the car, and caused a full evacuation of my family just moments later.

Nowadays, we do not get those kinds of memory moments anymore. My brothers and I and all the different pockets of my dad’s family come to the beach from our various corners: Oregon, Louisiana, Maryland and Washington, D.C., Florida, and Seattle. But for one week, which just finished up, we all get to see each other again, and different memories are made: body surfing the waves, frat-boy-like jumping off the second-story deck into the pool (thanks to my nutty son), looking for shells and walking on the beach, golf and tennis, puzzles on the tables, miniature golf, great food and drinks, and nonstop laughing. My family loves to laugh.

This year we added a new adventure. I’ve taken small boat rides in the Outer Banks before, but I had never done one on a tourist boat. The one we took held about 40 people, and the time frame of 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. worked well because, first, much longer and it would have simply gotten too hot, and second, I do not like to be away from the beach and all that fun back at our rental house. It was billed as a dolphin and wild horse sightseeing tour. The company, Lookout Cruises, based in Beaufort, North Carolina, runs several other types of rides, including a six-hour afternoon and sunset one for more of the drinking crowd, wedding rides, and probably just about any ride you would want to reserve. I am pretty sure they would accommodate you.

We oddly never saw any dolphins, but we did see the horses and lots of birds. The perspective of that area of the southern tip of the Outer Banks was well worth the ride. The captain pointed out the direction to the Intracoastal Waterway, which offers a 200-plus-mile shot northeast to Virginia Beach without ever having to enter the open sea. Then we sailed to parts of Bogue Sound that I have mostly only seen from the confines of Tony’s Sanitary Market restaurant in Morehead City and other land-based vantage points. I have still never been to the legendary Shackleford Banks (legendary in my family at least; I think we just like the sound of the two words together), but it was gorgeous to get so close to the long strip and those storied feral horses who reside there.

We sailed around Fort Macon State Park, which I have visited several times and is both the second-most-visited state park in North Carolina and, according to Wikipedia, where Confederate soldiers lived for a year in preparation for battle while equipping it with 54 heavy cannons. The Rachel Carson Reserve is named for a famous environmentalist author and is an official NOAA National Estuarine Research Reserve site. We could see the breathtaking Cape Lookout Lighthouse in the distance, with its unique checkered design: the center of the black diamonds points in a north-south direction, while the center of the white diamonds points east-west. We passed the cool little 1,000-plus-population community on Harkers Island and then went past the jaw-dropping mansions that have consumed the Beaufort shoreline in recent years.

I clearly love the Outer Banks, and if you have not been, I highly recommend it as one of the greatest treasures among the many across the United States. There are so many magnificent places across the country to get to on our travel lists, but of all the locales I’ve been on the Atlantic coast, there is no comparison, whether it is other beautiful shorelines in Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, or Maine.

Washington Irving played a major role in inventing the American short story, and I think his best-known tales still endure because they turn the anxieties of a young nation into entertaining, memorable myths.

Ichabod Crane and Rip Van Winkle are perhaps the most famous post-American Revolution characters, and they were both created by Irving. I hadn’t revisited his most famous stories since I was in my teens and thought it was time to re-read “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” and also sample another of his most famous short stories that I’ve never read called “The Spectre Bridegroom.”

In the lineage that would later be followed by Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King, I can now confirm that I have been reminded of the true greatness of Irving.

A little background: he was born the year the Revolutionary War ended, and the three stories I just finished reading were heavily shaped by that historical marker.

Beyond the brilliance of the stories themselves, there are several reasons Irving remains one of our most prominent authors of the era. One big reason is that he was the first “professional” American writer who made a living from it, when writing was still considered a hobby for anyone outside the fields of politics or religion. In an 1828 book about Christopher Columbus, Irving mentioned a tale from about 350 years earlier about the world being flat, which he jokingly revived but which has since become a piece of misinformation embraced by some people still. He primarily wrote about New York and coined the terms “Gotham” and “Knickerbocker.” In the 1840s, he was an ambassador to Spain. Through his writings about British holiday traditions, he unintentionally preserved many of the ideas we have about Christmas and heavily inspired authors like Charles Dickens, who would further influence the way Americans celebrate.

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” ★★★★★ 5/5

In a sleepy hollow north of Manhattan on the Hudson River, a character named Ichabod Crane comes from Connecticut to teach children in a setting filled with superstitious residents. It’s around the year 1790, and Ichabod has developed a crush on the wealthy Katrina Van Tassel, but he is in competition for her heart with the less refined, bold, and mischievous Abraham “Brom Bones” Van Brunt. After a party, when the story is recounted of a headless horseman still haunting the area since the war, Ichabod is assaulted and disappears.

The moral is that superstition and the greed of wanting to marry a wealthy partner can overwhelm the mind and become a person’s worst enemy. The tale also reinforces that stories passed through history can be an important cohesive force in building shared community identities, especially in postwar America.

“Rip Van Winkle,” ★★★★★ 5/5

This one may be even better. It is funny, a must-read for all, and asks, like with Ichabod Crane, what the disappearance of a man means. Van Winkle is a Dutch American who lives in the Catskill Mountains before the American Revolution has occurred. He is admired and loved by just about all the townspeople except his nagging and irritated wife. One day, while squirrel hunting, he meets some other people and gets drunk before falling asleep high in the hills. When he wakes up, he soon learns that the Revolutionary War happened, his wife and many other villagers have died, and he has offspring who recognize him. He has been missing for 20 years.

The moral is that laziness and escapism may happen with an individual, but life and society roll along whether they are with it or not. “Rip Van Winkle” became one of the first and most popular folktales in postwar American history.

“The Spectre Bridegroom,” ★★★☆☆ 3/5

This story goes to show that dabbling in an author’s short stories can tell you most of what you need to know and how much time to invest with that writer in terms of your own reading time-management budget. The first two stories are beyond question must-reads and, it turns out, probably and thankfully the only time you need to commit to Irving. This tale, set in Germany, is widely regarded as his third best and, frankly, it’s far inferior.

This story goes to show that dabbling in an author’s short stories can tell you most of what you need to know and how much time to invest with that writer in terms of your own reading-time budget. The first two stories are beyond question must-reads and, it turns out, probably the only ones you need to commit to Irving. This tale, set in Germany, is widely regarded as his third best, and frankly, it is far inferior.

This is an excerpt from the pop-culture memoir I’m writing.

I’ve always been an enthusiastic writer, which should come as no surprise since you’re currently holding a book I wrote.

The kind of writing I’ve most often gravitated toward is documenting the pop culture that has shaped my life, or at least distracted me from it in meaningful ways. As a kid, I wrote thousands of movie reviews, complete with star ratings, and compiled them into a thick manuscript. Years later, I discovered I hadn’t actually seen some of the movies I reviewed. I think I just liked the idea of reviewing movies, and jotting down the short versions of their plots and premises.

I also created comic books, started novels, wrote short stories, and assembled elaborate sports and music magazines that had no readership beyond myself and a sprinkling of confused yet admiring and loving relatives. My interests kept circling back to music and movies, and then outward to books, TV, and whatever else caught my attention at the time. I love tennis, so I’ve used writing to track my own improvement and to analyze the sport’s colorful characters, such as Andre Agassi, whose memoir Open fits my parameters and contains enough introspection to make you reconsider both your backhand and your life choices.

I’m a communicator by trade, which means I also spend time thinking about media, marketing, and how stories get told. And because curiosity is a slippery slope, I occasionally wander into topics like architecture, transportation, and history.

At heart, I’m still a journalist, which is how I began my career. I write things down because it helps me remember what I’ve seen and heard. Without that record, my memory becomes unreliable to the point of self-sabotage. There are times I can’t remember if I’ve even seen a movie or heard an album, so I search my own blog to find out what I thought. I consider it less like reflection and more like outsourcing my brain to a younger, slightly more opinionated version of myself.

In 2009, I started Pop Culture Lunch Box. In the early days, I was publishing nearly a post a day. If I knew myself better I’d say that may have been some kind of cry for help. Luckily that pace didn’t last. Life (jobs, family, friends) intervened, as it tends to do. Some years were more productive than others. But I never stopped entirely, and I’ve come to believe that showing up consistently is at least half the job. The other half is trying, however slowly, to get better.

When I began this book, I spent months wrestling with outlines that went nowhere. Eventually, I realized I might not need one. This is either a very good idea or a very bad one. But in a sense, I’ve already been outlining this book for more than a decade through the blog itself. This is just the moment where I admit that publicly.

If I’ve learned anything with age (a fool’s bet), it may be that time is finite and the amount of available pop culture is not. I will never read everything, watch everything, or listen to everything that is on my to-do lists. So I’ve started adjusting my approaches. For example, I read short stories by the masters as a way of sampling their work before committing to larger, more intimidating novels like Moby-Dick, Crime and Punishment, or Ulysses, the kinds of books I have started multiple times and abandoned with the quiet confidence of someone who is assured I will live to read them on another day.

I could have made this book a simple “greatest hits” collection from Pop Culture Lunch Box. That would certainly be easier. But I’m not sure how valuable that would be to you, or to me, beyond nostalgia. Instead, I went back to the beginning and started reading my earliest posts, looking for threads worth pulling.

The first post I ever wrote was titled “James Howard Kunstler’s Apocalypto Nation,” about a sci-fi book by an author who I described as “a poor man’s Cormac McCarthy.” I abandoned it after one chapter and still felt compelled to write about it, which tells you something about both my attention span and, at the time, my confidence level. My second post followed a similar pattern. “Joan Rivers is Made of Plastic Surgery” covered a book by a comedian I admired, but after about ten minutes of reading, my interest collapsed entirely. It didn’t just sour me on the book and further on the general idea of plastic surgery, it downgraded Rivers slightly in my personal rankings. As you’ll soon see, my personal rankings is something I take very seriously.

This brings me to the obvious question: What is this book actually about, and who is it for?

I didn’t fully know when I started writing it, which could be viewed as either freeing or irresponsible. Possibly both. My hope is that it functions like the work of writers I admire such as Chuck Klosterman and David Sedaris. The joy of reading those authors comes not just from the destination, but from the accumulation of wit and societal observations along the way. You don’t always know where the story is going, but you trust that it’s filled with interesting landmarks all along the way.

If I’m lucky, some of the humor of writers like Woody Allen and Steve Martin will surface here and there. There’s a particular pleasure in encountering a sentence so sharp or strange that you have to read it twice just to confirm it exists. I felt that recently while reading Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.” When Rip returns from a mysterious 20-year absence and encounters a younger version of himself in his old village, he exclaims, “That’s somebody else got into my shoes,” a line which I read over and over, laughing out loud every single time. Irving’s stories are often treated like historical artifacts, but I found them genuinely funny, full of small, perfectly timed lines that elevate them from relics to something still bursting with life.

Maybe that’s part of the thesis here. I’ve spent years consuming books, music, movies, TV, and whatever else the culture throws at me, and this is my attempt to make sense of it, to build a set of recommendations, reflections, and arguments about what’s worth your time. Not definitive answers, but informed opinions, which are sometimes even better.

The inimitable Mr. Rogers once asked, “Won’t you be my neighbor?” This book is a version of that invitation. We’re all sorting through the same overwhelming pile of culture, trying to decide what matters. These are my lists, my reactions, my attempts to connect the dots. You may agree with them, or you may think I’m completely wrong. Ideally, both.

James Taylor is one of those artists who is quietly woven into the background of American life, and seeing him live at the age of 78 underlined that fact for me. Even if some of his albums are uneven, the best songs and the way he delivers them in concert have a warmth and staying power.

I remember Taylor being one of the first pop voices in my house as a kid. My parents had a copy of Walking Man, which, it turns out, isn’t a very good album, but there must have been others, because his classic hits are also firmly lodged in those early memories.

By now, he was among the handful of favorite artists I hadn’t seen in concert. That changed when I went with a large group of relatives to catch him on a hot summer night at the Saratoga Springs Performing Arts Center (SPAC). Taylor has survived a lot, including a heroin addiction, but he’s still got it on the guitar and has a crack band of session musicians behind him.

After a handful of songs I was only vaguely familiar with, once “Mexico” and “Shower the People” played, it was pretty much a greatest-hits show from there on out, with a sprinkling of insightful and fitting political commentary. One example is a story about how Richard Nixon didn’t like to appear in public and, when he did, his walk was kind of a primordial one.

Taylor soared with four songs that will likely survive very far into the future: “Country Road,” Carole King cover “You’ve Got a Friend,” “Carolina in My Mind,” and “Fire and Rain.” And “Sweet Baby James” was a fitting closer for the evening.

It was my fourth night in a row at concerts, after attending the three-day Solid Sound festival in Massachusetts, which might be a personal record. The mellow vibe of Taylor and SPAC’s lawn was a great way to come down from all the music.

Here are my 17 favorite JT tracks, in order, with “Carolina” being tops, and what I would consider the essential collection:

1. Carolina in My Mind

2. You’ve Got a Friend

3. Fire and Rain

4. Up on a Roof

5. Country Road

6. Your Smiling Face

7. Sweet Baby James

8. Shower the People

9. Mexico

10. Walking Man

11. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight

12. How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)

13. Handyman

14. Everyday

15. Her Town Too (with J.D. Souther)

16. Something in the Way She Moves

17. Copperline

Victor Willis was perhaps the most recognizable member of the gay-icon disco-era band Village People. My favorite Christmas gift one year as a small kid was the band’s double album Live N Sleazy. The lead-singing cop fronted the Halloween-ready band, which had major smashes that included “YMCA,” “Macho Man,” “Go West,” and “In the Navy.” Lots of homophobic people have ridiculed the Village People over the years, but there’s no irony there for the anti-LGBTQ U.S. president Donald Trump, as he regularly includes the band’s music in his MAGA rally soundtracks. He passed away at age 74.

Gene Shalit was someone I listened to frequently going up, inspiring me to often write my own movie reviews from his perch on NBC’s Today. He has arguably been the most influential movie critic behind only Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. Shalit was almost as much of a comedian as a critic, and his frizzy hair, huge mustache, and bow ties helped form a very memorable image. He passed away at 100.

James Burrows co-created and directed Cheers and directed tons of other classic TV episodes, including ones for Taxi, Friends, Frasier, Will & Grace, Two and a Half Men, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, Laverne & Shirley, and The Big Bang Theory. He passed away at 88.

Stacey King was a player from a time long ago when I followed the NBA closely. That’s because the Oklahoma college superstar went on to be a key supporting player of my beloved Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls championship teams of the 1990s. King went on to become a TV announcer for the Bulls. He has passed away at the age of 59.

Doug Goldstein was the longtime manager of Guns N’ Roses, and was usually the “good cop” on the destructive rockers’ management team. But one example of him laying down the law was when Slash broke a TV and he took it out of the guitarist’s personal funds. Slash was not happy. Goldstein passed away at 65.

Peabo Bryson was not the kind of super-duper soft pop in my wheelhouse. While he’s apparently most known for Disney songs “A Whole New World” and “Beauty and the Beast,” my faves are the soaringly cheesy “If Ever You’re in My Arms Again” (“the best of romancin’/deserves second chancin’”) and the anticipatory-sex duet with Roberta Flack “Tonight I Celebrate My Love.” He passed away at 75 from a stroke.

Clive Davis discovered Whitney Houston and helped musicians wind their way through the passages of fame, including Aretha Franklin, the Grateful Dead, Santana, the Kinks, Dionne Warwick, Barry Manilow, Air Supply, Patti Smith, and many others, mostly through the label he started called Arista. He passed away at age 94.

Joe Negri was the musical handyman on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and appeared in a whopping 331 episodes. He helped Fred Rogers develop the children’s show and passed away at age 99.

Walter Parazaider was a founding and long-time member of yacht-rock legends Chicago, notably playing saxophone on“Just You ‘n’ Me” and a flute solo on “Colour My World.” He had the idea that the band should include horns. Parazaider had Alzheimers and passed away at 81.

Alan Greenspan is the kind of person I don’t typically write about because finance and economics aren’t really my best, but he was a giant while leading the Federal Reserve under four presidents. I think Donald Trump has already had about four under just his administration! Greenspan was also married to journalist Andrea Mitchell and had many hobbies and interests, including baseball, football, and tennis. He had Parkinson’s and has passed away at 100.

Lee Raymond was one of the most outspoken anti-climate change oil executives in history. As CEO of ExxonMobile, he made countless enemies with environmentalists and basically anyone who believes industry needs gatekeeping safeguards. He passed away at 87.

David Hockney came of age in Swinging 60s London before moving to Los Angeles and luxuriated his art in the sunny colors of his surrounding landscape of swimming pools and suntanning men. He passed away at age 88.

When someone like Kasey Musgraves continues to make albums of such stunning beauty and emotionalism, it’s very difficult to pigeonhole the artist into a musical genre as fluffy as Top 40 pop-country. That’s the obvious home for Musgraves, but 2018’s Golden Hour, 2021’s star-crossed, and 2025’s Deeper Well were popular and artistic achievements that might only be topped by Taylor Swift, in terms of having strings of consistently excellent releases. And now we’ve got a fourth in a row …

Middle of Nowhere, Kacey Musgraves, ★★★★½ 4.5/5

Musgraves has officially placed herself as my favorite artist in a genre that might be called new-country-pop. Her insightful metaphors represent some of today’s best storytelling in any genre, and, on this album, she appears to be a free-agent in the game of love, and her journey is fascinating.

Parallel Stride, Doug Gillard, ★★★★½ 4.5/5

The guitar master of Guided by Voices doesn’t disappoint with yet another great solo album, with a pop sound and crunching licks that sound just like the title suggests. The guy’s got a serious strut.

Something Worth Waiting For, Friko, ★★★½☆ 3.5/5

This album is testament again to the powerful young Chicago indie-rock scene happening right now. While some of the songs grind on me, the highlights like “Hot Air Balloon” and “Seven Degrees” display some of the stylings that made Arcade Fire great when that band was firing on all cylinders. I would think great things could be ahead for Friko.

Your Favorite Toy, Foo Fighters, ★★★½☆ 3.5/5

The Foos’ first three albums remain true 1990s classics, but I don’t think the band has ever matched those works at any point this century. That said, more than half of this album is well worth adding to your library. It starts and ends strong, with a noticable dip in quality throughout the middle.

I Used to Go to This Bar, Joyce Manor, ★★★½☆ 3.5/5

A short but loud and clear release from these California emo rockers who have been around for a decade and a half. I’ve never known much about them until now, but this is fun stuff.

Moo, King Tuff, ★★★½☆ 3.5/5

This Vermont band always satisfies with its form of laid-back classic rock, and this album is another good one, with “Backroads,” “Invisible Ink,” and the Tom Petty-like “Unglued” supplying the high points.

Attitude Adjustment, Buzzcocks, ★★★½☆ 3.5/5

I can’t believe this is only the pop-punk legends’ eleventh album. I also can’t believe how immaculate the first five songs are. They have a distinctive big-party, late 1990s-era Guided by Voices feel. The rest is pretty ho-hum, but I haven’t heard a better stretch of five in 2026 yet.

Look for Your Mind!, The Lemon Twigs, ★★★½☆ 3.5/5

Some of my least favorite elements of this, the Long Island brothers’ sixth proper album, are surprisingly the ones that still sound fab but are so committedly derivative of early works by the Beatles and Beach Boys, two of my most favorite bands ever. The songs I keep returning to have more of the Twigs’ personal touch, including “2 or 3,” “Nothin’ But You,” and “Fire and Gold.”

Doctor Faith, Christopher Cross, ★★★½☆ 3.5/5

Cross was hailed as a major pop star with the 1979 and 1983 releases of his first two albums. Those alone were enough to earn him a lifetime of goodwill in my eyes. This latest release supposedly doesn’t have any music from later than 2010, but it’s still welcome. Opener “Hey Kid” is among my very favorite of any of his songs. The quality thins with the last several songs but this is still a treat for Cross and yacht-rock fans everywhere.

Maitreya Corso, Maya Hawke, ★★★½☆ 3.5/5

I think this fourth release from the New York-based Stranger Things actress is a big step up in songwriting quality. From beautiful ballads to more rocking tunes, there are plenty to like here, and some of my favorites are “Love of My Life,” “Last Thoughts on Morning Star,” and “Great Minds.”

Slippers 08, Slippers, ★★★★½ 4.5/5

This mysterious little band has welcome echoes of the poppier sides of the 1990s Elephant 6 musical collective as well the Lemonheads’ Aussie side projects with Tom Morgan. The whole thing is a joy to listen to and will brighten up any indie-pop lover’s day, while “Wants for Everyone,” “Wasted Tonight,” and “Til You Know” are each in the running for my favorite songs of the year.

Brink, Girl Scout, ★★★½☆ 3.5/5

I didn’t think I liked this album until I got to the seventh track, “Operator,” which is in the running for my song of the year. I went back again and listened, and now I’m a fan of the whole collection, from a band of Swedes in a Snail Mail vein.

We leisurely packed up our camping sites and headed to the third and final day of Wilco’s Solid Sound, with a shorter Sunday in store than Friday’s driving and half-day fest and Saturday’s epic full day of music and arts.

Again grabbing some seats on Joe’s Lawn, this time with two days under our belts for where to have optimal sights and sounds, we then headed into the museum to see some really cool modern art. That led us to stumble upon a soundcheck by Jeff Tweedy’s son Sammy. We came back to see his main show as well, which featured him in the center of a long space singing and dancing to swirly electro backbeats. Dad Jeff was also milling about.

Next we took in some of the art, including Laurie Anderson’s fascinating works, while Hannah Cohen’s performance echoed just outside.

One of the day’s most anticipated performances for me was the Autumn Defense. Earlier this year, I wrote that the band’s new album, Here and Nowhere, displayed “part of the reason why Wilco is so good. Even its bass player John Stirratt and keyboard/guitarist Pat Sansone can release a once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece like almost nobody else can.” They did not disappoint and I was excited to be down in front at the somewhat more intimate Courtyard C. They carry a lot of Americana references in their sound, such as the Eagles, the Jayhawks, America, and even quite a few yacht-rock touches.

A brief rainstorm hit for Nels Cline’s set in the spacious but open-air Courtyard D, so many attendees creatively found cover while doing their best to still listen. I went into an upstairs area with the bourbon and soda I ordered from a semi-hidden bar. I was happy to get that because I frankly wasn’t a huge fan of the beers and canned cocktails available throughout the venue.

The weekend rounded out with a bang as Tweedy and Friends launched into their set on Joe’s Field just as the skies cleared into bright sunshine. “One Tiny Flower” was the first song, just as it is on his 2025 30-song masterpiece Twilight Override. The two-hour, 24-song set was different but every bit as great as the Wilco one the night before. His kids and their friends who make up the band are so likable and talented. Highlights include “Feel Free,” “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter,” and covers “Hot Stuff” by Donna Summer, “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver, and closer “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” by Bob Dylan. Special guests included all of Wilco and many of the bands who had performed throughout Solid Sound.

Solid Sound was three days of good-vibing music and art and community strengthening led by a person, Jeff Tweedy, who clearly has proven that he is worthy of being one of our country’s great leaders. The mountain mecca festival was every bit worth the effort of visiting all the way from Maryland and getting to see Wilco in a truly unique environment.