I’ve been thinking a lot recently about which albums I return to again and again as full albums. Since streaming has made it trivially easy to only listen to songs you like, I think many of us listen to playlists rather than albums. I do listen to albums I’ve bought on Bandcamp as full albums, but otherwise, I mostly listen to Sirius radio or playlists.
But there are some albums I like to listen to in their complete form. So I thought I’d share them with you not to show how cool I am (I mean, sure, that too) , but also because I’m always interested in music recommendations from real people, so maybe you will be too.
Hey, so I’ve noticed that the definition of “one-hit wonder” seems to be shifting a little bit. Or maybe I’ve just misunderstood it all along. So I wanted to take a minute to address this crucially important issue.
I saw Supergirl during the last heat wave. (So like, 2 weeks ago?). I knew it didn’t do well with critics and that the box office had been underwhelming by blockbuster movie standards, but I liked it a lot.
I was as surprised as you that I got an invite! Here’s what happened: on arrival, we were ushered into what looked like a fairly traditional wedding chapel that had been custom built inside Madison Square Garden.
Back in 2013, my elder daughter was in the improv group in her high school. The co-captain of the improv team was a girl named Ayo Edebiri.
So I’ve seen Ayo Edebiri perform live on stage many times, though, before Sunday, it was only in high school improv shows. I joked before we went to see Proof that the fact that we’d seen her in so many high school improv shows surely meant that Ayo should comp us some tickets to her broadway debut.
(I should point out that she and my daughter were friendly but not close, and I think Ms. Edebiri could probably pick my daughter out in a crowd but certainly not me or my wife.)
Anyway, so we were excited to see Proof, and I knew very little about it except that Ayo (because we’re all on a parasocial first name basis with her in our house) and Don Cheadle were in it.
Several years back I was broke and working 4 jobs and extremely frustrated about how hard it was to get around on the MBTA. (I was literally trying to get from Community College to Downtown Crossing on the Orange Line, which should be a simple thing but never was.). Frustrated, I started a website challenging Massachusetts politicians to take the T.
One of the frustrating things about getting older is that you start noticing that people are stuck in their ways and unwilling or unable to do the simple things necessary to solve most problems.
“You just don’t understand. It’s complicated,” say people, like, for example, Massachusetts legislators, who know damn well it’s not complicated—they just don’t actually want to do anything.
Let’s take Boston traffic, for example. Right now Boston simply doesn’t work for cars. I’ve recently spent time in Cincinnati and Philadelphia—in both cities you can get around in a car relatively easily. As everyone knows, that’s simply not the case in Boston.
I’m a bike commuter, and I think ghost bikes are counterproductive.
Most of you will probably not know what a ghost bike is, so here goes: when someone is killed on their bike, bike advocates will often paint a bike white and lock it to something at the scene of the crash to memorialize the dead and to draw attention to the shortage of good bike infrastructure.
Most people, as I said, have no idea what ghost bikes are about, so if the intent is to make a statement to the wider community, I don’t think it’s succeeding. But also—I don’t think the presence of a ghost bike helps change the behavior of car drivers. In the unlikely event that they know what it means, they’ll doubtless think the bike had it coming because that’s how it’s always reported when people in cars kill people on bikes.
But of course we don’t have ghost people at the site of pedestrian fatalities (at least not ones we can see) nor ghost cars where fatal car crashes have happened. So the presence of ghost bikes gives the impression that biking is a uniquely dangerous mode of transportation. This, of course, isn’t true, but also it discourages people from biking, and the more people who bike, the safer it is to bike.
Something for the men in the audience because I think a lot of us don’t necessarily get explicit training on this.
I was fortunate enough to be trained as a high school teacher, so I did get explicit instruction on this: I was told to not be alone with students with the door closed, to not touch or hug students, and to be constantly aware of, basically, the worst possible interpretation someone could put on your conduct.
“But I’m not a teacher!” you say. Okay, but the same rule applies. You’re gregarious and social and want to talk to people but have no creepy intent? Sorry, but creepy guys have ruined this for you.