Concerts won’t save music:
Concerts might be a short-term fix. As one national concert promoter says, “The road is where the money is.” But in the long run, the music business can’t depend on concert tours for a simple, biological reason: the huge tour profits that have been generated in the last few decades have come from performers who are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. As these artists get older, they’re unlikely to be replaced, because the industry isn’t investing in new talent development.
Brendan Loy tells the truth.
Uh-oh. I guess the Tories will win next time, then, won’t they?
Will Obama’s refusal to hand it out hurt him in Pennsylvania?
Scottsdale, Arizona, 8.15 am.
A classic from Spencer Ackerman. "Twinkletoes" is especially fifth grade.
Bill Clinton disinters the Tuzla story. And gets it wrong.
It could be worse.
A reader writes:
I think of Eternity in terms of one day at a time. Would I rather not die today? Yes, I think I would rather not. Carry that into the future, and you’ve got Eternity.
There’s no point in trying to comprehend what Eternity would be like, because we couldn’t comprehend it even if we were living it. The human brain has only so many cells in which to store so many memories. Long before a thousand years pass by, and assuming we had the technology to do so, you’d have to perform a ‘spring cleaning’ on your brain and decide which memories to keep and which to discard so that you could have room to store new memories.
In effect, thanks to the memory storage limitation of the human brain, we are immune to Eternity. Therein, of course, lies good and evil.
If we had the technology to reverse the aging process, the big deal wouldn’t be about the existential crisis of facing Eternity, it would be about the sociological crisis of one generation never making way for the next. Imagine New Kids on the Block plotting a comeback every decade for the next thousand years, and you’ll see what I mean.
Shudder accomplished.
Unthinking hostility to gay people is far more entrenched among Republicans than Democrats, alas. But prejudice and fear are human things – and liberals aren’t immune. Some deploy homophobia when it suits them. Take Joe Wilson on the right-wing attacks against him:
"He’s had three wives, he’s a womanizer, he’s done drugs. But then they realized they couldn’t use those because I’ve never actually denied them. I mean, I’m the first to admit that, unlike Ken Mehlman and David Dreier, I really like women."
Jamie Kirchick explores this territory here. The truth is: there are tolerant Republicans who nonetheless acquiesce in their party’s institutional hostility to gay people, and intolerant Democrats who never get called on their shit.
