Some of the lyrics to Blur’s “Pressure on Julian” are eerily appropriate to this week’s big story:

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Tyler Cowen Alex Tabarrok considers some economic explanations for the recent inversion of the traditional dominance of movies over television as “elite entertainment,” primarily the rise of pay-TV and the growing importance of the international market for movies. (Explosions don’t need to be translated, after all.) That’s surely part of it, but I’d be more [...]

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This has always sort of bugged me: You know I work all day to get you money to buy you things And it’s worth it just to hear you say you’re going to give me everything So, first, rhyming “things’ with “thing” is kinda cheating, but let that pass. What’s that “just” in the second [...]

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The Metropolitan Opera has put together a ton of material on the website for their new (and, from the looks of it, absolutely gorgeous) production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Meanwhile, I finally got around to checking out the Radiolab episode “The Ring and I“—which as I’d expect from one of my favorite radio programs, is [...]

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Apropos of the Very! Exciting! News! that Dismemberment Plan—one of my all time favorite bands—is reuniting for a winter tour, here’s “The City” off the classic Emergency & I. (No, seriously, if you don’t have this album, go download it now.) The city has, indeed, been dead since they’ve been gone:

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So, I inadvertently started a pretty ridiculous Twitter meme yesterday. I wrote: Painfully tempted to do a parody rewrite w/John Galt as hipster & Gulch in Williamsburg RT @thecalebbacon: Atlas shrugged and said “meh.” The 60-page speech to be replaced by a Tom Verlaine solo… Which inspired: ziege19 @normative Who is John Galt? Oh, you [...]

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You can’t stop the press!

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Wired’s Dylan Tweney recounts his live-tweeting of Wagner’s Die Walküre at the San Francisco Opera. I cannot fathom how he escaped the opera house alive. Look, fussing with your phone constantly—even on “minimum brightness”—is kind of a dick move at any performance, but it’s borderline sacrilegious when it comes to Wagner, whose genius was in [...]

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The mediocrity of their recent stuff sometimes makes me forget how much I liked their early albums.

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