Daniel Browne

To me, the movie The Simpsons is most like isn’t Groundhog Day but Everything Everywhere All at Once. There isn’t one Homer and Marge that resets; there are 750 and counting. Each episode, the core of the characters remains, but the world is slightly different — they have different jobs, different talents, different temperaments. What these past two seasons revealed is that there are still new dimensions of Homer and Marge and new visions of their world worth watching for 22 minutes.

Rita Lee, 1947-2023

Anyone in those days arriving for the first time in America's number one winter playground would have had to be very blasé  not experience a thrill. There was magic in the place. Nowadays you are deposited at a shabby Florida East Coast station situated in the least glamorous section of Palm Beach's frowsy namesake on the wrong side of the tracks...

I don’t have ambitions for my books. I don’t want them to teach people anything. I don’t want people to come away feeling different about themselves. I think life is interesting and it’s the writer’s job to make it more interesting than it might otherwise appear to be. And if people have fun reading it, if they find it interesting, then they will find other things in their life more interesting.

Sugar burned bright and hot, releasing Beaster (recorded during the same sessions as Copper Blue) a mere six months later, yet flamed out during sessions for their second album. Still, Copper Blue remains one of Mould's best collection of songs. It's a perfect record.

He was spindly with a thinning hairline, archetypically British, and never took off his shades, which made him appear more nearsighted than cool. But he was also great. His dual 1976 releases, Howlin’ Wind and Heat Treatment, heralded the emergence of a street-tough soul singer with genuine literary chops. Here was a gas station attendant from the miraculously named working-class London exurb Deepcut, channeling the mystic-reverie of early Van Morrison and the comically embittered broadsides of Highway 61 Revisited-era Bob Dylan. Graham Parker was a force of nature.

[A]ll that really seems clear is that no matter how much you want to change things, it sure is hard to do.

Compact discs were never about romance — they were about function. They just worked. They were less glamorous than vinyl, less cool, less tactile, less sexy, less magical. They didn’t have the aura that we fans crave. You didn’t necessarily get sentimental over your CDs, the way you fetishized your scratchy old vinyl, hearing your life story etched into the nicks and crackles. Your copy of Spice World or Life After Death sounded the same as everyone else’s. But CDs work. They just do. You pop in the disc, press play, music booms out. They delivered the grooves so efficiently, they became the most popular format ever. If you’re looking to focus on something cool for an hour, without getting up to flip sides every 20 minutes, the compact disc has what you want, bigger and louder. It gives you room to get lost inside the music.

CD sales have indeed been on the rise, and some Gen Z music fans are happy to enthuse about their affection for these once-futuristic pieces of plastic. While there seem to be voguish as well as nostalgic factors driving this interest in CDs among people younger than Napster, the phenomenon is also a reminder of how the original digital-audio medium’s influence has lingered into the streaming era.