Hey Earn This friends and readers… Back in 2009, I started this blog with one of my friends during my senior year of college. 13 years, 22 writers, 900 articles, and 1.2 million readers later, we’ve entered adulthood and have all moved to bigger and (debatably) better endeavors. I’m excited to share with you one…
Welcome Interstate Managers is a perfect and great album. Every song is necessary and loved. Some of the songs are serious, some are lighthearted, but even the trifles are brilliant. That said: this album has 17 tracks (including the bonus). Some of these great songs are greater than the other great songs. I’m here to…
Alright, let me try this as a Daniel Stern voiceover: “It was the fall of 2011. I was a fresh-faced college graduate living in my parents’ basement. My girlfriend had moved back to college, and I was stuck listening to Adele and Katy Perry fifty times a day on the radio like every other kid…
Seven books. Seven horcruxes. Seven Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers. It’s an important and recurring theme in the series. I was tempted to rank the series #7 on my Top 100 Everything for that reason alone. (Plus, you know I love the number seven.) In that spirit, here is my Harry Potter story in…
It’s basically impossible to succinctly describe Bruce Springsteen artistic output. He is large, he contains multitudes. The Boss has released 18 studio albums over the past 45 years and developed a reputation for unsurpassed, marathon live performances. His commitment to heartland rock is easy to parody; it’s also key to his expansive creative achievement. Springsteen…
When I think of Mass Effect, I think of synthesis… And not just because of that word’s prominent role in the series conclusion. There are so many layers to a video game, especially a story-based RPG, that it’s reductive to say “this game works because of X.” And I’ve certainly been guilty of this. When…
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Adam Schlesinger, the absurdly talented and prolific songwriter, died yesterday from coronavirus complications. Go to hell, COVID-19. Schlesinger, best known for co-founding Fountains of Wayne and co-writing over 150 songs for the musical-comedy TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, was 52. He had been churning out songs and musical projects for more than 25 years for…
I don’t know much about classical music, but I know I love it. Call me a pleb, but… baroque music sometimes runs together. It doesn’t absorb my attention; it deflects it. Bach is essentially the urtext of Western music, but the fact that we hadn’t invented things like “dynamics” or “cadence” before the mid-18th century…
I don’t know much about classical music, but I know I love it. Saying “Clair de Lune” is one of your favorite classical songs is a bit like saying “Yesterday” is one of your favorite Beatles songs. It’s such an unchallenging opinion that it has almost no meaning. But I love it. I really, really…
I don’t know much about classical music, but I know I love it. I could easily do a whole week of my favorite Tchaikovsky pieces, but I am bound to the one-artist-per-day rule. So then I have to narrow it down to one song. The Nutcracker Suite is one of the most delightful collections ever,…