About 90 percent of everything I know about music I know from two friends who both now live (not together) in Brooklyn. One of those is my Pittsburgh friend Steve who has been making and sending me mixes for so long that the first ones were on tape, because few of us had CD-burning laptops [...]

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Thanks, Sara G. You’re welcome, music-starved ears of Lincoln, Nebraska.

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Everyone knows allegorical readings of anything written after 1500 are dull and limiting. They do the opposite of what reading is all about doing, which is to answer questions about a text with further questions, and with mental and associative play. Allegorical readings try to answer every question and they can’t help but look foolish [...]

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Some things: I. His Dark Materials It’s a trilogy that turns Harry-Potter grads into atheists, have you heard? The overarc(h)ing narrative is the quest to kill God. Here’s the thing: it’s so much more godly and Christian than any other book I’ve written. Even if God dies (spoiler alert) in a terribly anticlimactic scene, all [...]

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