Updated 2/24/2024

The last thing I’ll ask you to read this year, I promise: my thoughts on the Beatles’ Christmas records — both the more familiar and the...

I’m thrilled that an excerpt from Magic Circles has found its way into another magnificent anthology of music writing. In Sound Bites:...

My review of the controversial Jann Wenner biography, concerning “the baby-boomer visionary whose singular will to power, rakish...

Black voters kicked racist red-state ass. To repurpose a phrase from Ronald Reagan – who meant something quite different by it – it’s...

“Unless [the] would-be lover is able to replace his or her backbone with a steel rod, he or she is doomed. This is no place for love.” At...

Up at Critics at Large: thinking about Sinéad O’Connor, her classic album, her painful public life, and her notorious Saturday Night Live...

My fifty-years-on appreciation of Forever Changes, the pixilated masterpiece of Arthur Lee and Love, is up at Critics at Large.

Today at Critics at Large, my review of Nicholas Jennings's Lightfoot, concerning the balladeer who maintained just the right emotional...

My review of David Thomson’s Television: A Biography, concerning the medium described by Norman Mailer as “a small and modest malignancy,...

My review of Mary V. Dearborn's Ernest Hemingway: A Biography, concerning perhaps the greatest American writer of the 20th century.