CIA MAN: Ben Bradlee & The Mystery Of The Missing Diary Of JFK’s Suddenly Dead Mistress

  DAILY BEAST: Suicide was not uncommon among the Mad Men of the Cold War, and Janney makes much of the timing of the death of Washington Post publisher Phil Graham, whose suicide in the summer 1963 was preceded by a notorious breakdown in which he grabbed the stage at a gathering of national newspaper editors and, drink in hand, proceeded to call them all assholes, and reel off the names of women sleeping with Kennedy, before bursting into tears. For Janney, the unhinged newsman had to die, because the dark forces plotting to kill Kennedy knew they needed a […]

EARLY WORD: Confusion Is Next

  The Thurston Moore Band plays Boot N’ Saddle on 10/25 in support of the just-out The Best Day. PITCHFORK: The Best Day is not the first music Thurston Moore has released since becoming the most famous—and, in some circles, most reviled—divorcé in American indie-rock. It is, however, the first time he’s released a song-oriented album under his own name since his highly publicized split from long-time wife/bandmate Kim Gordon. And given that Moore’s traditionally used these solo albums to explore more intimate, emotionally resonant songcraft than Sonic Youth’s gnarled guitar jams normally accommodate, it’s not totally unreasonable to expect […]

JIM MORRISON: Fat Is Beautiful

HUFFINGTON POST: In a new video excerpt from a 1969 interview with Doors frontman Jim Morrison finds the singer emphasizing that “fat is beautiful.” The video was released by Blank on Blank, a new online PBS series that animates old interviews between journalists and their famous subjects. This one finds Morrison talking about his experiences gaining weight and how “great” he felt when he packed on additional pounds while in college. MORE

BEING THERE: Wiz Khalifa @ The Piazza

Photo by DEREK BRAD As the sun dropped on a warm late October afternoon, the gates opened for the Forbes’ first ever Under 30 Music Festival at the Piazza in Philadelphia. The festival is a partnership with Global Poverty Project, the organization that runs the annual Global Festival in NYC. Both events are free ticketed events for anyone who took specific action against extreme poverty on social media — watching a video on extreme poverty, tweeting about it, or even taking a selfie and hashtagging about Global Citizen.

WORTH REPEATING: High Infidelity

  NEW YORK TIMES: It’s hard to imagine now, but there once was a time when you could not play any song ever recorded, instantly, from your phone. I call this period adolescence. It lasted approximately 30 years, and it was galvanized by conflict. At that time, music had to be melted onto plastic discs and shipped across the country in trucks. In order to keep this system running smoothly, a handful of major labels coordinated with broadcasters and retailers to encourage everyone to like the same thing, e.g. Third Eye Blind. This approach divided music into two broad categories: […]

BEING THERE: Gerard Way @ The Trocadero

Photo by PETE TROSHAK Last night a sold-out crowd at the Trocadero Theater bore witness to the evolution of former My Chemical Romance singer Gerard Way from a leather-wrapped wild boy to a suave, Kool-Aid-haired thin white duke in a dark blue suit. Way and his tight four-piece backing band, The Hormones, spent an hour throwing out darts of finely-honed New Wave-y rock from his debut solo album, Hesitant Alien, to the delight of the loud and raucous crowd. It is fitting that the Troc would be one of the first stops on Way’s first solo tour given that in […]

CINEMA: The Killing Fields

  FURY (2014, directed by David Ayer, 134 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC War films are most interesting not just for the stories they tell but for the insight they offer into contemporary attitudes towards war. Former Navy officer David Ayer writes and directs the new WW2 thriller Fury and his story is determined to show us that the best thing about going to war is to reveal what a man can achieve once he allows himself to be dehumanized. It’s an attitude missing from the WW2 Hollywood propaganda films of the 1940s and certainly different from the […]

POLL: Majority Of Delawareans Favor Legalization

  DELAWARE ONLINE: Want legal weed in Delaware? You’re easily in the majority, according to a new University of Delaware poll that finds 56 percent of Delawareans support legalization of marijuana use. The university polled 902 Delaware adults between Sept. 10 and 22, finding just 39 percent opposed to legalization. Delawareans older than 60 and self-identified conservatives were the only groups to express deep opposition, while young adults and liberals drove the support. Support for legalization crossed racial and geographic boundaries, with poll respondents in all three counties saying they back legal marijuana. “I would say the numbers suggest solid […]

BEING THERE: Flying Lotus @ The Tower

Photo by MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ Upon his arrival onstage last night at the Tower Theater, Flying Louts (a.k.a. Steven Ellison) tilted his head skyward and petitioned the ‘Whiskey Fairy’ for a divine intervention. FlyLo was, he said, about to spirit-guide the jam-packed audience to their ego deaths, which is no easy task without an entire bottle of liquor at the ready. Then, with a maniacal grin, Flying Lotus informed the Tower crowd that they were dead and with that the wild rumpus had begun. Though terrifyingly ominous at times, Flying Lotus’ signature spaced-out jazz-infused electro-ambient hip-hop whosiewhatsit set sent the […]

THE GOOD SHEPHERD: A Q&A With Globe-Trotting New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof

  BY JONATHAN VALANIA Last week we got New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on the horn to discuss his new book, A Path Appears, co-authored with his wife Sheryl WuDunn, which extols the innovative but largely un-heralded efforts of a dedicated few to leave the world a better place than they found it. Just a few days prior, Kristof had been at the center of a cultural storm that erupted in the wake of his appearance on REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER along with Ben Affleck and Sam Harris, so we gave him an opportunity to clarify some points […]