WALL STREET JOURNAL: Hip-hop group the Roots hails from Philadelphia, but since becoming the house band on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” last year, its members have increasingly embraced New York. The Roots’ new album, “How I Got Over,” was recorded in Philadelphia and New York, and is the group’s first release since taking on the late-night TV gig. Members of the Roots are also working on a number of forthcoming projects, including collaborative albums by soul British soul siren Duffy and American singer John Legend. “Between all those records I’ve been living out of a hotel, like the lone […]

New Pornographers play the Troc tonight.

FRESH AIR When LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy attended live concerts, he says he always felt like there was something missing. “I’d start to see bands prioritize things wrong in my mind,” he tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “[They weren’t] prioritizing the momentness of a show or the physical experience of a show. Instead, they [were] prioritizing making sure they didn’t make mistakes or prioritiz[ing] trying to faithfully represent a prerecorded piece of material.” When Murphy hit his early 30s, he says he decided that he would stop complaining and instead make his argument for better live music by composing […]

BY DAVID M. SNYDER Subtitling his documentary The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store,  I Need That Record! director Brendan Toller imagines he’s telling some great conspiracy tale in his pursuit of an explanation for why more than 3,000 independent record stores have closed in the last decade. But in reality he presents a partial picture, picking and choosing the facts that will heighten his thesis. The movie itself is composed of an intertwining of interviews with a select number of independent record store proprietors from a couple of regions of the country, with a focus on […]

[image via MANIFEST VEGAN] BY MAVIS LINNEMANN I was first exposed to Greek food many years ago when my best friend, Laura, and her parents, the Brokamps, took me to the Panegyri Greek Festival in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Greeks have always known how to throw a party, and the festival is a barrage of fun activities: music, dancing, amusement rides, raffles, games, and, of course, food. The succulent smell of lamb wafts through the air at Greek festivals, but it’s the sweet and sticky Greek pastries that really win me over. There’s usually a host of Greek moms and grandmas […]

Lisa & Steve Volk, Meadowbrook Inn, Tannersville, PA, Saturday 5:34 PM by JEFF FUSCO

[photo by JEFF FUSCO] NEW YORK TIMES: Manute Bol, a towering Dinka tribesman who left southern Sudan to become one of the best shot blockers in the history of American basketball, then returned to his homeland to try to heal the wounds of a long, bloody civil war, died Saturday at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, according to Sally Jones, a spokeswoman for the hospital. He was 47 and lived in Olathe, Kan. The cause was severe kidney trouble and complications of a rare skin disorder known as Stevens-Johnson syndrome, said Tom Prichard, who runs Sudan Sunrise, […]

MORE TANGENTIALLY RELATED: After the war, he returned to his office delighted he still had a job — indeed, owned the job — and eager to resume architecture. But it is good to remember that war can vex the spirit in subtle and unexpected ways. He sat at his drafting table, and did nothing. Not for days, not for weeks. There were plenty of commissions, and he had no pressure on him: his partner, who had run the business during the war, urged him not to worry. Of course it will take a while, Dick, he said. It did. My […]

TIME: As recently as Memorial Day, Alvin Greene was an unemployed 32-year-old, 13-year military veteran who had been involuntarily discharged from both the Army and the Air Force and was facing an obscenity charge for allegedly showing a teenage stranger online pornography in a college campus computer lab (Greene has denied comment, but he is fighting the charge). What he became after winning 59% of the vote in the June 8 Democratic primary is now in dispute. To Representative Jim Clyburn, the state’s most powerful Democrat, Greene is a pod person of unknown origin — “someone’s plant.” To his older […]