Who Says You’re Dead? Medical and Ethical Dilemmas for the Curious & Concernedby Jacob Appel Who Says Your Dead is the book we didn’t know we were going to love. This is such a peculiarly delightful book, mostly because it does so many things right. First of all it’s incredibly interesting and a borderline page-turner covering topics we didn’t know were right in front of us the whole time. We live in such a protocol-driven world that we don’t always...

I remember when I first started listening to indie rock, underground rock and other sorts of music which was a little left-of-center in nature, and it wasn’t always easy. In fact, it was often sort of a gamble; in the days before the internet, there were occasions when you didn’t know exactly what you were going to get, and you just sort of had to trust what you had read in a magazine or heard from a record store clerk....

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Pretty Garbage LP by Come Closer. While it’s very easy for me to get excited about a new punk band that I’ve never heard before (I’ve been listening to a lot of punk, for a for a lot of years), running across something which makes me excited because I can’t immediately qualify it is instantly attractive because it’s obviously operating within a paradigm I recognize, but there’s something about it that...

Jaws45th Anniversary We can argue all night about what the best New England movies are, but for my money nothing comes close to Jaws. OK Second Sight might be a worthy contender, but the sheer terror of Jaws probably still overpowers it. Jaws is one of these movies that terrified us as kids and manages to stay with us in our deep consciousness. And for me, I also grew up on an island with sandy beaches. I’ll let you...

Mastodon Medium Rarities There’s a reason why Mastodon is currently one of the biggest metal bands that still matters. They don’t pack in stadiums, I know, but they’re not playing tiny venues either. They’re big enough to play all the late night shows (I’ve seen them on Letterman, Kimmel, and Fallon), and even occasionally do the oddball appearance (remember when they were on the Human Giant show?). Also, they have a sense of humor about themselves. These are all good...