Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Healthby Anupam B Jena & Chris Worsham There’s nothing like a good summer book, and there’s no reason why a summer book shouldn’t be fun AND informative. Random Acts of Medicine is one of those rare books because it deals with a pretty complicated topic, but it’s also very accessible. I cannot stress this enough: there are plenty of informative and enlightening books out there,...

How Nirvana Killed Rock Music By G. Murray Thomas Let me say right off that this is not an anti-Nirvana rant. Yes, I feel they killed rock music, but it was involuntary manslaughter, not murder. Actually, it was more like the EMT who accidentally kills the critical patient while trying to save him. Rock was on its last legs anyway, they just finished it off. And they did it by being as good as they were. To understand how,...

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial Let’s go back to a time when kids’ movies would scare the living daylights out of you. Let’s talk about ET. This is a movie I remember seeing once as a little kid and don’t really think about much. Sure, it’s cherished by a select few, but those are also the people who won’t stop talking about Sandlot and have a shuffle truffle tattoo on their arm. How are you supposed to take these overgrown infants...

White Stripes Elephant 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition The White Stripes’ Elephant is an important album both for me personally and in the wider scope of musical history as it gives good perspective on what was happening in music at the time.  For me personally, it conjures up memories of driving through the redwoods for the first time, wondering how exactly Meg White manages to hit her drums so hard. It was also the first song we learnt as a band...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Wronger LP by Tommy Stinson’s Cowboys In The Campfire. While the breadth of musical styles that Tommy Stinson has approached in his career has not been small (beginning first with indie rock with The Replacements, Stinson has has touched on punk with Bash & Pop and Perfect as well as undeniably mainstream, “for the paycheque” rock with Soul Asylum and Guns N’ Roses), it would be hard to deny that everything...

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sandsby Kate Beaton Like many, I was completely smitten by Kate Beaton after being exposed to Hark! A Vagrant. Like many, I was also very intrigued by whatever project she had been working on since moving back to Nova Scotia and starting a family (what’s she building up there?). The answer is putting the finishing touches on Ducks: an autobiographical graphic novel about Beaton’s two years working in the oil sands of Canada. The...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into The Hypnotist 12” EP by The Flaming Lips. 2023 marks the twentieth anniversary of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and, to celebrate, Warner Brothers has embarked on an impressive campaign to re-examine the album (stay tuned for more on that later) but, without question, one of the most unusual parts of that endeavor is exhibited in the standalone release of The Hypnotist – a sort of unusually paced creation (one mammoth, 23-minute...

The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost Worldby Karl Schlögel & Rodney Livingstone Soviet Russia is my jam. I’ve been reading about it for over ten years and am totally captivated by the politics and impact it had around the world. And the period spanning the revolution to Stalin’s death? Don’t even get me started on that. That’s the sweetest plum. But I often forget that the richness of Russian culture doesn’t end when Khrushchev took over, and especially now...

Poe – “Trigger Happy Jack” – Hello LP A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Hello vinyl reissue by Poe. The fact is that, by intention and not by accident, Poe (born Anne Decatur Danielewski) has always chosen to present herself in a manner completely separate from any artist who might pretend to be her peer. Most recently, the proof of presenting herself that way can be found in the fact that – at the height of “reissue...

The Maltese Falcon When the pandemic started, I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to go through the AFI 100 list. Get some takeout, queue up a movie rental from the library, and get educated. I made it through all of them except Sophie’s Choice (I don’t know if it’s the feel-good movie for a new parent) and Intolerance (my endurance for silent movies is low, especially a 3+ hour one). Through it all, I laughed (both WITH...