I first knew David Hale as a statistic. To the similarly uninitiated, he is the same magnificent number, one that transcends the SAT scores and GPAs and BACs for which lesser Princetonians acquire numerical infamy. A sophomore in Mathey College, David carries an unpretentious and wholly likable air that belies his reputation.

The increasing frequency and surprising breadth of product recalls in recent memory—spanning decapitating child seats, exploding laptop batteries, self-strangling cribs, fecal spinach, undeclared peanut butter cup candies in “Homestyle” ice cream, lead-laden Chinese Barbies, and “My First Kenmore” Play Stoves with “tip-over hazard”—makes it easy to forget or overlook the actual societal machinery that whirs into action whenever and only if a mass-consumed product is recalled.

I spent this past weekend at the Experience Music Project (EMP) Pop Conference in Seattle, Wash., an annual gathering of journalists, academics, and writers of all stripes to talk about pop music with varying degrees of seriousness. If you were there, you might have known what most of them were talking about, or you might not have. Myself, I spent most of the past seven years listening to Shaggy (“It Wasn’t Me”), Outkast’s Stankonia, The Beatles Anthology 3 (Disc 2), and music that appeared in the Star Wars films.ray

Rufus Wainwright performed at McCarter Theatre last Saturday. It was a gorgeous weekend all around, though less so as Saturday waned and Sunday’s clouds arrived unfashionably early. I freely admit to never having heard a lick of Rufus Wainwright’s recorded music. Wainwright’s is one of those singer-songwritery names that lurks around the back of my mind with “Ben Folds,” “Duncan Sheik,” “Jeremy Enigk,” and “Mason Jennings.” Such a name, Sheik.

The day the House Zuckerberg first decreed that high schoolers needed their own Facebook was a classic “what the fuck” moment: the outrage was pure, the anger irrational. We hated it, initially, for no reason other than that it existed and that it was just…stupid.

Animal Collective doesn’t sound like a rock band. It sounds like a couple of shamans have sat down around a fire every once in a while with an acoustic guitar, a floor tom, and a delay pedal to effuse sixty captivating, otherworldly minutes of sound onto a patient, waiting ...

Harvey Philip Spector might have fallen in love with Veronica Yvette Bennett on some late night in a recording studio, sometime around 1962. There were probably cigarettes smoked and fleeting glances exchanged. Most tempting to imagine is the two coming together over the music they made—lovely, cavernous music that ...

Barack Obama--U.S. Senator and Democratic candidate for president--has, if nothing else, my entire extended, voting-age family in a polarized tizzy. My mother isn’t voting for Obama because of his smoker’s teeth--my uncle because his middle name is Hussein. My father likes his health care platform--his father-in-law is filled with warmth by his back story and earnestness. Me? I’m voting for Obama because he won a Grammy.

We’ll continue watching Gossip Girl, perhaps, like we look through old postcards or yearbooks. We’ll speculate what it would have been like to watch it over the course of a school year, as though the show transpired in real time; what it would have been like to watch it with Kate or Shannon or definitely Erin, at least back when she said you looked good in red, before her flitting, girlish sarcasm started to sound programmatic and conditioned.

Silvery and warm, Anderson’s voice is comfortable, like that of a children’s book narrator. It sounds terrifically, radically human through a vocoder, a fact that she indulges frequently on record and in live performance.

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The answer’s in the desk. Oh, yes! This PROBABLY cures cancer. Meta! THE OL’ ONE-TWO! A dog eats a cell phone and it keeps ringing in its stomach. Oh, no! …eats the whole thing. …as explained by a Chorus. Baby talk. NO! Animal ...

But come on, let’s be serious, here’s probably what happened.  We all get it in our heads that we’d be better off missed every once in a while, contract supply to jack up the price a little, you know, like OPEC does every once in a while.  Dude’s just tired of being taken for granted, tired of being somebody just by being there.  So don’t be there for a few days, he says.  Go west, young man.  Return to the sea.

The free market—or, more aptly, free market thought—finds itself, once again, on the defense. Popular judgment, abetted by politicians and pundits, has placed the blame for the current economic crisis squarely on faulty or missing financial regulation.

On a damp Friday afternoon in November, traversing the broad, entirely empty main courtyard has the feeling of trespassing. Whitman’s Class of 1970 theater is the setting, this particular Friday afternoon, for a screening of 'Einstein and Margarita,' a so-called “media opera” composed by Iraida Iusupova and with libretto by Iusupova and the poet Vera Pavlova.