Stuff I've read, watched, or listened to that's good enough to recommend.
Yeasayer / "2080" (music): Yeasayer is a difficult band to describe, which is a good thing. I can't imagine anyone agreeing with this, but "2080" reminds me of music that would play in a movie about an optimistic, post-apocalyptic future.
The whole album has an aura of oddly familiar strangeness. It's like the music skipped a few stages of evolution, so it's difficult to see where it came from, but it's still recognizable enough to enjoy.
How about this: (World Music)^2 ? I give up. Great band, regardless.
Heroes (TV): I avoided watching the show until recently because the premise--ordinary people discover latent superpowers and try to avert a world disaster--sounded bland. The execution is excellent though. The show's strength is its constant diet of new surprises and resolutions. It's almost like the anti-Lost--something significant is revealed in every episode, to the point that I don't see how they maintain the pace for more than a few seasons.
The Real All-Americans (book): I'm not a huge sports fan, but I found Sally Jenkins' book on how Native Americans were integral to the development of collegiate football fascinating. I'm surprised I never heard of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an experiment in assimilating Native Americans by a well-meaning but perhaps misguided army officer, or knew that it was the source for a lot of what we now consider basic parts of football, like the forward pass,
reverses, and training dummies.
The book also brought light to some names I only heard in passing, like Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner. It's worth checking out from the library or buying for anyone with an interest in sports history.
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