If you follow music news, or just scan entertainment headlines, you might have noticed that a few weeks after his death, beloved Foo Fighters’ drummer Taylor Hawkins’ final days became a controversial subject. According to a Rolling Stone article quoting Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, Hawkins was exhausted by the Foo Fighters’ touring schedule. He needed a break, and he didn’t get one. Both drummers have issued statements disavowing the article. Meanwhile, as GQ noted, a Rolling Stone “Instagram post highlighting the article is being slammed by critical fans in the comments.”

Arguing over hearsay about a musician’s state of mind before his death seems like a poor way to remember him soon after he’s gone. If you’d rather steer clear of this scene, the original Rolling Stone piece is still worth checking out for its introduction: a feelgood story from three days before Hawkins, 50, was found in his Bogotá hotel room.

After Foo Fighters canceled a headlining concert in Asunción, the capital city of Paraguay, […]

In light of the recent release of Matt Reeves’ film The Batman, we consider the strange alternation of darkness and camp that is Batman. Is he even a super hero? What’s with his rogues’ gallery? What’s with DC’s anti-world-building?

Your Pretty Much Pop host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by philosophy prof/NY Times entertainment writer Lawrence Ware, improv comedian/educator Anthony LeBlanc, and Marketing Over Coffee host John J. Wall, all of whom are deeply immersed in the comics, and we touch on other recent shows in the Batman universe.

Some relevant articles include:

• “Batman Actors Ranked from Worst to Best” from Den of Geek
• “All the Batman Movies, Ranked” by Eliana Docterman
• “The Best Order to Watch All the Batman Movies” in by Austen Goslin
• “The Top 27 Best Batman Comics and Graphic Novels” from IGN
• “5 Things ‘The […]

By most measures, Japan boasts the highest life expectancy in the world. But that ranking, of course, doesn’t mean that every Japanese person sees old age. Though the country’s rate of violent crime is low enough to be the envy of most of the world, its suicide rate isn’t, and it says even more that the Japanese language has a word that refers specifically to death by overwork. I first encountered it nearly thirty years ago in a Dilbert comic strip. “In Japan, employees occasionally work themselves to death. It’s called karōshi,” says Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss. “I don’t want that to happen to anybody in my department. The trick is to take a break as soon as you see a bright light and hear dead relatives beckon.”

You can see the phenomenon of karōshi examined more seriously in the short Nowness video at the top of the post. In it, a series of Japanese salarymen (a Japanese English term now well-known around the world) speak to the exhausting and unceasing rigors of their everyday work schedules — and, in some […]

Granted a wish to travel back in time, many a Bach lover would leap to Thuringia, in a pre-unified Germany, circa the early 1700s, or to Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, the courts of Weimar and Köthen, or Leipzig. There, Bach composed his concertos, suites, fugues, preludes, canons, chorales, organ works, solo pieces, as well as unique works like the Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier. He wrote principally for churches and sovereigns who had his music performed in what we now call its original settings.

Of course, we can’t hear Bach’s Baroque masterworks the way his contemporaries did, though we can try. But imagine standing in St. Paul’s Church, hearing the composer play his organ works himself in the early 1720s. (Built in 1231, the church survived WWII, only to be demolished for redevelopment under the East German regime in 1968.) Imagine hearing Bach’s chamber works played in the ornate chambers of the 18th century. It’s a nice dream, but I think we’re fortunate to live in his distant future, and to have experienced his music through three-hundred years of interpretations, new arrangements and instrumentation, […]

Niccolò Machiavelli lived in a time before the internet, before radio and television, before drones and weapons of mass destruction. Thus one naturally questions the relevance of his political theories to the twenty-first century. Yet in discussions about the dynamics of power, no name has endured as long as Machiavelli’s. His reputation as a theorist rests mostly on his 1532 treatise Il Principe, or The Prince, in which he pioneered a way of analyzing power as it was actually wielded, not as people would have liked it to be. How, he asked, does a ruler — a prince — attain his position in a state, and even more importantly, how does he maintain it?

You can hear Machiavelli’s answers to these questions explained, and see them illustrated, in the 43-minute video above. It breaks The Prince down into seven parts summarizing as many of the book’s main points, including “Do not be neutral,” “Destroy, do not would,” and “Be feared.”

These commandments would seem to align with Machiavelli’s popular image as an apologist, even an advocate, for brutal and repressive forms of rule. But his […]