How love really works. "What almost no one ever talks about with love is that it’s a choice. Love is an active process of awareness and decision. We can’t love by accident. We love with intention."

A consideration of dream-come-true in gig form in Best Classic Bands. "But you know what? 'Roll Over Beethoven' registers as soporific after the fact when compared with the performance of 'From Me to You' that follows. It is so apparent that both Lennon and McCartney cannot wait to have their turn to sing—on a shared lead vocal, as it were—that it’s as if they’re in a race to see who can sing the first note, ultimately hitting it at the same time."

The musicality of the Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. "The Beatles made beat music—hence the pun in their name. And it was as if here they were making sure no one ever forgot it, never mind that everyone was just getting acquainted."

A lesson in how to be the best (and how not to be). "When you cease to strive, you come back to the pack. Doesn’t matter if you’re Belichick or Beethoven."

The longest sustained work of literature in history marks a milestone with an excerpt from "And I Walked Some More," a work that will be in The Solution to the World's Problems: Surprising Tales of Relentless Joy. 

200 years of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" and why you ought to believe in the fellow. "I didn’t believe for a while. Ironically, as life got harder and lonelier, I began to believe again, in a manner beyond the scope of making a list and putting it in the mailbox with extra postage for the North Pole."

Exploring the worthwhile weirdness of 1945's Strange Confession, a Lon Chaney, Jr. vehicle in the Inner Sanctum series. "The picture opens with a horror host, I suppose you could say—a disembodied, talking head, floating in a glass jar on a desk. No explanation—this was just how it was going to be. Heads sans bodies that retained the ability to function—or expatiate, anyway—were a staple of the 1950s, and if you’re familiar with the likes of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, this particular head may seem no more out of place to you than one attached to someone’s neck, only it happened to be a trail-blazing head."

Best Classic Bands feature about the 12/7/63 hometown show at the Liverpool Empire Theatre. "Instrumentally, this isn’t how we think of the Beatles. McCartney’s bass playing on the chorus is as inventive as what we later experience with Sgt. Pepper numbers like 'With a Little Help from My Friends' and 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,' but with the raw brutality of the bass style he sometimes favored on the White Album. As you listen to these musicians play together on 'Boys,' you wonder if it’s the Beatles we’re hearing or the Sonics."

The insight on offer in Murder Without a Trial. "Guns are another subject that for so many people are also discussed and related to in the abstract. Personally, it blows my mind—and I just cannot accept how this okay or wise—that people can walk around armed. It takes but an impulse—and near the end of the doc a psychiatrist calls attention to how impulsive Chapman’s choice was—to take a life. Lives. And yet, sure, show up at the Starbucks with your gun on you, that’s cool. Is it?"

The soul of a writer. "Everything on one side of the street eventually comes to the other, whether we like it or not, and the sacred and the profane ride together. More than that, each is what it is in part because of the other. They are foes, foils, and even companions. This is the sticky stuff of being alive and human, and MacGowan understood it better than most ever have."  

Confession and epiphany of a Thanksgiving misfit. "I'm not a looking back kind of person. Nostalgia isn't for me. What's next is. Always what is next. As a result, what I'd say that I'm grateful for is untraditional. It might not pass muster at the dinner table, but it does so at the banquet of life." 

Breaking bread with the Peanuts gang. "Peppermint Patty is earnest. I don’t think very many of us are. To the degree that I’m doubtful who even knows what the word means. Earnestness is a great quality to have. When you do, you’re okay in revealing your enthusiasm. There’s no need to play it cool. Strike a pose. You don’t lead with artifice, but rather your self."

The album that might have been and, for a time, briefly was. "But it’s the vibe that makes Get Back an album that’s almost rustically avant-garde. If the Beatles were ever to toss aside shoes and clothes and make music in field and forest, it’d be this album that would have changed our perception of their final campaign together."

Why "Now and Then" doesn't work. "Beatles art was bracing and new. 'Now and Then' has been posited as a career capper, the final paragraph of the final page. I think that final paragraph counts for a lot. That’s sacrosanct space. You better be all in and entirely in that moment, if that's what you’re going for."

Some classic radio scares with Quiet, Please and "The Thing on the Fourble Board," and an exercise in imagination. 

On knuckleballs, dancing with the one your brought, and life. "The knuckleball is something that might as well have come from a witch’s brew. I’m not sure anyone has ever mastered it. Perhaps it’s a matter of the knuckleball mastering you. There are barely more knuckleball pitchers (2) in the Hall of Fame than back-up catchers (0). Or baristas or Abstract Expressionists, for that matter."

Exploring the backstory and various versions of an intensely personal--and universal--song. "The site of the accident was visible from John’s window, so his aunt never told him where, exactly, it had happened, but the boy pieced it together, and to a composite of things to haunt him was added that of roadside propinquity."

A consideration of the Stowe recording as a crucial Beatles document. "These guys were the best R’n’B band that England ever produced, though they morphed so frequently in their evolution that it was as if the Beatles were in the business of discarding skins as much as they were exploding into new forms—and newly invented forms—of music."

The inspiring, inspirting realness of the songwriter's art on his centennial. "His was an art divorced from time, the same way that human nature is. The sound of Hank Williams is the sound of how humans were at the start, and how humans will be at the end — on the inside, that is."

A case is made. "Nor is the coda some sonic graft; the outro manages to reach back and infuse all that we’ve already heard — our memory of those notes, verses, choruses — because it germinates out of that progression, and is a further — albeit finalizing — bout of movement. It’s what sends us back out into the world."

On the delights of The Great Lost Kinks Album. "Nor do any musical artists better epitomize British eccentricity, as extolled by George Orwell in his essay 'The English People,' than these would-be hillbillies of Muswell, abettors and upholders of personal identity. They are strange, but also no more so than any of us when we set aside affectation, pretense and what we presume is expectation, and are most ourselves."

The power and influence of the ultimate rhythm and blues singer. "You also can’t sound more Black than Alexander. I’m being reductive, but recognizing what makes a sound a quintessentially Black sound is one of those things we know reductively, as clearly as we know whether it’s day or night, because first we feel it — it’s a matter of the body — and that impels our cognition. Black music initially lodges in bodily portions of us. Shakes the physical core. Has root there. But then it progresses — from gut to heart, through limbs, and to the mind, where we might apply a label. Soul. Rhythm and blues. Jazz. Black music."

Piece in Best Classic Bands on the band's July 16, 1963 session for the BBC. "The Beatles fostered community in the works that we might say most made them them, and the backing vocals of McCartney and Harrison suggest friends turning up at the house of another friend to give him whatever he needs to get through what he’s experiencing. This is the sound of both the process and that outcome."

A personal, annual tradition in Concord. "The flag is an external construct, but without internal due diligence to better know the person within and rise up accordingly, the flag becomes akin to cloth that just happens to blow in the wind."

The importance of an album that might not have seemed very important at first. "What has become popular critical opinion—that the Beatles of 1969 were more inventive than the Beatles of 1963—is also one of the chief fallacies in all of popular music. A wizard tasked with creating a hundred patents a year would be hard-pressed to invent more than those early Beatles did."