Steve Thorngate

I once wrote that the Felice Brothers have one capable lead singer at best: while Ian Felice sings more expressively than his brother James, it’s not a pretty sound. But I was overlooking the Catskills folk-rockers’ third brother, Simone.

So I've discontinued the sidebar link blogging, which was a bit of a pre-Twitter relic. But I'll still post semi-regular roundups of links, with a shift toward doing what Twitter's not always so good at: giving a taste of the actual writing. In other words, here's some quotes.

Growing up, my listening habits progressed from the evangelical subculture’s schlockiest pop to its Americana fringe to secular alt-country. One common thread: prolific sideman Phil Madeira.

This is a welcome development: Call them the debt crisis dissenters. The two parties are miles apart on how to cut the deficit and national debt: Republicans want to slash spending even more. Democrats want to raise revenue. And then there are the other Democrats — the ones who reject the entire premise of the current high-stakes fiscal fight. There’s no short-term deficit problem, they say, and there isn’t even an urgent debt crisis that requires immediate attention.

In case you missed it last week, when the breaking-news kind of media kept dominating our attention: Jonathan Cohn's cover story on home-based child care is pretty startling.

When I filed my taxes earlier this month, I paid my use tax to the State of Illinois. A lot of people don't pay use tax, and enforcement is almost nonexistent. But there it was on the form I had to sign, and it was all of 50 bucks or something, so I paid it. Those of us who live in a state with a sales tax are required to pay tax on online purchases.

Yesterday I heard the NPR news desk transition from its top story, Boston, to the latest from West, Texas. Here's how they did it: "Let's check in on another major story that dominated our attention last week." That's not quite how I remember it.

Matt Yglesias makes some interesting points here, and I'll echo his pick for best pizza place in DC. Still: if making homemade pizza is doing it wrong, I don’t want to do it right.

Sometimes when a vote doesn't go the way you want, you just have to sigh and remind yourself that this is how democracy works. Other times you have to wish that it actually did work. The overwhelming majority of Americans support background checks for gun buyers. No matter.

In the immediate aftermath of the bombing in Boston, an injured marathon spectator was tackled by another bystander and then taken into police custody. His apartment was searched. Read Amy Davidson's post.

When Ross Douthat's right, Ross Douthat's right: What I hope we don’t see, when the next race or a parade or festival looms up in front of us, are layers of extra stops and searches and checkpoints, wider and wider rings of closed streets, the kind of portable metal detectors that journalists remember unfondly from political conventions, more of the concrete barriers that Washingtonians have become accustomed to around our public buildings … more of everything that organized officialdom does to reassure us, and itself, that soft targets can somehow be eliminated entirely, and that everything anyone can think of is being done to keep the unthinkable at bay.