Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 985

“SNL”’s insane first show: Behind-the-scenes secrets of Chase, Belushi and more, 40 years ago this weekend

"Saturday Night Live" celebrated its 40th anniversary last February with an avalanche of stars parading through a three-hour prime-time special. Overlooked in all the excitement was the fact that the show’s actual 40th anniversary wouldn’t arrive until eight months later — until this Sunday, to be exact. "SNL" premiered on Oct. 11, 1975 (it was actually named "NBC’s Saturday Night" at the time) and it’s startling to compare the shaky, unformed show that almost nobody saw that night to the high-wattage, high-rated season opener we saw last week. We devote a chapter to the first show in our book, "Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live." Here are a few details that illuminate the remarkable distance the show has traveled over the course of those 40 years. Lorne Michaels' scruffy, pot-smoking, disrespectful "enlightened amateurs" It’s odd how many people, including not a few guest hosts, never seem to grasp that "Saturday Night Live" really is, as its name plainly suggests, a live show, a fact that makes it one of the most ambitious, complicated and dangerous programs ever produced. By now SNL has a production schedule that can be described as routine chaos, meaning that, despite a determination to keep things loose and flexible, there are seasoned professionals at the helm who can be relied on to get 90 minutes of comedy on and off the air. Such was not the case going into the premiere. To the contrary, there was no confidence that the first show would come off at all. "SNL" Fearless Leader Lorne Michaels, who was a master at appearing in complete control at every moment, tried to cut the tension in staff meetings by telling his terrified cast and writers to relax. “The worst thing that can happen,” he assured them, “is that none of us will ever work again.” Many of the crew members who worked in Studio 8H and most of the executive hierarchy at NBC thought that was exactly what would happen — and the sooner it happened, the better they’d like it. When Lorne started putting together the show’s cast and writing team during the summer, he’d decreed that no one who’d ever worked in television before would be hired. He was looking for what he called “enlightened amateurs,” meaning talented renegades from the thriving underground comedy scene who were contemptuous of everything network television in those days stood for — a nearly relentless bath of mainstream mush. Lorne’s demands, and the attitude that inspired them, hadn’t gone over especially well with the old-timers in 8H, many of whom had been working there since the days of Milton Berle’s "Texaco Star Theater." They recognized immediately that, whatever “enlightened” was supposed to mean, the amateurs Lorne had hired were just that: amateurs who didn’t have a clue what it took to actually make a television program. Almost as quickly, Lorne realized the show was going to need some seasoned support and backpedaled, but the damage had been done. Thus "SNL" premiered in the midst of hostile territory. The show had managed to get as far as it had mainly because of the support of one man — NBC President Herb Schlosser. Pretty much everyone else in the building had done as little as possible to help the scruffy, pot-smoking, disrespectful troops of "SNL" before the show went on the air, and they couldn’t wait to see them fall flat on their faces when it did. NBC panicked over guest host George Carlin  The guest host for the premiere show was comedian George Carlin, who was chosen, Lorne said in a press release, because “he’s punctual and fills out forms well.” The real reason was that Lorne didn’t want to subject hosts he cared about more, like Lily Tomlin and Richard Pryor, to the trauma of a first show — he wasn’t sure, he told us, that he’d be able to “protect” them adequately. Carlin had no idea what he’d signed on for when he arrived and what he saw didn’t make him comfortable. A practitioner of the standup monologue, he found himself booked on a sketch comedy show run by a bunch of neophytes. Partly for that reason and partly because he was, he later admitted, “in another world” on cocaine at the time, Carlin stayed aloof from the proceedings, declining as the week went on the opportunity to appear in any of the sketches he was offered. NBC, for its part, was extremely nervous about having Carlin appear, live, on its airwaves, given that he’d been the focus of a major free-speech battle over his routine about the seven dirty words you can never say on television. Putting the show on a seven-second delay was considered but eventually abandoned. Network executives, however, did demand that Carlin cut his hair and wear a suit. Carlin compromised: he didn’t cut his hair, but he did wear a three-piece suit — with a blue t-shirt rather than a white dress shirt and tie underneath. Billy Crystal's long ride home One of Lorne’s nightmares for the first show was that he’d run out of material 30 minutes before it was supposed to go off the air. In order to make sure that wouldn’t happen, he booked what turned out to be a ridiculous number of guests. Besides Carlin there were three other standups: Billy Crystal, Andy Kaufman and Dan Aykroyd’s longtime comedy partner from Canada, Valri Bromfield, and not one but two musical guests, Janis Ian and Billy Preston (as close as Lorne could get to his original targets, Carole King and Stevie Wonder). During the hour between dress rehearsal and the air show, Lorne realized he’d overcompensated and told Crystal and Bromfield they’d have to drastically cut their routines. Crystal’s manager, Buddy Morra, vehemently resisted, and for once Lorne lost his temper, ending up in a shouting match with Morra in a hallway outside 8H. Morra insisted that if Lorne didn’t relent he and Crystal were walking. Lorne didn’t, and they did. Instead of making his network TV debut, Crystal soon found himself riding a train home to Long Island, his face pressed against the window, wondering how things could have gone so wrong. The disastrous run-through The first full run-through of the premiere show, on Friday night, October 10, didn’t go well. Somebody forgot to make sure that there was an audience in Studio 8H, and at the last minute, pages from NBC’s Guest Relations staff were outside 30 Rock, pulling in any warm bodies they could find. Thus a fair number of those who witnessed SNL’s first full rehearsal were homeless people taking the opportunity to spend 90 minutes off the street. They got more than they bargained for: the rehearsal ran at least twice the show’s allotted 90 minutes and, thanks to a sound system that hadn’t been significantly upgraded for decades — certainly not to the standards needed for both sketch comedy and rock and roll — few people in the audience could hear what was being said onstage anyway. NBC’s vice president in charge of late-night programming, Dick Ebersol, who had hired Lorne and helped run interference for him within NBC, managed at 2 a.m. to find an outfit called Hollywood Sound that was in the process of breaking down the sound system they’d used that night for a concert at Madison Square Garden. With the help of a generous disbursement of network dollars, Ebersol convinced them to truck their equipment over to 30 Rock, where they worked all night setting it up for the premiere. They worked alongside the stagehands, who with set designers Eugene Lee and Leo Yoshimura were frantically trying to finish home base — the main set. Lee had stubbornly insisted, for authenticity’s sake, on using real 8 x 8-inch facing bricks for the floor, instead of the more conventional contact paper or paint. The bricks weighed half a pound apiece and had to be cut to fit. The carpenters at the Brooklyn set shop had refused to build the bricks into the set, saying they’d break when they were trucked to Manhattan. Instead, the bricks arrived at 30 Rock in a crate along with a single carbide saw blade. To Yoshimura, the message was clear: “Cut them yourself, asshole.” Yoshimura was still finishing the set a half an hour before show time. Every few minutes Dick Ebersol would run up to him to ask, “Are you gonna get done? Are you gonna get it done?” Yoshimura, who at that point had been without sleep for several days, shrugged and said, “I don’t know Dick. If I don’t, you can fire me.” John Belushi almost didn't go on John Belushi was at the center of another drama that unfolded just before air time. Like all the cast members, Belushi had been insulted by the salaries the network had offered the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, for good reason. NBC was demanding that the performers commit themselves to the network for an absurd length of time — five years — for an even more absurd amount of money – $750 a show in the first season. Take it or leave it. For much longer than the other cast members, Belushi kept insisting he wasn’t going to take it, and by 11 o’clock the night of the premiere he was still refusing to affix his signature to the deal. With ever-growing desperation — Belushi was one of two characters in the show’s opening sketch, and he wouldn’t be able to go on without a contract — Ebersol kept begging him to sign, but Belushi was having none of it. Finally he spotted Lorne’s manager, Bernie Brillstein, who was standing nearby, and waved him over. “This guy is telling me this is favored nations,” he said to Brillstein, referring to a common clause in ensemble show contracts that ensures every cast member is paid the same. “The only way I’ll sign,” Belushi continued, “is if you tell me it’s fair, and I’ll only sign if you represent me.” Brillstein shrugged and said fine, and Belushi took Ebersol’s pen and signed. Crazy John Belushi, Brillstein would later reflect. He conned himself right into a deal with the boss’s manager. Crazy like a fox. (Like most show-biz contracts, the initial one Belushi and the other cast members signed turned out to be negotiable. As their stardom increased, so did their salaries, in both cases precipitously.) And it wasn't even an immediate hit The first show did come off without any disasters, although afterward it disappeared more or less soundlessly into the late night void. Contrary to popular belief, "SNL" wasn’t an overnight success — far from it. Ratings for most of the first season were unimpressive. It stayed on the air partly because it had strong support from young newspaper critics and partly because it seemed to be building an audience among young viewers, including the teenaged children of many of NBC’s top executives, who were begging their fathers to get them tickets to the show. (One of those influential offspring was Herb Schlosser’s son Eric, who attended the show often and who later became the author of the best-selling exposé, "Fast Food Nation.") "SNL" didn’t qualify as a genuine hit until its third season. One viewer on Oct. 11, 1975, got the joke immediately, however. Steve Martin had watched the premiere in Aspen, Colorado, and remembers not laughing so much as looking on in wonder. “Fuck,” he said to himself as the credits rolled. “They did it. They did the show everyone should have been doing.""Saturday Night Live" celebrated its 40th anniversary last February with an avalanche of stars parading through a three-hour prime-time special. Overlooked in all the excitement was the fact that the show’s actual 40th anniversary wouldn’t arrive until eight months later — until this Sunday, to be exact. "SNL" premiered on Oct. 11, 1975 (it was actually named "NBC’s Saturday Night" at the time) and it’s startling to compare the shaky, unformed show that almost nobody saw that night to the high-wattage, high-rated season opener we saw last week. We devote a chapter to the first show in our book, "Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live." Here are a few details that illuminate the remarkable distance the show has traveled over the course of those 40 years. Lorne Michaels' scruffy, pot-smoking, disrespectful "enlightened amateurs" It’s odd how many people, including not a few guest hosts, never seem to grasp that "Saturday Night Live" really is, as its name plainly suggests, a live show, a fact that makes it one of the most ambitious, complicated and dangerous programs ever produced. By now SNL has a production schedule that can be described as routine chaos, meaning that, despite a determination to keep things loose and flexible, there are seasoned professionals at the helm who can be relied on to get 90 minutes of comedy on and off the air. Such was not the case going into the premiere. To the contrary, there was no confidence that the first show would come off at all. "SNL" Fearless Leader Lorne Michaels, who was a master at appearing in complete control at every moment, tried to cut the tension in staff meetings by telling his terrified cast and writers to relax. “The worst thing that can happen,” he assured them, “is that none of us will ever work again.” Many of the crew members who worked in Studio 8H and most of the executive hierarchy at NBC thought that was exactly what would happen — and the sooner it happened, the better they’d like it. When Lorne started putting together the show’s cast and writing team during the summer, he’d decreed that no one who’d ever worked in television before would be hired. He was looking for what he called “enlightened amateurs,” meaning talented renegades from the thriving underground comedy scene who were contemptuous of everything network television in those days stood for — a nearly relentless bath of mainstream mush. Lorne’s demands, and the attitude that inspired them, hadn’t gone over especially well with the old-timers in 8H, many of whom had been working there since the days of Milton Berle’s "Texaco Star Theater." They recognized immediately that, whatever “enlightened” was supposed to mean, the amateurs Lorne had hired were just that: amateurs who didn’t have a clue what it took to actually make a television program. Almost as quickly, Lorne realized the show was going to need some seasoned support and backpedaled, but the damage had been done. Thus "SNL" premiered in the midst of hostile territory. The show had managed to get as far as it had mainly because of the support of one man — NBC President Herb Schlosser. Pretty much everyone else in the building had done as little as possible to help the scruffy, pot-smoking, disrespectful troops of "SNL" before the show went on the air, and they couldn’t wait to see them fall flat on their faces when it did. NBC panicked over guest host George Carlin  The guest host for the premiere show was comedian George Carlin, who was chosen, Lorne said in a press release, because “he’s punctual and fills out forms well.” The real reason was that Lorne didn’t want to subject hosts he cared about more, like Lily Tomlin and Richard Pryor, to the trauma of a first show — he wasn’t sure, he told us, that he’d be able to “protect” them adequately. Carlin had no idea what he’d signed on for when he arrived and what he saw didn’t make him comfortable. A practitioner of the standup monologue, he found himself booked on a sketch comedy show run by a bunch of neophytes. Partly for that reason and partly because he was, he later admitted, “in another world” on cocaine at the time, Carlin stayed aloof from the proceedings, declining as the week went on the opportunity to appear in any of the sketches he was offered. NBC, for its part, was extremely nervous about having Carlin appear, live, on its airwaves, given that he’d been the focus of a major free-speech battle over his routine about the seven dirty words you can never say on television. Putting the show on a seven-second delay was considered but eventually abandoned. Network executives, however, did demand that Carlin cut his hair and wear a suit. Carlin compromised: he didn’t cut his hair, but he did wear a three-piece suit — with a blue t-shirt rather than a white dress shirt and tie underneath. Billy Crystal's long ride home One of Lorne’s nightmares for the first show was that he’d run out of material 30 minutes before it was supposed to go off the air. In order to make sure that wouldn’t happen, he booked what turned out to be a ridiculous number of guests. Besides Carlin there were three other standups: Billy Crystal, Andy Kaufman and Dan Aykroyd’s longtime comedy partner from Canada, Valri Bromfield, and not one but two musical guests, Janis Ian and Billy Preston (as close as Lorne could get to his original targets, Carole King and Stevie Wonder). During the hour between dress rehearsal and the air show, Lorne realized he’d overcompensated and told Crystal and Bromfield they’d have to drastically cut their routines. Crystal’s manager, Buddy Morra, vehemently resisted, and for once Lorne lost his temper, ending up in a shouting match with Morra in a hallway outside 8H. Morra insisted that if Lorne didn’t relent he and Crystal were walking. Lorne didn’t, and they did. Instead of making his network TV debut, Crystal soon found himself riding a train home to Long Island, his face pressed against the window, wondering how things could have gone so wrong. The disastrous run-through The first full run-through of the premiere show, on Friday night, October 10, didn’t go well. Somebody forgot to make sure that there was an audience in Studio 8H, and at the last minute, pages from NBC’s Guest Relations staff were outside 30 Rock, pulling in any warm bodies they could find. Thus a fair number of those who witnessed SNL’s first full rehearsal were homeless people taking the opportunity to spend 90 minutes off the street. They got more than they bargained for: the rehearsal ran at least twice the show’s allotted 90 minutes and, thanks to a sound system that hadn’t been significantly upgraded for decades — certainly not to the standards needed for both sketch comedy and rock and roll — few people in the audience could hear what was being said onstage anyway. NBC’s vice president in charge of late-night programming, Dick Ebersol, who had hired Lorne and helped run interference for him within NBC, managed at 2 a.m. to find an outfit called Hollywood Sound that was in the process of breaking down the sound system they’d used that night for a concert at Madison Square Garden. With the help of a generous disbursement of network dollars, Ebersol convinced them to truck their equipment over to 30 Rock, where they worked all night setting it up for the premiere. They worked alongside the stagehands, who with set designers Eugene Lee and Leo Yoshimura were frantically trying to finish home base — the main set. Lee had stubbornly insisted, for authenticity’s sake, on using real 8 x 8-inch facing bricks for the floor, instead of the more conventional contact paper or paint. The bricks weighed half a pound apiece and had to be cut to fit. The carpenters at the Brooklyn set shop had refused to build the bricks into the set, saying they’d break when they were trucked to Manhattan. Instead, the bricks arrived at 30 Rock in a crate along with a single carbide saw blade. To Yoshimura, the message was clear: “Cut them yourself, asshole.” Yoshimura was still finishing the set a half an hour before show time. Every few minutes Dick Ebersol would run up to him to ask, “Are you gonna get done? Are you gonna get it done?” Yoshimura, who at that point had been without sleep for several days, shrugged and said, “I don’t know Dick. If I don’t, you can fire me.” John Belushi almost didn't go on John Belushi was at the center of another drama that unfolded just before air time. Like all the cast members, Belushi had been insulted by the salaries the network had offered the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, for good reason. NBC was demanding that the performers commit themselves to the network for an absurd length of time — five years — for an even more absurd amount of money – $750 a show in the first season. Take it or leave it. For much longer than the other cast members, Belushi kept insisting he wasn’t going to take it, and by 11 o’clock the night of the premiere he was still refusing to affix his signature to the deal. With ever-growing desperation — Belushi was one of two characters in the show’s opening sketch, and he wouldn’t be able to go on without a contract — Ebersol kept begging him to sign, but Belushi was having none of it. Finally he spotted Lorne’s manager, Bernie Brillstein, who was standing nearby, and waved him over. “This guy is telling me this is favored nations,” he said to Brillstein, referring to a common clause in ensemble show contracts that ensures every cast member is paid the same. “The only way I’ll sign,” Belushi continued, “is if you tell me it’s fair, and I’ll only sign if you represent me.” Brillstein shrugged and said fine, and Belushi took Ebersol’s pen and signed. Crazy John Belushi, Brillstein would later reflect. He conned himself right into a deal with the boss’s manager. Crazy like a fox. (Like most show-biz contracts, the initial one Belushi and the other cast members signed turned out to be negotiable. As their stardom increased, so did their salaries, in both cases precipitously.) And it wasn't even an immediate hit The first show did come off without any disasters, although afterward it disappeared more or less soundlessly into the late night void. Contrary to popular belief, "SNL" wasn’t an overnight success — far from it. Ratings for most of the first season were unimpressive. It stayed on the air partly because it had strong support from young newspaper critics and partly because it seemed to be building an audience among young viewers, including the teenaged children of many of NBC’s top executives, who were begging their fathers to get them tickets to the show. (One of those influential offspring was Herb Schlosser’s son Eric, who attended the show often and who later became the author of the best-selling exposé, "Fast Food Nation.") "SNL" didn’t qualify as a genuine hit until its third season. One viewer on Oct. 11, 1975, got the joke immediately, however. Steve Martin had watched the premiere in Aspen, Colorado, and remembers not laughing so much as looking on in wonder. “Fuck,” he said to himself as the credits rolled. “They did it. They did the show everyone should have been doing."

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“An emotional Benjamin Buttoning”: The inside secrets of 6 new books that will top your fall reading list

For September, I posed a series of questions — with, as always, a few verbal restrictions — to six authors with new books: Ryan Britt ("Luke Skywalker Can’t Read: And Other Geeky Truths," Nov. 24), Susan Cheever ("Drinking in America: Our Secret History," Oct. 13), Ron Childress ("And West Is West," Oct. 13), Josh Gondelman (co-author with Joe Berkowitz of "You Blew It!: An Awkward Look at the Many Ways in Which You've Already Ruined Your Life," out today), Maris Kreizman ("Slaughterhouse 90210," out today) and John Seabrook ("The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory," out now). Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about? GONDELMAN: It's basically "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" but nonfiction, and for grownups. Is that too much summary? If so, it's about the feeling of remembering something embarrassing you said ten years ago and thinking about it all day. CHILDRESS: Ethan Winter and Jessica Aldridge, a Wall Street quant and a military drone pilot, respectively. Bit players caught in a nexus of secrets, technology failures, identity loss and family crises. Also, it's about America’s transitional state between a society managed and run by people to one controlled by algorithms and mediated through screens. SEABROOK: It's probably as close as I am ever going to come to satisfying my true ambition, which is to write a musical. People talk for a while, and then there's a song. BRITT: My book is an attempt to replicate on the page what it's like to talk to me in real life when I'm conflating weird opinions about science fiction with random personal anecdotes. CHEEVER: It’s about a new way of writing history using the vivid details of actual lives to show how past events unfolded. I have tried to take the pictures of our forefathers off the wall and let them dance. KREIZMAN: "Slaughterhouse 90210" is about how books intersect with TV and film, how loving books and loving pop culture go together. They’re not mutually exclusive enjoyments, and at best they enhance each other. Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book? CHILDRESS: Current news. The Internet. Military blogs. Stock market flash crashes. Enhanced security. The acceptance of mass surveillance. Diminished expectations. The possibility of resistance. BRITT: There's a fictional character who is name-checked in the title of the book whom you maybe have heard of. Gin and tonics were probably an influence. The older brother from the band Oasis — Noel Gallagher — has probably influenced all my nonfiction. Not necessarily his music. But his interviews. I am not kidding. SEABROOK: My parents were a major influence on this book, because they both loved the pop songs of their day (Andrews Sisters, Frank Sinatra) and played them around the house — my mother on the piano, my father on the record player. And I noticed that whenever music was playing in the house, everyone seemed happier. The furniture seemed to float a millimeter or so off the floor. I wanted to recapture that happy feeling in the book. CHEEVER: Many of the historians we revere in this country write with a kind of sleepy gravitas, a soft-focus lens that leaves out all the interesting things — sex, food, clothes and especially drinking. I looked for the exceptions. KREIZMAN: US Weekly, TV recaps, cartoons, fan fiction, pop music, that feeling of accomplishment and mortification after a particularly long period of binge-watching or binge-reading. GONDELMAN: Our book is influenced enormously by Freudian slips, chemistry-free first kisses and botched job interviews. Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book? SEABROOK: The Boy calls shotgun, reprograms the radio presets to pop stations, Kesha's barbaric yawp enters my life, WTF IS this shit? "You spin my head right round" ... Thumpa thooka whompa whomp Pish pish pish Thumpa wompah wompah pah pah Maaakaka thomp peep bap boony Gunga gunga gung GONDELMAN: The opposite of what was happening in the book. An emotional Benjamin Buttoning, if you will. CHEEVER: Same old, same old. BRITT: Travel. What-am-I-doing-with-my-life-is-this-really-where-I-want-to-be. Also: New York nonsense. KREIZMAN: Abject self-doubt; attempting to watch and read everything all at once in big deep gulps and wishing I could pour books directly into my brain; working on my night cheese. CHILDRESS: This and that. Reading. Travel. Exercise. Netflix. Art openings. Housekeeping. Database projects. Motorcycle rides. Audiobooks. What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers? CHEEVER: The words that hurt are often code words for the writer being feminine. Paul Muldoon called me “soppy … sloppy and sentimental,” after my last book, a biography of E.E. Cummings. Would he have said that about a man? There are many examples of this. KREIZMAN: "Wake up, sheeple." CHILDRESS: I’m concerned that my work may be pigeonholed in the thriller category because of the pacing ... but I do like a story that keeps moving. BRITT: My book comes out in November, so I'm in that stage where everyone is giving me tons of thumbs-up and winks and smiles. I will say this: despite the word "geeky" being in the subtitle, I try to be very careful about how I use that word. GONDELMAN: I've tried not to read reviews, but sometimes things come across my social media feed. My least favorite is any synonym for funny that's not "funny": Knee-slapping, rib-tickling, anything about the reader's "funny bone." So often, when people talk about comedy, they revert to the language people used to review the Marx Brothers. I imagine "garbage," "seizure-inducing," and "nauseous" would sting too. SEABROOK: "Brilliant."  Such a cliche. "Deeply felt." Gag me with a spoon. "Best thing I've ever read." Bullshit! If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent) what would it be? GONDELMAN: In a dream world, I would love to be a master pastry chef, because it combines something I love doing (baking) with something I'm not good at doing (baking). BUT! Practically, if I weren't writing and doing comedy things, I'd like to teach kids to read. I would be good at that in real life. CHEEVER: I don’t really think of writing as a career. It’s something that happened to me. By working harder than I knew it was possible to work, I have become passable at it. CHILDRESS: Computer programmer. As a coder, like a writer, you sit in a room and type, solving small problems as they arise while developing a more comprehensive overall goal that is similar to a narrative. SEABROOK: My high school aptitude test said I would make a good hospital administrator. There are a lot of sick people out there who should be very glad I didn't follow that suggestion. BRITT: I wish I'd become a paleontologist, because I love dinosaurs. But I think I realized at a young age that those folks are outside a lot and I really can't handle getting sunburned. KREIZMAN: I would be The Rock's dog walker. What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at? KREIZMAN: I am pretty great at juxtaposition, less great at subtle yet effective self-promotion (self-promo is one of the foremost elements of craft, right?). BRITT: I'm decent with weird and quirky analogies. I'm bad at patience. I like jumping to conclusions without explaining myself and praying that my weird analogy will confuse you long enough to get on-board my crazy space-train. CHEEVER: All writers have strengths and weaknesses. I am terrified of being boring, so I write short, compressed stories that sometimes don’t give a reader time to think about what they have read. I struggle to slow down. SEABROOK: I'm pretty good at the Shaker chair-building part of it. Simple woodworking that you can sit on and not hurt your butt or worry about the back giving way. I'm terrible at imagining things that didn't happen — which is why I stopped writing fiction at the age of 23. CHILDRESS: I’m good at editing myself down. I dislike using too many words and am suspicious of clever phrases that can seduce. This may not always be a good thing. I wish that I wrote faster, probably so that I could cut more. GONDELMAN: I tend to be better at describing feelings and ideas, and worse at painting a picture of any physical thing. I have terrible spatial reasoning skills so even if I were describing my girlfriend, whom I see every day, it sound like I was talking about a child's drawing of her. "Very beautiful. Glasses. Brown hair. Super smart brain. Bigger than our dog. Smaller than me." How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything? BRITT: I just think about singer-songwriters, or actors who write their own scripts, and I figure, well, it could be worse! CHILDRESS: I don’t think about anyone reading what I’m writing when I’m writing. I’m enjoying the writing process — the exploration of ideas, the solving of compositional problems — as an end in itself. I hope that’s not hubris. SEABROOK: With large dollops of bitter experience. I started out assuming people would automatically be interested in things that interested me, only to be shocked — shocked! — to discover they were often not. So with "The Song Machine" I set out to write about the most popular cultural artifacts in the world — pop songs. Not sure if people who like pop songs read, or if people who read like pop songs. I guess we're about to find out. And hey, the audio book is amazing! GONDELMAN: It makes me happy to smash words together. So it's nice when I can be met with warmth and enthusiasm, but doing standup comedy has taught me how to push through the fact that statistically speaking, 100% of Earth's population population doesn't have any interest in what I'm doing at all. I try to think less about having/deserving an audience and focus on enjoying the privilege of creating things I like. CHEEVER: It’s certainly hubris, but it’s the same hubris that makes me a teacher, a useful friend, a good mother for that matter. I hope that when readers look up from the last page of my book they will see the world in a new way. It would be hubris to think that happens automatically; I think it’s humility to hope that it might someday. KREIZMAN: I look at Twitter and how everyone I know is constantly spouting opinions about anything and everything and I think, Why not me?For September, I posed a series of questions — with, as always, a few verbal restrictions — to six authors with new books: Ryan Britt ("Luke Skywalker Can’t Read: And Other Geeky Truths," Nov. 24), Susan Cheever ("Drinking in America: Our Secret History," Oct. 13), Ron Childress ("And West Is West," Oct. 13), Josh Gondelman (co-author with Joe Berkowitz of "You Blew It!: An Awkward Look at the Many Ways in Which You've Already Ruined Your Life," out today), Maris Kreizman ("Slaughterhouse 90210," out today) and John Seabrook ("The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory," out now). Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about? GONDELMAN: It's basically "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" but nonfiction, and for grownups. Is that too much summary? If so, it's about the feeling of remembering something embarrassing you said ten years ago and thinking about it all day. CHILDRESS: Ethan Winter and Jessica Aldridge, a Wall Street quant and a military drone pilot, respectively. Bit players caught in a nexus of secrets, technology failures, identity loss and family crises. Also, it's about America’s transitional state between a society managed and run by people to one controlled by algorithms and mediated through screens. SEABROOK: It's probably as close as I am ever going to come to satisfying my true ambition, which is to write a musical. People talk for a while, and then there's a song. BRITT: My book is an attempt to replicate on the page what it's like to talk to me in real life when I'm conflating weird opinions about science fiction with random personal anecdotes. CHEEVER: It’s about a new way of writing history using the vivid details of actual lives to show how past events unfolded. I have tried to take the pictures of our forefathers off the wall and let them dance. KREIZMAN: "Slaughterhouse 90210" is about how books intersect with TV and film, how loving books and loving pop culture go together. They’re not mutually exclusive enjoyments, and at best they enhance each other. Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book? CHILDRESS: Current news. The Internet. Military blogs. Stock market flash crashes. Enhanced security. The acceptance of mass surveillance. Diminished expectations. The possibility of resistance. BRITT: There's a fictional character who is name-checked in the title of the book whom you maybe have heard of. Gin and tonics were probably an influence. The older brother from the band Oasis — Noel Gallagher — has probably influenced all my nonfiction. Not necessarily his music. But his interviews. I am not kidding. SEABROOK: My parents were a major influence on this book, because they both loved the pop songs of their day (Andrews Sisters, Frank Sinatra) and played them around the house — my mother on the piano, my father on the record player. And I noticed that whenever music was playing in the house, everyone seemed happier. The furniture seemed to float a millimeter or so off the floor. I wanted to recapture that happy feeling in the book. CHEEVER: Many of the historians we revere in this country write with a kind of sleepy gravitas, a soft-focus lens that leaves out all the interesting things — sex, food, clothes and especially drinking. I looked for the exceptions. KREIZMAN: US Weekly, TV recaps, cartoons, fan fiction, pop music, that feeling of accomplishment and mortification after a particularly long period of binge-watching or binge-reading. GONDELMAN: Our book is influenced enormously by Freudian slips, chemistry-free first kisses and botched job interviews. Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book? SEABROOK: The Boy calls shotgun, reprograms the radio presets to pop stations, Kesha's barbaric yawp enters my life, WTF IS this shit? "You spin my head right round" ... Thumpa thooka whompa whomp Pish pish pish Thumpa wompah wompah pah pah Maaakaka thomp peep bap boony Gunga gunga gung GONDELMAN: The opposite of what was happening in the book. An emotional Benjamin Buttoning, if you will. CHEEVER: Same old, same old. BRITT: Travel. What-am-I-doing-with-my-life-is-this-really-where-I-want-to-be. Also: New York nonsense. KREIZMAN: Abject self-doubt; attempting to watch and read everything all at once in big deep gulps and wishing I could pour books directly into my brain; working on my night cheese. CHILDRESS: This and that. Reading. Travel. Exercise. Netflix. Art openings. Housekeeping. Database projects. Motorcycle rides. Audiobooks. What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers? CHEEVER: The words that hurt are often code words for the writer being feminine. Paul Muldoon called me “soppy … sloppy and sentimental,” after my last book, a biography of E.E. Cummings. Would he have said that about a man? There are many examples of this. KREIZMAN: "Wake up, sheeple." CHILDRESS: I’m concerned that my work may be pigeonholed in the thriller category because of the pacing ... but I do like a story that keeps moving. BRITT: My book comes out in November, so I'm in that stage where everyone is giving me tons of thumbs-up and winks and smiles. I will say this: despite the word "geeky" being in the subtitle, I try to be very careful about how I use that word. GONDELMAN: I've tried not to read reviews, but sometimes things come across my social media feed. My least favorite is any synonym for funny that's not "funny": Knee-slapping, rib-tickling, anything about the reader's "funny bone." So often, when people talk about comedy, they revert to the language people used to review the Marx Brothers. I imagine "garbage," "seizure-inducing," and "nauseous" would sting too. SEABROOK: "Brilliant."  Such a cliche. "Deeply felt." Gag me with a spoon. "Best thing I've ever read." Bullshit! If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent) what would it be? GONDELMAN: In a dream world, I would love to be a master pastry chef, because it combines something I love doing (baking) with something I'm not good at doing (baking). BUT! Practically, if I weren't writing and doing comedy things, I'd like to teach kids to read. I would be good at that in real life. CHEEVER: I don’t really think of writing as a career. It’s something that happened to me. By working harder than I knew it was possible to work, I have become passable at it. CHILDRESS: Computer programmer. As a coder, like a writer, you sit in a room and type, solving small problems as they arise while developing a more comprehensive overall goal that is similar to a narrative. SEABROOK: My high school aptitude test said I would make a good hospital administrator. There are a lot of sick people out there who should be very glad I didn't follow that suggestion. BRITT: I wish I'd become a paleontologist, because I love dinosaurs. But I think I realized at a young age that those folks are outside a lot and I really can't handle getting sunburned. KREIZMAN: I would be The Rock's dog walker. What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at? KREIZMAN: I am pretty great at juxtaposition, less great at subtle yet effective self-promotion (self-promo is one of the foremost elements of craft, right?). BRITT: I'm decent with weird and quirky analogies. I'm bad at patience. I like jumping to conclusions without explaining myself and praying that my weird analogy will confuse you long enough to get on-board my crazy space-train. CHEEVER: All writers have strengths and weaknesses. I am terrified of being boring, so I write short, compressed stories that sometimes don’t give a reader time to think about what they have read. I struggle to slow down. SEABROOK: I'm pretty good at the Shaker chair-building part of it. Simple woodworking that you can sit on and not hurt your butt or worry about the back giving way. I'm terrible at imagining things that didn't happen — which is why I stopped writing fiction at the age of 23. CHILDRESS: I’m good at editing myself down. I dislike using too many words and am suspicious of clever phrases that can seduce. This may not always be a good thing. I wish that I wrote faster, probably so that I could cut more. GONDELMAN: I tend to be better at describing feelings and ideas, and worse at painting a picture of any physical thing. I have terrible spatial reasoning skills so even if I were describing my girlfriend, whom I see every day, it sound like I was talking about a child's drawing of her. "Very beautiful. Glasses. Brown hair. Super smart brain. Bigger than our dog. Smaller than me." How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything? BRITT: I just think about singer-songwriters, or actors who write their own scripts, and I figure, well, it could be worse! CHILDRESS: I don’t think about anyone reading what I’m writing when I’m writing. I’m enjoying the writing process — the exploration of ideas, the solving of compositional problems — as an end in itself. I hope that’s not hubris. SEABROOK: With large dollops of bitter experience. I started out assuming people would automatically be interested in things that interested me, only to be shocked — shocked! — to discover they were often not. So with "The Song Machine" I set out to write about the most popular cultural artifacts in the world — pop songs. Not sure if people who like pop songs read, or if people who read like pop songs. I guess we're about to find out. And hey, the audio book is amazing! GONDELMAN: It makes me happy to smash words together. So it's nice when I can be met with warmth and enthusiasm, but doing standup comedy has taught me how to push through the fact that statistically speaking, 100% of Earth's population population doesn't have any interest in what I'm doing at all. I try to think less about having/deserving an audience and focus on enjoying the privilege of creating things I like. CHEEVER: It’s certainly hubris, but it’s the same hubris that makes me a teacher, a useful friend, a good mother for that matter. I hope that when readers look up from the last page of my book they will see the world in a new way. It would be hubris to think that happens automatically; I think it’s humility to hope that it might someday. KREIZMAN: I look at Twitter and how everyone I know is constantly spouting opinions about anything and everything and I think, Why not me?For September, I posed a series of questions — with, as always, a few verbal restrictions — to six authors with new books: Ryan Britt ("Luke Skywalker Can’t Read: And Other Geeky Truths," Nov. 24), Susan Cheever ("Drinking in America: Our Secret History," Oct. 13), Ron Childress ("And West Is West," Oct. 13), Josh Gondelman (co-author with Joe Berkowitz of "You Blew It!: An Awkward Look at the Many Ways in Which You've Already Ruined Your Life," out today), Maris Kreizman ("Slaughterhouse 90210," out today) and John Seabrook ("The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory," out now). Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about? GONDELMAN: It's basically "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" but nonfiction, and for grownups. Is that too much summary? If so, it's about the feeling of remembering something embarrassing you said ten years ago and thinking about it all day. CHILDRESS: Ethan Winter and Jessica Aldridge, a Wall Street quant and a military drone pilot, respectively. Bit players caught in a nexus of secrets, technology failures, identity loss and family crises. Also, it's about America’s transitional state between a society managed and run by people to one controlled by algorithms and mediated through screens. SEABROOK: It's probably as close as I am ever going to come to satisfying my true ambition, which is to write a musical. People talk for a while, and then there's a song. BRITT: My book is an attempt to replicate on the page what it's like to talk to me in real life when I'm conflating weird opinions about science fiction with random personal anecdotes. CHEEVER: It’s about a new way of writing history using the vivid details of actual lives to show how past events unfolded. I have tried to take the pictures of our forefathers off the wall and let them dance. KREIZMAN: "Slaughterhouse 90210" is about how books intersect with TV and film, how loving books and loving pop culture go together. They’re not mutually exclusive enjoyments, and at best they enhance each other. Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book? CHILDRESS: Current news. The Internet. Military blogs. Stock market flash crashes. Enhanced security. The acceptance of mass surveillance. Diminished expectations. The possibility of resistance. BRITT: There's a fictional character who is name-checked in the title of the book whom you maybe have heard of. Gin and tonics were probably an influence. The older brother from the band Oasis — Noel Gallagher — has probably influenced all my nonfiction. Not necessarily his music. But his interviews. I am not kidding. SEABROOK: My parents were a major influence on this book, because they both loved the pop songs of their day (Andrews Sisters, Frank Sinatra) and played them around the house — my mother on the piano, my father on the record player. And I noticed that whenever music was playing in the house, everyone seemed happier. The furniture seemed to float a millimeter or so off the floor. I wanted to recapture that happy feeling in the book. CHEEVER: Many of the historians we revere in this country write with a kind of sleepy gravitas, a soft-focus lens that leaves out all the interesting things — sex, food, clothes and especially drinking. I looked for the exceptions. KREIZMAN: US Weekly, TV recaps, cartoons, fan fiction, pop music, that feeling of accomplishment and mortification after a particularly long period of binge-watching or binge-reading. GONDELMAN: Our book is influenced enormously by Freudian slips, chemistry-free first kisses and botched job interviews. Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book? SEABROOK: The Boy calls shotgun, reprograms the radio presets to pop stations, Kesha's barbaric yawp enters my life, WTF IS this shit? "You spin my head right round" ... Thumpa thooka whompa whomp Pish pish pish Thumpa wompah wompah pah pah Maaakaka thomp peep bap boony Gunga gunga gung GONDELMAN: The opposite of what was happening in the book. An emotional Benjamin Buttoning, if you will. CHEEVER: Same old, same old. BRITT: Travel. What-am-I-doing-with-my-life-is-this-really-where-I-want-to-be. Also: New York nonsense. KREIZMAN: Abject self-doubt; attempting to watch and read everything all at once in big deep gulps and wishing I could pour books directly into my brain; working on my night cheese. CHILDRESS: This and that. Reading. Travel. Exercise. Netflix. Art openings. Housekeeping. Database projects. Motorcycle rides. Audiobooks. What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers? CHEEVER: The words that hurt are often code words for the writer being feminine. Paul Muldoon called me “soppy … sloppy and sentimental,” after my last book, a biography of E.E. Cummings. Would he have said that about a man? There are many examples of this. KREIZMAN: "Wake up, sheeple." CHILDRESS: I’m concerned that my work may be pigeonholed in the thriller category because of the pacing ... but I do like a story that keeps moving. BRITT: My book comes out in November, so I'm in that stage where everyone is giving me tons of thumbs-up and winks and smiles. I will say this: despite the word "geeky" being in the subtitle, I try to be very careful about how I use that word. GONDELMAN: I've tried not to read reviews, but sometimes things come across my social media feed. My least favorite is any synonym for funny that's not "funny": Knee-slapping, rib-tickling, anything about the reader's "funny bone." So often, when people talk about comedy, they revert to the language people used to review the Marx Brothers. I imagine "garbage," "seizure-inducing," and "nauseous" would sting too. SEABROOK: "Brilliant."  Such a cliche. "Deeply felt." Gag me with a spoon. "Best thing I've ever read." Bullshit! If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent) what would it be? GONDELMAN: In a dream world, I would love to be a master pastry chef, because it combines something I love doing (baking) with something I'm not good at doing (baking). BUT! Practically, if I weren't writing and doing comedy things, I'd like to teach kids to read. I would be good at that in real life. CHEEVER: I don’t really think of writing as a career. It’s something that happened to me. By working harder than I knew it was possible to work, I have become passable at it. CHILDRESS: Computer programmer. As a coder, like a writer, you sit in a room and type, solving small problems as they arise while developing a more comprehensive overall goal that is similar to a narrative. SEABROOK: My high school aptitude test said I would make a good hospital administrator. There are a lot of sick people out there who should be very glad I didn't follow that suggestion. BRITT: I wish I'd become a paleontologist, because I love dinosaurs. But I think I realized at a young age that those folks are outside a lot and I really can't handle getting sunburned. KREIZMAN: I would be The Rock's dog walker. What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at? KREIZMAN: I am pretty great at juxtaposition, less great at subtle yet effective self-promotion (self-promo is one of the foremost elements of craft, right?). BRITT: I'm decent with weird and quirky analogies. I'm bad at patience. I like jumping to conclusions without explaining myself and praying that my weird analogy will confuse you long enough to get on-board my crazy space-train. CHEEVER: All writers have strengths and weaknesses. I am terrified of being boring, so I write short, compressed stories that sometimes don’t give a reader time to think about what they have read. I struggle to slow down. SEABROOK: I'm pretty good at the Shaker chair-building part of it. Simple woodworking that you can sit on and not hurt your butt or worry about the back giving way. I'm terrible at imagining things that didn't happen — which is why I stopped writing fiction at the age of 23. CHILDRESS: I’m good at editing myself down. I dislike using too many words and am suspicious of clever phrases that can seduce. This may not always be a good thing. I wish that I wrote faster, probably so that I could cut more. GONDELMAN: I tend to be better at describing feelings and ideas, and worse at painting a picture of any physical thing. I have terrible spatial reasoning skills so even if I were describing my girlfriend, whom I see every day, it sound like I was talking about a child's drawing of her. "Very beautiful. Glasses. Brown hair. Super smart brain. Bigger than our dog. Smaller than me." How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything? BRITT: I just think about singer-songwriters, or actors who write their own scripts, and I figure, well, it could be worse! CHILDRESS: I don’t think about anyone reading what I’m writing when I’m writing. I’m enjoying the writing process — the exploration of ideas, the solving of compositional problems — as an end in itself. I hope that’s not hubris. SEABROOK: With large dollops of bitter experience. I started out assuming people would automatically be interested in things that interested me, only to be shocked — shocked! — to discover they were often not. So with "The Song Machine" I set out to write about the most popular cultural artifacts in the world — pop songs. Not sure if people who like pop songs read, or if people who read like pop songs. I guess we're about to find out. And hey, the audio book is amazing! GONDELMAN: It makes me happy to smash words together. So it's nice when I can be met with warmth and enthusiasm, but doing standup comedy has taught me how to push through the fact that statistically speaking, 100% of Earth's population population doesn't have any interest in what I'm doing at all. I try to think less about having/deserving an audience and focus on enjoying the privilege of creating things I like. CHEEVER: It’s certainly hubris, but it’s the same hubris that makes me a teacher, a useful friend, a good mother for that matter. I hope that when readers look up from the last page of my book they will see the world in a new way. It would be hubris to think that happens automatically; I think it’s humility to hope that it might someday. KREIZMAN: I look at Twitter and how everyone I know is constantly spouting opinions about anything and everything and I think, Why not me?

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No, really, go the f*ck to sleep

A friend of mine, an experienced mother who had her children before I had mine, told me once that every parent would find one of the basic biological functions of her child a nearly impossible challenge. For some, it’s feeding, an area rife with conflict (breast or bottle, rice cereal or baby-led weaning) and crowded with what the psychoanalyst Selma Fraiburg called “ghosts in the nursery”—those powerful, often unconscious, voices from our past that can affect our parenting, whether we know it or not. Other parents wig out over elimination, getting locked into potty-training power struggles, endlessly strategizing over their little one’s constipation. More from DAME: "What Happens When Women Literally Fight Back?" But one issue looms above the others: sleep. It’s why so many parents of babies and toddlers find themselves dreading nighttime, even though they themselves are exhausted. They know that each bedtime can become a battle, whether with a six-month-old doing her best to scuttle your dreams of an easy sleep-training regimen, or a 3-year-old whose requirements for falling asleep have grown to include six books, three songs, and half an hour of back-rubbing (with an option to repeat the whole thing if he isn’t quite feeling sleepy yet). Whether we follow one of the many, many, many sleep-training programs available today or eschew them entirely for the family bed, many of us feel guilty about our choice. And in the first year of parenting, we are often simply too tired to think too deeply about anything at all. Just how exhausted are the parents of young children? “The other day I stood trying to lock my cubicle at work with my car remote key,” said one mother on a Facebook parenting group. Another drove to the wrong house and tried to get inside with her groceries. More dangerously, one recalls falling asleep at the wheel at every streetlight: “People had to honk at me every time to get me going.” The lack of sleep can make things surreal. Mothers report hallucinating while sleep-deprived, panicking in the middle of the night that they can’t find the baby who is sleeping in their arms. “I also have a friend who once tried to nurse her cat in the middle of the night,” another mother writes. Bronwyn Becker Charlton, a developmental psychologist and co-founder of the Seedlings Group, sees a lot of parental exhaustion. “I think that a lot of times, we have very low expectations of what a child is capable of,” she says, adding that parents “take for granted that they signed up for having sleepless nights.” But, she argues, this doesn’t have to be the case. “A lot of parents feel guilty because they feel like it’s selfish that they want to get good sleep,” Charlton says. “And yet to learn to sleep well, to be a good sleeper, is an incredible gift to give to your child. Sleep is up there with breathing and eating in terms of its relevance for health.” More from DAME: "Why Are More Parents Homeschooling Their Kids?" Charlton, who often works with families over years, touching base as their children grow, says she sees parents change their minds about how they feel about sleep. Many parents start out letting their children sleep with them, she says, only to come to her years later saying, “we loved the idea of the family bed, but now our four-year-old is such a fitful sleeper, he kicks and rolls, and I cannot sleep.” A preschooler can be taught new habits—Charlton points out that kids are resilient—but her strong message is that it’s smartest to begin as you mean to proceed. If you don’t want a kid in your bed, don’t take the baby into your bed. But many of us do, even if we don’t particularly want to, because it’s the only way anyone gets any sleep at all—this despite the long-running public health debate about baby sleep safety. Despite a growing chorus of support for bed-sharing (and more evidence-based guidelines for doing it safely), the American Academy of Pediatrics continues to advise against it. When the experts disagree so vehemently, and they all sound so convincing, and we are just so damn tired, is it any wonder we mostly feel we’re getting it wrong? The runaway success of Adam Mansbach’s 2011 parody of children’s book, "Go the Fuck to Sleep," is proof of how ubiquitous parental stress over children’s sleep has become. Ben Reiss, a literature professor at work on a cultural history of sleep, notes that the book’s Amazon page is filled with “readers’ cathartic responses” to a book that somehow captures “contemporary American parents’ heroic attempts to suppress their frustration with the strange system we’ve been led to believe is normal or even natural.” Perhaps, Reiss suggests, getting our kids to sleep all alone every night is so difficult because it’s not particularly natural. “One of the really big issues is that, for the last century and a half we’ve been living under an orthodoxy that says that children have to sleep in their own rooms and sleep all through the night,” Reiss says. “We expend tremendous amounts of energy trying to make this thing happen, which before that time never happened anywhere else in the world.” And, he points out, “it certainly doesn’t seem to be anything that children want. They fight it every step of the way. And then, what’s the first thing they want to do when they’re old enough to form independent friendships? They want sleepovers, they want to sleep together.” How much do our children want to sleep with us? I’ve heard that some kids are genuinely happiest in their own beds—probably those kids who were expertly sleep-trained by very competent and determined parents—but both of mine were more like Twitter persona Honest Toddler, whose tweets and blog posts about claiming "the big bed" perfectly capture what many of us go through at night. “I know that my nighttime requests, occasional flatulence, REM screaming, and kicks to the face can be disconcerting,” Honest Toddler admits, arguing that it’s a toddler’s prerogative to share the big bed, rather than face the dark of night alone. More from DAME: "Why is the FDA Poisoning the Beauty Industry?" Between these two strong messages—society saying that babies need to learn to sleep independently, babies saying that they would really love to sleep with parents, thanks—most parents, Reiss says, “are caught. There’s no middle ground.” And then there are the ghosts in our own nurseries about what it means to be left alone at night. I remember lying in my bed as a small child, afraid of the dark and aware that it was against the rules to climb into my parents’ bed unless I was deathly ill. I envied my brothers, who shared the bedroom next to mine. When I had my own kids I overcorrected. My nighttime parenting style was all about maximum nurturing: nursing to sleep, reading to sleep, singing to sleep, snuggling to sleep. My kids never used pacifiers or loveys. I became their pacifier and lovey. It was a total parenting fail—and yet, somehow, it got me and my children through the nights. These days, the big one is in college and the little one almost always stays in his bed. And none of us is afraid of the dark.

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Two more shootings and a lockdown at U.S. universities in one day: Our sick gun culture just keeps getting worse

There were two shootings at U.S. universities in a span of less than 12 hours on Friday. A lockdown was also called for an unconfirmed third shooting. Arizona An 18-year-old college student shot four members of the Delta Chi fraternity at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ in the early hours of the morning. One student died; the other three are wounded. The shooter, freshman Steven Jones, survived and was taken into police custody. Texas At around noon, three suspects shot and killed a student and wounded another at an apartment complex on the campus of Texas Southern University, in Houston, TX. Two suspects were taken into police custody. The third suspect remains at large. Kentucky Mere hours later, another active shooter situation was announced at Jefferson Community and Technical College (JCTC) in Louisville, KY. A call reporting a shot fired was made around 3:30 PM EST. The shooting is unconfirmed. The Kentucky Community & Technical College System (KCTCS) reported at 3:59 that JCTC is "currently in lockdown due to a report of violent incident on our technical campus." Less than half an hour later, KCTCS announced that the campus emergency was over. SWAT officers were called to sweep a building, but were called down around 4:15. Details of the incident have not yet been released by authorities, and it is unclear if anyone was taken into custody. More than one shooting per day Exactly one week before, in Roseburg, OR, shooter Chris Harper-Mercer killed nine people at Umpqua Community College before committing suicide. President Obama visited with survivors and victims' families in Oregon on Friday, while the three incidents took place across the nation. In the first 238 day of 2015, there were over 247 mass shootings -- more than one per day, on average. Gun control advocacy group Everytown For Gun Safety has documented 149 school shootings in the U.S. since 2013, an average of almost one per week.There were two shootings at U.S. universities in a span of less than 12 hours on Friday. A lockdown was also called for an unconfirmed third shooting. Arizona An 18-year-old college student shot four members of the Delta Chi fraternity at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ in the early hours of the morning. One student died; the other three are wounded. The shooter, freshman Steven Jones, survived and was taken into police custody. Texas At around noon, three suspects shot and killed a student and wounded another at an apartment complex on the campus of Texas Southern University, in Houston, TX. Two suspects were taken into police custody. The third suspect remains at large. Kentucky Mere hours later, another active shooter situation was announced at Jefferson Community and Technical College (JCTC) in Louisville, KY. A call reporting a shot fired was made around 3:30 PM EST. The shooting is unconfirmed. The Kentucky Community & Technical College System (KCTCS) reported at 3:59 that JCTC is "currently in lockdown due to a report of violent incident on our technical campus." Less than half an hour later, KCTCS announced that the campus emergency was over. SWAT officers were called to sweep a building, but were called down around 4:15. Details of the incident have not yet been released by authorities, and it is unclear if anyone was taken into custody. More than one shooting per day Exactly one week before, in Roseburg, OR, shooter Chris Harper-Mercer killed nine people at Umpqua Community College before committing suicide. President Obama visited with survivors and victims' families in Oregon on Friday, while the three incidents took place across the nation. In the first 238 day of 2015, there were over 247 mass shootings -- more than one per day, on average. Gun control advocacy group Everytown For Gun Safety has documented 149 school shootings in the U.S. since 2013, an average of almost one per week.

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Beltway media beclowns itself again: Kevin McCarthy, GOP extremism & the Village’s asinine false equivalence

Surfing through the cable news channels yesterday morning, it was clear that the beltway wags were preparing to spend the day indicting Hillary Clinton for buckling under pressure to left-wing fanatics who have taken over the Democratic Party and forced her to take a position against the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal against her will. The word had gone forth from NBC's First Read that Hillary Clinton had obviously flip-flopped from her true beliefs on the issue in the most flagrantly dishonest way possible and had therefore cemented "every negative stereotype about her." During MSNBC's" Andrea Mitchell Reports," they even called in Chris Matthews to analyze the fallout from this terrible decision and the talking heads agreed this showed the left was driving the train. With a socialist gunning for the presidency (a socialist who won't even agree to join the Democratic Party!), unions calling the shots on trade and tree-huggers bringing the hammer down on the environment, the Democrats were in the same predicament as the right with Hillary Clinton being forced, in Matthews' words, to "bow to the extreme." And so a new Beltway meme was born. Or rather, it was stillborn, since within minutes of Mitchell and Matthews declaring that the Democratic Party's hippies were driving the party straight over the cliff with all their unreasonable demands, the news broke that the presumptive Speaker of the House, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, had dropped his news that he was withdrawing from the race. What followed was the kind of chaos you normally only see during a natural disaster or a bomb scare, with sweaty reporters shoving microphones into the face of every person who looked like he or she might be a Republican and anchors back in the studios shaking their heads in disbelief. How on earth could this have happened? Of course, it was entirely predictable. After all, John Boehner had been forced to resign because he simply could not get his fractious caucus to work together to do the business Congress is tasked with doing. And John Boehner was a 25-year congressional veteran who understood how to work every lever to get that job done. It remains a mystery why anyone thought that Kevin McCarthy -- a man who had only been in Congress since 2007 and whose rhetorical skills made George W. Bush sound like Martin Luther King Jr. by comparison -- would fare better than Boehner. MSNBC's Luke Russert seemed to think that he would be more successful because had gone to some lengths to "stay in touch" with all the members by texting them frequently, but that was about it. McCarthy's epic gaffe, admitting that the Select Committee on Benghazi is a partisan sham, was likely the most important reason for his fall from grace and subsequent inability to put together enough votes to win. And there were rumors circulating about a personal scandal. But by all accounts it was the anti-establishment Freedom Caucus yanking McCarthy's chain so hard with demands for greater say in policy and process that made him realize he couldn't win the vote. Evidently, his assurances that he would not be John Boehner were simply not enough to assuage their concerns. (All that texting seems not to have done the trick after all.) Indeed, one wonders why everyone assumed they would fall in line -- after all, they never had when he was the party whip. Robert Costa at the Washington Post reported that the far right leveled some specific demands that McCarthy simply couldn't meet:

Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.), the leader of the House Tea Party Caucus, asked McCarthy to publicly oppose efforts by establishment groups — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others — to run radio and TV ads criticizing conservatives who defied their own leaders.

In other words, they wanted the Speaker of the House to take their side in disputes with ... himself. Once he understood the impossibility of his position, McCarthy wisely withdrew. The media were completely shocked -- as they are every single time the House GOP caucus behaves like the radicals they are. It's not as if this is the first time, after all. But they had convinced themselves that it made sense that the amateurish Kevin McCarthy could transcend the troubles that plagued the much more experienced John Boehner. Despite years of evidence, they simply cannot accept that the Republican caucus is completely ungovernable so they, and the GOP establishment, turned their hopeful eyes to yet another savior: Paul Ryan, who, just as Kevin McCarthy had been days before, was seen as a man uniquely capable of bringing the feuding factions together. And once again the reaction was swift: https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/sta... https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/sta... https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/sta... Luke Russert noted the tweets and said on MSNBC:

To demonstrate just how difficult it is in the House GOP conference Laura Ingraham, noted conservative commentator, said, "no, he's a young gun" we should do three young guns and you're out," talking about Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy. So if someone like Laura Ingraham who has a huge following it the conservative blogosphere and on radio airwaves, if she's opposed to it, it will have a lot of influence on House conservatives who will look skeptically on Paul Ryan.

It sounded as though Russert, being so badly burned by his blithe assumptions about McCarthy, was finally developing some healthy skepticism about the GOP's ability to govern. But then he added, "That being said, he's trusted by a lot of conservatives because he's gone after a lot of the president's programs." But would he be willing to publicly oppose anyone who criticized the Freedom Caucus? Would he allow the Freedom Caucus to have equal say in the process and policy agenda? Would he agree to more government shutdowns and hostage schemes? Would he be a willing hostage himself? These are the terms, after all. Moreover is it reasonable to blithely assume that this is someone these people will trust?

Ryan’s fellow House Republicans have largely put the kibosh on moving forward with immigration reform this year, but some key GOP lawmakers are still lobbying their colleagues publicly and privately to tackle immigration. The 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee is among figures who have urged the GOP to embrace an overhaul. “To me, it’s not a question of ‘if’ we fix our broken immigration laws,” Ryan said Wednesday at a breakfast hosted by the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “It’s really a question of ‘when.’” Ryan called the nation’s immigration laws “chief” among the problems that are curbing economic growth. Noting the rate of retirement among baby boomers, Ryan said reforming the immigration system is necessary to fill future jobs. “Please know that we understand the value of immigration,” Ryan told the crowd. “We know its importance; we know its roots, its history here in America; and we have ideas on how to make this go forward and make it work so that we do have the rule of law, so that we do have reform, so that we’re not in the same position 15 years down the road.”

And yet MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said that Ryan is perfect because he can "cut deals," as if cutting deals isn't exactly what these people hate about "the establishment." Benghazi committee chairman Trey Gowdy sees him as a religious figure:

Asked if anyone could unite the conference, Gowdy was unequivocal that Ryan was the man for the job. “Either him or the fellow who just spoke to us,” he said, “but he went back to Italy.”

Maybe they're correct and Paul Ryan is The One they've all been waiting for, the man who can bind up the party's wounds and make it whole again. But you'd think they'd be just a tiny bit chagrined by their assumption that these anti-establishment rebels are going to fall in line simply because Paul Ryan is Paul Ryan. Say what you will, but they seem pretty serious about their agenda. Nobody knows at this point if Ryan will agree to be drafted. He's consistently said no up until now but is reportedly mulling it over. It's hard to imagine why he would take the job. Unlike the media and the political establishment, he probably recognizes that he isn't a magician or a miracle worker. And perhaps the Freedom Caucus has decided they've made their point and they'll acquiesce to Ryan and agree to obstruct another day. But the underlying dynamics that led to yesterday's circus haven't disappeared. At some point, the Beltway media is going to have to grapple with the fact that the Republican Party is no longer functional and that this is not a dynamic that's mirrored on the other side. There is simply no comparison between Hillary Clinton responding to the voters and her rivals on specific issues as she runs for president and this lunacy that's taking place in the Republican party. What she's doing is called "politics." What they are doing is ... something else. But they haven't grappled with it yet. Chris Matthews summarized the events to Brian Williams this way:

I think the headline for the day is "the center cannot hold" to quote Yeats.The center isn't holding in American politics today. The center right isn't holding. We'll see if the center left and Hillary Clinton will hold as well. It seems the poles are winning, the poles of right and left are winning the arguments, getting the press. The fact that Trump is on the television set every night, free media, that he is the best show in town, is really a reflection that the house of representatives, particularly has dropped the ball... The center didn't hold today and the forces of the right and the left are starting to look interesting and that's a problem.

Perhaps the most poignant comment of the day came from Norman Ornstein, an establishment figure who, along with Thomas Mann, wrote the book about the right's extremism and was shunned by the political media: https://twitter.com/NormOrnstein/stat... through the cable news channels yesterday morning, it was clear that the beltway wags were preparing to spend the day indicting Hillary Clinton for buckling under pressure to left-wing fanatics who have taken over the Democratic Party and forced her to take a position against the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal against her will. The word had gone forth from NBC's First Read that Hillary Clinton had obviously flip-flopped from her true beliefs on the issue in the most flagrantly dishonest way possible and had therefore cemented "every negative stereotype about her." During MSNBC's" Andrea Mitchell Reports," they even called in Chris Matthews to analyze the fallout from this terrible decision and the talking heads agreed this showed the left was driving the train. With a socialist gunning for the presidency (a socialist who won't even agree to join the Democratic Party!), unions calling the shots on trade and tree-huggers bringing the hammer down on the environment, the Democrats were in the same predicament as the right with Hillary Clinton being forced, in Matthews' words, to "bow to the extreme." And so a new Beltway meme was born. Or rather, it was stillborn, since within minutes of Mitchell and Matthews declaring that the Democratic Party's hippies were driving the party straight over the cliff with all their unreasonable demands, the news broke that the presumptive Speaker of the House, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, had dropped his news that he was withdrawing from the race. What followed was the kind of chaos you normally only see during a natural disaster or a bomb scare, with sweaty reporters shoving microphones into the face of every person who looked like he or she might be a Republican and anchors back in the studios shaking their heads in disbelief. How on earth could this have happened? Of course, it was entirely predictable. After all, John Boehner had been forced to resign because he simply could not get his fractious caucus to work together to do the business Congress is tasked with doing. And John Boehner was a 25-year congressional veteran who understood how to work every lever to get that job done. It remains a mystery why anyone thought that Kevin McCarthy -- a man who had only been in Congress since 2007 and whose rhetorical skills made George W. Bush sound like Martin Luther King Jr. by comparison -- would fare better than Boehner. MSNBC's Luke Russert seemed to think that he would be more successful because had gone to some lengths to "stay in touch" with all the members by texting them frequently, but that was about it. McCarthy's epic gaffe, admitting that the Select Committee on Benghazi is a partisan sham, was likely the most important reason for his fall from grace and subsequent inability to put together enough votes to win. And there were rumors circulating about a personal scandal. But by all accounts it was the anti-establishment Freedom Caucus yanking McCarthy's chain so hard with demands for greater say in policy and process that made him realize he couldn't win the vote. Evidently, his assurances that he would not be John Boehner were simply not enough to assuage their concerns. (All that texting seems not to have done the trick after all.) Indeed, one wonders why everyone assumed they would fall in line -- after all, they never had when he was the party whip. Robert Costa at the Washington Post reported that the far right leveled some specific demands that McCarthy simply couldn't meet:

Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.), the leader of the House Tea Party Caucus, asked McCarthy to publicly oppose efforts by establishment groups — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others — to run radio and TV ads criticizing conservatives who defied their own leaders.

In other words, they wanted the Speaker of the House to take their side in disputes with ... himself. Once he understood the impossibility of his position, McCarthy wisely withdrew. The media were completely shocked -- as they are every single time the House GOP caucus behaves like the radicals they are. It's not as if this is the first time, after all. But they had convinced themselves that it made sense that the amateurish Kevin McCarthy could transcend the troubles that plagued the much more experienced John Boehner. Despite years of evidence, they simply cannot accept that the Republican caucus is completely ungovernable so they, and the GOP establishment, turned their hopeful eyes to yet another savior: Paul Ryan, who, just as Kevin McCarthy had been days before, was seen as a man uniquely capable of bringing the feuding factions together. And once again the reaction was swift: https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/sta... https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/sta... https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/sta... Luke Russert noted the tweets and said on MSNBC:

To demonstrate just how difficult it is in the House GOP conference Laura Ingraham, noted conservative commentator, said, "no, he's a young gun" we should do three young guns and you're out," talking about Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy. So if someone like Laura Ingraham who has a huge following it the conservative blogosphere and on radio airwaves, if she's opposed to it, it will have a lot of influence on House conservatives who will look skeptically on Paul Ryan.

It sounded as though Russert, being so badly burned by his blithe assumptions about McCarthy, was finally developing some healthy skepticism about the GOP's ability to govern. But then he added, "That being said, he's trusted by a lot of conservatives because he's gone after a lot of the president's programs." But would he be willing to publicly oppose anyone who criticized the Freedom Caucus? Would he allow the Freedom Caucus to have equal say in the process and policy agenda? Would he agree to more government shutdowns and hostage schemes? Would he be a willing hostage himself? These are the terms, after all. Moreover is it reasonable to blithely assume that this is someone these people will trust?

Ryan’s fellow House Republicans have largely put the kibosh on moving forward with immigration reform this year, but some key GOP lawmakers are still lobbying their colleagues publicly and privately to tackle immigration. The 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee is among figures who have urged the GOP to embrace an overhaul. “To me, it’s not a question of ‘if’ we fix our broken immigration laws,” Ryan said Wednesday at a breakfast hosted by the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “It’s really a question of ‘when.’” Ryan called the nation’s immigration laws “chief” among the problems that are curbing economic growth. Noting the rate of retirement among baby boomers, Ryan said reforming the immigration system is necessary to fill future jobs. “Please know that we understand the value of immigration,” Ryan told the crowd. “We know its importance; we know its roots, its history here in America; and we have ideas on how to make this go forward and make it work so that we do have the rule of law, so that we do have reform, so that we’re not in the same position 15 years down the road.”

And yet MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said that Ryan is perfect because he can "cut deals," as if cutting deals isn't exactly what these people hate about "the establishment." Benghazi committee chairman Trey Gowdy sees him as a religious figure:

Asked if anyone could unite the conference, Gowdy was unequivocal that Ryan was the man for the job. “Either him or the fellow who just spoke to us,” he said, “but he went back to Italy.”

Maybe they're correct and Paul Ryan is The One they've all been waiting for, the man who can bind up the party's wounds and make it whole again. But you'd think they'd be just a tiny bit chagrined by their assumption that these anti-establishment rebels are going to fall in line simply because Paul Ryan is Paul Ryan. Say what you will, but they seem pretty serious about their agenda. Nobody knows at this point if Ryan will agree to be drafted. He's consistently said no up until now but is reportedly mulling it over. It's hard to imagine why he would take the job. Unlike the media and the political establishment, he probably recognizes that he isn't a magician or a miracle worker. And perhaps the Freedom Caucus has decided they've made their point and they'll acquiesce to Ryan and agree to obstruct another day. But the underlying dynamics that led to yesterday's circus haven't disappeared. At some point, the Beltway media is going to have to grapple with the fact that the Republican Party is no longer functional and that this is not a dynamic that's mirrored on the other side. There is simply no comparison between Hillary Clinton responding to the voters and her rivals on specific issues as she runs for president and this lunacy that's taking place in the Republican party. What she's doing is called "politics." What they are doing is ... something else. But they haven't grappled with it yet. Chris Matthews summarized the events to Brian Williams this way:

I think the headline for the day is "the center cannot hold" to quote Yeats.The center isn't holding in American politics today. The center right isn't holding. We'll see if the center left and Hillary Clinton will hold as well. It seems the poles are winning, the poles of right and left are winning the arguments, getting the press. The fact that Trump is on the television set every night, free media, that he is the best show in town, is really a reflection that the house of representatives, particularly has dropped the ball... The center didn't hold today and the forces of the right and the left are starting to look interesting and that's a problem.

Perhaps the most poignant comment of the day came from Norman Ornstein, an establishment figure who, along with Thomas Mann, wrote the book about the right's extremism and was shunned by the political media: https://twitter.com/NormOrnstein/stat...

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Just shut up, Bristol Palin: You are the last person who should talk about birth control

Bristol Palin, I know that you don't care that a lot of us have actually been rooting for you over the past several years. And then you constantly have to go and act like a completely insensitive, ignorant tool. You've had a lot of obstacles in your life — you've been a small town, teenaged single mom, and frankly, your mother is a goddamn nightmare. This year you went through a broken engagement and the announcement, soon after, that you're pregnant again — not just a major embarrassment for someone who's been a paid ambassador for teen pregnancy prevention but no doubt a genuinely stressful and challenging situation. You're still only 24 years old. You have at times displayed flickering moments of self-deprecation — you've danced on TV in a gorilla suit! And when you went public with your pregnancy, you wrote with a vulnerable candidness, "I’ve been trying my hardest to keep my chin up on this one. At the end of the day there’s nothing I can’t do with God by my side, and I know I am fully capable of handling anything that is put in front of me with dignity and grace. Life moves on no matter what. So no matter how you feel, you get up, get dressed, show up, and never give up." I want to be believe the girl who can look at her life and her choices with that level of self-compassion and hopefulness is capable of saying and doing good things in the world. And then you open your mouth again and it's like, where did that girl go? In a straight up bonkers recent post on her consistently incoherent Patheos blog, Palin — America's least credible source on the topic of birth control — asserts, "Life isn’t so innocent and carefree for some 10 years old in Washington State. This summer a report came out claiming that some schools in Washington were giving free birth control implants to children as young as 10 years old! These birth control devices are implanted in a girl’s uterus, and all of this can be done without a parent’s consent!" She adds, "It is crazy that the government is offering a controversial form of birth control that can have serious life-long side effects to 10-year-old CHILDREN, but then to do all of this behind a parent’s back is simply outrageous!" Earlier this year, the conservative site Judicial Watch obtained public records from the state for the past three years that break down the number of students who received birth control implants and their ages. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the girls are between the ages of 17 and 20. A small number are between 10 and 12. Before we continue, let's remember here that they don't hand out IUDs at the cafeteria — it's a medical procedure, not, as Judicial Watch suggests, a case of "State Gives 10-Yr-Olds Free Birth Control Implants." I know this is a radical idea if your last name is Palin, but let's go to the facts. As Snopes explains, "Over half the states in the U.S. allow all minors 12 and older to consent to contraceptive services." That does not mean that they're all having sex -- note how the HPV vaccine is recommended for middle schoolers. But did you know that IUDs can also be used to control periods? It's true. So imagine you're 10 and you're dealing with heavy, difficult menstrual cycles. Maybe you want to explore your options. And if the IUD is so "controversial," why does the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists say it's safe for adolescents?  Palin acts like schools are tossing IUDs into playgrounds and kids are just running around, grabbing Mirenas without telling their parents. What she isn't doing is: A) Asking if a girl might obtain birth control for a reason other than birth control, B) Considering that just because parental consent is not required that it is never asked for or given. Shockingly, many loving, responsible families understand that as teens get older, many become sexually active, and they want their kids to make smart, healthy choices and protect themselves from unplanned pregnancies. And while Palin is extraordinarily fortunate to have made lemonade of her own circumstances, helping kids avoid unintended pregnancies is great for women, it's great for families, and it saves everybody a whole ton of money in services. She also isn't acknowledging that the reality is that lots of adolescents well over the age of 10 do have sex without their parents' knowledge, so maybe they should go ahead and get contraception without their parents' knowledge too. And wow, you'd think after two pregnancies of her own, she'd finally understand and have a little empathy on that point.

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Jeb Bush’s gross “Redskins” pandering: “Washington” is pejorative, not the slur

Republican voters have made it abundantly clear that they want out with the old and in with the new, forcing so-called establishment Republicans out of Washington and insisting that their nominee for president be as disconnected from the Beltway as possible. And boy does that make Jeb Bush nervous. The former Florida governor, never the most eloquent candidate on the campaign trail, has been whipping himself into a frenzy deriding the less than 70 square mile colony while defending the racially offensive name of the areas NFL team, the Washington Redskins. Appearing on the conservative Hugh Hewitt Show following the turmoil that befell the House Republicans after Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy made a surprise announcement withdrawing himself from the race for speaker, Bush made an awkward joke meant to disparage a "dysfunctional" D.C.. "There was a big argument about the Washington Redskins, the 'Redskins' being a pejorative term," Bush said. "I think 'Washington' is the pejorative term, not the 'Redskins.'" “I don’t think they should change it,” he told ABC’s Rick Klein and ESPN’s Andy Katz last month. “But again, I don’t think politicians ought to have any say in that to be honest with you. I don’t find it offensive. Native American tribes generally don’t find it offensive." “I don’t find it offensive. Native American tribes generally don’t find it offensive,” he repeated on “

We must pay attention to Yemen: Weddings bombed, civilians killed — with U.S. help

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Nick Jonas, Rick Ross, Meek Mill added to Tidal concert

NEW YORK (AP) — Nick Jonas and rappers Rick Ross, Meek Mill and French Montana have been added to the Tidal X concert in October, concert organizers announced Friday.

Previously announced artists include Tidal-owners Beyonce and Jay-Z, as well as Prince, Nicki Minaj, Usher, Lil Wayne, Damian Marley, Thomas Rhett.

The concert, "TIDAL X: 1020 Amplified by HTC," will be held at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, on Oct. 20 and will be livestreamed.

The music and video streaming platform has been struggling to compete with services like Spotify since it was launched this year.

____

Online:

http://tidal.com/

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This is the Fox News of music: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is an embarrassing, corrupting institution

Both Elvis Presley and Louis Armstrong, two of the most monumental cultural icons of the last century, worked as Shabbos Goys. This is a terribly interesting fact. Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison, Jim’s father, was the commander of U.S. Naval Forces at the Gulf of Tonkin and intrinsically involved in the hoax that our country used as the pretext for starting the Vietnam War. That’s very interesting, too. Complaining about the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame is not particularly interesting, but it is still occasionally necessary. As long as an organization is going to operate under that name (as opposed to a more specific or honest moniker like Rolling Stone Magazine’s Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, or the Petco/Dave Marsh Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame Cougar Mellencamp at Camden Yards, or something like that), and as long the Hall presents itself as “definitive” while performing in a manner that is lousy with personal biases, they open themselves up to this kind of examination. Plus, it’s occasionally fun to complain about the stupidity and implied corruption of self-serving bureaucratic organizations we can do very little about (like Apple, the U.S. House of Representatives, Fox News or Sting). The list of deserving artists who are neither in the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame nor amongst this year’s nominees is astonishing, but I’m not going to pick-over that ugly scrap heap. When I want to point out the specious legitimacy and questionable judgment of the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, I generally shine my flashlight at one omission in particular. This is an act that should have been in the Hall a long time ago, especially if we view that place as we wish it would be: a passionately impassioned forum that honors the most significant creative and commercial achievements and the most fundamental influences in the magical, shambolic, subtle and sweaty story of pop, rock, rap, and R&B. You may not like Kraftwerk. You may not like synthesized pop music, or the use of quantized synths in pop or rock. But love ‘em or hate ‘em, Kraftwerk are the second most influential pop/rock act of the post-Elvis era (the first being, obviously, the Beatles). That’s a statement that deserves a little explaining. Kraftwerk are not my favorite band – they’re not even my favorite krautrock band – but their profound influence cannot be disputed. Prior to 1972, a pile of artists had experimented with using the synthesizer (and other burgeoning electronic music devices) to create sound effects and aural noodles, and some had even used it (in very occasional and non-committal ways) to thump a rhythm. For instance, the Beach Boys employed it in this manner for about eight bars on “Do It Again” in 1969, and way back in 1963, the remarkable Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire had fashioned an amazing piece of proto-synthpop when they created the original, all-electronic Dr. Who theme. Also, the amazing Wendy Carlos used rhythmic synths to drive her radical and inventive interpretations of classical pieces, and pioneering electronic musician Gershon Kinglsey had created all-synth novelty hits like “Popcorn.” But prior to Kraftwerk in 1972, no artist working within the essential melodic and structural boundaries of post-Stephen Foster pop had taken a synthesizer and said “We now challenge the listener to accept that a pop music rhythm section can be completely conjured with a synthesizer, and that most of the melodic and harmonic elements that accompany the rhythm will also be played with a synthesizer. Enjoy, and bitte, tippen sie der waitresses.” Only Kraftwerk didn’t just say it, they did it again and again and again, underlining that synth pop was a true genre and format for pop, and not just a gimmick. Every synthetically thumping rhythm section you have heard since then – and think of how many you hear, every single day, either intentionally or more likely atmospherically/accidentally – can be traced, without fail, to Kraftwerk’s amazing invention. That’s the whole pile of ‘em, from obvious Kraftwerk homages like “Funkytown,” “I Feel Love,” and Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” to the ubiquity of the tsk-and-burp/boots’n’pants beat in virtually all modern pop and dance music. With “Autobahn,” Kraftwerk created something unprecedented yet dynamic and user-friendly, announcing, “Here is the apple of synthesized pop. Take a bite, leave our Düsseldorf Eden, and make a new world.” There have been plenty of remarkable scene changes in the last 70 years of pop/rock  (from Hardrock Gunter and Ike Turner’s use of distorted electric guitar in r’n’b and hillbilly music in 1950 and ’51 to the Ramones massively original and glorious reduction of all existing pop/rock memes in ’74, etcetera), but Kraftwerk’s invention of the totally self-contained synth-generated rhythm section is likely the biggest purely musical scene change in the history of post-Elvis pop/rock (keep in mind the Fabs’ gift was the way they re-appropriated, mated, and exploded existing musical memes, not their invention of new ones). And how can the second most influential act in the story of pop/rock not be in the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame? It’s true that for the first 10 years of the Hall, acts primarily associated with synth-based music were largely ignored; but around 1997 that house of cards began to fall, and by 2007 and the induction of Grandmaster Flash, the Hall started regularly admitting acts who created music built out of electronic, synthesized, or sampled elements. Also, even the most cursory look at the list of inductees indicates that the Hall honors every facet of the Pop of Our Lifetime (especially if that lifetime was spent listening to FM deejays in the 1970s and trying to convince our friends to stop thinking about Adrienne Barbeau and take us to Friendly’s). This landscape -- and most notably the pop and rock of the 21st century -- is absolutely rife with the ancestors, acolytes, and admirers of Kraftwerk’s miraculous invention. I am goddamn sure there’s a lot else wrong with the hall, and I won’t even address the other mega-significant omissions from both the inductees and the nominees list, like the New York Dolls and the Pixies. Generally, the heinous, obvious and nearly comical biases of the Hall would be unworthy of comment; I mean, it is so very clear the Hall have their own agenda, and that this agenda has relatively little to do with honoring the diverse panoply of pop and rock’s achievers in a consistent or balanced way. But as long as that Kraftwerk omission is still waved in our faces, at least once or twice a year I am compelled to point a finger at that whole stinking, fetid, coiled pile in Cleveland. And in the meantime, I look forward to the inevitable induction of G.E. Smith, and I will knead my hands in childlike excitement anticipating how the Hall devises to give even more awards to members of the E-Street Band.Both Elvis Presley and Louis Armstrong, two of the most monumental cultural icons of the last century, worked as Shabbos Goys. This is a terribly interesting fact. Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison, Jim’s father, was the commander of U.S. Naval Forces at the Gulf of Tonkin and intrinsically involved in the hoax that our country used as the pretext for starting the Vietnam War. That’s very interesting, too. Complaining about the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame is not particularly interesting, but it is still occasionally necessary. As long as an organization is going to operate under that name (as opposed to a more specific or honest moniker like Rolling Stone Magazine’s Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, or the Petco/Dave Marsh Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame Cougar Mellencamp at Camden Yards, or something like that), and as long the Hall presents itself as “definitive” while performing in a manner that is lousy with personal biases, they open themselves up to this kind of examination. Plus, it’s occasionally fun to complain about the stupidity and implied corruption of self-serving bureaucratic organizations we can do very little about (like Apple, the U.S. House of Representatives, Fox News or Sting). The list of deserving artists who are neither in the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame nor amongst this year’s nominees is astonishing, but I’m not going to pick-over that ugly scrap heap. When I want to point out the specious legitimacy and questionable judgment of the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, I generally shine my flashlight at one omission in particular. This is an act that should have been in the Hall a long time ago, especially if we view that place as we wish it would be: a passionately impassioned forum that honors the most significant creative and commercial achievements and the most fundamental influences in the magical, shambolic, subtle and sweaty story of pop, rock, rap, and R&B. You may not like Kraftwerk. You may not like synthesized pop music, or the use of quantized synths in pop or rock. But love ‘em or hate ‘em, Kraftwerk are the second most influential pop/rock act of the post-Elvis era (the first being, obviously, the Beatles). That’s a statement that deserves a little explaining. Kraftwerk are not my favorite band – they’re not even my favorite krautrock band – but their profound influence cannot be disputed. Prior to 1972, a pile of artists had experimented with using the synthesizer (and other burgeoning electronic music devices) to create sound effects and aural noodles, and some had even used it (in very occasional and non-committal ways) to thump a rhythm. For instance, the Beach Boys employed it in this manner for about eight bars on “Do It Again” in 1969, and way back in 1963, the remarkable Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire had fashioned an amazing piece of proto-synthpop when they created the original, all-electronic Dr. Who theme. Also, the amazing Wendy Carlos used rhythmic synths to drive her radical and inventive interpretations of classical pieces, and pioneering electronic musician Gershon Kinglsey had created all-synth novelty hits like “Popcorn.” But prior to Kraftwerk in 1972, no artist working within the essential melodic and structural boundaries of post-Stephen Foster pop had taken a synthesizer and said “We now challenge the listener to accept that a pop music rhythm section can be completely conjured with a synthesizer, and that most of the melodic and harmonic elements that accompany the rhythm will also be played with a synthesizer. Enjoy, and bitte, tippen sie der waitresses.” Only Kraftwerk didn’t just say it, they did it again and again and again, underlining that synth pop was a true genre and format for pop, and not just a gimmick. Every synthetically thumping rhythm section you have heard since then – and think of how many you hear, every single day, either intentionally or more likely atmospherically/accidentally – can be traced, without fail, to Kraftwerk’s amazing invention. That’s the whole pile of ‘em, from obvious Kraftwerk homages like “Funkytown,” “I Feel Love,” and Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” to the ubiquity of the tsk-and-burp/boots’n’pants beat in virtually all modern pop and dance music. With “Autobahn,” Kraftwerk created something unprecedented yet dynamic and user-friendly, announcing, “Here is the apple of synthesized pop. Take a bite, leave our Düsseldorf Eden, and make a new world.” There have been plenty of remarkable scene changes in the last 70 years of pop/rock  (from Hardrock Gunter and Ike Turner’s use of distorted electric guitar in r’n’b and hillbilly music in 1950 and ’51 to the Ramones massively original and glorious reduction of all existing pop/rock memes in ’74, etcetera), but Kraftwerk’s invention of the totally self-contained synth-generated rhythm section is likely the biggest purely musical scene change in the history of post-Elvis pop/rock (keep in mind the Fabs’ gift was the way they re-appropriated, mated, and exploded existing musical memes, not their invention of new ones). And how can the second most influential act in the story of pop/rock not be in the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame? It’s true that for the first 10 years of the Hall, acts primarily associated with synth-based music were largely ignored; but around 1997 that house of cards began to fall, and by 2007 and the induction of Grandmaster Flash, the Hall started regularly admitting acts who created music built out of electronic, synthesized, or sampled elements. Also, even the most cursory look at the list of inductees indicates that the Hall honors every facet of the Pop of Our Lifetime (especially if that lifetime was spent listening to FM deejays in the 1970s and trying to convince our friends to stop thinking about Adrienne Barbeau and take us to Friendly’s). This landscape -- and most notably the pop and rock of the 21st century -- is absolutely rife with the ancestors, acolytes, and admirers of Kraftwerk’s miraculous invention. I am goddamn sure there’s a lot else wrong with the hall, and I won’t even address the other mega-significant omissions from both the inductees and the nominees list, like the New York Dolls and the Pixies. Generally, the heinous, obvious and nearly comical biases of the Hall would be unworthy of comment; I mean, it is so very clear the Hall have their own agenda, and that this agenda has relatively little to do with honoring the diverse panoply of pop and rock’s achievers in a consistent or balanced way. But as long as that Kraftwerk omission is still waved in our faces, at least once or twice a year I am compelled to point a finger at that whole stinking, fetid, coiled pile in Cleveland. And in the meantime, I look forward to the inevitable induction of G.E. Smith, and I will knead my hands in childlike excitement anticipating how the Hall devises to give even more awards to members of the E-Street Band.Both Elvis Presley and Louis Armstrong, two of the most monumental cultural icons of the last century, worked as Shabbos Goys. This is a terribly interesting fact. Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison, Jim’s father, was the commander of U.S. Naval Forces at the Gulf of Tonkin and intrinsically involved in the hoax that our country used as the pretext for starting the Vietnam War. That’s very interesting, too. Complaining about the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame is not particularly interesting, but it is still occasionally necessary. As long as an organization is going to operate under that name (as opposed to a more specific or honest moniker like Rolling Stone Magazine’s Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, or the Petco/Dave Marsh Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame Cougar Mellencamp at Camden Yards, or something like that), and as long the Hall presents itself as “definitive” while performing in a manner that is lousy with personal biases, they open themselves up to this kind of examination. Plus, it’s occasionally fun to complain about the stupidity and implied corruption of self-serving bureaucratic organizations we can do very little about (like Apple, the U.S. House of Representatives, Fox News or Sting). The list of deserving artists who are neither in the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame nor amongst this year’s nominees is astonishing, but I’m not going to pick-over that ugly scrap heap. When I want to point out the specious legitimacy and questionable judgment of the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, I generally shine my flashlight at one omission in particular. This is an act that should have been in the Hall a long time ago, especially if we view that place as we wish it would be: a passionately impassioned forum that honors the most significant creative and commercial achievements and the most fundamental influences in the magical, shambolic, subtle and sweaty story of pop, rock, rap, and R&B. You may not like Kraftwerk. You may not like synthesized pop music, or the use of quantized synths in pop or rock. But love ‘em or hate ‘em, Kraftwerk are the second most influential pop/rock act of the post-Elvis era (the first being, obviously, the Beatles). That’s a statement that deserves a little explaining. Kraftwerk are not my favorite band – they’re not even my favorite krautrock band – but their profound influence cannot be disputed. Prior to 1972, a pile of artists had experimented with using the synthesizer (and other burgeoning electronic music devices) to create sound effects and aural noodles, and some had even used it (in very occasional and non-committal ways) to thump a rhythm. For instance, the Beach Boys employed it in this manner for about eight bars on “Do It Again” in 1969, and way back in 1963, the remarkable Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire had fashioned an amazing piece of proto-synthpop when they created the original, all-electronic Dr. Who theme. Also, the amazing Wendy Carlos used rhythmic synths to drive her radical and inventive interpretations of classical pieces, and pioneering electronic musician Gershon Kinglsey had created all-synth novelty hits like “Popcorn.” But prior to Kraftwerk in 1972, no artist working within the essential melodic and structural boundaries of post-Stephen Foster pop had taken a synthesizer and said “We now challenge the listener to accept that a pop music rhythm section can be completely conjured with a synthesizer, and that most of the melodic and harmonic elements that accompany the rhythm will also be played with a synthesizer. Enjoy, and bitte, tippen sie der waitresses.” Only Kraftwerk didn’t just say it, they did it again and again and again, underlining that synth pop was a true genre and format for pop, and not just a gimmick. Every synthetically thumping rhythm section you have heard since then – and think of how many you hear, every single day, either intentionally or more likely atmospherically/accidentally – can be traced, without fail, to Kraftwerk’s amazing invention. That’s the whole pile of ‘em, from obvious Kraftwerk homages like “Funkytown,” “I Feel Love,” and Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” to the ubiquity of the tsk-and-burp/boots’n’pants beat in virtually all modern pop and dance music. With “Autobahn,” Kraftwerk created something unprecedented yet dynamic and user-friendly, announcing, “Here is the apple of synthesized pop. Take a bite, leave our Düsseldorf Eden, and make a new world.” There have been plenty of remarkable scene changes in the last 70 years of pop/rock  (from Hardrock Gunter and Ike Turner’s use of distorted electric guitar in r’n’b and hillbilly music in 1950 and ’51 to the Ramones massively original and glorious reduction of all existing pop/rock memes in ’74, etcetera), but Kraftwerk’s invention of the totally self-contained synth-generated rhythm section is likely the biggest purely musical scene change in the history of post-Elvis pop/rock (keep in mind the Fabs’ gift was the way they re-appropriated, mated, and exploded existing musical memes, not their invention of new ones). And how can the second most influential act in the story of pop/rock not be in the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame? It’s true that for the first 10 years of the Hall, acts primarily associated with synth-based music were largely ignored; but around 1997 that house of cards began to fall, and by 2007 and the induction of Grandmaster Flash, the Hall started regularly admitting acts who created music built out of electronic, synthesized, or sampled elements. Also, even the most cursory look at the list of inductees indicates that the Hall honors every facet of the Pop of Our Lifetime (especially if that lifetime was spent listening to FM deejays in the 1970s and trying to convince our friends to stop thinking about Adrienne Barbeau and take us to Friendly’s). This landscape -- and most notably the pop and rock of the 21st century -- is absolutely rife with the ancestors, acolytes, and admirers of Kraftwerk’s miraculous invention. I am goddamn sure there’s a lot else wrong with the hall, and I won’t even address the other mega-significant omissions from both the inductees and the nominees list, like the New York Dolls and the Pixies. Generally, the heinous, obvious and nearly comical biases of the Hall would be unworthy of comment; I mean, it is so very clear the Hall have their own agenda, and that this agenda has relatively little to do with honoring the diverse panoply of pop and rock’s achievers in a consistent or balanced way. But as long as that Kraftwerk omission is still waved in our faces, at least once or twice a year I am compelled to point a finger at that whole stinking, fetid, coiled pile in Cleveland. And in the meantime, I look forward to the inevitable induction of G.E. Smith, and I will knead my hands in childlike excitement anticipating how the Hall devises to give even more awards to members of the E-Street Band.Both Elvis Presley and Louis Armstrong, two of the most monumental cultural icons of the last century, worked as Shabbos Goys. This is a terribly interesting fact. Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison, Jim’s father, was the commander of U.S. Naval Forces at the Gulf of Tonkin and intrinsically involved in the hoax that our country used as the pretext for starting the Vietnam War. That’s very interesting, too. Complaining about the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame is not particularly interesting, but it is still occasionally necessary. As long as an organization is going to operate under that name (as opposed to a more specific or honest moniker like Rolling Stone Magazine’s Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, or the Petco/Dave Marsh Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame Cougar Mellencamp at Camden Yards, or something like that), and as long the Hall presents itself as “definitive” while performing in a manner that is lousy with personal biases, they open themselves up to this kind of examination. Plus, it’s occasionally fun to complain about the stupidity and implied corruption of self-serving bureaucratic organizations we can do very little about (like Apple, the U.S. House of Representatives, Fox News or Sting). The list of deserving artists who are neither in the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame nor amongst this year’s nominees is astonishing, but I’m not going to pick-over that ugly scrap heap. When I want to point out the specious legitimacy and questionable judgment of the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, I generally shine my flashlight at one omission in particular. This is an act that should have been in the Hall a long time ago, especially if we view that place as we wish it would be: a passionately impassioned forum that honors the most significant creative and commercial achievements and the most fundamental influences in the magical, shambolic, subtle and sweaty story of pop, rock, rap, and R&B. You may not like Kraftwerk. You may not like synthesized pop music, or the use of quantized synths in pop or rock. But love ‘em or hate ‘em, Kraftwerk are the second most influential pop/rock act of the post-Elvis era (the first being, obviously, the Beatles). That’s a statement that deserves a little explaining. Kraftwerk are not my favorite band – they’re not even my favorite krautrock band – but their profound influence cannot be disputed. Prior to 1972, a pile of artists had experimented with using the synthesizer (and other burgeoning electronic music devices) to create sound effects and aural noodles, and some had even used it (in very occasional and non-committal ways) to thump a rhythm. For instance, the Beach Boys employed it in this manner for about eight bars on “Do It Again” in 1969, and way back in 1963, the remarkable Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire had fashioned an amazing piece of proto-synthpop when they created the original, all-electronic Dr. Who theme. Also, the amazing Wendy Carlos used rhythmic synths to drive her radical and inventive interpretations of classical pieces, and pioneering electronic musician Gershon Kinglsey had created all-synth novelty hits like “Popcorn.” But prior to Kraftwerk in 1972, no artist working within the essential melodic and structural boundaries of post-Stephen Foster pop had taken a synthesizer and said “We now challenge the listener to accept that a pop music rhythm section can be completely conjured with a synthesizer, and that most of the melodic and harmonic elements that accompany the rhythm will also be played with a synthesizer. Enjoy, and bitte, tippen sie der waitresses.” Only Kraftwerk didn’t just say it, they did it again and again and again, underlining that synth pop was a true genre and format for pop, and not just a gimmick. Every synthetically thumping rhythm section you have heard since then – and think of how many you hear, every single day, either intentionally or more likely atmospherically/accidentally – can be traced, without fail, to Kraftwerk’s amazing invention. That’s the whole pile of ‘em, from obvious Kraftwerk homages like “Funkytown,” “I Feel Love,” and Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” to the ubiquity of the tsk-and-burp/boots’n’pants beat in virtually all modern pop and dance music. With “Autobahn,” Kraftwerk created something unprecedented yet dynamic and user-friendly, announcing, “Here is the apple of synthesized pop. Take a bite, leave our Düsseldorf Eden, and make a new world.” There have been plenty of remarkable scene changes in the last 70 years of pop/rock  (from Hardrock Gunter and Ike Turner’s use of distorted electric guitar in r’n’b and hillbilly music in 1950 and ’51 to the Ramones massively original and glorious reduction of all existing pop/rock memes in ’74, etcetera), but Kraftwerk’s invention of the totally self-contained synth-generated rhythm section is likely the biggest purely musical scene change in the history of post-Elvis pop/rock (keep in mind the Fabs’ gift was the way they re-appropriated, mated, and exploded existing musical memes, not their invention of new ones). And how can the second most influential act in the story of pop/rock not be in the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame? It’s true that for the first 10 years of the Hall, acts primarily associated with synth-based music were largely ignored; but around 1997 that house of cards began to fall, and by 2007 and the induction of Grandmaster Flash, the Hall started regularly admitting acts who created music built out of electronic, synthesized, or sampled elements. Also, even the most cursory look at the list of inductees indicates that the Hall honors every facet of the Pop of Our Lifetime (especially if that lifetime was spent listening to FM deejays in the 1970s and trying to convince our friends to stop thinking about Adrienne Barbeau and take us to Friendly’s). This landscape -- and most notably the pop and rock of the 21st century -- is absolutely rife with the ancestors, acolytes, and admirers of Kraftwerk’s miraculous invention. I am goddamn sure there’s a lot else wrong with the hall, and I won’t even address the other mega-significant omissions from both the inductees and the nominees list, like the New York Dolls and the Pixies. Generally, the heinous, obvious and nearly comical biases of the Hall would be unworthy of comment; I mean, it is so very clear the Hall have their own agenda, and that this agenda has relatively little to do with honoring the diverse panoply of pop and rock’s achievers in a consistent or balanced way. But as long as that Kraftwerk omission is still waved in our faces, at least once or twice a year I am compelled to point a finger at that whole stinking, fetid, coiled pile in Cleveland. And in the meantime, I look forward to the inevitable induction of G.E. Smith, and I will knead my hands in childlike excitement anticipating how the Hall devises to give even more awards to members of the E-Street Band.

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