Seeing the moving Lives of Others shortly after a screening of actual Eastern Bloc surveillance footage Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea—why did nobody tell me about this album earlier? (Well, they did, but I didn’t listen.) Sleeper film of 2006, United 93, devastating and absolutely not a date movie Baking cinnamon sticky buns and feeding them to a small child Sean’s music recommendations are almost always spot on, and especially his recent pick, Yo La Tengo’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One Ze Frank’s The Show, the funniest thing on the internet, which finally ended after exactly one year The pleasant feeling when your word processor and bibliographic database work as a team, generating a beautiful reference list at the click of a button, particularly the night before you submit your dissertation A hankering for poetically brutal scalpers on a sociopathic rampage through the Old Southwest? Why then, you need Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian Mary Roach’s Stiff, a book about the various fates of cadavers, which had a great Six Feet Under cameo Watching robins fly about their beaks stuffed with nest-building scraps The Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible—anthem rock for hipsters.