Daily Download: "Beanbag Chair," Yo La Tengo
Yo La Tengo's next album, "I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass," isn't due out until mid-September, but they've already made this song available for download on their Web site. This is the sound of a band coasting -- a great band, but one that seems content to leave its past glories unchallenged, and just bask in how good they sound even in second-rate work. And we can bask right along with them: They have such a mastery of this particular breezy pop idiom, and those caressing vocal harmonies in the chorus are irresistible.
-- T.B.
Great literary podcasts:
"In Walked Bud"
Amiri Baraka
"The Last Days of the Suicide Kid"
Charles Bukowski
"The House on Mango Street"
Sandra Cisneros
"A Reporter's Life,"
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"An Open Heart," by The Dalai Lama
Read by Nicholas Vreeman
"Robert Frost Reads"
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"In Harry's Bar in Venice"
Ernest Hemingway
"The War on Drugs"
Bill Hicks
"I Have a Dream"
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"King of Horror"
Read by Stephen King
"Motherless Brooklyn," by Jonathan Lethem
Read by Steve Buscemi
"Long Walk to Freedom," by Nelson Mandela
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"Shopgirl"
Steve Martin
"All the Pretty Horses," by Cormac McCarthy
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"The Bluest Eye"
Toni Morrison
"Lolita," by Vladimir Nabokov
Read by Jeremy Irons
"The Bell Jar,"
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"The Raven," by Edgar Allen Poe
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"Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," by JK Rowling
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"Everything"
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"Fast Food Nation," By Eric Schlosser
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"Slaughterhouse Five"
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"Hooking Up"
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Audiofile logo by: Aris Blevins
