Media reporters have pointed out that paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore’s essay in the April 23rd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers.

This was the classy and correct thing to do; after all, this wasn’t a close-call type of case: An entire, 68-word paragraph of Zakaria’s CNN piece had appeared, word-for-word, in Lepore’s essay. In his Time column, Zakaria changed around a few words, but he also borrowed a few more sentences. Here’s Zakaria in Time (the identical words are in bold):

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For new initiates, a brief history: The Punch Brothers were formed six years ago, when mandolin prodigy Chris Thile decided he’d reached the end of the creative line with Nickel Creek, the Grammy-winning acoustic trio he’d joined when he was eight years old. (That’s not a typo.) He recruited a group of similarly fresh-faced virtuosos — Leftover Salmon banjoist Noam Pikelny, Infamous Stringdusters guitarist Chris Eldridge, fiddler Gabe Witcher, and bassist Greg Garrison — to help him record a four-movement, 40-minute “folk-formal” suite titled “The Blind Leaving the Blind”; before they wrestled that beast to the ground, they released in 2006 Thile’s solo album, "How to Grow a Woman From the Ground." (Garrison has since been replaced by Paul Kowert who, at age 25, is one of the few musicians in the world who can make the rest of the band feel old.)

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That New Jersey's largest city holds its nonpartisan municipal elections in the middle of the spring is just one of the many ways Newark sets itself apart from the rest of the world. This is a city, after all, that's still trying to move past the gruesome legacy of the 1967 race riots that decimated the city's downtown. Cory Booker was supposed to be a big step in a new direction.

Booker, a made-for-TV dreamboat of a candidate, was challenging Sharpe James, the comically entrenched four-term incumbent, a man who saw no shame in tooling around town in a Rolls, a man who thinks nothing of tarring his opponent -- publicly -- by calling him "faggot white boy" or accusing Booker (who, like James, is an African-American and a Democrat) of being owned by the Jews and the Ku Klux Klan.

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The Roadhouse is on Park Place between Church and West Broadway. The chain-link fence set up as a perimeter around what was the World Trade Center is tattooed with hand-lettered signs cheekily touting the bar: "Bin Laden Missed Us; Don't You Too," "Meet Ground Zero Workers And Buy 'Em One," "Wash The Dust Down." In the three weeks since the Roadhouse reopened, it's become a drop-in site for the electricians, metalworkers and emergency personnel who have been all but living in lower Manhattan for the last two months.

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Steve Earle and Sheryl Crow cover the song here, and perhaps director Robert Greenwald thought that the new performance would inch the song away from cinematic clichi. If anyone can get away with singing lines like "Our souls've been psychedelicized," and "I might get burned up by the sun," set against knee-jerk snippets of dialogue ("I think we stand for the destruction of property") it's Earle, whose timeworn voice conveys a thick layer of grit with every syllable he utters. The same, alas, cannot be said for Sheryl Crow, whose ridiculous yelping and forced inflections are actually comical. Sadly, this is not a farce.

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Earle is also a literary figure: He has been through dope addictions, jail stints, radical politics and six marriages (but only five wives). His is the kind of redemption tale that self-righteous "I read the New Yorker but haven't read a novel since college" types grasp with dedicated fervor. Earle's real, man.

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In the early 1970s, Austin wasn't known for much besides the University of Texas and the state's capitol building. Janis Joplin had hung around before moving to San Francisco, and there was a small music scene for country balladeers like Townes Van Zandt and the singer-songwriters of the Flatlanders, but the scene wasn't recognized as much by outsiders. The airport wasn't, as it is now, festooned with posters proclaiming it "The Live Music Capital of the World." Movie stars didn't live there, and neither did high-tech moguls. There were no hip rock 'n' roll festivals every spring.

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Cut to the front cover of "Riding." Clapton, in a tailored black suit and clunky Rolex, is chauffeuring King around town in a vintage Cadillac convertible; King is wearing a tuxedo with an ornate guitar pin on his lapel. Message: You've come a long way, babies.

So far, in fact, that on the new record by the duo it's often hard to remember just how the two got to where they are now. When, on "Marry You," King sings, "I wanna marry you/Isn't that what you want, too?" it's unclear how the listener is supposed to react. When did the blues evolve to the point that singers moan about hesitation. For that matter, since when did male blues singers care what their women wanted?

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This year, Dorf's festival (which now boasts the moniker of its corporate sugar daddy, Bell Atlantic) includes opera with Elvis Costello, folk-blues with the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir, art rock with Stereolab and Latin-funk with Los Lobos. Lest the roster of talent leave any doubt that this festival is firmly ensconced in the mainstream, check out ticket prices: Wednesday night's Al Green show in Central Park tops out at $70 a seat.

But Dorf is still cobbling together an inspiring array of avant-jazz practitioners, often offering up programs that would never be seen otherwise. Take last Thursday's Ornette Coleman show, featuring the Texas titan playing with a chamber ensemble, in a "Global Expression" project and in a trio with two longtime collaborators, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins. Or Sunday's free show at Columbia, headlined by drummer Max Roach, 76, and pianist Cecil Taylor, 71, doing their once-a-decade gig. (The duo played at Columbia in 1979 and at Town Hall in 1989.) The Columbia show, which also featured a typically rousing set by the David S. Ware Quartet, was notable for its audience even more than its music, as thousands of people, primarily twentysomethings priced out of New York's upscale jazz clubs, camped out on Columbia's lawn to catch some truly out jazz.

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To a generation that came of musical age with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nirvana, to say nothing of teens weaned on the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys, such a claim may seem so overblown as to be comical. After all, what is Devo known for these days other than that silly "Whip It" video and a herky-jerky cover of the Stones' "Satisfaction"?

Some history, then. Devo was birthed in the early 1970s by Kent State art students Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh. The band started as an elaborate joke, riffing on the notion that human beings had regressed, or de-evolved, rather than evolved (the notion of de-evolution was borrowed from -- what else? -- a Wonder Woman comic book). When the National Guard killed students protesting the Vietnam War the idea became more serious: "It was below tragedy," Casale said. "More absurd and ugly. It showed human beings at their worst. It was real Devo."

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Fans of the noodly hippie band Phish are a blessing and a curse. The
Saab-driving trustafarians buy tickets for
hundreds of shows, spend millions of dollars on records and merchandise and encourage the furry quartet from Burlington, Vt., to follow
whatever whimsical road they wish to explore, be it switching instruments in mid-song or covering href="/music/sharps/1997/12/01sharps.html">Chumbawamba's dizzy hit "Tubthumping." Yet as long as Phish is trailed by
unwashed and somewhat-dazed boarding-school refugees, the rest of the world will fail to see the band for what they are: the most
musically challenging and adventurous of all pop outfits working today.

The Phish camp seems to be aware of this dilemma. In this light, "Farmhouse," the eighth studio album over the last dozen years, plays
like the latest effort to reach an audience that doesn't wear Tevas. Like "The Story of the Ghost" (1998) or "Billy Breathes" (1996),
"Farmhouse" forgoes much of the shape-shifting pyrotechnics of the band's early studio albums in order to focus on discreet, even
pretty, songs. Only three of 12 tracks clock more than five minutes; on "Junta," the band's debut, half the songs broke the nine-minute
barrier.

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You'll forgive me if I gave this announcement about as much weight as Billy Joel's overheated claims that he would retire from concert touring in early 1999. I didn't believe Joel because pop stars are, as a rule, greedy bastards. But I didn't believe Shipp for a different reason: He's among the most restless members of New York's avant-jazz scene. He plans festivals, leads a few different musical outfits and collaborates with like minds; "DNA," for example, was a project with bassist William Parker. There was no way that he wasnt going to get back into the game.

Sure enough, Shipp has returned in just over a year. And true to form, he's well extended: "Pastoral Composure" marks his "return" as a session leader; he is now also the head curator of something called "The Blue Series," an as-yet barely defined project sponsored by the boutique label Thirsty Ear. This album is the first installment of "The Blue Series."

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Now, after a country record, one full of sea chanteys and a two-disc live project, Ween are back, making an entire album without their obligatory drum machine or use of the word fuck. Which is not to say that "White Pepper" is any less pretty or any less demented than previous efforts. "Even If You Don't," a roiling update of the Beach Boys' early romps, is a classic example: "I love you," sings Gene Ween over chirping guitar chords and major piano chords, "Even if you don't/You've got your knife up to my throat/What do you want, to see me bleed?" The song goes on to detail how the love interest in question rifles through the trash for food, forges her boyfriend's name to cash in his prescriptions and goes through his phone book in order to harass his friends. As a love anthem, "Even If You Don't" fights for space with the Casio-charged "Pandy Fackler," a nimble, swinging ditty about a girl who eats stale cotton candy, does the Funky Cold Medina and "suck[s] dicks under the promenade." Summer lovin' has never been so sweet.

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Now, more than seven years after it was recorded and almost five years after Garcia died, Grisman has finally released 70 minutes of music from this onetime collaboration. And Grisman has even showed a mellowing sense of humor, titling the disc "The Pizza Tapes," and including between-song patter, or "spicy appetizers." As one in an ongoing series of Garcia/Grisman releases, "The Pizza Tapes" is a clear triumph, showing the still-fruitful avenues an older Garcia could have explored had not his body succumbed to decades of abuse and neglect.

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Their new albums were released on the same day this week. The parallels end there: Smith's "Gung Ho," featuring a baker's dozen of new songs and her longtime backing band, is a wild burst of adrenalin and beauty; Mitchell's overwrought "Both Sides Now" is an orchestral collection of standards (and a pair of Mitchell's own classics) that collapses under the weight of her jazz pretensions and decimated voice.

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No, no, no, no and no. Pity, too, because the baker's-dozen songs that make up the Boston-based trio's third album all recall earnest pop hallmarks from the past three decades. Unfortunately, Papas Fritas don't live up to their predecessors. Instead of sugary pop confection, we get sickly sweet cotton candy. Instead of prescient emotion, we get precious pretense.

Neither Tony Goddess nor Shivika Asthana, who share vocal duties, has a strong singing voice, and yet the two mix their voices upfront. Rather than sounding pretty, which is the effect the pair seems to aspire to, Goddess and Asthana sound saccharine. On "People Say," Asthana seems to be emulating Vega's style of sing-speaking, but Asthana doesn't have the skill or the lyrical prowess to make this effect work. The song, like most of the album, deals with the difficulties lovers have forging emotional connections, but lines like "People think she's crazy/But they don't ask why" and "I love the love and the laughter/That she holds inside" sound trite and lazy. And while the musicianship, particularly Goddess' clear-eyed acoustic and electric guitar solos, is always fine, often good and only occasionally enervating, it doesn't redeem an overall aggressively mediocre effort.

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"Lost Blues 2," his third full-length release under his own name, is characteristically odd. The songs run from a lurching, acoustic sing-along rendition of AC/DC's "Big Balls," to a Casio-accompanied recitation of D.H. Lawrence's "The Risen Lord," to what has become signature stream-of-consciousness rantings ("The Spider's Dude Is Often There") and twisted tales of sexual dysfunction ("Boy, Have You Cum"). Throughout it all is Oldham's endlessly vulnerable voice, a quivering falsetto, a nakedly earnest instrument that makes Neil Young's whine sound like a polished gem.

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"Nixon," Lambchop's fifth solo LP, does have its moments, some of them truly glowing. The album opener, "The Old Gold Shoe," is a fantastical tale of domestic longing, and Wagner's gruff voice, a combination of Greg Brown and Lou Reed, sing-speaks its way through lines like "The dirt on the tracks/Have hardened into clusters/Earthen legs and honey mustard." Paul Niehaus' Telecaster telegraphs its cascading lines; you can feel your stomach dropping out as Niehaus descends the scales effortlessly. The holy-roller earnestness of "Up With People," with its refrain, "Up our lives today," is another victory in which Wagner seems to proclaim that good soul music can consecrate the listener.

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While Phish's Trey Anastasio, appearing at the Tibet House benefit for the second time, may have elicited the most fervent fan reaction, he was hardly the musical highlight of a night that moved smoothly from the quietly transcendent -- and there is no other word for the otherworldly chanting of the monks from Drepung Gomang Buddhist Monastic University -- to the deeply sensual sounds of Brazilian singer Virginia Rodrigues, who looked, moved and sounded like a French Quarter priestess.

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