Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, July 8th

Three Great Football Coaches Crossed Paths for Years, and Now They’re Leaving Together

In 1979, Pete Carroll, then twenty-eight years old, was a secondary coach at Ohio State. One former colleague remembered how he’d sit at his desk, listening to the Beach Boys with a smile on his face. But behind the smile was a ruthless competitor, a student of aggressive defensive schemes, and, the next year, he […]

Before He Formed Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page Played a Prom in Ohio

Back in 2021, I wrote an essay about the great musicians who, surprisingly, had performed at my high school, in Kansas City, in the nineteen-sixties: the Crystals, the Drifters, Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Ike & Tina Turner. There were so many of them that I assumed high-school dances with big-name talent must have been […]

Lorde Strips Down to Start Over

Lorde is contemporary pop’s greatest demystifier, and also its greatest mystic. This contradiction has animated her music from the beginning. “We aren’t caught up in your love affair,” she declared in 2013’s “Royals,” taking a defiant stance against the world of pop-culture glamour—only to spend the rest of her début album making her own inverted […]