Categories
Entertainment Music

The Black Angels Tiny Desk Concert

Electronic psychedelic rock outfit The Black Angels performed a Tiny Desk Concert, without the electronics, at NPR Music’s offices. Awesome stuff.

Categories
Entertainment Music

Upcoming Album Watch: Brothers by The Black Keys


“This is an album by The Black Keys. The name of this album is Brothers.”

If you don’t know American blues-rock duo The Black Keys yet, you’re sure missing out on something special. It took all of thirty seconds listening to the first track off the new album “Brothers”, due out May 18, for me to get hooked right back into their raw, catchy, we’re-so-ridiculously-fucking-cool-you-can’t-handle-it sound. You can preview the entire album online now: Click here to listen to The Black Keys on NPR.org.
With production input from Danger Mouse (quite literally the Midas of the music scene right now), you know it has to be spectacular. This is definitely one for the LP collection.

Categories
finance

The Global Financial Crisis for Dummies

The Financial Crisis Explained...in English

If you want the lowdown on what exactly has happened in the global economy to cause the panic and strain we’ve been seeing over the past few weeks in finance markets worldwide, you could do a lot worse than the following links:

In The Giant Pool of Money, This American Life producer Alex Blumberg teams up with NPR’s Adam Davidson to tell the surprisingly entertaining story of how the U.S. got itself into a housing crisis.

In the follow up show, Another Frightening Show About the Economy, Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson recount what happened when the credit markets froze, and how the housing crisis started impacting the markets as a whole through the ‘evils’ of unregulated credit default swaps.

In plain spoken English these guys do a great job of informing the rest of us exactly what the hell happened.

As an added bonus, they’ve now started the Planet Money Podcast and Planet Money Blog, essential material for anyone who wants to keep abreast of what is happening in the world of money.