THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

The title "One-Hit Wonders" does not refer to an especially potent brand of psychedelics, but rather the evanescent burst of the perfect pop song in what quaintly was called the Top 40 era. (As in " Radio plays 'em, record stores sell 'em, Billboard ranks 'em, and AT40 counts 'em down. I'm Casey Kasem !") The writers at The AV Club have their hot takes , but once the question's out there, there's just no way I could leave my choices out, right? Here's a few that jump out without thinking about it too much (or replicating The AV Club choices), so enjoy: “ My Boyfriend’s Back ” – The Angels (1963) When the early Sixties -- that's post-Elvis & pre-Beatles -- gave us the first wave of girl groups, it was inevitable that when the Aqua Net settled, there would be some divisions within those gaggles of harmonizing estrogen bombs. One division was obvious, given the times -- black v. white -- but one division was more thematic, ...

bellum se ipsum alit is a Latin phrase that roughly translates to "the war feeds itself." It's the last thing we hear at the end of the four-part History Channel documentary entitled America's War on Drugs (more information here ). Like most things on the History Channel, it suffers from tacky re-enactments, but the core message -- a message that could be whittled down to a strong two hours, IMHO -- is devastatingly simple: the utterly ruinous policies behind the "War on Drugs" have cost trillions of dollars and millions of dead or ruined lives. It has negatively impacted domestic and foreign policy for a half-century, it is the hub of what Kerouac called the slaving meat wheel of incarceration and racism and other societal and interpersonal ills, and it is long past time to try anything else. But we won't. We won't because the United States -- by far the largest consumers of drugs, legal or other -- cannot have an honest engagement with the dr...