The portentous nature of 1950s sci-fi films.

On hockey this time, and how the NHL playoffs are the best thing going in all of sports because the NHL is the league least oriented around classism.

The Wizard of Oz as a horror film, The Rules of the Game as the best film ever made, Bonita Granville as pluck personified, and more.

Which became the basis for the classic 1945 film noir of the same name, with Goldsmith writing the screenplay, despite director Edgar G. Ulmer saying the novel was awful. It was not!

Looking at DD's finest moment as a jazz singer.

Book number four is out today. It's a story collection set on Cape Cod that functions as something larger. Each story is set in a different Cape Cod town. It's a plotty, moving, beach-y read to tuck into while the kids slop mud into their sand buckets and wade at the shore, or you're waiting for your spouse to get back from the clam shack, and also something you can mark up too and think, "gee, that's a new literary device," if you're that kind of person.

Talking about some great albums by CCR, the Velvet Underground, the MC5, Elvis, Cream, and Led Zeppelin from the first half of 1969.

On how we speak and write in the same dozen vapid phrases--"at the end of the day," "asking for a friend," "sorry not sorry," "hive mind."

Delving into some thrillers from 75 years ago: Bluebeard, Laura, Double Indemnity, The Scarlet Claw, Gaslight, The Uninvited.

"May Day" for 5/1.

On a large Anthony Braxton box set.

Discussion about our pop culture obsession with death.

On Downtown with Rich Kimball talking about Twitter, Tinder, hockey, an M.R. James ghost story, and Fleming's new short story, "Dunedin."

Essay on M.R. James's "A Warning to the Curious," the best ever Easter ghost story, save the one about the guy with the holes in his hands who pops out of the cave three days after his murder.

On Victor Hugo, Notre Dame Cathedral, and architecture in prose.

Favorite playoff series from the past.

Talking about Fleming's new humor book, Meatheads Say the Realest Things: Satire from the End of Civilization.

A look at journals as literature, from Pepys, to Thoreau, to Tynan, to Delacroix, to Fleming.

What his suicide tells us about publishing fifty years later.

From KISS to Mr. Belvedere to Chistropher Cross to Sherlock Holmes to Def Leppard to Horatio Hornblower.

With Fleming's Sam Cooke volume, Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, coming in 2020.

Good discussion about how people don't challenge themselves more, recent Fleming publications, his precocious neighbor, the friendship between Rich and Colin, and Colin's new short story, "Linesman."

For Nat King Cole's 100th birthday--a different look.

On J.P. Donleavy's A Fairy Tale of New York.

Non-blarney.