Country music news

Attention all NYC country music fans: My band (which is to say, the band I’m in) The Steamboat Disasters has a show coming up at Spike Hill in Williamsburg on January 30th, and another on March 10 at Trash Bar, also in Williamsburg. Come by and introduce yourself. And stay tuned for new dates, which will be added in the next couple weeks as we ramp this operation up. For a taste, here’s a video from a recent gig at the legendary Hank’s Saloon in Brooklyn. Ignore the woodenness of first tune, it was a soundcheck…

New dispatch from the lying and folly beat

Hey folks, after a long break from freelancing, I’ve got a new story-ish, in the Boston Globe. It’s a Q&A with John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago. He set out to write a book about lying in geopolitics, thinking that it must happen all the time. What he discovered was that world leaders actually very rarely lie to one another. What they do, instead, is lie to their own people, freely, especially in democracies. His book is well worth a read. I don’t touch on it in the interview, but there’s a lot of smart stuff about why leaders lie, when, and what the possible consequences are.