Books, music, and TV in 2025: There has been unusually good stuff lately for me. I’m just going to mention them by name and give some quick impressions. I don’t know if I’ll write reviews later, but definitely not now.

NONFICTION BOOK: Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value (Julian Johnson): brilliant, thorough, balanced, enjoyable.

NONFICTION BOOK: Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing (Miranda Fricker): precise and thorough.

NONFICTION MUSIC-INSTRUCTION BOOK: Decoding Afro-Cuban Jazz: The Music of Chucho Valdés & Irakere (Chucho Valdés & Rebeca Mauleón).

FICTION BOOK: A Closed and Common Orbit (Becky Chambers): a marvelous treatment of questions of personhood and consciousness, perhaps up there with Hofstadter & Dennett’s The Mind’s I.

“TV” SHOW: LUCIFER (NETFLIX): The best-concluded show I’ve ever seen: It’s not my favorite show ever (probably my third, definitely in my top five), but it is the most satisfying way to complete a show I’ve yet seen (better than my favorite show, Babylon 5, and my second-favorite show, The Good Place).

LIVE MUSIC: Helmet, at the Crocodile, Wednesday, March 5, 2025: I didn’t know music could be this heavy and be this tight. I do believe there was exactly one bad note in that whole performance. And Helmet is definitely even better live than in the studio (I now think) because having the vocals take a back seat and having the guitars and the perfect drummer for this band be so up front in the mix made the music better in a way I could not have imagined previously.

RECORDED MUSIC: I’m slowly getting familiar with and really digging ONDA by (Korean band) Jambinai. Check them out if you like originality and surprise in your rock music.