Come here. Sit down. We need to talk. Now listen, I want you to know I love you and everything is going to be okay, but what I’m about to tell you is going to be very upsetting to you. It will probably make you angry. And I get that. It is normal to feel angry when you are confronted with something unfair. I know you get irritated when I say, “Life isn’t fair,” but it really isn’t, and part of growing up and being an adult is learning that when things don’t go your way — when the system is obviously flawed and you want to smash your fists against a wall to protest over the injustice of it all — you need to take a moment to compose yourself, accept that the world doesn’t always work the way you want it to, and do what you can to change things so that next time the situation allows for a little more righteousness. Okay, take a deep breath. Are you ready? I’m sorry to tell you this, but there is the possibility that Hamilton might not win the most Tonys of all time. It might not even get the most nominations. Hey, hey, don’t cry, it’s going to be fine! No, I can’t believe it either. Shhhh. Okay, just relax. It could still be okay! All we can do is hope. Anyway, I’m here for you. We’ll get through this together. Shhhh.

“We’ve been shaped to have perceptions that keep us alive, so we have to take them seriously. If I see something that I think of as a snake, I don’t pick it up. If I see a train, I don’t step in front of it. I’ve evolved these symbols to keep me alive, so I have to take them seriously. But it’s a logical flaw to think that if we have to take it seriously, we also have to take it literally…. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations.”
 — What if everything we believe about the world around us turns out to be untrue? What if we are simply a series of responses to stimuli we can neither name nor understand? What if our actions are only the result of a soft-shelled cellular sort of machine learning, and the values we ascribe to things we do are as empty as the sorry little lives we lead while we think we do them? It might mean that we could let go of all the worry we carry around — that the hurt we’ve caused can never be forgiven, that the pain we’ve felt will never truly heal, that our loved ones might be sad to lose us — each day and truly embrace the oblivion that is our inevitable destiny. We could face it unafraid, with arms open wide and a sense of relief that no one need ever suffer for us again. But what do you think is the best part about understanding that our lives are futile and hollow? Tell us in the comments!

I know we all get down on the Internet for being vapid and terrible and soul-crushing and depression-inducing and generally just making us wish we all lived in a world without wireless while also causing us to wonder if we even deserve the gift of literacy, but on extremely infrequent occasions it offers up something so beautiful, so miraculous, that you are able to forgive it its manifest sins against humanity. This is one of those times.

Jesus Christ, it has been a goddamn decade since Band of Horses’ debut, Everything All the Time. What have I done with my life since then? Ugh, don’t answer. Anyway, here’s something from their forthcoming fifth album. Hopefully it will get you motivated to contend with today’s thundery, swamplike conditions. Enjoy.

★★★★ Highlights of sun flared off glazed white brick and glimmered in the elastic fiber of leggings. There was something less than a breeze, just enough to offer resistance. A black pigeon scurried along the bright sidewalk. The stacked masses of the Ansonia receded in space. People with yoga mats slung on their backs stood in line out the door of a restaurant. A lanky young man with a basketball worked on his handle, perpendicular to the sidewalk traffic, challenging his own reflection in the window of the cleaners.

Define fiction.

“This seems like a good Internet rule of thumb: When in doubt, bring up ‘Hamilton.’”
 — This New York Times analysis of how the fluidity of identity can lead to unexpected consequences for celebrities in an age of vibrant social media engagement is both an important clarification of a complex situation and a teachable moment for anyone who is as yet unfamiliar with the vital instruction rendered above.

Fans of Mick Harvey’s anglicization (Englishing? Gallictomy? WHATEVER, HE TRANSLATED THEM INTO ENGLISH) of the works of Serge Gainsbourg will be happy to know that Delirium Tremens, a third volume, is forthcoming on June 10. Those of you who are unfamiliar with the project have a little time to catch up. Enjoy.

a beef patty, a fried shrimp patty, a rib patty, and a second beef patty with cheese; then it tops the meat tower off with more cheese, bacon, lettuce, cabbage, tomato, and onion; then it heaves a healthy glop of six sauces on top (teriyaki, mayo, spicy mayo, tartar sauce, meat sauce, and ketchup) to presumably seep down and act as glue. But if the goo potential here still underwhelms so far, no worries — Lotteria also crams a soft-boiled egg in there.

Japan is better than America at most things, and that includes American overindulgence.

“This marks somewhere around 2,500 years, at least since Plato’s Laws, that someone or other has been fretting over the glory of music being diluted or corrupted by its own popularity with the rabble. And at least two centuries of people demanding that good music should be hard work, not just to make but also to listen to.”
 — “How About a Little Poptimism for Tchaikovsky?” from last week in the Los Angeles Review of Books, is the kind of thing that you will either utterly devour or only click on by mistake, but if you are someone who is in the former category you will for sure have thoughts about it. (Just don’t share them with me! I don’t like fighting on the Internet! Especially about music!) Speaking of the Los Angeles Review of Books, certain people in L.A. seem to love it, since it is the first time any of them have come into contact with culture since they moved there from New York.