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efetters-walp
Jun 216 min read
Watching journalism tumble toward a painful end
I knew I could no longer be a journalist by 2007—even though it was the only job I’d ever wanted, and I was 14 years deep into a career...
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efetters-walp
Jun 153 min read
A father remembered
He’s almost impossibly gaunt. One eye seems partially open, and his mouth is agape. But he is unconscious, out of pain. His paper-thin...
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efetters-walp
Apr 34 min read
When life becomes a whole new ballgame
As baseball season started a year ago, in spring 2023, my dad had been in his retirement community’s memory care facility for just a few...
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efetters-walp
Sep 12, 20213 min read
A day that seems far away in so many ways ...
It’s the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists took over airplanes and slammed them into the World Trade Center and the...
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efetters-walp
Feb 6, 20215 min read
Viva 'Sandinista!'
(Or “how I learned to embrace an album that’s messy and way too long even though I love the band that made it”) I first heard The Clash...
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efetters-walp
Dec 16, 20195 min read
Revolution rock—40 years later
Rolling Stone magazine called “London Calling” the best album of the 1980s—even though it was released in 40 years ago this weekend in...
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efetters-walp
Dec 12, 20192 min read
Old ears, new songs
I’m not a list maker by nature. But spending too much time listing my favorite top 20 songs of the past year has become my annual...
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efetters-walp
Oct 11, 20194 min read
Come hell or high water ... or both
I saw the SUV speed around the corner of the intersection, swerve a few times and then head straight toward my vehicle. That part now...
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efetters-walp
Sep 11, 20193 min read
Shouting amid the remembrance
The raw horror of that day comes back so easily. For me, it just takes an image of those smoking skyscrapers. I own a book that simply...
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efetters-walp
Apr 20, 20193 min read
Faith, hope and baseball
When I was a kid in the mid-1970s, I dressed up like Steve Garvey, the Dodgers’ great first baseman at the time, for Halloween. In other...
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efetters-walp
Feb 14, 20194 min read
Tuning in invisible waves
So many things swirling in the big world right now, but all I want to write about is radio. It’s appropriate timing, at least, because...
26 views0 comments
efetters-walp
Feb 7, 20194 min read
The band that still matters
Today, Feb. 7, is International Clash Day, which started as a Seattle radio DJ’s lark and now is an international event of sorts. And...
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efetters-walp
Nov 8, 20184 min read
Living in a Leonard Cohen afterworld
I don’t have a good story about how I started listening to Leonard Cohen. He and his music snuck up on me over the course of a few years,...
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efetters-walp
Sep 22, 20183 min read
An anniversary for anemic royalty
“Nirvana already did their first song—it’s from the new album that came out just this week. The song was different—but a good, raw...
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efetters-walp
Apr 14, 20184 min read
My favorite '90s creations crash headfirst into the woke age
There is no happy happy, joy joy in Springfield today. Yes, I know I’m mixing my 1990s cartoon references. The tide of social progress,...
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efetters-walp
Mar 30, 20184 min read
Pulp's coda to Britpop turns 20
“What a drag it is getting old,” Mick Jagger sang well before he got old. He turned 23 the same month the song with that lyric came out....
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efetters-walp
Feb 17, 20184 min read
It just doesn't stop
Our first two children were born through emergency Cesarean sections, scary moments that ushered them into the world. Our oldest, now on...
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efetters-walp
Jan 26, 20183 min read
History, both recent and rhyming
Why does history in books seem so far away, while history you’ve lived through seems like yesterday? That question hit me when I realized...
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efetters-walp
Jan 17, 20183 min read
Music, memories and mortality
Dolores O’Riordan died yesterday. The lead singer of The Cranberries was a year younger than I am. After the shock of yesterday’s news...
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efetters-walp
Jan 2, 20188 min read
Favorite songs from 2017
This full list first appeared in pieces on my Facebook page over the past few weeks ... First off: Listen to the music you like, the...
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