Tune in to Seattle public radio station KEXP, 90.3 FM, today at 3 PM PT / 6 PM ET, to hear an in-studio performance from and conversation with Stephin Merritt. The Magnetic Fields were in Seattle last week to play two nights at Town Hall; they'll close out their Distortion tour with three nights---six shows---at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music this weekend.

The Washington Post has reviewed a handful of notable new albums by artists with "the makeup of a chamber ensemble, the mind-set of a rock band"---the sort for which "Kronos Quartet paved the way." Kronos's latest, The Cusp of Magic, is "at turns luminous, frightening and unbearably lovely." It's music that "shimmers with the elusive delicacy of a dream ...  and evokes those transitional moments in life when the sharp edges of reality become blurred, and anything seems possible."

"We write a television show." So, humbly, begins the Time magazine essay by David Simon, the creator of HBO's The Wire, and his fellow series writers, as the show they created comes to a close this Sunday. In the essay, the writers offer a call to action against the public policy debacle that has been at the core of their show over five seasons: the failed drug war and its pervasive, destructive consequences. They propose a real-world solution to the ills they've depicted so powerfully in their fictionalized TV drama.