Larry Livermore

During my years in California I used to listen compulsively – nowadays you might call it hate-listening – to a talk show host who constantly infuriated me.

Bob Dylan once told me (well, not personally) that I should “know my song well before I start singing.”

I don’t know how strict or impenetrable the New Yorker paywall is, but hopefully at least some of you will be able to read the article I’m referring to.

At least in part because I spent so much of my life in the music world, where everyone is young even if they aren’t, many of my friends are as much as 10, 20, even 30 years younger than me.

At school we were taught that the crucial battle, the one that determined Canada would be British rather than French, took place on the Plains of Abraham, just outside the walled city of Quebec.

Billie Joe texted to ask if I was going to write anything about the 30th anniversary of Green Day’s Kerplunk.

The year I turned 22 my then-girlfriend insisted on throwing me a birthday party, even though I repeatedly said I didn’t want one.

Like most people I know, I was less than thrilled when it became evident that Joe Biden was going to get the Democratic nomination for president.

“Is Trumpism a mental illness?”

It was a rainy, warm spring day in Hong Kong, and I was whiling away the afternoon with a Punjabi friend who I’ll call Rakesh.