brooklyn
At home with the National
“Anxiety and worry are common mental states,” says Berninger. “But it’s not a mid-life crisis because it never goes away.” Sitting on the sofa with his bandmates, a glass of wine in his hand, it looks like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
TV On The Radio’s curse
TV On The Radio are victims of their own success. After three albums, they are indisputably the most critically adored band in the western world, but every ecstatic review draws them deeper into a game they don’t enjoy. They write political songs, but are contemptuous of politics. They’re angry, but don’t like raising their voices. Although they make uplifting, exhilarating music, everyone thinks they’re miserable.
Mum’s The World
Home birth has been steadily increasing in New York for the past decade, as middle-class mums seek alternatives to the increasingly standardised, managed approach to childbirth in US hospitals. Doctors, rather than midwives, are in control. The result is one of the highest caesarian rates in the world.
The Harmony Programme
Six months of intensive musical education in Brooklyn, for children who have never picked up an instrument before. Is a model devised in Venezuela - El Sistema - the best way to teach life skills to disadvantaged kids in the West?
Seventy-seven drummers by the Brooklyn Bridge
John Moloney, of Sunburned Hand Of Man, was one of fifteen ‘Drum Leaders’ charged with keeping his section in time and alert to rhythmic changes. He said: “I’m a huge Boredoms fan, so I told them ‘I will drink rat blood to do this thing’ and in a very gracious gesture on their part, they put me in.” He had been drinking free Sapporo all afternoon.
