<I>Invention & Technology</I> considers the electric guitar.

Reissues. Hey, I don't care who you are, everyone has a guilty pleasure that's now been reissued on CD, possibly with bonus goodies. What's gonna happen to reissues in the big, new, all&#150digital, all&#150download, all&#150the&#150time world is an easy one: listeners will do the same thing they do with new records, download the tracks they want and leave the lesser tracks as scraps. Funny how it's now possible to think of cuts of meat and record albums in the same breath: bites of choice flesh you eat surrounded by bone, fat and gristle you leave. It must make musicians feel real good to see their collection eviscerated in this way. You can say it serves them right for filling out albums with lesser tracks but then there's that creeping alchemy that happens upon further listening when some of the tracks deep into the record become essential. How many album tracks have you grown fond of after repeated listens versus those that jumped out at you the first time you dropped the needle or pressed play?

If you only know Wil Wheaton as <I>TNG</I>'s Wesley Crusher, you ought to read his stuff on the web. He's smart and he's funny&mdash;and, in this column on Internet radio, absolutely spot on the money.

I walk in from the kitchen to find her crouching behind a loudspeaker, inspecting the binding posts, it seems.

Here's a weird one. I was recently going through CDs that sit on my shelves, in my collection so to speak, and for kicks I decided to check how much a random handful were worth on Amazon. Perhaps it's my naivet, but to my very great surprise, many were out of print. So let me get this straight, a business that needs catalog pieces right now as much as ever is allowing a significant portion of their holdings go out of print? Wow! I was at a party recently where I overheard this: "So do the big labels want to go out of business or is there another plan?"

24 craft beers you should be drinking. Hey, it's a list and it's beer. Double the pleasure.

Ian Pindar reviews William Rosen's <I>Justianian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe</I>, in which a "flea looms as large as an emperor." Sound like an unlikely read? Apparently not.