The very first issue of <i>The Stereophile</i> appeared 45 years ago, in October 1962. It had been founded by a guy named J. Gordon Holt. The "J." is for Justin. I've never met him, never even exchanged e-mails with him.

"Pools and pools and pools of chocolate—fifty-thousand-pound, ninety-thousand-pound, Olympic-length pools of chocolate—in the conching rooms in the chocolate factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Big, aromatic rooms. Chocolate, far as the eye can see. Viscous, undulating, lukewarm chocolate, viscidized, undulated by the slurping friction of granite rollers rolling through the chocolate over crenellated granite beds at the bottoms of the pools. The chocolate moves. It stands up in brown creamy dunes. Chocolate eddies. Chocolate currents. Gulfs of chocolate. Chocolate deeps. Mares’ tails on the deeps. The world record for the fifty-yard free-style would be two hours and ten minutes."

I was happily reading Sasha Frere-Jones' <A HREF="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones">blog</A&gt; about CMJ, when he dropped this linkbomb on me, asking, "If you do not think there is any drumming in this cover of 'Satisfaction,' watch Bj&#246;rk’s hips. Also, a question for physicists, audio engineers, and clerics: how can Bj&#246;rk sing so loudly and not drown out Polly Jean Harvey, even though Harvey never raises her voice particularly high? And a question for music lovers everywhere: why has this song inspired so many good covers?"

"If the midrange isn't right, nothing else matters." Stereophile founder J. Gordon Holt's decades-old observation of the musical importance of the midrange has become a truism cast in stone. Gordon's other famous observation, "The better the sound, the worse the measurements," was made only partially in jest.

There's one presidential candidate who is not afraid to tackle the big issues.

On Monday, <I>The Washington Post</I> published a long, enthralling article on Richard Mellon Scaife's messy divorce.