It doesn’t seem totally fair to pick on what may be the first professionally published work by an intern, but I feel like with Max Fraser’s lamenting the end of Tower Records in The Nation, anti-Wal-Mart sentiment has truly gotten out of control. The problem here, apparently, is that the relative decline of Tower Records vis-a-vis “big box” retailers like Wal-Mart and Target is bad for independent music, since said stores stock fewer unique albums than did Tower. To which I say, fair enough, but as Fraser himself notes the other side of the story is the rise of internet distribution of music. It’s impossible for me to imagine anything that will be more aided by online sales than independent music.

A place like EMusic that doesn’t require a physical inventory has every incentive to stock (virtually) any album whatsoever that a record label is interesting in having them stock, something that no brick-and-mortar record store could ever claim. Meanwhile, “discovering new musical acts while browsing the stacks and interacting with a knowledgeable staff” doesn’t seem like an especially optimal method. The online world features a number of useful discovery tools. At its most basic, lots of website will “recommend” albums purchased by other people who bought the same ones you bought. On a more sophisticated level, Pandora will recommend new things based on formal analysis of bands’ musical styles — it tells me, for example, that “Ode to Rock” by Manda and the Marbles features “meandering melodic phrasing, major key tonalities, and many other similarities” with The New Pornographers.

Last.FM also does recommendations, this time through a social-affinity analysis and lets you filter for obscurity when searching out similar bands according to what, exactly, you’re trying to accomplish. There may be much to fear in the bold new digital future, but this isn’t it. All that’s offered on the other side is “As Russ Solomon, the 81-year-old progenitor of Tower Records, remarked to Joel Selvin of the San Francisco Chronicle recently, ‘Who’s going to download an opera?’” Opera fans, I would assume. Why wouldn’t they?

I think it may be a condition of employment at The American Prospect to say only bad things about The Hamilton Project, but this business about Summer Opportunity Scholarships sure is interesting. They note that schoolkids’ academic skills deteriorate over America’s lengthy summer vacations, which makes sense once you think about it. They also note that the impact of this deterioration is especially large on low-SES kids, which I suppose also makes sense once you think about it. So they propose “the creation of Summer Opportunity Scholarships (SOS) to finance summer school or other summer enrichment programs” for poor kids which, once again, makes sense to me.

On another level, of course, it would make sense to revisit our national commitment to very long summer vacations, a policy which as best I can tell is grounded in the belief that kids’ labor is needed on the farm during those months. Budget constraints are obviously backing up blind adherence to tradition here, and I really loved my time at Camp Winnebago, but along with being dubious education policy this has to be a huge pain-in-the-ass to single parents and dual-income families, especially those of modest means. Certainly combining the world’s shortest vacations for adults with the world’s longest vacations for kids doesn’t seem reasonable at all. Does crime go up during the summer months? It must, right. Google’s not giving me a quick answer to that question.