I was–I am–a Lost dork. I listened to all the best Lost podcasts, I read the message boards, I delighted in puzzling over each episode until the final moments of the season. For a lot of Losties, the show didn’t end with the final scene–there was still an endless amount of questions.

And now, some of those questions are answered. In the interest of folks who don’t want to be spoiled before the August 24th season six DVD release, I won’t post any links (they’re out there) to the 12-minute video. I will say, however, that anyone still wondering about some of the show’s loose ends will be somewhat satisfied. But, of course, this is Lost–so there are a few more questions to replace those answers. Clever, suspenseful, and great fun.

There was an essay in the Sunday Book Review about adults reading young adult (teen) books:

But big type and short, plot-driven chapters aside, the erosion of age-­determined book categories, initiated by Harry Potter, has been hastened along by an influx of crossover authors like Stephenie Meyer and interlopers like Sherman Alexie, James Patterson, Francine Prose, Carl Hiaasen and John Grisham, to name just a few stars from across the spectrum of adult fiction who have turned to writing Y.A. According to surveys by the Codex Group, a consultant to the publishing industry, 47 percent of 18- to 24-year-old women and 24 percent of same-aged men say most of the books they buy are classified as young adult. The percentage of female Y.A. fans between the ages of 25 and 44 has nearly doubled in the past four years. Today, nearly one in five 35- to 44-year-olds say they most frequently buy Y.A. books. For themselves.

I am one of those age 25-44 female YA fans, although I’m on the younger end of that spectrum; almost exactly half of the fifty-ish books I’ve finished so far in 2010 have been marketed as young adult. I started reading classic “teen” authors like L.M. Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott twenty years ago and never stopped, but I really got into contemporary YA literature when I was in library school and took a teen librarianship class. I’ve long since given up making excuses for it.

Paul mentions several possible reasons why adults are reading teen books – the visibility of Harry Potter and Twilight; easy-to-read, fast-moving plots; stress relief – and I’m sure they all play a role. But what she glosses over is the fact that a lot of these novels are just really good. I firmly believe that a large percentage of today’s best writers are writing in YA, and readers who assume that these books are simplistic or boring are missing out.

If you’d like to give YA a try, here are a few great titles I’ve read in the past few months that are a little less well-known than The Hunger Games (which is excellent, and you should definitely read it) and the various vampire series:
Girl at Sea by Maureen Johnson (and anything else by her, too)
Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy, starting with A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Demon’s Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan
How to Say Goodbye in Robot by Natalie Standiford
Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
Knightley Academy by Violet Haberdasher

Yesterday the New York Times Sunday magazine had a mildly interesting story on a fascinating topic: modern U.S. copyright law. The story itself is about music industry licensing executives, who drive around the country trying to convince those who are using copyrighted music illegally to pay for it:

[Devon] Baker, 30, is a licensing executive with Broadcast Music Incorporated, otherwise known as BMI. The firm is a P.R.O., or performing rights organization; P.R.O.’s license the music of the songwriters and music publishers they represent, collecting royalties whenever that music is played in a public setting. Which means that if you buy a CD by, say, Ryan Adams, or download one of his songs from iTunes, and play it at your family reunion, even if 500 people come, you owe nothing. But if you play it at a restaurant you own, then you must pay for the right to harness Adams’s creativity to earn money for yourself. Which leaves you with three choices: you can track down Ryan Adams, make a deal with him and pay him directly; you can pay a licensing fee to the P.R.O. that represents him — in this case, BMI; or you can ignore the issue altogether and hope not to get caught.

[...]

Once contacted by BMI [Broadcast Music Incorporated], owners are given a worksheet. Does their venue use a radio, CD players, karaoke machine? Do they feature live music? If so, how often? How many people can the venue legally hold? For smaller businesses with low capacity that don’t make much use of music, a license may be as little as $300 a year. For really big operators, the cost might be as much as $9,000 per location per year, the maximum BMI is permitted to charge a single customer. (The fees are distributed to artists based on what BMI calls “an appropriate surrogate” — local radio or TV — that reflects a sampling of bars and restaurants in the area.) All in all, the division Devon Baker works for, General Licensing, accounts for 11 percent of BMI’s revenue.

One thing becomes abundantly clear as you read about the mission of Baker and BMI is that the current copyright law is insane. The few coffee shop owners that aren’t owned by sprawling corporations like Starbucks are expected to pay licensing fees of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars? No wonder people just play what they want and hope not to get caught. Their mission seems even crazier when you consider that the RIAA, in an attempt to sue individuals over filesharing, spent more than $17 million in legal fees and recovered less than $400,000. Granted, it’s difficult to judge the deterrent effect on those who chose not to download illegally because they feared a lawsuit, but the expenditures seem disproportionate and irrational.

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert in copyright law — that seems like a job for someone with a Ph.D. or a law degree, neither of which I possess. But it is easy to see the disconnect between the average person thinking that artists should be paid for their work and why the average person isn’t all that interested in paying money for each note he or she listens to.

The challenges of trying to convince people to pay for music in an environment where it’s easier and easier to obtain it for free isn’t so different from the modern world of journalism. From debates over paywalls, micropayments, and MediaPasses, leaders in the industry are desperately trying to figure out how to deal with expanding competition and shrinking ad sales in an environment where everyone is used to reading what they want for free. The fundamental problem is the same: How do you get people to pay for something they’re used to thinking of as free?

I certainly don’t have the answer, but I suspect Baker’s cross-country road trip to notify coffee shops of federal copyright law isn’t it.

Like Kay, I was at the Arcade Fire/Spoon show at Merriweather last Friday. All of it was fantastic, but the most surprising moment was Spoon’s cover of “Modern World” by Wolf Parade. Apparently they’ve being playing it for much of the Transference tour; here’s them with Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade at Radio City Music Hall:

Wolf Parade has sort of fallen off the radar; its latest album, Expo 86 arrived in June without much fanfare, and 2008′s At Mount Zoomer went nowhere. Some of this is no doubt due to Spencer Krug, who with Boeckner makes up the band’s songwriting duo, spending more time with his other band, Sunset Rubdown. But Expo and Zoomer, despite tracks like “What Did My Lover Say?” and “Call It a Ritual”, were bound to be disappointing after Apologies to the Queen Mary, their debut. It sounds just as viscerally exciting, and shockingly consistent, now as it did five years ago. Here’s the opening track, “You Are a Runner and I Am My Father’s Son”:

“Modern World” is a great song, but coming after that even it feels like just another album track. Queen Mary got some love at end-of-decade list season, but it appears, like Interpol’s Turn On the Bright Lights, to have set itself up to be ignored later on. When your next albums are going to be, of necessity, merely okay, the band’s brand generally is damaged, and people are less inclined to revisit the album that got them interested in the first place.