httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icGOLDJv08c

Thanks to the recent addition of our new byline correspondents and an extraordinarily good week of extraordinarily good posts, I am experiencing (to tweak Alan Greenspan’s famous formulation) a surge of extra-rational exuberance.

There’s no accounting for taste, of course, although there can at least be an accounting of it.  All of the arts provide us an opportunity to feel — to know! — that the world can be changed for the better, and we find our private anthems where we can.  Here’s one I’ve been hitting the replay button on all day; from the Cold War depths of the Reagan era and the Golden Age of Indie Rock, REM’s “Radio Free Europe”  I can’t be the only person who hears Peter Buck’s joyfully pealing arpeggios and feels the involuntary pleasure of knowing that I am both free and have some very hard work to do.

Calling all in transit / Calling all in transit . . .