“You’ll Tic Tic All Day Long”: The Cold War, Geiger Counters, and Doris Day

By: Tim Smolko (Athens, Georgia) // Some wars are good. Most are bad. Some are just plain weird. The Cold War was definitely weird, and one of the best ways to grasp its weirdness is to listen to Cold War novelty songs from the 1940s to the 1960s. The oddest of them all may be …

Top 40: More Hits More Often

By: Ben Fong-Torres (San Francisco Chronicle) // From What’s That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and its History, Fourth Edition, by John Covach and Andrew Flory (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015) It’s hard to imagine, but there was a time, not long ago, when radio was declared dead. In the early 1950s, television was …