Listening closely to Tegan and Sara, the twin musicians enjoying unprecedented popularity two decades into their career due to 2013’s irresistible Heartthrob, can offer the kind of satisfaction that comes from solving a logic puzzle. Listening less closely can offer the same satisfaction great pop music always does. They bring a scientist’s rigor and an editor’s clarity to the stereotypically mushy topic of love, as well as, lately, to the synth-pop template they’ve helped repopularize on radio. Their trick is conveying lots of information—melodic, rhythmic, and lyrical—while maintaining simplicity and elegance.

The first track, “That Girl,” sets the album’s bittersweet tone in a very cool way. It’s about considering who you’ve become and not liking what you find—an extremely Tegan and Sara concept in that it’s less a demonstration of emotions that it’s a demonstration of thinking about emotions.

The vocals are moving enough to have worked nearly acapella.

TV is drowning in cheap, sloppily executed deaths

The spring of 2016 has been marked by death after death after death on TV. Some have proved controversial. Some have passed without commentary. A couple have been largely applauded.

But the fact remains: TV is killing major characters at an astonishing rate.

It is generally well-reported that there is a life expectancy gap between white and black Americans of about four years. But it can be hard to visualize exactly what this number means. In a recent conversation, David Williams, public health researcher at Harvard, described the racial gap to me in stark terms: One of the ways to think of the racial gap in health is to think of how many black people die prematurely every year who wouldn't die if there were no racial differences in health. The answer to that from a carefully done [2001] scientific study is 96,800 black people die prematurely every year. Divide it by 365 [days], that's 265 people dying prematurely every day. Imagine a jumbo jet — with 265 passengers and crew — crashing at Reagan Washington Airport today, and the same thing happening tomorrow and every day next week and every day next month. That's what we're talking about when we say there are racial disparities in health.

I asked Williams why there is such a tremendous gap in black and white life expectancy. He said there's no single issue to blame; it instead comes down to many factors, largely related to where people live.

GOLDMAN SACHS THE STORY Yesterday, Goldman Sachs agreed to fork over $5 billion and a 'sorry for the financial crisis' note to the US gov.  EXPLAIN PLEASE. The settlement docs say that leading up to the '08 crisis, Goldman knew of the issues in the mortgage market. But the bank continued to sell bonds packaged with sketchy mortgages to its investors without giving them the heads up. A handful of other Wall St. banks have agreed to similar settlements with the feds over the years.  No individual bankers have ever been punished. theSKIMM More than a few people are annoyed by this. Including Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. He's made Wall St. reform THE issue of his campaign, so expect to hear about this during his debate with Hillz later this week.

There have always been radicals on both sides of the political spectrum. But what is different about the conservative movement is that, since the 1990s, some of its most distinguished mainstream members have embraced the rhetoric and tactics of the extremes.

It is gratifying to see the National Review mobilize against Trump, decrying his “free-floating populism” and disdain for the details of public policy. But where were the magazine’s editors when Sarah Palin put these same forces on full display eight years ago? Loudly cheering her on.

Palin knew next to nothing about national or international public policy, but she almost celebrated that ignorance, playing to the anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism of parts of the conservative base.

What do you think we should call Donald Trump?

Why is Donald Trump always “Mister”?

“It’s this underlying power,”

Is a raised, emphatic voice heard as something more grating when it emanates from a woman? Is toughness perceived as something more pernicious when the hide and stride are female?

But for an even more obvious, indisputable example of unequal treatment, look to Trump. A woman with his personal life, public comportment and potty mouth wouldn’t last a nanosecond in a political campaign — or, for that matter, in a boardroom. Her name on a line of scarves wouldn’t be the selling point that his on a line of ties is.

The moral judgments — in particular the sexual ones — that we make about men and women are utterly and unjustly dissimilar.

For the first time ever, scientists have directly detected gravitational waves, bizarre ripples in space-time foreseen by Einstein a century ago. The discovery was the final, acid test of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Einstein has been proven right – again.For the first time ever, scientists have directly detected gravitational waves, bizarre ripples in space-time foreseen by Einstein a century ago. The discovery was the final, acid test of Einstein’s celebrated general theory of relativity, and once again Einstein’s genius held up to scrutiny.

The waves in question arose during the close approach of two black holes some 1.3 billion years ago, when multicellular life began to spread on Earth. Traveling at the speed of light, the waves reached our planet in September -- precisely when a observatory built to detect them was emerging from a long hiatus.