Meet Mayer Hawthorne. Born and raised in the Detroit area, home to some of the rawest hip hop and rock music on earth, one might naturally expect him to bear some of that same roughness, that edge. On the contrary, Mayer Hawthorne (Andrew Mayer Cohen) is a fucking nice guy. Ask anyone who has talked to the guy (or just follow him on Twitter). That's not to say he doesn't rock out, however, as audiences across the country (and right...

There probably isn't a greater moment of relief and redemption in the whole of Western Literature than in Canto XXXIV of The Inferno. Dante has endured violent tornadoes, muck and mire, fiery rains, a run in with Medusa and the Furies, and a series of gruesome visions which would make a bad acid trip in NAM look like a shuffleboard tournament on a Carnival Cruise. He finds himself in Hell's icy center, whereupon he shimmies down the...