@JoCoCruise {"dynamic":true,"content":"post_title","settings":{"before":" ","after":" "}} Alexandra Petri is a syndicated humor columnist for the Washington Post, playwright, periodic podcast guest, and author of “A Field Guide to Awkward Silences.” She’s also Emo...

Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. Her first novel, Autonomous, won the Lambda Literary Award and was a national bestseller. She’s also the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (Doubleday and Anchor). She’s an editor-at-large for Ars Technica, and a freelance science journalist for magazines and newspapers. She’s also the co-host, with Charlie Jane Anders, of the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. She’s currently working on another novel for Tor, as well as a nonfiction book for W.W. Norton about ancient abandoned cities.

Previously, she founded io9, and was the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo. Her nonfiction has appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, The Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post, 2600, New Scientist, Technology Review, Popular Science, Discover and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. She’s the co-editor of the essay collection She’s Such A Geek (Seal Press), and author of Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Duke University Press). Earlier, she was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a lecturer in American Studies at UC Berkeley. She was the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, and has a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley.

@JoCoCruise {"dynamic":true,"content":"post_title","settings":{"before":" ","after":" "}} Aparna started out doing comedy in her hometown of Washington D.C. and now resides in New York City. 2016’s Elle’s Women in Comedy Issue, featured her as one of the most exciting...

@JoCoCruise {"dynamic":true,"content":"post_title","settings":{"before":" ","after":" "}} Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards. Also, a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short...

Actress and writer Dannah Phirman is the co-creator, executive producer, and star of Hulu’s The Hotwives series. She’s written on Marry Me (NBC), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (FX), I’m Sorry (TruTV) and Showtime’s new series, Black Monday in which she also has a recurring role. She voiced the title character on the long running PBS animated series, WordGirl, and can be seen on Jenji Kohan’s upcoming show, American Princess.

Emily Nussbaum is the television critic for The New Yorker. She won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Nerve, Lingua Franca and New York Magazine, where she created The Approval Matrix. She is currently working on an anthology of her criticism and a book about reality television.

Commonly known as America’s Favorite Comedian, Greg Benson is also a recognized author of his own bios. As a professional actor since his college days, he’s played character roles in dozens of films and TV series, including “Melrose Place”, “Diagnosis Murder”, “Big Day”, “Caprica”, “Method & Red” and “Quintuplets”, and has also appeared in over 100 national commercials including memorable ads for McDonald’s, Hertz, Michelob, Lean Pockets and Honda. He will soon be seen playing a politically incorrect minister in the upcoming film “Deported” with Nick Swardson, Missi Pyle and Andy Dick.

Benson is also a popular YouTuber, with over Two Million subscribers and One Billion video views across his channels. He has scored dozens of viral video hits with his comedy sketches, music videos, kindhearted pranks and web series. As the host of the popular random acts of kindness series “Prank It Forward,” he’s been proud to award deserving guests everything from cash to cars to a newly renovated house. Greg has also directed the hit web series “The Guild” and “Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show”, produced new original series for DreamworksTV, Go90 and Official Comedy and has created viral commercial campaigns for Toyota, Intel, LEGO, MTV, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and many others.

You might catch Greg’s alter ego Yeshmin Blechin absentmindedly roaming the ship, or hosting his daily Mourning Show, which will be broadcast live on all the ship’s TVs.

“Nostalgia can be wonderful and amazing. It’s OK to look back. But then you gotta get the fuck out of there.” So says singer-songwriter Jill Sobule, explaining the theme of her new album, Nostalgia Kills.

On Nostalgia Kills (out September 14 on Jill’s own Pinko Records), the woman hailed by The New York Times for making “grown-up music for an adolescent age” turns her warm wit and poet’s eye on herself more than ever before, revisiting moments from throughout her life that made her into the person she is today. It’s an especially poignant look back at childhood — “exorcising some junior high school demons,” as she puts it.

Looking back is a new experience for Jill Sobule. Ever since she first caught mainstream attention with her 1995 song “I Kissed a Girl” — the first song about same-sex romance ever to crack the Billboard Top 20 (and no relation to the later Katy Perry tune) — she’s always pushed forward, exploring new sounds and subject matter with each passing album and refusing to be pigeonholed by her early hits (which also include the ‘90s alt-rock anthem “Supermodel,” featured in an iconic scene in the film Clueless).

Along the way, Jill has shared stages with the likes of Billy Bragg, Cyndi Lauper and Warren Zevon, written music for TV and theater, and been a pioneer in the art of crowdfunding, raising so much money for her 2009 album California Years that a then-unknown startup called Kickstarter came to her for advice. She’s also been active in numerous social and political causes, performing at prisons as part of Wayne Kramer’s Jail Guitar Doors project, playing dates with Lady Parts Justice’s “Vagical Mystery Tour,” and curating Monster Protest Jams Vol. 1, featuring protest songs by Tom Morello, Billy Bragg, Boots Riley, Amanda Palmer, Jackson Browne and many other great artists — including Jill’s own “When They Say We Want Our America Back, What the F#@k Do They Mean?”, which traces the history of anti-immigrant sentiment in America.

For Nostalgia Kills, Jill worked with her good friend, Australian singer-songwriter Ben Lee, to cull the album’s 11 songs from a collection of over 100, representing nearly a decade’s worth of material accumulated since the release of California Years. In turning those songs into an album, she received a little extra motivation from an unlikely source.

“I was at an industry party,” she recalls. “And I heard this total douche saying, you know, once someone reaches the age of 40, they can’t write a good song. And I went up to him and I was like, ‘You don’t know me, but you’re an idiot.’”

Making it her mission to prove her new nemesis wrong, Jill took the songs into Lee’s home studio in Los Angeles with a supporting cast of players that included John Doe (X), Wayne Kramer (The MC5), Petra Haden (That Dog), Roger Joseph Manning Jr. (Jellyfish), and Richard Barone (The Bongos). “This was done with a lot of friends,” she says. “It was very organic.” Many of the final mixes even contain elements of the original demos, recorded with various apps on Jill’s iPad.

Right from the jump, Nostalgia Kills proves that this songwriter, despite being a few years north of 40, is still at the peak of her powers. How many artists of any age can write a song like “I Don’t Wanna Wake Up,” an Old Testament head trip inspired by a bad breakup, the death of a parent, and microdosing mushrooms? Let alone have the nerve to make it their album’s opening track?

From there, Nostalgia Kills explores its titular theme through a collection of songs that ponder the past without ever lapsing into easy sentimentality. “I Put My Headphones On,” as catchy as anything in Jill’s catalog, captures the cozy feeling of tuning out the outside world with a favorite record. “Almost Great” is a ukulele-laced ode to youthful brushes with success and adult battles with procrastination. “Forbidden Thoughts of Youth” is a beautifully rendered portrait of adolescent unrequited love, as Jill looks back at her first gay crush (“an incredible combination of Marcia Brady and future meth-smoking biker chick”).

“Headphones” and “Forbidden Thoughts” will be part of #Fuck7thGrade, a one-woman show about “the worst year of my life,” and just the latest of Jill’s many forays into theater. Nostalgia Kills features new versions of several of Jill’s best songs for the stage: “There’s Nothing I Can Do” is a defiant breakup anthem from the off-off-Broadway musical Prozak and the Platypus, sung from the perspective of a rebellious 17-year-old girl. “25 Cents” is from Times Square, a new musical based on the 1980 cult film of the same name — and Jill’s own memories of visiting New York City as a teenager, back when the city was still “scary and fascinating and full of junkies.” And the gorgeous ballad “Tomorrow Is Breaking My Heart” is one of several original songs Jill wrote for a new adaptation of Yentl, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s tale of gender-bending romance later made famous by Barbra Streisand’s film adaptation.

There are two versions of “Tomorrow Is Breaking” on Nostalgia Kills — a mournful duet with John Doe, and a special bonus track version featuring an amateur musician named Nicholas Ford, who made a pledge to the Nostalgia Kills Kickstarter campaign in which the prize was to sing a duet with Jill. “I decided to do it in a different style with a piano and he kicked ass,” she says proudly of Nicholas’ crooning accompaniment.

Nostalgia Kills’ bonus tracks also include “The Donor Song,” on which Jill gives shout-outs to her Kickstarter backers (including Avengers director and Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon, whom Jill calls “my personal lord and savior” because he donated at the highest level), as well as lovely covers of The Stairsteps’ soul classic “O-o-h Child” and “Don’t Let Us Get Sick,” a heartbreakingly beautiful, late-career ballad by Jill’s friend and mentor, Warren Zevon, with whom she tour shortly before his death in 2003. “He used to come out during my set to sing ‘I Kissed a Girl’ with me,” Jill remembers. “He would always wink at me when we would sing ‘They can have their diamonds and we’ll have are pearls’ to let me know he got the clitoral reference.”

For all its graceful, funny and heartbreaking explorations of awkward youth and grown-up regrets, Nostalgia Kills is as of-the-moment as anything in Jill Sobule’s catalog. Through her own experiences, she explores issues our society still collectively struggles with (LGBTQ rights, teen mental health, our unhealthy obsession with staying forever young) and gently skewers our tendency to dwell on the past at the expense of addressing the present. As she sings on the title track: “We look at ourselves in a long row of mirrors/We get smaller and smaller with each passing year/We have to keep moving or die.”

Dr Katherine (Katie) Mack is a theoretical astrophysicist who studies a range of questions in cosmology, the study of the universe from beginning to end. She currently holds the position of Assistant Professor of Physics at North Carolina State University, where she is also a member of the Leadership in Public Science Cluster. Throughout her career she has studied dark matter, the early universe, galaxy formation, black holes, cosmic strings, and the ultimate fate of the cosmos. Alongside her academic research, she is an active science communicator and has been published in a number of popular publications such as Scientific American, Slate, Sky & Telescope, Time.com, and Cosmos Magazine, where she is a columnist. You can find her on Twitter as @AstroKatie.

Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of The Glamourist Histories series of fantasy novels. She has received the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, three Hugo awards, and the RT Reviews award for Best Fantasy Novel. Her work has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. Stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, and several Year’s Best anthologies as well as in her collection Scenting the Dark and Other Stories from Subterranean.

Mary, a professional puppeteer and voice actor, has performed for LazyTown (CBS), the Center for Puppetry Arts, Jim Henson Pictures and founded Other Hand Productions. Her designs have garnered two UNIMA-USA Citations of Excellence, the highest award an American puppeteer can achieve. She is a member of SAG/AFTRA and records fiction for authors such as Kage Baker, Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi.

Mary lives in Chicago with her husband Rob and over a dozen manual typewriters. Visit maryrobinettekowal.com.

Matt Chapman is the co-creator of, and primary voice-doer for, HomestarRunner.com, an ancient cartoon website once frequented by early, primitive internet users. He usually makes things with his brother Mike and once convinced Disney to pay them to make weird animated shorts (Two More Eggs). He has written and done voices for more legit stuff like Gravity Falls, Wander Over Yonder, Pickle and Peanut, and The Aquabats Super Show. He currently plays sloppy rhythm guitar for Robert Schneider’s band Air-Sea Dolphin.

To Whom It May Concern: I did not come from San Luis Obispo, CA, go to UCLA, work as a visual effects artist on CSI, tour colleges and comedy clubs as part of the comedy music duo Hard ‘n Phirm, nor did I record a solo album called “The Very Last Songs I Will Ever Record (Part 1)” that includes a song with “Weird Al” Yankovic, and I certainly did not jump into making kid-friendly comedy music that’s still intended to entertain adults and release an album of it in 2018 called “Songs to Sing at Children” all so that I can write some silly bio! Sorry, but you’ll have to find someone else to do it.

Ophira Eisenberg is a staple of the New York standup comedy scene, a writer, and host of NPR’s trivia comedy show, Ask Me Another where she has interviewed and played silly games with Sir Patrick Stewart, Connie Britton, Roxanne Gay, Mozhan Marno, Josh Groban, George Takei, Ethan Hawke, Julia Stiles, Big Freedia, Lewis Black, Uzo Aduba, Jason Mraz and more. She has appeared on HBO’s Girls, Gotham Live, The Late Late Show, The Today Show, The Nightly Show, Comedy Central, and VH-1. Selected as one of New York Magazine’s Top 10 Comics that Funny People Find Funny, and featured in the New York Times as a skilled comedian and storyteller with a “bleakly stylish” sense of humor, Ophira’s debut memoir, Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy was optioned for a feature film with Zucker Productions. She is also a regular host and teller with The Moth, her stories are part of their award winning radio show, podcast, and New York Times best-selling books. Her comedy special Inside Joke was recently released by New Wave Entertainment and available on Amazon and iTunes.

Solomon Georgio burst into comedy with his own brand of indignant irreverence. He flawlessly intertwines biting social commentary with stories of his life as an openly gay African immigrant.

Solomon had his television debut in February 2015 as the featured comedian on CONAN, and followed it up with appearances on Drunk History, The Meltdown with Jonah & Kumail, This is Not Happening, Viceland’s Flophouse and Last Call with Carson Daily.

On October 20, 2017, Solomon’s first half hour comedy special premiered on Comedy Central Stand Up Presents. His debut album with Comedy Central Records, Homon√©gro Superior, is also now available.

They Might Be Giants have always been a little obsessed with death.

Over the course of their 30-plus year career, renowned college-pop experimentalists John Flansburgh and John Linnell have never shied away from joining the lyrically macabre with bold and often unusual instrumentation—whether it’s talking about being reincarnated as a bag of groceries on 1990’s Flood or having their remains shot out into space (and coming back as a ghost) on 2016’s Phone Power.

The duo’s 20th studio album, I Like Fun (arriving on January 19, 2018), is similarly—if not more so—interested in personal oblivion.

“At some point we realized we could call any They Might Be Giants record ‘Deathtrip,’ and it would be appropriate,” jokes Flansburgh. “But it wouldn’t be very welcoming.

“I think the truth is, as a band, and as writers, the mixed bag of writing melodic songs with dystopian content is a winning combination for us. I think it speaks more to the persuasive power of melody than it does to the inevitability of dystopian themes. Because ultimately, I think people find a lot of optimism in what we’re singing about, even when it’s relentlessly pessimistic.”

“[Death is] a great topic,” concurs Linnell. “It never gets old, and there’s a million different ways to talk about it. It’s never lost its juice as far as I’m concerned. I love making up songs about death. It’s not the only thing we write about, obviously, but I think it’s the gift that keeps on giving.”

Take I Like Fun’s lead single: the harmonizing, mid-tempo “I Left My Body,” which contemplates what becomes of the mind after the body is finished living and likens death to a nondescript waiting room.

“There’s a receptionist, but the receptionist isn’t there,” says Linnell. “It has a slightly mysterious, we-don’t-know-what’s-happening quality that I liked, that’s sort of bureaucratic.”

Written over the last year and designed by TMBG’s longtime graphic collaborator Paul Sahre, I Like Fun is the result of Linnell and Flansburgh sending each other material from their respective residences in New York City and State. It also found the band in familiar territory: Reservoir Studios (formerly Skyline Studios) in New York City, where the duo once recorded their commercial breakout, Flood.

“[Skyline] has a lot of great memories for us,” says Flansburgh. “Last year our producer Pat Dillett and his partner Steve took over the space, brought it back, and in a bunch of ways made it even better. I know believing a studio has any kind of special power is believing in voodoo, but when the voodoo is working for you, that’s okay!”

“The idea that this album took about a year to make surprises me because I wouldn’t say we fussed over any particular track that much,” Flansburgh continues. “This album is kind of under-produced for us and certainly by 2017 standards. It’s more like a ‘60s psychedelic production with a featured sound or instrument, maybe a vocal double, but not a ton of overdubs or processing. For me, just being a little more confident to keep things simple keeps it all much fresher. We just made a lot of recordings and just took advantage of being able to pull the best set out of a much larger stack.”

So, why call an album with such worrying titles as “Let’s Get This Over With,” the aforementioned “I Left My Body,” “An Insult To The Fact Checkers,” and “Push Back The Hands” I Like Fun?

According to Linnell, the title (which is also the name of a song on the record) felt right on a gut level. “I think it connects up with another album title from the recent past, which was Join Us, which was a very positive vibe,” he says. “It’s kind of refreshing in a way—not everything has to be snarky.”

“It’s funny because it’s a tautology—it’s obvious,” continues Linnell. “Of course everybody likes fun. That’s the definition of fun—it’s something you like. And yet there’s a nice simplicity to it. And it contrasts with a lot of the material on the album, which is complicated and challenging.”

Flansburgh also points out that the song for which the album takes its name is nowhere near as one-sided as it sounds: “The song itself is basically about waiting for your painkillers to arrive.”

Then, there’s the twinkly “Push Back the Hands,” which sighs with longing for a foregone time. “‘Push Back the Hands’ is sort of maybe about this wistful nostalgia—a false nostalgia, like there was a better time than now, and how do we get back there,” acknowledges Linnell.

Additionally, the apocalyptic “By The Time You Get This” contrasts the optimistic way we once imagined the future with today’s more fatalistic vision. “The narrator of the song is projecting all this stuff that is not correct about the future,” Linnell says. “Apparently there was this belief at the end of the 19th century, so I’m told, that people had a kind of Utopian vision of the future, that they had this notion that, by the end of the 19th Century, that maybe war and disease and all these things were going to be eradicated. Of course, they had no anticipation of the two world wars or the Holocaust or the atom bomb or any of this stuff that then happened. Nowadays, we have this more Blade Runner-y notion of what the future is like.”

Meanwhile, “An Insult To The Fact Checkers” is just a good old-fashioned kiss-off anthem (despite its politically relevant-sounding title). “I guess in our post-factual media environment, you might assume that it’s political commentary,” says Flansburgh. “But it’s really just an ‘I Hate You’ song, in the proud tradition of ‘I Hate You’ songs. Everyone has had unreliable friends over the years, and it’s really just about a friendship going sideways.”

Even album closer “Last Wave” leaves you with a pit in your stomach by, as Linnell points out, “reminding you of your darkest fears.”

“On an album with a fair share of death imagery we went a little overboard with this one, but perhaps the music is kind of uplifting,” he says.

Though They Might Be Giants have built a lengthy, successful career around blanketing perturbed themes with springy, experimental melodies, the one thing Linnell and Flansburgh remain assured about is their band’s future.

“There’s not a lot of job security in music,” acknowledges Flansburgh. “You see how quickly the best acts you’ve ever seen explode or implode and you come to realize every turn is really a chance to crash the project. Somehow we beat the odds.

“A long time ago The Onion had a piece spoofing the Behind the Music of They Might Be Giants and how disappointing it was that there was no sex or drugs,” he continues. “But maybe that’s not the worst strategy—don’t take drugs in public.”

(Photo by Shervin Lainez)

@JoCoCruise {"dynamic":true,"content":"post_title","settings":{"before":" ","after":" "}} "“What should I do?” That's the question Merrill Garbus asks herself halfway through “ABC 123,” the stunning centerpiece of the new Tune-Yards album, I can feel you creep into my...