From 11 a.m. to 11:45, come chat about all things "American Idol." Did the right person win? Did Steven Tyler call anything beautiful? Did JLo get "goosies"? Will you watch next year? And then from 11:45-12:30 we'll switch to our usual TV free-skate, wherein we talk about whatever you like from the "Revenge" finale to the upcoming summer shows. It's not a chat sprint, it's a chat marathon! Be sure to carbo-load. About Viewer Discretion What we're watching on TV. Contributors Matthew Gilbert is the Globe's TV critic.Sarah Rodman is a staff TV and music critic for the Boston Globe. Michael Brodeur is the assistant arts editor for the Boston Globe, covering pop music, TV, and nightlife. Nicole Cammorata is a producer for Arts & ... Continue reading →

Chatting with singer/songwriter, pianist and drummer Ben Folds last week was life-affirming and giddiness-inducing, but also an exercise in evaluating irony. When the last Ben Folds Five album, The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, came out in 1999, Folds, Robert Sledge and Darren Jessee didn’t have iPhones to tend to between songs. Twitter obviously didn’t exist yet, so interacting with fans in up to 140 characters would have been incomprehensible. Few people, much less musicians, owned laptops, and no one existed in a bubble of Wi-Fi. Buzzwords like “digital crowdsourcing” and “fan-funding” had not yet pervaded the public’s lexicon.Not to be the cynic here, but when Folds talks about how he doesn’t want the new BF5 album to have a narrative, I have to laugh—the ... Continue reading →