The Church Doors Blown Open, I Can Hear the Organ's Song

Congratulations to Mr. Stephen Olson for correctly naming "15 Step" by Radiohead as the Monday Song of the Day.

I'm not sure if I thought I would ever be able to write the words "Thom Yorke" and "U.S.C. Marching Band" in the same sentence without making a Chuck Klosterman-esque comparison between the 2004-05 Trojan football team and In Rainbows, but lo and behold, on Sunday night, members of the U.S.C. band backed Radiohead as they played "15 Step" at the Grammys.

Unfortunately for you, the reader, the Grammy I.P. forces quickly shut down video of the performance, and you have been left with this performance of "15 Step" from Jools Holland.

Moving on...I'm not going to say that everyone out there needs to immediately go purchase a copy of Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, but if you're looking for a book that does an excellent job of explaining the "why" of 9/11 as much as the "what", you would be hard pressed to find a better piece of work.

There are a number of great books out there that have conveyed the aftermath of 9/11 and the aftershocks it caused in American foreign policy such as Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, George Packer's The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, Thomas E. Ricks' Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, and The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 by Ron Suskind, but The Looming Tower was the first book that I've read on the topic that explained how an organization that was virtually unknown to the international intelligence community in the mid-90s could pull off the most shocking act of terrorism in history.