Whenever historians examine the past, they tend to put forth one of two points: They either want to show how things today are totally different, or they want to argue that things are pretty much the same.

Whenever people write about the Rolling Stones, they inevitably feel obligated to make some kind of predictable joke about how the Stones are ancient, and how they recorded their first single, "Come On," during the Woodrow Wilson administration, and how Charlie Watts now resembles Jack Kevorkian's younger brother.

Here's a little counterintuitive truth about celebrity magazines: For the most part, they don't interview famous people. Now, I know it seems like that's all celebrity magazines do, and one could certainly argue that interviewing famous people should be a celebrity magazine's prime directive. But this is an illusion. Most of the time,

If you are the kind of person who subscribes to Spin (as opposed to the kind of person who steals Spin from sleeping hobos), you've probably noticed that the publication always arrives a few days early: The October issue typically shows up in September.

There are three ways to remember the not-so-distant past. The first is to remember how things actually were, which almost no one does. The second is to remember things the way we assume they must have been, which basically equates to making up plausible stories that (a) don't directly involve us and (b) are potentially true.

"Will the wolf survive?" asked Los Lobos in 1984, and we still ponder that query 21 years later. At long last, we may have an answer: "Yes, but mostly in small clubs." There are less than 300,000 wolves on the face of the planet and a mere 70,000 in all of North America. The upside, however, is that at least 70 of these are indie-rock bands.