In this week’s New Yorker Out Loud podcast, Amy Davidson talks to Ben McGrath and Roger Angell about the strange charm of the knuckleball pitch and how to approach writing about baseball: http://nyr.kr/ZY1BCQ

(Source: newyorker.com)

Cartoon by David Sipress. For more from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/Z0qY6v

Listen to the podcast of “Happy Birthday,” Adam Gopnik’s Comment on Philip Roth at eighty: http://nyr.kr/10Dw2EX

On this week’s Political Scene podcast, Jon Lee Anderson and John Cassidy talk with host Amelia Lester about the late Hugo Chávez’s ambitions as a leader, what he was able to accomplish in his time as the President of Venezuela, and the legacy he leaves behind. Listen now: http://nyr.kr/15AMpkD

This week, Rand Paul and his Republican colleagues staged a thirteen-hour filibuster against John Brennan’s nomination as C.I.A. director. It involved a tremendous amount of talking, some of which was also reading. Here are some songs about talking: http://nyr.kr/12xxlXa

John Donohue listens to the forthcoming record from Lafayette quartet, Brass Bed: http://nyr.kr/11BPenl

They’ve been around for two albums of mostly bouncy, mostly trippy pop—typified by “People Want to Be Happy (Summertime),” on their previous record, 2010’s “Melt White”—but the band headed in a slightly different, slightly darker direction…

Joseph Mitchell started at The New Yorker in 1938, and was a staff writer for fifty-eight years, until his death in 1996. His journalism chronicled everyday life in New York City—he wrote about Mohawk steelworkers, fishermen, street-preachers, bartenders, ticket-takers, and bearded ladies. In the mid nineteen-sixties, he stopped publishing any work in the magazine. But apparently he never stopped writing. In this week’s issue, there’s a previously unpublished chapter from an unfinished memoir that he started in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies. On this week’s podcast, The New Yorker’s editor David Remnick and staff writer Ian Frazier talk with Sasha Weiss about their memories of Mitchell, why he didn’t publish for so many decades, and the influence his writing has had on them and on the magazine. Listen now: http://nyr.kr/Y3TcwH

Nemo, the winter storm you’ve heard so much about, is bearing down on the East Coast. Here are some songs about snow to keep you warm: http://nyr.kr/YK3gO8

Of the rushing river of records heading toward us, there are two I’d like to mention, one imminent and one on the horizon: “Love Has Come for You,” by Edie Brickell and Steve Martin, which arrives in April, and “We the Common,” by Thao & the Get Down Stay Down, which arrives this week. Brickell and Martin’s record is a banjo-and-singer collaboration, a form without many footprints. They draw several of their references from bluegrass and old-time banjo styles and from modal forms, the type of reserve that Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have visited and absorbed by a different, more plainspoken route. It’s a capacious reserve, though restricted compared to, say, jazz, with its often much broader instrumentation and more complicated harmonic structures…

Alec Wilkinson listens to new albums by Edie Brickell and Thao Nguyen, and looks at the origins of bluegrass: http://nyr.kr/12r4vGA

Photograph by Kevin Mazur/WireImage/Getty.