THE DALLAS OBSERVER HAS A PIECE ON THE DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE and a defense from its builder. A reader emails: “It’s the clearest defense of the pipeline construction process I think I’ve seen.”

Folk singers are threatening to boycott a music festival he sponsors. But why would anyone mind a boycott by folk singers? What’s next, a boycott by accordion-playing mimes?

Plus, a flashback on why “folk” singing is a crock. “The entire ‘folk’ movement was Stalinist through and through (including Woody Guthrie, who was a Communist Party hanger-on and probably a member. How do I know this? My late mother was Arlo’s nursery-school teacher in the Red Brooklyn of the 1940s). Of course, it was all a put-on. Woody Guthrie was a middle-class lawyer’s son. Pete Seeger was the privileged child of classical musicians who decamped to Greenwich Village. The authenticity of the folk movement stank of greasepaint. But a generation of middle-class kids who, like Holden Caulfield, thought their parents ‘phony’ gravitated to the folk movement.”