Courtney Smith is the author of Record Collecting for Girls.
Photo: Bend the Light Photography

The web makes it easier to discover and hear new music than ever before, but in some ways it’s also made that process a bit of a hot mess: Should you use Rdio or Spotify? Will you be better off checking music blogs or looking for hearts on Hype Machine? Should you follow your fave artists on Twitter or “Like” them on Facebook?

In her first book, Record Collecting for Girls: Unleashing Your Inner Music Nerd, One Album at a Time, writer Courtney Smith offers all sorts of tips for female music geeks,...

Allow me a tiny I Told You So. In February, I wrote a story for SELF Magazine about the rising incidence of diseases other than Lyme that are caused by tick bites. (And told you about it here, of course.) The story highlighted one particular tickborne parasite, Babesia, and a serious problem with the infection it causes, babesiosis: that it was moving into the blood supply. We dug through FDA transcripts and CDC field reports in order to reveal that federal health authorities were very concerned about this prospect, and that more than 100 babesiosis infections caused by transfusions had...