As the Right Wing of United States politics and culture continues to tighten its stranglehold on our lives, disastrous new laws are being passed in the Red States that severely limit abortion rights and threaten to topple the hard-won victory of Roe vs Wade. It’s a very serious problem. Women…

A story of Kansas City, 1986–1988 — I estimate I was 12 years old when I met Ruth Kindermann. I’d just crapped out of sixth grade at a public elementary school in Kansas City called Marlborough like the cigarettes, over chronic periods of truancy and a series of conflicts with teachers and classmates. My mother somehow arranged…

Here’s a little history lesson. You might have heard about The Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) protesting hard in France for the past few years. There was a comparable movement in the late 90s and early 2000s, which focused on radical group tactics of defense in order to successfully stand up…

How a dwindling minority of mid-caste teacher’s pets dominate the expert class despite their near-total lack of experience — I’ve written before about the Square University Culture. I don’t mean everybody who attends university — I mean people who are born in comfortable circumstances, advance easily through the educational system, get their university degrees, then find jobs and settle into comfortable lives (generally including marriage, kids, buying a house…

Millions of creatives with expensive degrees will be left in the cold — Have you seen the new stuff, “Mario Finds a Mushroom” and all that? The results are funny to look at, but you’ve got to admit the AI art software has improved dramatically since it first went viral a year and a half ago. It’s designed to get better and better…

No more MCU, DC, Star Wars, Disney, Reboots, Prequels — it’s bad for me, and it’s bad for the world — I’m not sure when I started thinking about it. First I stopped with DC — I still haven’t seen Batman Vs. Superman, Justice League, Aquaman, Shazam, the second Wonder Woman, and so on. Then I skipped Rise of Skywalker, though I eventually watched it on an airplane (and hated every…

Jordan Peele Sees You, and He’ll Stop at Nothing to Get the Shot — Warning: This article’s got spoilers that would make Rat Fink blush. That’s how big and ugly these spoilers are. I had the coolest idea for a title, but I didn’t use it because it would have spoiled the movie. You should really watch the movie before you read this article…

The material conditions of your life (and mine) matter in a way that words do not. Focus on what’s real. — Language isn’t very important. This is obvious to anyone who lives in a state of genuine precarity or hardship. Nobody’s arguing about language in a war zone, or a famine, or a natural disaster. The lives of Americans, particularly the ones who spend their time on the Internet blabbing all…

Near the end of 2009, I had the honor of conducting this long-form interview with Ju Suk Reete Meat of the legendary freak ensemble Smegma. This and a good deal of long-form music journalism like it can be found in my book, Scatterbrain, available for purchase here. It takes me…