Near the end of my 25-year marriage to poetry, a friend jokingly called my books “stocking stuffers.” That was when I stopped questioning what I could do to make poetry more relevant and entertaining and […]
Art - Culture - Media
Posted on:
Nothing New and Nowhere to Play
Duke Ellington emerged from the Harlem Renaissance, Charlie Parker from the Memphis jazz clubs, Coltrane from the Philadelphia jazz clubs, Chester Burnett from the clubs of West Memphis, before moving to Chicago in the early […]
Culture - Media - Technology
Posted on:
Reverse-Engineering the Nerd Oligarchy
The other day I was watching Bill Maher’s Club Random, and the guest was tech millionaire and anti-aging geek Bryan Johnson. Part of the conversation was about the apparatus that Johnson wears on his penis […]
Class - Culture - Politics
Posted on:
Where Are the “Goddamned Liberals” Now?
In 2015, I met a retired lieutenant commander in the United States Navy who had purchased a small townhouse about a block down the road from mine. He was often in the yard doing renovations […]
Class - Culture - Politics
Posted on:
President Pennywise and the (Un)real Reign of Terror
An appliance can become art, like Duchamp’s urinal did. But to do that it must give up being an appliance. A gallows installed on the National Mall on January 6, with a sign on it […]
Culture - Politics
Posted on:
Mitch McConnell: Master of the Obvious
In two years, a great iterator of the evident will retire from the United States Senate. He was a man who stood for undeniable truth. A man who destroyed the separation of church and state […]
Class - Culture - Media - Politics - Technology
Posted on:
Zuckerbucks Says Later Days to the Facts
During the 2016 election, a Buzzfeed News analysis found that “fake election news stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined.” This, no doubt, is what […]
Consumerism - Culture - Dystopia - Literature
Posted on:
The Dystopia Files: Brave New World
Happiness, broadly conceived, is the predominant endeavor of human existence. It is the state we tell ourselves that we fundamentally want yet fail to achieve. It is what progress promises yet fails to deliver. And […]
Culture - Dystopia - Literature - Philippic - Politics
Posted on:
The Dystopia Files: It Can’t Happen Here
Sinclair Lewis wrote this political satire of American exceptionalism in the early 1930s, when one in four Americans were out of work and the complacent assumptions he’d ridiculed in Babbitt were rasped away by real […]
Culture - Dystopia - Literature - Philippic - Politics
Posted on:
The Dystopia Files: When the Sleeper Wakes
H.G. Wells originally published When the Sleeper Awakes in 1898 as a serial in The Graphic, an illustrated London newspaper. In his preface to the 1910 edition, The Sleeper Awakes, he expressed disappointment with the […]