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    - George Conway  

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  • THE LEDE

    New and Noted

    Catherine Tumber Remembers Christopher Lasch Christopher Lasch was spared the Web-powered...
    Robert Reich Friends, Forty years ago today, on March 22, 1984, I had lunch with John Kenneth...
    Paul Cullum The Hole in the Wall is just what it sounds like: a dive bar with a pool room in...
    March 23, 2024
    Cindy Lee Berryhill I knew Mojo Nixon pretty well. We met at the beginning of 1984. He saw me...
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  • The Fiction Issue 2024

    Lawrence Osborne, MG Vassanji, Elizabeth Evans, Baba Badji

    Lawrence Osborne For several years Hilal ran a boat hire out of Qantab beach, taking rich...
    M.G. Vassanji It was January 1972. Pakistan had recently, only the previous month, lost a...
    Elizabeth Evans The following extracts come from the novel DANIEL ELLSBERG’S PSYCHIATRIST by...
    Baba Badji Chapter Eleven : Aunty Salymata After years, I finally found the courage to go...
  • FIRST PERSON

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  • FICTION

    TRUTH SPEAKS LOUDER THAN FACTS

    In the novel, Libertyville, two young men, a British reporter and a West African coup leader form...
    Tom Piazza I had the idea for The Auburn Conference at the beginning of November 2018, driving...
  • POLITICS

    Aren't We Better Than This?

    March 18, 2023
    March 5, 2023
    October 29, 2022
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  • MOVIES

    While Second and Third Wave feminists argue over whether Margot Robbie was too damn beautiful to...
    Yeah, Get Over It No Explanation Necessary What the Right-Wingers Said A good dad in the U...
    March 14, 2021
    Jan Oxenberg In 1992 I was an indie filmmaker in New York with a first feature about to be...
  • Phinney v. The World

  • THE DEBUNK

    SOMETIMES IT'S SO DAMN OBVIOUS THAT THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM IS WRONG

    You don't want to hear this. Neither do we. But you've been reading the same news stories:...
    Indrajit Samarajiva Include us? In what? Colored people and women have always been included in...
  • Phinney Somewhere in the World

    Our fearless correspondent in Washington, D.C. and sometimes Ukraine

    There are no published blog posts yet.
  • MUSIC

    The Soundtrack for Your Seclusion

  • THE NUMBERS

    Want the cheery Covid news from your neighborhood? 

    October 28, 2022
    April 30, 2022
    May 10, 2021
    May 9, 2021
  • STORIES WE LOVE

    The Best of Substack & Elsewhere

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    Yes, we curate. But no table service.

     

  • Fall/Winter Issue: ESCAPE

     

    Blanche McCrary Boyd I don’t know why everyone hasn’t been watching women’s professional...
    Brian Cullman “Oh, I went to Jajouka a long, long time ago," Ornette said. "Why?” I was with...
    Mike Medberry Jessica Keetso grew up in the shadow of Black Mesa, a high plateau on the Navajo...
    Terrence Moore My involvement with combating the coal mining and power plants in the Four...
    Steve Erickson Jean-Luc Godard 3 December 1930 - 13 September 2022 The New Wave’s head to...
    Roger Benham Early morning at our last campsite in the Canadian Rockies, Bow River Provincial...
    Anna Gotlib Anna Gotlib is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College CUNY,...
  • DREAMING THE PANDEMIC

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  • MONEY

    Lack of money is the root of all evil

    - George Bernard Shaw

    (What he really said: Money is harmless, but the fear of lack of money can create wars and decimate whole nations of people.)

     

  • Listen to Steve Erickson read his JOTPY essay "Fear"

  • Special Section

    An Hallucinyx: The Last Four Years

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    Steve Erickson

    Art by Alexa Grace
  • SCAMS

    So Many We Can't Keep Up

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  • Bringing Out The Dead

    Obits, Epitaphs, Anecdotes, and Near-Misses

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    David Phinney is a reporter's reporter. He's worked for ABC, NBC, CBS, BBC, the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Phinney's stories on unfair labor practices and poor treatment of foreign workers contracted to do construction work in Iraq have been the subject of congressional inquiries, ongoing US Justice Department criminal probes and investigations by U.S. Inspectors General. He's on his way to Ukraine and sending news to the Journal via Twitter.
  • Bill Moyers has a hard-on for a guy named Steve

    Why America's conscience is shining a spotlight on Blackstone Equity's Steve Schwarzman

  • The Week's Best Podcast

    Nina Kruscheva on Putin, U.S. overreach, and the post-Ukraine World Order

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  • 40 Days and 40 Nights

    Geandy Pavón

    Imara López-Boada

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    Day 1

    Day 2

    Day 3

    Perseus and Medusa

    Day 4

    The Origin of Drawing (Dibutades and the Shepard)

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    Day 5

    Day 6

    Stay home Stay Safe

    Day 7

    Echo and Narcissus

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    Day 8

    Domestic

    Day 9

    Adam and Eve

    Day 10

    The Annunciation

    Day 11

    War of the Worlds

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    Day 12

    Vanitas

    Day 13

    Pietá

    Day 14

    The Lonely Fortune Teller - After George La Tour

    Day 15 

    Salome

    Day 16

    Portrait of Charlotte Corday

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    Day 17

    Apollo and Daphne

    Day 18

    Pandora

    Day 19

    The Incredulity of Saint Thomas

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  • BREAKING

    SHORT TAKES ON THE NEWS

    Trump Appointee Kills Baby Chickens

    The U.S. Postal Service has already removed sorting machines and mailboxes all over the country. Sorting machines that can handle 35,000 pieces of mail a day have been dismantled and thrown out. Despite Postmaster Louis DeJoy's assurances that mail-in ballots will be delivered efficiently, one observer called a California postal facility "Armageddon" with dead baby chicks, rotting fruit, and clouds of gnats. LA Times story here, our breakdown of the war against the post office here.

     

    Want more? 

     

    The backstory: Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was tasked with getting the new postmaster to stack the U.S. Postal Service board with loyal Republicans, including allies of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.

     

    According to the Washington Post, Mnuchin was determined to oust the former postmaster general, Megan Brennan, who had risen through the ranks. The New York Times reported that he called a meeting that wasn't subject to "sunshine" laws requiring transparency. It's not clear whether this was legal.

     

    David Williams, the former Postal Service inspector general and the board’s vice chairman until his resignation in protest in April against Mnuchin’s involvement, told House Democrats that Mnuchin demanded that new governors “come to his office to kiss the ring and receive his blessing before confirmation.”

     

    Mnuchin was the CEO of Golden West, a bank that aggressively pursued foreclosures in the 2008 economic crisis. See more in Homewreckers by Aaron Glantz.

    The Case for Punishment

    Humans are infinitely adaptable, they say. Now we appear to be getting used to living with Covid. Although infection and death rates are rising steadily in the U.S., airline travel has nearly doubled. It's not necessarily that we're safer, but that we're becoming numb. When we do something and we aren't punished--immediately--we tend to do it again, much like children, the experts say. So the idea of giving people fines and tickets for unsafe behavior doesn't just earn money for strapped cities and towns. It just might save us from ourselves, according to the Washington Post.

    Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border

    How many times have we read the same story? Migrants dying as they struggle to cross the inhospitable Sonoran desert in the summer. The New York Times calls these deaths a pandemic: Biblical, tragic, and like many Covid losses, unnecessary. While we attribute a certain number of Covid deaths to theTrump administration's irresponsibility, these deaths of desperate people crossing the desert--and there are thousands each year--are the result of equally criminal negligence by four presidents, including Bill Clinton's. Will immigration, once again, fall through the cracks in a Biden administration? Kudos to the Times for a deep dive that you can read here.

     

    For more, read Luis Alberto Urrea's book The Devil's Highway.

  • Ira Silverberg

    How to Have a Happy New Year

    Acerbic yet heartfelt. What more can one say?