The Bleak Shall Inherit: An Excerpt from David Rakoff’s Half Empty
The Bleak Shall Inherit We were so happy. It was miserable. Although it was briefly marvelous and strange to see a car parked outside an office, the wide hallway used like a street, many stories above...
View ArticleAm I My Other’s Keeper?
There are any number of reasons to refuse friendship to someone. They range from the practical to the personal and will certainly vary by individual. Here are some examples: Lying, cheating, stealing,...
View ArticleWhy Moneyless?: An Excerpt from Mark Boyle’s The Moneyless Man: A Year in...
Why Moneyless? Money is a bit like love.We spend our entire lives chasing it, yet few of us understand what it actually is. It started out, in many respects, as a fantastic idea. Once upon a time,...
View Article“Generation Y” Grows Up
I. For my sixth birthday, my family bought a house. It was 1990, and we Campbells already had the first-generation minivan, the gas grill, and the first kid; all we needed now was a piece of property...
View ArticleAn Interview with West Hollywood Councilmember Lindsey Horvath
The City of West Hollywood will be holding its General Municipal Election this Tuesday, March 8, wherein its citizens will be able to elect three members to the City Council. The City itself is famed...
View ArticleI’m Voting for the Dead Guy
Let me tell you a little story. Perhaps it won’t be very compelling or important, and perhaps the opinion of one slightly unhinged free lance writer means nothing, but the truth is I never voted in my...
View ArticleEarthquakes and Storm Surges
This has been a bad month for earthquakes. The Pacific is working things out with its tectonic plates in a spectacularly violent fashion, affecting those near and dear to us in dramatic and terrifying...
View ArticleMeditation on the Revelation of a Gang Rape of an Eleven-Year-Old Girl and...
I’m a Pittsburgh Steelers fan. A fair weather one—I don’t start paying much attention until the playoffs—but lifelong, and when I give my attention to a game, I’m there all the way. My body reacts as...
View ArticleIt’s Official: The World is Bankrupt (And Soon There Will Be Nothing Left to...
Anyone following the political debate in the United Kingdom will have realised that yesterday London was filled with demonstrators protesting against the British Government’s public spending cuts....
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Blood in the Sand: the 2012 Republican Primary Candidates
As a veteran political reporter I’m always excited for the Republican presidential primaries. You like candy, right? The bright packaging and sugar rush. Let us say you combined the candy of Halloween...
View ArticleOur Sexy Bodies are Being Undervalued!
When I first received the email warning me that a breasteraunt wanted to open in the middle of town, I snorted it off. “Yeah, right,” I thought. “Like they’re going to let them do that here.” The...
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Hustings Hustler: GOP Rocks the Granite State
[for lack of a better name I’ve decided to dub my sporadic political column the “Hustings Hustler.” Because I adore alliteration.] The second GOP debate took place this week in New Hampshire, also...
View ArticleTo Tea Partiers
You hate our president. I know the feeling well. I hated our previous president. His policies struck me as wrong-headed, and his way of expressing himself rubbed me the wrong way almost every time....
View ArticleThe End of the Kayapó People? Eat Your Dinner and Shut Up?
The Brazilian government has finally done it. Like a sadistic child with a stick beating a dog to death, it has authorized the Bel Monte dam. We are talking here of a region that functions as the lungs...
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Hustings Hustler: Iowa Straw Poll Draws Blood
What a wild few weeks it’s been in the Republican Presidential primary race, AKA America’s Top Celebrity Presidential Candidate Rehab Survivor’s Got Talent! First, a certain vote against raising the...
View ArticleWow, I Got An Interview with the Head of the Brazilian Communist Party!
As I enter the simple youth hostel in Rio de Janeiro where Mr. R. Belo has agreed to be interviewed, I am struck by how very ordinary this man looks. I am reminded of something Winston Churchill once...
View ArticleHustings Hustler: Straw Polls Suck
Man oh man oh man oh man. It’s what, FOUR months until the first primary and the Republican field has been bludgeoning itself like a bunch of tweens at a razor party listening to My Chemical...
View ArticleExcerpt from Killing the Cranes—A Reporter’s Journey Through Three Decades of...
It was a warm Thursday afternoon on August 5, 2010, in a remote woodland of the Hindu Kush mountains when a band of men with full beards and ankle-length white gowns appeared out of nowhere....
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Embedded Protester at Occupy Portland
Before I rode my bike downtown to the kickoff march for Occupy Portland I scoured my office for a press pass. Although I’ve worked for several large media conglomerates ( I think they’re separate but...
View ArticleOccupy the Spaces Between
My people come from what is often referred to by banks as LDC’s (least developed countries), little brown tropical countries, drenched with religious fanatics, stalks of sugar like magic wands picked...
View ArticleDropping the Ball
You’ve heard all about it, maybe more than you want to know, but to recap: Last week Jerry Sandusky, a former defensive coordinator for the Penn State football team, was charged with sexually abusing...
View ArticleBarack, Meet Mary Jane
Two weeks ago, the local press went into a frenzy when a man named Don Kerr was arrested for possession of marijuana. His alleged offense was to sign for a package, delivered by the crack agents at the...
View ArticleThree Amendments to the Constitution That We Need Right Now
Congress is the 1 percent. If I’m off here, I’m not off by much. Two-thirds of our senators, and over 40 percent of our congressional representatives are millionaires. The family of the average member...
View ArticleRomney: Can He or Can’t He?
Taking a gentlemanly, congratulatory phone call from Sen. John McCain after he stuffed former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in the Iowa caucus in January of 2008, former Arkansas Governor Mike...
View ArticleAll Quiet on the Western Front: Media Reacts to SOPA Debate with Resounding...
The U.S. House of Representatives is debating legislation that could fundamentally change what types of content we’re allowed to access over the Internet, and the resulting outrage has sparked a heated...
View ArticleFirst Amendment Confusion Over the Obama Contraception Rule
Recently, I have been struck by how misinformed many Americans are about their Constitutional rights. The debate over the new federal rule requiring most employers, including religious-affiliated ones,...
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Romney’s America
Mitt Romney is staking his presidential candidacy on his long business career and the values reflected in the photograph below, taken from a Bain Capital Christmas card in the 1980s. If recent polls...
View ArticleField of Fallacies
As a writer with a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing, I make most of my living teaching composition, argument and rhetoric to college students. This means I have the often-unenviable job of...
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Limbaugh, the Ladies and Consumer Activism: Women are Good at Math After All
Unless you live in a sound-proof cave protected by fire ants, you know that ten days ago, right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh went on a tirade and deemed Georgetown University Law School’s Sandra...
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Excerpt: Delirium: How the Sexual Counterrevolution is Polarizing America
Asked for “one single word to describe your impression of the budget negotiations in Washington,” Americans volunteered “crazy,” “disgusting,” “stupid,” and “juvenile.” Two-thirds of the American...
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Top Ten Dick Cheney Heart Transplant Punchlines
On Saturday, Dick Cheney got a new heart. That doesn’t require a punchline any more than did the news that he shot his friend in the face because he mistook him for a deer. But that doesn’t mean...
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Hold Your Breath and Do Not Panic
Tear gas, for the uninitiated, really does make you cry. And not in the gradual fashion of an organic cry, with the palpable build-up of liquid emotion that your body ultimately can’t contain and...
View ArticleMother’s Day Manifesto
On this day of Mothers, let us not just remember flowers and cute cards, or Sunday Brunch. Let us remember: Some women don’t want children. Womanhood ≠ Motherhood and vice-versa. Some mothers love...
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Excerpt from America, You Sexy Bitch, by Meghan McCain & Michael Ian Black
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride Meghan: As much as I consider myself a Republican and feel in almost every way intellectually and culturally tied to both the Republican Party as an organization and its...
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Excerpt from The Mormonizing of America, by Stephen Mansfield
There are nearly seven million Mormons in America. This is the number the Mormons themselves use. It’s not huge. Seven million is barely 2 percent of the country’s population. It is the number of...
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Politics and Sincerity
There are exactly two ways you can react to things. You can either react sincerely or politically. For example, if I’m listening to a Chicago Cubs game in 2012, and a Cub hits a grand slam to win it in...
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Romney ‘Rithmetic
While I have a great deal of respect for my opponent, President Obama, I am forced once again to come to the American people and set straight the distortions that both his campaign and the leftwing,...
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2012 Election Literary Smackdown: Atlas Shrugged vs. The Grapes of Wrath
I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all...
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Excerpt from The United States of Paranoia, by Jesse Walker
October 7, 2001: less than a month after 9/11. Police in Maryland decide that two trucks on Interstate 270 might be carrying explosives. The alert cops block traffic for an hour, searching the vehicles...
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Notes from Buffalo: On the Current Crisis in Washington, D.C.
I’ve been pretty worked up about the government shutdown, and more so now since it appears that we’re headed for default. Yesterday I let loose some thunder from the pulpit of my church about...
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Excerpt of Friday Was the Bomb, by Nathan Deuel
PEOPLE LIKE US On our leafy terrace in Lebanon, beside the civil war in Syria, my wife Kelly and I were entertaining an old friend, the new Beirut bureau chief for a major news organization. This woman...
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Making Space, Holding Space: #90X90 and Literature as Resistance
There haven’t been many weeks since the summer of 2014 ended in which I haven’t thought about or someone hasn’t reminded me of #90for90, that time we did 90 events over 90 days in a train station bar....
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Excerpt of Hacking Trump, by Ranbir Sidhu
Fuck it. We Lost. Or, an Old Man Burns in a Chair Days before the November 8 election, while driving through rural New England, I was invited to, of all things, a Guy Fawkes Night celebration—the...
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Excerpt of Hacking Trump, by Ranbir Sidhu, Part II
“What’s going on over here?!!” Donald J. Trump, moments before body-slamming Vince McMahon, 04/01/07 There’s perhaps no better arena to understand the spectacle at the heart of Donald Trump than the...
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Ten Reasons Why Al and Tipper Gore Should Reconsider
Al and Tipper Gore announced their break up, “a mutual and mutually supportive decision that we have made together.” Here are ten reasons why I think they should reconsider. 10. A few years ago, Al...
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Unprecedented News from Australia
In one of the wildest 72 hours in backroom politics in Australia’s history (which is saying something), Kevin Rudd has been deposed as leader of the Labour Party, and Julia Gillard has taken the helm...
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Five Certain Words
My American friends. Imagine, if you will, waking tomorrow to find that Hillary Clinton had suddenly replaced Barack Obama as President of the United States. Imagine that, while you slept, a gaggle of...
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Knives Out
This is a very exciting weekend for all of us in Australia. Wait, did I say exciting weekend? I meant, ‘carnival of idiocy’. I wish I could say this is because the jetpack I ordered from the internet...
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Tom Sleigh: The TNB Self-Interview
Hey! You showed up! I didn’t think you would. Well, I almost didn’t when I heard you were doing the interview. I’m not that bad…we go way back, after all! I think of us as brothers, almost twins....
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Excerpt of American Snake Pit, by Dan Tomasulo
Rock, Paper, Sister Private Practice: 30 Years Later June 8 Nick had presence. He was a tall, solid bodybuilder. Sharp, chiseled angles defined his jaw and shoulders. He wore a worn green T-shirt and...
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