Dan Sinker's Blog

Foundational Texts: Raised by the Channel Five News Team

2026-03-31T00:00:00Z

Ron Magers and Carol Marin on their last broadcast together, May 1, 1997.

Foundational Texts is a monthly essay series for 2026 looking at some of the culture that shaped me and how it still resonates today.

Read all the installments: January: Jenny Holzer | February: The Goonies | March: The Channel 5 News Team

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Channel One

I was raised by the Channel 5 News Team. A latchkey kid whose parents weren't back until dinnertime, I'd come home to an empty house, make myself a snack, and park myself in front of our small TV, the kind with an antenna augmented by tinfoil. The picture was fuzzy but fine, the way everything was in late 80s.

First up was a slate of afternoon cartoons: Transformers, certainly, Inspector Gadget, reluctantly, and Voltron if you were lucky. I remember Battle of the Planets being infrequently on one of the high-number UHF channels, which was the equivalent of winning the lotto for me, but really all of that was killing time for when Channel 5 would start their news programming at 4:30.

Carol Marin, Ron Magers, Warner Saunders when one of the two big guns was out, Mark Giangreco on sports. There were others but these were the main event for me.

I don't remember exactly why I started watching the news at 11 years old or how I landed on that particular channel, but I was a kid with a lot of questions about how the world worked, and Carol and Ron would patiently sit there and explain it.

It was through Carol and Ron that I really got to understand Chicago, its politics (this was at the height of Harold Washington's run as mayor), and the many different levers that power uses here. But it wasn't just lessons about Chicago. I never went to journalism school, the best education I got about news was from watching Carol and Ron on my TV in a house empty and quiet until my parents came home and the fighting would start.

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Channel Two

It's 1997, I am three years into running Punk Planet magazine and holding down a full time job in the production department of the Chicago Reader, which offered 40 hours a week crammed into three intense days, so I could focus on the magazine the other four.

Channel 5 had announced that Jerry Springer, 1990s Trash TV king, would be joining its 10pm newscast to offer his take on news events. It was a crass ratings grab and everyone knew it. Springer's show, which was filled in Chicago and featured topics like "You Slept With My Stripper Sister!" and "I Married a Horse", was closing in on besting Oprah for most-watched daytime talk show (a feat he'd accomplish, briefly, in 1998), management wanted a piece of it.

While mixing trash with news (regrettably) feels normal today, it was still fairly taboo in the late-90s, and Carol Marin and Ron Magers took a stand. Carol was first to quit, Ron followed suit shortly after. Jerry Springer lasted for less than a week on the 10pm news and Carol and Ron eventually found new gigs anchoring for the other two stations in Chicago, but they would never share a desk again.

All this shook out over a couple late night shifts at the Reader, and I remember my boss back then talking about the amount of integrity that it took for Carol and Ron to walk away from the job. One of my bellwethers ever since, as the journalism business forces ever-more compromises on the journalism job, has been what Carol and Ron taught me: You can always walk away. That measure has served me well many times.

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Channel Three

Rahm Emanuel was running for mayor of Chicago and had to debate on Valentines Day, 2011. The moderator of the debate was Carol Marin, who at that point was working for Chicago's public television station, WTTW.

This was too good for me to pass up in the alternate-Chicago occupied by @MayorEmanuel, the surreal, foul-mouthed, anonymous Twitter account I wrote during the election, and so my Rahm went to the debate cocky and entirely unprepared (his debate prep partner was a duck, so he came ready to answer questions about bread crumbs and ponds).

I have no recollection how it played out in real life, but in my fictional debate, Carol proceeds to dogwalk Rahm and he drinks away his post-debate misery with a concoction he names the Carol Marin, "Delicious, and it'll kick your fucking ass." He spends the rest of his Valentines' night drunkenly throwing chunks of slush into the lake.

The @MayorEmanuel account ended a few weeks later and, after my identity was revealed, I was invited to be a guest on the Colbert Report, an experience that was amazing and surreal (and thanks to media consolidation, no longer exists on the internet).

When I landed back from that trip to do Colbert and took my phone out of airplane mode, I had a voicemail waiting: it was from Carol Marin. She was thanking me for naming a drink after her. "Now I know how Harvey Wallbanger felt," she said, laughing.

After that call, we kept talking and Carol ended up interviewing me for the @MayorEmanuel book event at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. A young performance poet/rapper named Chance opened.

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Channel Four

She didn't stop calling. For years, Carol would call when she had questions about a new technology or about how journalism was evolving.

Dan, Carol Marin here, every call began.

I remember being at a party once and her calling to ask why "like" was the predominant verb on Facebook and what does it mean if a journalist "likes" something. "I don't want to have to 'like' the governor to follow what he's up to," she said, annoyed. I spent an hour in my friend's bedroom puzzling that out with her. I missed the party. It was worth it.

These calls eventually turned into a multi-year appointment with her Center for Journalism Integrity and Excellence at DePaul University where I worked with Carol and her ever-present producer Don Mosley on their investigations class, which had students working collaboratively on real investigations that would eventually air on WTTW's Chicago Tonight.

We disagreed a lot in the class, which felt awkward at first but eventually I realized that's why I was there: she wanted someone that came from an entirely different perspective than her, whose background in journalism was as far away from big-budget news desks as possible. Carol was old school, I was definitely not. So I disagreed, the students put out great work, and Carol kept inviting me back.

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Channel Five

When you're a child, your world is very small and very simple. The act of growing up is, in part, the act of accepting that it is neither of those things; it is complicated and large, so large that you will never know it all no matter how long you live or how much you learn.

Right now the world feels more complicated than ever. You are likely very familiar with the feeling in the pit of your stomach that simply living in it creates. Everything feels chaotic and ever-changing, it feels impossible to stand on ground that is constantly shifting beneath your feet.

A key role of news has always been to bring some order to that chaos and a level of understanding and context to the changes happening around you. That, ultimately, is the job. Not everyone does the job well—I was lucky to grow up watching some of the best.

Watching old videos of Carol and Ron, I'm struck at how young they look. When Carol gave her final sign-off after quitting over Jerry Springer, May 1, 1997, she was younger than I am now. It would still be more than a decade before we'd cross paths, paths that would intertwine a little and remain that way for all the time since.

As a kid—11 and lonely, unsure of the world or where I fit in it—the Channel 5 News Team offered what felt like a simple guide to what was happening around me. As I've grown I've learned that there's nothing simple about it. It is difficult and it is layered and it requires real work and effort to understand.

That work is journalism, of course, but it's also the work of living.

Living is about embracing the contradictions and the complications, about making hard choices about where you stand and when to walk away, about knowing when to laugh at yourself, and about when to seek out disagreement. It's about engaging in the world to understand the world, and it's about explaining it as best you can, every day, so that others can understand it too.

Porous Barriers That Divide Then From Now

2026-03-24T00:00:00Z

The empty lot at 315 Mulberry Street where George Dale's house once stood.

It was tonight—right now, 10:30pm—but 104 years ago, 1922, on the corner of Mulberry and Gilbert in Muncie, Indiana. It was late, well dark by then, and George and his son George Jr, 18 at the time, were making their way back home after a night in the billiard room at the Delaware Hotel, just a few blocks further south on Mulberry.

They were steps away from home when it happened.

It was dark and quiet, early spring, still cold but you could tell it would change soon.

Everything would change soon.

The quiet was pierced by two cars—Buicks, solid and black and loud—which stopped suddenly. That in and of itself was surprising. Sure, you saw cars in Muncie now that the roads had started to be bricked, but two stopping short like this and both full of men—six by some count, a dozen by others—men who were yelling from the moment the breaks shrieked? George had to have known from that very moment that there was going to be trouble.

There was trouble.

Men piled out of one of the Buicks, every one of them wearing black hoods over their faces, yelling at George and his son: "Stick up your hands!"

George Dale didn’t think. Some people say he never thinks. But tonight he didn’t have to. He was nearly home, with his son. How dare they? He grabbed at the gun shoved in his gut and wrestled it away from one of the masked bastards. He fired. Someone went down.

It wasn’t him.

It was chaos from there. Dale was hit, first with a fist and then with a blackjack. Blood exploded from his ear. He went down, his whole head ringing. The thugs turned to his son and pistol whipped him—he went down too (George Jr would carry a scar on his forehead for the rest of his life). The attackers dragged the member of their gang who had been shot into their waiting car, and drove off into the darkness. George claims he killed the motherfucker.

And then the night was quiet.

Things wouldn't stay quiet for long.

That night changed everything for George Dale, the editor of the Muncie Post-Democrat, a tall, rail-thin man with a face like a clenched fist. Up to that point, he was taking on all comers in the pages of his newspaper: corrupt politicians, rum runners, cops on the take, you name it, he was out for them. But after that night things were different.

"The Post-Democrat wishes to serve notice, here and now, to those who hope to intimidate us into servile fear of reprisals, that they have picked the wrong bird. The rule of the blackjack, the automatic, the black mask and the dark lantern, never works.”

There were so many people that George Dale hated, but after that night, those masked bastards—the Ku Klux Klan—shot to the top of the list.

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It is tonight—not right now, but a few hours ago—2026, on the corner of Mulberry and Gilbert in Muncie Indiana, and the sun is setting. The clouds in the west glow in blues and yellows and oranges. There are two children—eight years old, nine maybe—rollerblading unsteadily in the empty parking lot that sits almost precisely where George Dale's house once stood. They laugh as they wobble across the lot, a sister and a brother most likely, calling out to each other.

I'm here in Muncie to do research for my book about George Dale, I HATE THOSE MASKED BASTARDS. I've spent the day buried in archives and talking with historians. But I am here this week specifically for this moment, for March 24th, as the sun falls on Mulberry street.

I don't believe in ghosts, but I do believe that the stories that history tells us are nearly the same thing. It's all shadows and echoes and blurry lines, all porous barriers that divide then from now. That's why I wanted to be here on this corner tonight as day turned into night.

This corner, tonight, changed George Dale's life. It set in motion a series of events that would see him fight against impossible odds, against the Klan and the entire power structure of Muncie (really one and the same), largely alone, and win.

I wanted to be here, tonight, to feel that pivotal moment in physical space, even if it meant standing in front of an empty lot.

There are empty lots all over George's old neighborhood, which clearly had its best days some time ago. Tonight the air is thick with the distinct, acrid smell of burning garbage, but I walked a few blocks and never found the source. Just around the corner from Mulberry on North, two old timers sit on their front porch surrounded by mounds of what looks like trash to me but clearly means something to them. They eye me suspiciously as I walk past. Next to them is another empty lot.

I circle back around the block as the sun sinks lower in the sky. The children are arguing now, one stands in front of the 60s-era low-slung office building that loiters at the corner of Mulberry and Gilbert, the other stands on the far edge of the parking lot, where the cement ends and the grass begins. 104 years ago, he would probably be standing in George's living room.

"Come back!" she yells, clearly tired of whatever game he is playing.

"You can't see me" he yells back. "I'm invisible"

The boy turns in the space that used to be George Dale's house, filled with his wife and too many children, a house that they would move away from shortly, one in a series of moves that seem to have been driven by his struggle to stay afloat as the onslaught of lawsuits brought against him by Klansmen tapped his already-shaky finances. But at the time 104 years ago, that house on Mulberry street was home, and George and his son were just steps away from it when everything changed for them forever.

The cars screech, the thugs pile out, the gun, the shot, the beating. The men leave as fast as they arrived and then there's just blood and pain and questions, so many questions. Some will get answered, others never will, even now, 104 years later, even now.

"Come back!" the girl yells again.

"I can't," the boy calls back, "I've disappeared."

Record for tomorrow the stories that today's victors would prefer we forget

2026-03-15T00:00:00Z

"If you want to get a letter out of a Burmese prison, do not give it to the guards."

It's sage advice from someone who knows, Danny Fenster, a journalist who spent six months in Insein prison after the 2021 military coup in Myanmar (the one that unfolded behind a woman's fitness instruction video). A decade before that, he was my student.

Danny chronicles his time in prison—the hopelessness and hope, the stress and boredom—in a beautiful, harrowing, evocative biographic comic he wrote in collaboration with illustrator Amy Kurzweil for the tech-and-culture website The Verge. I can not urge you enough to go read it.

Scrolling through the story, you learn what led Danny from the US to Myanmar, you see early moments of budding love with his now-wife Juliana, you witness the coup through their eyes, you watch ants crawl up the walls of prison alongside Danny, and you feel his joy when he first hears Juliana's voice in prison via a smuggled SD card. It's a remarkable piece of reporting and storytelling, one that resonates especially poignantly right now.

In what feels like another lifetime or two (or three) ago, I taught journalism at Columbia College Chicago. Danny was a student, bright and curious, a little more quiet and contemplative than most of the kids that passed through. That was 15 years ago now. Over the years I've kept in touch with a few students, largely over social media, coupled with the occasional DM or email. Danny was one of them. He'd drop a line, letting me know what he was up to. Last I'd heard from him, he was in Louisiana I think.

I still remember clicking on an article about a journalist who had been taken prisoner in Myanmar and the feeling in my stomach when I read Danny's name. I did what I could while he was inside to try and keep his story going: pressing Columbia to issue a statement, reaching out to a connection high up at the State Department (repeatedly), talking to reporters, and doing TV news spots. It never felt like enough. Days turned into weeks turned into months.

In November 2021, just after being sentenced to 11 years in prison, Danny was released thanks to the work of former ambassador Bill Richardson, who devoted the tail end of his life to helping to free political prisoners. He came back to the states, got a fellowship at Harvard (where I randomly ran into him on the street while touring campus with my kid), and is contemplating the question that so many of us have asked lately: what's next. For himself, for the country, for all of us. We had pizza a couple months ago, and I kept telling him to tell his story.

I think I've written "right now is very hard," or a variation of that phrase, more than a dozen times in the last year, but right now is very hard. One thing that helps me is to read about folks who have been through hard things and made it out the other side. Knowing that survival is possible, that even in the most hopeless of situations you can still find hope, is the key to making it through. Or, as Danny puts it so wonderfully: The lesson is to keep reporting anyway, to record for tomorrow the stories that today's victors would prefer we forget.

So please, on this dreary Sunday, the latest in a long line of dreary Sundays, give Danny's story the time it deserves.

Foundational Texts: Goonies Never Say Die

2026-02-28T00:00:00Z

Caves and traps and peril.

Foundational Texts is a monthly essay series for 2026 looking at some of the culture that shaped me and how it still resonates today.

Read all the installments: January: Jenny Holzer | February: The Goonies | March: The Channel 5 News Team

It is cold and it is wet and it is dark. Dark the way every cave is in your dreams, which is to say not dark at all but lit in blues and golds, the way it would never be in actuality but, for this story, it is. Because it is a good story, an adventure story, told through caves and traps and peril.

You are there with your friends, deep underground, under the town you were born in but not the town you'll grow up in because, tomorrow, you will be moving, all of you, because your parents didn't have the means to compete against the wealth and power that wants to turn your homes into rubble. That's why you're here, in the wet and the dark that isn't dark, and that's why you've almost died a half-dozen times due to the peril and the traps. You're here because you still have hope.

Hope has lead you here because you are a child and you still believe in miracles, still believe the impossible is possible, and so you have followed a map—a pirate map, the best kind—here, to this point, this cave, this very moment, and you are caked in mud and you are freezing cold and you are scared—but because you are on the verge of being an adult you will not say you are scared—and it is here, now, that you are faced with a choice.

This cave offers a retreat in the form of a bucket tethered back in reality, back in the above-ground, back home but not home for long. The bucket hangs below the opening to the town wishing well, the wet floor you stand on is covered with coins—wishes, including yours, that never came true. And that bucket offers a choice: freedom from the peril and uncertainties of the map and its traps, yes, but also a return to a home that will soon not be yours and to a life that feels even more uncertain than the near-death of the below.

And yet you are young and you are scared and you know that the right thing is to retreat and you have done the right thing your whole life and your friends are cold and hungry and scared and it would be best if you all gave up on the dream, gave up on the possibility of miracles, and rode the bucket out of the caves and out of the town and out of the only lives you've ever known. But you hesitate, because while that might be the smart path it's not the right path, not while there's still hope. And so, before the bucket raises and the first of your friends ascends, you speak.

You say a lot of things, desperate and pleading, your voice cracking from equal parts desperation and puberty, but what I remember most—what I have remembered forever—is when you said this: Our parents, they want the best of stuff for us, but right now, they've got to do what's right for them. Because it's their time, up there. But down here, it's our time. It's our time down here.

I was lonely the summer of 1985. Lonely and scared. I was ten years old and going through a period where I was frightened of everything: of killers breaking into our house, of food being poisoned, of creatures in books coming alive. It was a time that I mostly remember as one that felt like every turn could be a wrong one. I felt very alone, at an age where my grade school friends and I were growing apart, and where I felt like I didn't fit in with anyone else. My parents were both working, and so my days were mostly spent solitary, alone with thoughts that weren't helping.

I needed something to turn down the fears in my brain and so I went to the movies so many times that summer. I was old enough to ride my bike across town to the movie theater, both parents at work, a kids matinee ticket was two bucks. I'm sure I saw other movies, but mostly I saw The Goonies.

I'm not going to summarize the plot of The Goonies for you. You've had decades to watch it and either you did or you didn't at this point (and honestly rewatching today, you're going to be struck by the casual racism and cruelty of the 1980s as much as anything), but I am going to say that everything about that movie, at ten, felt like it was just for me. The sense of adventure, the fearlessness, the joy, everything. I was especially enamored with Ke Huy Quan's kid inventor Data and actually wept a few years ago when he finally received his flowers for Everything Everywhere All At Once. But mostly, it was the scene under the wishing well and the sense that there was a place, separate from the real world, where anything was possible, where it could be your time, your time to spend chasing an impossible dream.

I was lonely and scared that summer and not sure where I fit, or how I fit, or if I fit, and here was a voice telling me that there was a place for me after all, but it wasn't above ground. It was down underneath it all, where the surface ends and your life begins.

You can trace a very clear line from that summer of being scared and sad and loney and watching The Goonies over and over to punk. The underground that I discovered a few years later—probably four or five in actual years but it feels like far more separation than that—was exactly that: a place where you could exist separate from the conformity of the mainstream, where you could chart your own existence, where you could build possibilities that felt impossible and possible simultaneously, and where you could do it alongside others who had found themselves—their true selves—in the liner notes of 7"s and smudgy printing of zines and sticky floors of a Sunday afternoon show in a rock club that smelled of old beer and sweat. Down there, it was our time.

Even today—especially today, as we wake up to news of bombs falling in the Middle East yet again—this is still true. Because we know how this story goes in the mainstream: politicians will line up behind the cudgel of "supporting our troops," news channels will craft theme music, yellow ribbons will go on trees, and those that to try and stop the carnage, that question the premise of the whole endeavor, will be labeled traitors or fools or ignored entirely. You have probably lived through a few of these wars yourself, so you already know how this familiar playbook will play out up there.

But down here?

If the last year has taught us anything, it's that as the world above-ground falters the underground has never felt more vital and more alive. The decentralized networks of mutual aid and rapid response that have lit up across the country in response to ICE raids have grown robust. Everywhere you look there are regular people, many who have never ventured underground before, stepping up to deliver food and cover rent and keep watch. The organizing underground that has happened so rapidly and so thoroughly is extraordinary.

Today a new challenge has emerged in the form of an illegal, unjust war against Iran. And while the contours feel familiar, it has never felt like we are more prepared to meet the challenge—not up there where the refrain of Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" is already playing, but down here, where we've already traversed the wet and the mud and the traps and the peril. Down here where the caves are lit like our dreams, down here where—despite everything—hope is still possible, down here where we might be scared but don't want to show it, down here where a voice says that we still have a choice, down here were a voice reminds us:

Down here, it's our time.

On Joy and Resistance

2026-02-22T00:00:00Z

That's what I'm fucking talking about.

As she was leaving the ice after her gold-medal winning performance this week, figure skater Alysa Liu turned to the camera that was inches from her face and, beaming, yelled "That's what I'm fucking talking about." It was a moment of pure, unadulterated joy. The joy of accepting who you truly are, of no longer conforming to the boundaries that have constrained you. The joy of being free.

Liu's story has been told so many times now that I probably don't need to repeat it here, but the short version is that was one of the best figure skaters in the world as a child and at just 16 she shocked the skating world by announcing her retirement from the sport. She wasn't happy, she was burnt out, she was done. A few years later she came back to competitive skating, but she came back transformed: hair dyed, face pierced, and completely out of fucks to give. Her performance at the Olympics was a culmination and a celebration and a reminder that, as poet Toi Derricotte once wrote, "joy is an act of resistance."

I'm not an ice skating guy—in fact I'm pretty sure my last time in skates was on a date when I was 22 and I slipped so hard that I split open the entire inseam of my pants. I do not know a triple lux from a double whatever. But I know what joy is. I know what it feels like to put it all out there and leave nothing behind. I know what it means to see the path you're supposed to walk and to walk another way. I know what it means to be free.

This wasn't the first time this month that we got to see something this radically joyful, performed in front of millions.

After Bad Bunny's infectious Super Bowl halftime performance, essayist Soraya Nadia McDonald commented that he "makes art so alluring and enjoyable you want to understand everything about it and then you end up learning about sugar and slavery and colonialism and the Taínos and Hawaii and then you probably have some thoughts of your own, and that's why art is powerful and dangerous."

Art is radicalizing in the revelations it creates.

I was unable to walk away from that halftime show and not want to know everything about the story Bad Bunny was telling in the same way that I couldn't watch Liu's joyful gold medal-winning skate and not want to dive deep into what made her throw it all away and build it back up on her terms.

That there have been two high-profile examples of this kind of radicalizing joy on the largest possible stages in less than a month feels like a balm for the relentless shit we have been living under as ICE has destroyed our communities. It is a reminder that even right now, even as the fight rages on, there is time for joy, there is time for art, there is time to celebrate difference and self, and to insist that you too can be free.

Because they want you to forget that.

There is a reason why the administration has cracked down on the arts and humanities alongside its brutal assault on migrants. It knows that art is dangerous, that knowledge leads to asking questions, and that those questions don't always lead where they want you to go.

One of the pillars of fascism is conformity. In this country we see it unfolding in front of us every day. Those that don't speak English, those that are brown and black, are being rounded up by masked thugs. Those that speak up are labeled traitors. Universities are being blackmailed. History that doesn't line up with the administration's white supremacist views is being erased. Those that teach, those that make art, are called radicals and their livelihoods are threatened.

An ice skating performance at the Olympics or a Super Bowl halftime show may not seem like much in the ever-lengthening shadow of fascism, but they are a reminder that change is possible, that our lives are worth fighting for, that freedom is achievable, and that joy—real joy, the kind of joy that you want to surround yourself with and bask in its transformative glow—is one of the most radical things there is.

Because in spite of the administration's crackdowns, in spite of the masked bastards, in spite of everything, people are still speaking up, people are still making art, people are still teaching real history, people are still fighting back against the abduction of their neighbors. People still know what it means to feel joy. People still know what it means to be free.

Whistle Up 2: Rise of the Whistle Goblins

2026-02-08T00:00:00Z

This is about 300 tiny Penne whistle printed in three colorful batches, plus a heart.

Last November, as the federal occupation of Chicago was winding down and the occupation of Minneapolis had not yet begun, I wrote a piece called "Whistle Up," about the strategic use of whistles by anti-ICE observers and organizers that included advice on how to procure whistles for your own community. This post serves as a sequel and update, written three months later.

You've heard the whistles by now. Either because you're living in a place where they've become necessary or because you've seen video, endless video, of the streets of Minneapolis and the people who are out there blowing whistles to alert their neighbors of the presence of ICE and Border Patrol. The enduring sound of right now is the shrill wail of a chorus of whistles.

Inevitably when you talk about whistles on social media someone thinks they are hilarious in offering up the observation that if you really wanted to annoy these goons, you should use a vuvuzela, the plastic horn favored by South African soccer fans. But whistles aren't an annoyance system, they are an alert system. They are an alert system built entirely at street-level and massively deployed to serve two purposes: bring your neighbors out to witness the abuses of ICE and to let those that are more at risk to know to stay in or to find shelter immediately.

There's a simple code system that goes along with the whistles: short staccato bursts if ICE is seen in the area and long blows if they're actively snatching someone (though, honestly, in my experience you just blow like hell). It is a remarkably simple and effective system. Talk to anyone on the ground and they will tell that it has saved people, every single day. I have seen it work repeatedly.

The more whistles out there—the more whistles in people's hands, on their person, at all times—the more effective this system is, and so getting whistles to people has become a massive community effort. Across the country there are whistle packing parties happening in church basements and bars and nonprofit offices and pretty much anywhere else that can hold some people, some tables, and boxes of whistles, zines, and bags to put them all in.

When I wrote "Whistle Up" last fall, I spent a lot of time writing about strategies for procuring whistles in bulk, a process that became more challenging the longer the occupation of Chicago continued, because everyone was trying to do it and the limited number of mostly-Chinese manufacturers had not planned for a sudden and massive run on their supply. What began in early October as being able to get whistles for about 10-15 cents a piece, was up to 30-50 cents per whistle by the time I stopped looking in late November. Over the course of the fall, I paid out hundreds of dollars to put a thousand or so whistles out onto the streets. It was crucial, but it was slow and unpredictable (I'm still occasionally getting a random box of 20 whistles I ordered off Ali Express six months ago) and it wasn't an expense I could shoulder forever.

By late fall, there were a few people in Chicago who had moved from sourcing whistles to manufacturing them themselves with a 3d printer. When I talked with one of them who explained that they were making whistles a few dozen at a time and they were paying cents for materials for them I was intrigued.

A month later I bought a printer. It cost less than what I'd shelled out for whistles.

Yesterday I printed my 10,000th whistle.

I wasn't alone in doing it.

A Half Million Whistles

When I set up my printer, I reached out to some of those same Chicago printers to get some advice on what whistle they liked and how they approached the process. They answered by inviting me to join what, at the time, was around a dozen people spread out across the country who were printing whistles. They had printed and shipped close to 100,000 whistles. That was in early January.

Now, today, February 8th, earlier this morning in a cluttered garage or a cold basement or a too-full craft room, one of nearly 200 people bagged up the half-millionth whistle to be printed and shipped by this loose-knit group of printers that I call the Whistle Goblins, but which has no formal name (though some use the Whistle Avengers), no real hierarchical structure, no form, no funding, and no remit beyond printing whistles, at scale, as quickly as possible.

A half million whistles (since mid-December!) is an extraordinary amount made all the more so by the fact that it's been done by the most ragtag group of people you've ever seen—romance authors and nerdy engineers and crusty old punks and internet weirdos and every other type of person imaginable—singularly focused on one goal: whistles.

It's all so chaotic and loosely organized as to feel like it might fly off the rails at any moment, but impossibly, it hasn't (thanks in large part to the efforts of a small group of core members). It all runs on a handful of chats that fill with messages so quickly that I think most people put them on mute immediately. It's all jokes and troubleshooting and moments of real human earnestness shared between folks who don't even know each others actual names for the most part. There's a spreadsheet of whistle requests and anyone grabs whatever they can, fills them within a couple days, and moves to the next request on the list. At this point the Whistle Goblins have filled requests from all 50 states and Puerto Rico, with tens of thousands heading to hotspots like Minneapolis and St. Paul. You can request them too and we will send you whistles, a hundred to thousands at a time.

For me, I know I can reliably produce 400-500 whistles a day, so I'll stack a few smaller requests together and get them out the door along with all my usual mailorder shipping. Some people operate small farms of printers and are able to churn out a few thousand a day and those go out to folks living in hotspots that request thousands of whistles at a time. Other folks produce far less, 50, 100 whistles in a day. It doesn't matter: every whistle printed is a whistle on the street (these are all shipped for free thanks to donations from folks like you).

People in the group choose to print whatever whistle they want, some focusing on fun colors and bigger whistles, others (like me) focus on whatever is the most efficient and fast to print. Everyone does what they want in this chaotic horde of whistle goblins. The key is that the requests get filled and the whistles go out the door ("if it blows, it goes" has become a mantra among the group).

The whistles go out the door.

Watching the group expand, watching the number of whistles shipped grow from a couple thousand a day to what has been a solid 25,000 every day this week (in fact of the half-million shipped since mid-December, 40% were printed in the first week of February), has been truly inspiring. It's been a source of hope for me and I think for many in the group at a time where hope feels hard to come by.

Become Your Own Goblin

Probably the question that gets lobbed and me and others that talk about this work the most is "Why not just bulk buy a half million whistles," and that's certainly an option if you want to deal with the import and storage of 500,000 whistles, then deal with breaking them up and shipping them out to thousands of individual requests across the country. Sure, you'll have to pay an huge upfront cost, it will probably take a few months to get your shipment on a container and through customs, and in that time ICE will have run roughshod across many communities, and your per-piece cost will likely be higher than what we're getting from coils of plastic in our basements every day, but absolutely be my guest. There can always be more whistles out there, so go for it.

If that doesn't sound appealing but the idea of maybe making whistles of your own does, then great, let's go (if you'd rather just buy some whistles in reasonable numbers, my previous whistle post deals with all that).

First, I should say the particular group of goblins that I print with isn't onboarding new members right now because bringing new people in is a very labor-intensive process, not to mention how groups get more unwieldy the larger they get. But that's not stopping you from printing today and getting whistles into the hands of folks in your community who need them. So how to do it?

First, you need a printer. Maybe you already have one, or maybe your local library lets you sign up for time, or maybe you have a pal that has one that's got some idle cycles. I am not advocating you buy a 3d printer just for whistle production (though that's precisely what I did), but if it's a piece of technology that you've been considering, they're surprisingly inexpensive (as low as about $200 for a mini), relatively easy to use (though it's a piece of moving hardware that melts plastic so there are plenty of finicky ways it can require maintenance), and can make dozens to hundreds of whistles in a matter of hours. Personally, I bought a Bambu Labs machine and I know lots of people that use them. But there are many choices.

Next, you need a whistle to print. The crew I print with maintains a list called "Good Whistles" on Makerworld that range from stress-tested designs that print reliably at scale to novelty ones in fun shapes. While everyone prints whatever they want, anecdotally it feels like there are two whistles that get printed the most: The Micro-Bitonal and the Penne. Both are tiny so you can fit a lot on a plate at once, they use a small amount of plastic filament per whistle (the Penne, which I print, uses about 1 gram), and you can churn out lots in a few hours.

On my machine (a Bambu Labs P1S), I can produce 100 Pennes in about four hours. Because I am not right in the head, I do that all day, every day. I wake up at 2 or 3am most nights to change a plate (I could fit closer to 200 on a plate for a longer print time, but my experience has been that it's less reliable and reliability is what's most important to me, plus I'd rather not have to count anything, so doing batches of 100 is helpful). Bigger, fancier whistles take longer, but also they are bigger and fancier so that's nice. Print what you like in the amounts that make sense.

Now you've got whistles, what's next? The key element to surviving all this is to talk to people, and that's key here too. Find out who in your community needs whistles. There are likely groups already near you that are packing whistle kits, doing rapid response, actively organizing (here's a good list of rapid response networks across the country). Or, maybe there aren't, and then that's your next task: talk with friends, get them whistles. They will tell their friends and then you will become The Whistle Person very rapidly (spoken from experience: last fall after distributing whistles for a few weeks I had a neighbor ring my bell and ask for 50 whistles for her church group).

For more ideas and advice, a few folks maintain a good wiki with even more ideas of how to become your own goblin.

Right now is very hard. It's not going to get easier anytime soon. Pulling together as communities is all we've got. Today, a half-million more whistles exist than did before because of one community of absolute weirdos decided to just start printing and never stopped. Those whistles have gone out to people who have then reached out to their own communities to get them into others' hands. This is how it works, always, one community strengthens another, one after another, and on and on until real change happens.

Foundational Texts: Jenny Holzer's Truisms

2026-01-31T00:00:00Z

Words all the way up. (pic CC by beggs )

Foundational Texts is a monthly essay series for 2026 looking at some of the culture that shaped me and how it still resonates today.

Read all the installments: January: Jenny Holzer | February: The Goonies | March: The Channel 5 News Team

I still remember standing there, watching words scroll by on a long LED display: ALL THINGS ARE DELICATELY INTERCONNECTED / ALWAYS STORE FOOD / ANGER OR HATE CAN BE A USEFUL MOTIVATING FORCE / ANY SURPLUS IS IMMORAL ... on and on, blue LEDs reflecting on the floor below them. I don't remember how old I was—14, I think, but I can't tell you for sure—but I remember that moment, still, decades later.

It was at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the old building on Ontario, the one Christo wrapped back in the 60s. I'd taken the train down with friends, definitely early high school and only starting to straddle the line between art kid and punk (with a blonde bowl cut and a penchant for thrifted suit vests, "weirdo" was probably the most accurate description for me back then). I remember the walk from the train to the museum, it was sunny and there was a coolness in the air. I remember the windows of the building, from inside looking out, and then all I remember is the piece.

Jenny Holzer's Truisms was a text-based art series that evolved over a decade, from the late 70s to the late 80s. Starting as stark, short, statements printed on broadsheets and wheatpasted on the walls of Manhattan, they evolved into elaborate art installations involving low-rez LED displays, marble benches, the entire spiral of the Guggenheim Museum, porn theater marquees in Times Square, brass plaques, T-shirts, and wall after wall after wall after wall. Over the course of the decade that she worked on Truisms, Jenny Holzer wrote hundreds of them.

Truisms. (pic CC by PinkMoose )

For me, 14 and still trying to figure out how the walk in the world—motivated by anger and art in equal measure—seeing those LED displays scrolling through Truisms was a revelation. Art could be just words. Art could be just at home slapped on a POST NO BILLS wall as it could in a gallery. And art could be angry and blunt and even funny sometimes and it could be unapologetic for being all of those things at once. It was all entirely new for me, something I would grab onto and hold dear for decades. Truisms was, for me, absolutely a bedrock-level foundational text.

Memory is a funny thing: In my memory, I saw an entire Jenny Holzer exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art that day. Looking back at the MCA's records, that wasn't possible. They had a show a few years before that, and a couple more many decades after, but nothing in what would have been the early 90s. So it must have been a single piece in a group exhibit, or just something from their permanent collection on display. It was a single piece of art so impactful to me that in my mind it became the entire show. Those words, in my memory, grew and grew and grew until they were everything.

There have been so many variations of Truisms over the decades. In that time they have become something of a cliche in their own way. But to me, in a dark room, lit by the glow of the LEDs as words scroll by, or pasted up on a wall as high as you can see, they still hit every time.

Holzer wrapping around the Guggenheim. (pic CC by PinkMoose )

ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE

People are being killed in the streets, children are being snatched from schools, street vendors are being disappeared, goons are going door-to-door demanding papers. The abuses of power that are unfolding on a daily basis are shocking and unrelenting but, if you've given even a cursory glance at the history of this country, they are no surprise. This is the end stage of a country founded on genocide and chattel slavery, of Jim Crow and the Klan, of Japanese interment camps and forced sterilization. Abuse of power is our bedrock. But so, at every step of the way, has been fighting back against it.

GRASS ROOTS AGITATION IS THE ONLY HOPE

As I write this, a 3d printer is quietly warbling in the corner producing, from a thin coil of plastic, 100 whistles. When it is done, I will clear the printing plate, put it back in the machine, and start the process over. It takes about five hours to print a hundred, I'll clear the plate three times through the day, and leave the last one to print overnight. Those 400 whistles will then be sent across the country to organizers that have requested them from the collective of whistle goblins that I joined earlier this month. Yesterday we reached 200,000 whistles shipped in January. While everything has fallen apart, the news headlines have grown more bleak, a better future has looked further and further away, the work happening at the grass roots—be it whistle goblins or grandparents on school patrols or moms risking their lives to follow ICE vehicles or the organizers of the general strike in Minneapolis last week or the kids who walked out of schools yesterday or the people, just regular-ass normal people, who have simply had enough and aren't being quiet anymore—truly is the only hope.

PLAYING IT SAFE CAN CAUSE A LOT OF DAMAGE IN THE LONG RUN

When I was in high school I wore a pin that read SILENCE = DEATH, under a pink triangle. It was made by ACT-UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, a group that truly understood the stakes of inaction. The same is true today, right now, about what is happening in our cities and towns as masked bastards run wild in the streets. Incredibly, the people that are playing is safe right now are not the normal folk—virtually every one of whom would rather be doing anything else than what we are compelled to do—but those we have elected to power and asked to represent us. By and large our Democratic officials in Washington have elected to play it safe, to duck and cover, to talk about affordability when people are disappearing. The damage they have done by playing it safe is enormous and increasing exponentially.

YOU OWE THE WORLD NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND

We have one run at this. The fight against fascism in this country—right now—isn't one you can sit out. The incredible bravery of regular people on the streets of Minneapolis on the streets of Chicago on the streets of your town, probably, right now is the only way forward. I have said it before and I will say it again: the only ones coming to save us are us. And so we owe it—to each other, to our communities, to the world—to do the best we can with what we've got.

WORDS TEND TO BE INADEQUATE

I've really struggled to get these words out. The anger of the last few days, last few weeks, last few months, last few years makes articulating it all difficult. Right now my head feels like it's on fire. Right now I need to act. But I also need to write. We all do. We need to write and witness and act and work. Let's go.

In Foundational Texts next month: Goonies never say die.

We Are All We Have

2026-01-21T00:00:00Z

A peek into the printer that runs for 15 hours a day in my basement.

In the early days of Covid, when nobody knew anything—when we washed our mail, when everything seemed dangerous, when nothing was available—I made masks. Hundreds of them, a sewing machine permanent on the only table in our small house. I'd bag them and take them to friends and neighbors, tossing them onto their porches and stoops. Eventually, when I felt OK going into the post office, I'd mail them to groups that needed them. The Navajo Nation got packs from me, an org in Chicago for homeless LGBTQA+ youth, a teen mental health facility in Minneapolis. Anywhere I could find, I sent.

Because back then—back in those uncertain, frightening, early days—we were all we had.

As I write this, my freezing-cold basement is filled with the chipper hum of a 3d printer making whistles. Hundreds of whistles now, thousands. All bright oranges and pinks and greens and blues, a full spectrum rainbow, tiny and loud. At the beginning of the year I got jumped into a crew printing whistles at a remarkable clip. They've shipped nearly 100,000 this month. 2500 of those printed by me over the course of the last few weeks, sent coast to coast in packets of 100, 200. The thousand I sent to Minneapolis with folks from Chicago who went up took three days to finish. Five hours to make a hundred, I run the printer 15 hours a day.

Because right now, like back then, we are all we have.

The printer chirps away as I do the work that needs to happen to actually make it through a day, even while my brain feels like its on fire from the latest updates from Minneapolis. Updates not just from the news, but over texts and signal chat and DMs from friends spread across the Twin Cities. The come in urgent and hot and each one triggers the same impetus in me: to help.

The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul are among my core places. I've been traveling there since I was a teenager, enamored by its tight-knit punk scene back in the day and now by its resiliency and spirit and independence. I have so many friends there—true ride-or-die types, friend-to-the-end types—and I've spent a lot of time checking in with them as the nightmare of the federal occupation (ten times the size of the one we lived through in Chicago) has unfolded. To a person they are very much Not Okay.

Every single of one them has had abductions happen on their block, to their neighbors, right in front of them. Their kids have seen their classrooms empty out, remote school instituted like there's another plague. They all know the smell of tear gas, the burn of pepper in the air. One described the number of abandoned cars, windows smashed. Another described a neighbor screaming out. All of them talk of helicopters, the endless helicopters. They talk about trying to stay safe, knowing that none of them are. They talk about how hard it all is. How they don't feel like they can make it through. They talk about how angry they are. How angry every person they know is. They talk about how they feel abandoned, left to fend for themselves.

Abandoned, left to fend for ourselves. If this feels familiar, it's because that's what it felt like during the lonely early months of Covid too.

Today, if Democrats talk about the masked goons snatching us off the streets at all it's couched in terms of training and of equipment. They talk about body cameras as if every one of the Fed's abuses aren't filmed by a half dozen normal-ass people armed with a whistle and a phone. They talk about better training as if the agent who killed Renee Good wasn't a veteran of the force, not one of its new barely-trained recruits. They talk as if they don't have eyes, don't have ears. They talk as if they haven't seen the things that we see every day, some outside our doors and others in social channels and chats and livestreams. They talk, so disconnected from reality, that they may as well be discussing a different planet. A different world. A different life.

And so it's just us. We are all we have.

But we're doing it. They have come to the Twin Cities with 2000, 3000 troops and the people of Minneapolis St Paul have answered back with tens of thousands more. The call for help goes out, and it gets answered by so many. The people lining up to help support those in Minnesota is legion. Everywhere you look there are people—regular-ass people like you, like me—standing up to literal troops, everyone knowing full well how it could go and doing it anyway.

Nobody should have to do this.

But we do it.

It seems impossible to imagine right now, but eventually the feds will leave the Twin Cities the same way they did Chicago: suddenly and surprisingly (and also not completely). The surge will end, the tide will go out, and the aftermath will linger for a long, long time.

And then the goons will go elsewhere.

Maybe to your town. Maybe back to mine. We'll be ready. We will take what we learned in Minneapolis the same way we took what we learned in Chicago, and apply it to the next place. To your place. To mine.

The time to organize for that is right now. Talk to friends, talk to family, have a plan.

But beyond that: There are people in your community, today, doing the work that needs to be done. Reach out to the immigrant rights organizations that exist in your town and your region. They are already preparing for what feels inevitable. Find out how you can help. Find the food banks and pantries in your area, ask what you can do. Source whistles now, not just one but enough for your family and friends and neighbors, your clubs and church groups and whoever else. Find the mutual aid groups. Find who is delivering groceries to homes. These groups, these people, they all exist, near you, right now.

Minneapolis needs your help, your money, your supplies, absolutely right now. But so does the community you live in.

We are all we have and the more you do, today, to reach out in your neighbors, your town, your community, the better off everyone is.

Right now feels impossible, and unfortunately there's a lot of impossible still to come. There's no fast fix, no one easy trick to defeating fascism.

But.

But honestly I've never felt more hopeful that we actually have what it takes. That we can do the impossible, even when it seems insurmountable.

Because what it takes is us.

Strength and Hope Amid the Year’s Cold Start

2026-01-12T00:00:00Z

Hey, maybe you are struggling here at the beginning of the year, a year that has not started easy after a year that never let up.

I know I am.

Every day feels like a fresh hell and every day it's more and more clear that the only ones who are going to stand up for us is us. Same as it ever was, for certain, but it feels all the more stark in the cold of mid-January made colder still by the ICE killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis last week.

But here's the thing to remember, even amidst all this: we are strong enough. We always have been.

So as I reminder of that I offer up, on this cold January day, this beautiful performance of the song "Cold At Night" by the Mountain Goats, complete with a string section. I've come back to this song so many times since it came out last fall because of one refrain:

The first thing you learn is how strong you can be, if you have to.

Over and over again in the last couple hard months, and especially in this last impossible week, I've reminded myself of that fact, and today I remind you too:

The first thing you learn is how strong you can be, if you have to.

The whole performance is beautiful and the entire song is great—a story of survival and perseverance and hope. And it's a good reminder both of our strength and as John Darnielle sings,the first thing you learn will be the last thing to go.

💪💪💪

It's important to find hope where you can right now and so it's with a little bit of surprise that I've found myself getting a lot of hope from the Chicago Bears improbable come-front-behind victories this season.

I am not normally a fan of American football, but I am a big fan of Chicago and I am a big fan of keeping hope alive even when the chances seem impossible, and so I found myself screaming late Saturday night as the Bears overcame a massive deficit to beat their century-long rivals the Green Bay Packers and advance in the playoffs.

Partway through the night, as the odds got longer and the team fought like hell to stay in it, I realized that this struggle was actually quintessentially Chicago, a city that seems like it is always down, but never out.

So I made a shirt, ALWAYS DOWN / NEVER OUT (set, of course, in Cooper Black), and you can order it for $25 today.

Right now it's good to remember our strength and it's good to remember that even when we are down, even when the odds are long, we are never truly out.

We will always come back.

2025: The Exit Interview

2025-12-31T00:00:00Z

Yoko Ono's "Painting to Hammer a Nail," on display at the MCA Chicago's "Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind". One of those nails is mine.

My contract runs out with 2025 today—a terrible year after a string of bad ones—and so I requested an exit interview with HR. Here's the full transcript of our interview.

Thank you for your time with 2025 this year. We have a series of questions to better understand your experience with our year and your motivations for leaving. To begin, what was the primary factor influencing your decision to conclude this period of work?

I've spent some time over the last week reflecting back on this year, and the word I keep coming back to is "unrelenting." It has been an unrelenting year from start to finish. Unrelenting at a global level, unrelenting at a national level, unrelenting at a local level, and unrelenting at a personal level. Every single time I thought there would be a break, some new level of hell would rise up. So, under those unrelenting working conditions, it was clear that this year and I were not going to be collaborating effectively in the long term. It seemed like time to leave a long time ago, to be honest, however I had to see through the end of the contract which, thankfully, is today. My only regret is that it wasn't sooner.

Overall, how closely did your experience of this year align with your expectations at the outset?

Great question, because I felt like I came into this year with my eyes open and my expectations low. Donald Trump was going to become president for the second time so there was no part of me that expected this year to be an easy one. And yet it defied even my own low expectations.

Where to start? Probably with the surprise death of my mother, suddenly on a Sunday morning in June. We had a relationship that could charitably be described as "complicated," and let me tell you that nothing about a sudden death uncomplicates anything. Pile the exhausting work of clearing out her house on top of that and, well, it was a lot. Meanwhile, the health of our dog was on a rapid decline, my wife was struggling with a cancer scare, and we were moving our eldest kid into an apartment 2000 miles from home. And that was all in like a two month window. It was a lot. A lot a lot.

And that's not to mention the unrelenting assault on rights, on institutions, on schools, on all of us by the government itself, which was sort of a high-pitched alarm ringing out through the whole year until it came home, literally, with ICE and Border Patrol's assault on Chicago this fall. There was no part of my expectations for the year that ended with running down the side of a road relentlessly blowing a whistle as an SUV full of masked goons ran a red light to get away. Maybe it was lack of imagination, but I sure didn't envision that.

I'm sorry to hear all that. To change the subject to perhaps a more positive aspect of our year, which projects, initiatives, or efforts did you find most meaningful or satisfying?

I think probably the main thing that kept me even slightly sane this year was the writing I did here. As I mentioned a few days ago, I set out a goal of 36 posts this year, originally planned for three a month. As things spiraled out of control this summer, that felt like a completely impossible goal. But goals are good, because they force you to try and meet them, so once I got my feet back under me a little, I forced myself to try and meet it. And, as of this post, I did. It meant writing five times a month for a few months, but that discipline helped my brain a lot. I'm not sure how I would have made it through the ICE attacks this fall without being able to turn to this space and write it all down.

Beyond this site, there were two projects that were really satisfying and a lot of fun:

Santa Dan's Sticker Stocking, which I created for Says Who podcast as a way of working through some of the Says Who Sticker Club overstock, was just a joyful project to work on at a time when a little joy was a welcome thing. Buying weird little toys in bulk, stuffing cheap mesh stockings, even creating a sticker topper and hand-stapling it to 100 stockings was a total blast.
And assembling, typesetting, and (just yesterday) ordering the printing of a little perfect-bound zine compiling my favorite writing from this year was a really nice way of revisiting pieces that I'd written and flex some old typesetting muscles I haven't used in a really long time. If you haven't yet preordered They Can't Take Us All, go for it. It's $12 now and will be $15 when it ships in a few weeks.

What achievements from this year do you view as your most significant?

I'm still pretty stunned that I've got a book deal with the legendary radical publisher Haymarket Books to write about newspaperman George Dale's unrelenting war against the Ku Klux Klan in Muncie, Indiana in the 1920s. But what's more amazing about it is the way it all unfolded:

Sometime last year, I was approached by Chicago's great Andrew Huff to do a reading in early January at a series he runs called 20x2, where twenty people give two minute talks on a topic of their choice. Last year I'd set a goal for myself to say yes to more things like that (not at all my default setting), so I agreed and then immediately forgot about it. Flash forward to a week or two before the date and I was stressing about what to talk about. I'd been reading George Dale's papers ever since election day, and so I thought I'd give a brief talk about him. Of course, I put myself through it in prepping for the talk, but despite a lot of self-doubt, I went up and gave the talk. It went over really huge, including a couple other readers coming up and telling me that it should be a book. Instead, I adapted it into a blog post that came out about a month later and that also went over huge, like significantly huger than anything I'd written here before, and at that point I approached my pal Sarah Weinman for advice on an agent. She connected me with David Patterson who had great thoughts on how to turn the blog post into a book proposal and then he went out and turned it into a deal.

That the latter part, the actually-getting-a-deal part, unfolded at pretty much the apex of every shitty thing happening in my life this summer made it feel a little less special, but the reality is that it's a huge achievement and getting a book deal is something I've hoped for for years. That it came from a short talk and a blog post and all happened in about six months from start to finish is really stunning. Now I have to actually write it, which yikes, but also, wow. I can not understate how much this wouldn't have happened had I not made a goal for myself last year to say yes to more things. Once again: goals are good.

Additionally, I would be remiss to not mention Rebel Spirit winning both a Webby Award and a Signal Award this year. I'm hard-wired to declare awards as meaningless but man it felt good to see Akilah's and my work get the recognition it, frankly, deserves.

What systems, routines, or outside influences, such as books, films, music, or other media, contributed positively to your work?

I went and saw people and had experiences out in the world more this year than any since everything shut down in 2020 and that was wonderfully restorative and something that I'm going to attempt to double down on in 2026. I went to a movie in the movie theater for the first time in ages and sure it was just The Minecraft Movie with my 10-year-old but I left so excited about people in places that I sort of babbled on about it to anyone that would listen for weeks. People in places! It's an amazing cure for creeping fascism, even if everyone's just yelling "chicken jockey!" at the same time. But, thankfully, The Minecraft Movie was not the most resonant piece of culture I engaged with this year. I've already written about Annalee Newitz's excellent book Automatic Noodle, about community and robots and cooking, but I haven't stopped thinking about it all year. I also already wrote about Caitlin Angelica's sad and haunting album "Now I Know," a meditation on grief that I definitely needed this year. I did not write about, but was blown away by Alex Espinoza's thick book Sons of El Ray, a multigenerational saga about lucha libre wrestling, the immigrant experience, and living with secrets—it's a masterpiece. (The two books mentioned here are affiliate links.) On the subject of masterpieces, the newest installment of Mario Kart, Mario Kart World, is right up there—I have played it for hours with my kids this holiday break. I watched and then immediately rewatched The Studio, a love letter to Hollywood created at a moment when Hollywood is collapsing. The pace that Seth Rogan runs through every scene is incredible. Equally incredible is Wake Up Dead Man, by Rian Johnson largely because of the performance of Josh O'Connor, who anchors the movie with a quiet depth that was stunning.

But the two pieces of culture that I saw and have stuck with me the most this year were both in-person exhibits (like I said, people in places, what a concept!):

The first was "Music of the Mind" the incredible Yoko Ono retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The exhibit, which spans the entirety of the MCA's top floor, is filled with opportunities to interact with the art and become a part of the pieces on display. From leaving notes stuck to a wall outside the start of the show, to piecing together broken plates, to hammering a nail in a canvas, and adding messages scrawled in blue paint to the final room in the show, I've never seen a museum retrospective that makes you so central to it. It's truly stunning. And since interaction and playfulness is so much a part of Yoko's work it doesn't feel like a gimmick but instead a necessary element to understand her remarkable career. Also, yes to giving someone their flowers before they've passed on. I hope she knows how much people love the show.

The other exhibit I saw this year was about as far apart from the Yoko one as I can imagine: "Let there be GWAR" the career-spanning retrospective of the shock-punk band GWAR, held at LA's Beyond The Streets gallery. More than their music, I was always amazed at the elaborate costumes and sets they built for their shows, all of which were done on DIY budgets. The gallery had dozens of their enormous foam-rubber costumes on display as well as lots of concept art, full stage sets, and videos like the one I think about a lot with the guy who mixes together hundreds of gallons of fake blood before every show. Seeing the schlock of GWAR given a loving gallery treatment was a reminder that there is a lot of incredible art in the underground that doesn't get the loving respect it deserves.

Well that doesn't sound all that bad.

Oh, sorry if you misinterpreted finding some light in an endless darkness as "not that bad." Let me be clear: your year fucking sucked.

Noted. At what point did you begin to feel that a change in years was necessary, and what contributed to that conclusion?

Probably when I was running down McCormick Boulevard in Evanston, frantically blowing a whistle while an SUV full of masked bastards in tactical gear was driving recklessly trying to shake the line of honking cars behind them. That was definitely the "You know what?? I'm fucking done with this shit" moment. But there were so many moments leading up to it. The unrelenting nature of this year made it so you could probably pick any day in any week and point to something and say yes, that. It was a year I hope to never repeat, I hope none of us ever have to, and I desperately hope for something better in 2026. Despite every counterfactual, for some reason, I cling to the idea that that is possible. I have to. We have to. It has to be, right?

2026 is out of our purview. To conclude, are there additional reflections about your experience with this year that would be helpful to document here?

Yes. There was one thing about this year, despite its unrelenting awfulness, that is worth calling out: community was everything. As the government turned against us, as jobs were lost (oh yeah, that happened to me this year too), as thugs spread out across our neighborhoods snatching people, community was all we had. And community stepped up. As much of a nightmare as ICE and Border Patrol's occupation of Chicago was, seeing them thwarted at every turn by neighbors with whistles and car horns, seeing the organizing happening in ad-hoc Signal chats, seeing regular people—you and me—stepping into the path of danger, running toward trouble, and trying in any way we all could to keep our neighbors safe was remarkable. I have lived in my small, falling-apart house for quite a while and I've never felt closer to my neighbors than after the assaults this fall. People who I've never talked with before would come up, ask for a whistle, and explain what they were doing to help. Parents would coordinate patrols around schools, every day, and turn up in real numbers. When SNAP benefits were about to run out, people donated food in a volume that was truly mind-boggling. Seeing community come alive and work together to protect each other, despite the unrelenting nature of 2025, was truly inspiring and I believe is going to be the key to not just surviving 2026, not just making it through, but to reclaim what is ours and to make the year truly better. Like I said, despite every counterfactual, I cling to hope. We are all we have. Maybe we are all we need.

Thank you for your candid responses, this concludes our questions for you. Thank you for your service in 2025, please leave your ID at the front desk. You can leave.

Fucking finally. Goodbye 2025, I hope to never see you again.

I've got a feeling / This year's for me and you

2025-12-24T00:00:00Z

Even as he wrote a Christmas song, I can't imagine that Shane MacGowan believed he was writing a Christmas Song, something that you'd hear on one of those radio stations that starts playing holiday music 24/7 in November or in the background of one of a dozen interchangeable Hallmark holiday rom-coms. And yet, inexplicably, "Fairytale of New York," his ballad about a couple in a heated drunken argument in an NYPD jail cell on Christmas Eve, somehow did. You've heard it dozens of times as you've done your holiday shopping this year, nearly as inescapable as Mariah Carey.

I still remember the first time I heard it, smashed right up against the screamer "Bottle of Smoke," about betting on a longshot horse that wins, the fourth song on an album that up until then had not let up even for a second, and suddenly there's this lush, wistful duet. Shane's rough cigarette-scarred voice contrasted against Kirsty MacColl's perfect vocals is a magical pairing (that both Shane and Kristy are dead now makes listening to the original a little too haunting for me now). I had the Pogues' If I Should Fall From Grace With God on cassette and when the song ended I remember rewinding and re-listening immediately.

It's a beautiful song, about hope and love and the fleetingness of both, and the instrumentation captures the shimmer and wonder of the season perfectly. And at the end of this year—this long awful brutal year—I want more than anything to say to you this line from the song:

I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true

We've all been through so much this year and I have to hang on to the belief that 2026, like the song says, is for me and you.

So, on this Christmas Eve, take a moment to watch this performance of Glen Hansard and Lisa O'Neill performing "Fairytale of New York," at Shane MacGowan's funeral in 2023. It's a beautiful take on the song—sad and joyous all at once, as funerals can be—and when people start dancing in the pews at the end I've never not started to tear up.

A note in defense of Doing The Work, written on the shortest day of the longest year

2025-12-21T00:00:00Z

I write most of these posts out, roughly, by hand. It's all part of Doing The Work.

There's something about the winter solstice that always lends itself to reflection for me. It is dark and cold and the fleeting light mirrors the rapid dwindling of days at the end of the year. There hasn't been much light in this whole long, grinding year, that is for certain, but today, before the sun sets on this shortest day, I wanted to reflect not on the terrible bits (though there have been a lot) but instead on the one thing that has sustained me through them: Doing The Work.

For me, this year, The Work has largely been writing. I've written more words this year than I've written perhaps in any year before now. I wrote them for myself and for you, not for an ever-shrinking freelance check. I did it by setting a goal of writing 36 posts this calendar year, a number I'll hit exactly despite some of the tragedies and travel of the year meaning that I barely posted in June and August. It was an arbitrary goal, one that nobody was enforcing but myself. But, especially as things fell apart, it sustained me in a way that was a good reminder that The Work matters.

This year The Work saved me.

It's not the first time The Work has done that for me and certainly won't be the last. And so I guess I feel I owe The Work something, a defense, in a year that over and over we've heard about how new tools—offered by men richer than they have any right to be—can save us from The Work.

But here's the thing: There's no shortcuts, not really, to Doing The Work. There's no shortcuts to how it can save your life. The Work is everything. For me, the discipline and rigor of writing regularly brought structure to a year that fell deeply off the rails for many, many reasons. These men are out here insisting that the rigor and discipline isn't worth it, I am here to say: It is.

It is not easy. It is messy and frustrating (so frustrating) and it feels like it can take forever and half the time all you want to do (all I want to do) is quit, but here's the thing: All the mess and frustration and the tangents and mistakes and learning and everything else that goes into actually making a thing from nothing adds up to something that you miss with a prompt. It adds up to The Work.

That work, in all its chaos and messiness, is The Work. And that work will sustain you. It might not make you rich (it sure hasn't for me) but it fills you. And this year, I needed that more than anything. Next year too, most likely, as we suffer through the continued indignities of an authoritarian regime. The Work will be there, ready.

So as the days get longer, as the sun ascends just a little bit more, as 2025 rolls into 2026, Do The Work. Do it the hard way, the long way, the slow way. There is no other way. I'll be there toiling alongside you, getting frustrated, wanting to quit, and pushing through, all of us, each and every one Doing The Work the only way that it can be done, together.

📖📖📖

Speaking of Doing The Work, I'm doing something different this year. I'm compiling my favorite pieces that I've written in 2025 into a little perfect-bound zine called They Can't Take Us All, and I'd love if you preordered it.

The act of Doing The Work in this space has been so liberating to me, but digital writing is ephemeral and I think that capturing some of these pieces in a form that feels permanent is nice. So I did it and I'd love if you grabbed a copy.

It'll ship in January, and will be a limited run, signed and numbered, so reserve your copy now to ensure you get it. Thanks!

Announcing the Inaugural Snooping Newsie Awards for Excellence in Independent Journalism

2025-12-15T00:00:00Z

Unraveled Press and LA Taco, the inaugural winners of the Snooping Newsies.

Back in 2022, Magic: The Gathering, the endless card game that usually features wizards and dragons battling in high-fantasy settings, released a new set of cards called "Streets of New Capenna," which was set in a new world in the game's multiverse that was essentially 1920s America, with five demonic crime families battling for control of the city of New Capenna. All the cards had a beautiful art-deco approach to their illustrations, and the nod to the gritty mob battles of the 20s was a nice change of pace to the usual flavor of the game.

But among all the devil-mobsters, bird bootleggers and rhino thugs was a journalist, dead set on exposing the corruption of New Capenna in the form of the card Snooping Newsie. The card was designed to reflect the work of muckraking journalism: it got stronger the more cards it exposed and, if it really did the work, it brought new life to the player. Snooping Newsie was a little too finicky to be particularly useful in actual gameplay, but I was immediately hooked: I mean come on, it was a journalist in Magic: The Gathering!

I never forgot that card.

This year has been hard—perhaps the understatement of the year, I know—but one thing that has stood out to me throughout this endless struggle of a year has been the importance of small-scale, truly independent journalism to stand up for communities and to expose the abuses and corruption of the powerful. Nowhere has this work been more critical than in covering the raids of our communities by ICE and the US Border Patrol, where tiny news organizations with no budget and barely any staff have been a critical lifeline to understand the scale and impact of these attacks on our neighbors, our family, and our friends.

This year, as I was turning to tiny news orgs to find out what was happening down the street from me, I remembered that Magic: The Gathering card again, that Snooping Newsie and her dogged pursuit to expose the ills on the streets in order to bring new life to her community. It felt exactly like what was happening right now.

And so today I am thrilled to announce the inaugural recipients of the Snooping Newsie Award for Excellence in Independent Journalism. The award—which is for community-focused, independently-owned newsrooms with a staff of less than ten—is in recognition of the fearless work, commitment, and effort that goes into producing vital reporting for your community, on no budget, with no net.

The winners of this award should likely come as no surprise to those who have been reading my writing this year as I've called out their exemplary work before:

Unraveled Press

Based here in Chicago, Unraveled Press is a newsroom of just two people, Steve Held and Raven Geary. Raven and Steve not only got shot and arrested in their coverage of ICE's occupation of our region this fall, but were out on the streets or at the Broadview detention facility almost every day working tirelessly to expose the brutality of the federal agents and to speak up for the peope and communities that they attacked. Unraveled was also part of coalition of news organizations that filed suit against the federal government for violating their First-Amendment rights in deliberately targeting journalists during the occupation. Even as the fed attacks have slowed, Unraveled has continued to do vital work, exposing corruption in the Chicago Police Department just this week.

LA Taco

Based in Los Angeles, LA Taco was founded in 2006 to cover the street food scene in LA. This summer, when federal agents started snatching food vendors off the streets of Los Angeles, the tiny staff of LA Taco realized that their reporting beat had to immediately and dramatically change. They rose to the challenge, offering some of the best street-level coverage of the assault on Los Angeles. This culminated in creating their excellent Daily Memo, a brief-but-complete roundup of all the reports of ICE attacks across the huge LA region every day. The Memo, hosted by producer Memo Torres, is in my opinion the gold standard in how to do this kind of wide-angle coverage on a shoestring budget and every day I wish it was being copied by small news orgs in every community targeted by ICE.

Doing this work, in this way, is nearly impossible. I know because I've lived it. To do it under the conditions that the Unraveled and LA Tacos teams did this year, when the entire weight of the federal government is threatening to come down on you, is a miracle. And, because it's done on no budget, because it's done without institutional backing, because it's done with a point-of-view and a middle finger raised, it will be overlooked by the traditional awarding bodies.

That's where the Snooping Newsies come in. This is a small act of recognition that this work matters, that this work is important, and that these newsrooms deserve an award just as much as the big orgs, if not more.

Unraveled and LA Taco will each get a plaque and a copy of the foil-edition Snooping Newsie card in an acrylic case. I'd love to include a cash award, but, well, *stares in broke*. So here's my ask of you: What if we all gave them that cash award? What if you donated to Unraveled and gave to LA Taco today? If each of us tossed even $10 their way, that would make a huge impact on their bottom line at the end of the year. A community-funded award for community-first journalism. That sounds right. Please give a little something.

Mostly, please give a shit. Folks like Unraveled and LA Taco are doing this because journalism is a calling, and when done right it builds and strengthens the communities that it is a part of. The only way organizations this small survive is by you caring. Supporting with money—sure of course absolutely 100% yes, that—but also supporting by sharing their reporting and uplifting their work. Everything depends on voices like Unraveled Press and LA Taco, now more than ever.

'Tis the season or whatever - some more gifts, this time from me

2025-12-07T00:00:00Z

Last week I wrote a gift guide for a bunch of artists, writers, and Chicago people that I'm a fan of. Today, let's talk about me. If there's one constant for the last 30 years of my life, it's that I love making merch. Between my own little webstore, the Says Who Merch Store and the Rebel Spirit Spirit Ship, I've made a lot of great merch for you. Here's some highlights that you might want to put on your list or grab for someone else:

Let's kick things off festive, with perhaps the best piece of merch I've ever made: Santa Dan's Sticker Stocking. This little mesh stocking is filled with 10 random stickers produced over the last four years for the Says Who Sticker Club, plus a little cute food squish, a Ring Pop, some Bazooka gum (with the comics), an ICE whistle, and a monkey with a parachute. Inspired by Mike Montiero's Sock of Shit, this is a fun Christmas gift to maybe you or someone else. However: it's going to sell out very quickly. Last weekend I did a surprise drop and they sold out in an hour. This weekend's drop is the last chance for this! Sorry folks, these are now sold out.

But, don't worry: if you want stickers, sign up for the Says Who Sticker Club, available to our "Chamber of Commerce" $10 Patreon supporters, and you get a sticker in the mail every month!

While we're talking about Says Who, I am currently wearing this OH NO hoodie, which was just released on the Says Who Merch Store and which pretty much captures this current moment in time, set in enormous, all-caps Cooper Black, the greatest of typefaces. It's also super soft.

Speaking of capturing this moment in time, you can also get a hat with me and Maureen, Muppet-style, hanging out in a trash can. You know, if that's your thing.

Over the last year plus, I wrote a 13-essay series looking back at the entire run of Punk Planet, and to commemorate that, I rereleased a classic Punk Planet T-shirt. Literally built from scraps from our office copier, it's a classic design now available again.

And, did you know the Punk Planet book, We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet the Collected Interviews is still in print? Over two decades and still going strong. So many of these interviews are still super vital, plus it looks great on a bookshelf.

While you're grabbing things for your bookshelf, pick up We Are Civic Media, a book I helped edit that came out this year. It's a collection of two dozen essays written by people that have charted their own trajectory in life, built outside the mainstream, and fought like hell the whole time. It's a super inspiring collection that I'm so happy to have played a hand in creating. Plus, it's gorgeous.

Akilah Hughes (who has an essay in We Are Civic Media) and I are gearing up for the second season of Rebel Spirit (more on that in '26), but in the meantime, you can get the iconic BISCUITS sweatshirt to cheer on your favorite team, or food. Your choice.

What goes well with a a biscuit? How about a Rebel Spirit Butter T?

My classic TRYING patch is ready to ship your way and makes a great stocking stuffer.

If you're not a patch person, you can always grab a TRYING sticker sheet. Or, if you're both, get the bundle and save a little.

Finally, this one won't be for under the tree, but I'm trying something new this year: A small printed collection of my favorite blog posts from 2025. I think we should be leaning into physical objects right now for a whole bunch of reasons, and so I'm curating some of my favorite blog posts from this year into a small, perfect-bound collection called They Can't Take Us All. You can sit back during the cold winter months and read essays about fighting the Klan, about AI slop, about Chicago's pushback against ICE, and more. I'm really proud of the writing I've done this year and am excited to try this little experiment. NOTE: THIS IS A PREORDER, hence why you can't get it under your tree, and will ship in late January. By preordering though, you help me to know how many of these to print and also you'll save $3.

All Rad, No Bad

2025-11-29T00:00:00Z

Look, we live under the crushing boot of capitalism and all that, I get it. But also, it's the time of year where we try and find things for our friends and family that might bring them a little joy, a worthy cause if ever there was one, always, but especially this year.

So I've assembled a little gift guide of stuff I like a lot, largely from independent artists and makers, with an emphasis (but not exclusively) on things that are handmade and small-run. No stinkers in the bunch, these are all rad, no bad.

Stuff from Pals

There's nothing more joyful than getting to hype your pals' incredible work.

Chicago letterpress printer Jen Farrell has built a career on stunning letterpress creations hand-printed on century-old printing presses. One of her truly unique specialties is building urban landscapes from metal type, and she did a beautiful tribute to Chicago's pushback against ICE this fall featuring a quote from Chicago's legendary Studs Terkel. Jen also made a print from something I wrote on this blog earlier this year, which was super cool to be involved with.

My pals Nick and Nadine print under the name Sonnenzimmer, and their playful, inventive, and gorgeous prints evolved from gigposter to works of arts over many years. Their incredible, self-published tome, Per Diem: Graphics in Time by Sonnenzimmer, which is over 1000 pages long, collects 16 years of their work. It's a work of art unto itself, but also a remarkable collection of ideas, of moving in new directions, and of two people's creative collaboration over a decade and a half.

I spent many late-night hours at the Punk Planet office working on the magazine while Dan Grzeca was printing things in the other room. And I spent plenty of time drinking coffee with him in the early morning hours after. And so of course I love his new This Caffeine Kills Fascists shirt, which is also a fundraiser for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. But so much of Dan's stuff is incredible, including this beautiful Cooper's Hawk print.

I shared office space with Jay Ryan at The Bird Machine for years, and I continue to be in awe of his work. Everything he does is joyful in a way that is so uniquely him, and his color palatte is always stunning too. Anything he does is worth picking up, but I'm especially in love with this portrait of 12 wooly mammoths. You can see more of Jay's mammoths at Chicago's Field Museum's After the Age of Dinosaurs exhibit.

My pal Eve Ewing bought a bookstore earlier this year and this fall, when shit was getting rocky in town and we were all out on the street protecting each other, designed this wonderful totebag featuring a red winged blackbird in full attack mode. I love it so much. Plus, a percentage goes toward Organized Communities Against Deportations.

Annalee Newitz is both a pal and one of my favorite authors, and their latest is the cozy little novella Automatic Noodle (that's an affiliate link), about a group of robots who open a noodle shop in San Francisco and build a community among themselves and their human customers. Looking for a nice read about the post-apocalyptic future where basically nothing bad happens? Yes you are.

My longtime podcast collaborator Maureen Johnson, put out an absolutely stunning and really fun book, You Are the Detective, the Creeping Hand Murder (that's an affiliate link), where you get this beautiful little book that's a collection of letters, pictures, interviews, and more to help you solve a locked-room murder from the turn of the century. It's a ton of fun, really beautiful, and kind of shockingly inexpensive. A legit great gift for almost anyone.

Chicago things

Chicago has been through a lot these last few months, and here are a few things to celebrate our great city.

The Chicago Transit Authority gift shop goes so much harder than it needs to. It's hard to pick out one thing, but I think this 60s-era logo beanie could be your new winter look.

It's a Chicago Hot Dog Flag, what more explanation do you need?

Chicago has many iconic buildings but I've always loved the pink towers of the former Edgewater Beach Hotel (now condos), and I was so happy that scrappy third-tier US soccer team Edgewater Castle FC put it on a totebag. And speaking of Edgewater Castle, you can buy season tickets for only $60. Games are super fun. Go Rooks!

Chicago journalist, historian, and photographer Robert Lorzel created a breathtaking look inside the long-abandoned Uptown Theater in his book The Uptown: Chicago’s Endangered Movie Palace. When I first saw some images from this book I was stunned at what good shape the theater was still in. It's so fun traveling back in time with Robert and his co-author James Pierce.

Speaking of beautiful books,The Golden Era of Sign Design: The Rediscovered Sketches of Beverly Sign Co is a beautiful tribute to a classic Chicago hand-painted sign studio compiled and written by a current Chicago hand-painted sign studio. Filled with breathtaking sketches from the mid-20th century and assembled with real love and care, this is a gorgeous book you'll look at a lot.

Other Awesome Things

There are so many great things, here are a few more.

Speaking of books on signage, Bryan Yonki's 380 page love-letter to the hand painted signs of Los Angeles, "Hand-Painted in LA: Some Los Angeles Signs" is just an absolute gorgeous collection. Whenever I walk around LA I feel like half the time I'm just jaw-hanging-down agog at the various storefronts and their painted signs. Yonki's book really captures the beauty of them.

My family and I spent a really great week recently playing the wonderful Ministry of Lost Things game. It's less a board game than a series of puzzles to solve together, but the premise—you're helping lost items reunite with their owner—is really wonderful and the presentation, which plays out through opening envelopes filled with little artifacts like letters and calendars, and maps, is so satisfying.

One of the things that truly helped define who I was when I was still an impressionable youth was the artist Jenny Holzer, whose "Truisms" series (think: ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE) changed everything for me. When I discovered that one-woman-print-shop Bread and Water Print Shop does a monthly design dedicated to Holzer's work, I was so happy. You can even subscribe to get a Holzer shirt every month, if you have enough drawer space. Rose, who prints everything herself, has a ton of really cool shirts, including this awesome Royal Tenenbaums/Royal Trux mashup.

On the topic of rad shirt printers, this Garfield "I may be self employed but I can still hate my boss" T from High Desert Debris makes me laugh out loud every time I see it. It looks like they're almost out but they have a few sizes left. But also all their shirts are pretty rad.

And speaking of being self employed, Chicago chainstitcher Vitchcraft makes one of my favorite patches of all time, "Self Employed: Tough Little Bitches." I have one on my favorite pair of coveralls. Jenna also has a ton of really cool things available at her shop, including custom-chainstitched items.

OK, finally, I'm definitely not telling you to spend $65 on a stamp (someone bought this for me because I would never spend $65 on a stamp). But honestly this Japanese modular one-month stamp that you break apart and put back together to create a month-accurate stamp is actually really wonderful. It's transformed my setup for the frontmatter in my monthly journals, and is really unique and fun to snap together every month. That said: It's a $65 stamp, so obviously YMMV.

Whistle Up

2025-11-21T00:00:00Z

My current whistle supply, bagged and bulk.

For the last few months, the sound of whistles has become a regular occurrence in Chicago. They act as an instant alert system that ICE is on the streets, as a call to action to neighbors to come out, and as a rapid warning for those that need to take cover. Parents, whistles around their necks, have stood outside of schools on patrol. Businesses across the city and suburbs have bowls of whistles available. The zine produced by the Pilsen Arts & Community House, "Form a Crowd, Stay Loud," has become iconic, and "Whistlemania" events held everywhere from bars to libraries have brought hundreds of people together to fold zines and pack whistle kit bags that have put tens of thousands of whistles on the streets.

The whistle has been an effective weapon against the occupation of Chicago.

Effective enough that Greg Bovino and his band of Border Patrol thugs left our city last week. They moved their attack to Charlotte, North Carolina, where they were immediately greeted with the sounds of whistles. Now reports have them moving to Louisiana. Where they'll go after that is anyone's guess.

Which is why it's time to whistle up wherever you are.

Inspired by Chicago indie publisher Marc Fisher, I started buying and distributing whistles sometime in September. Originally I ordered around 100 to put into our Little Free Library and to send to some friends that ran stores in Chicago. Over the weeks that followed I ended up getting a few thousand whistles out to folks, constantly buying whistles from any place that had some in stock at a decent price.

In the spirit of getting whistles out to people, I thought I'd share some notes and resources on whistles so you can start stocking up wherever you are. Please note: this is from my own personal experience and is nowhere near definitive.

Buying Whistles

I bought whistles from anywhere that had them in stock and available for as cheap as possible. That meant a lot of random sellers on Amazon, which I usually try and avoid, but also some of the Chinese direct-to-consumer sites like Shein and Ali Express (which were cheapest by a lot but also wildly unpredictable in terms of arrival time). I feel shitty about it, but they were the easiest places to get hundreds of whistles quickly for not much money. Any port in a storm. I do know folks who ordered from domestic party supply and carnival supply places, though the whistles were of pretty cheap quality. But again: any port in a storm.

Stock comes and goes very quickly and prices vary wildly. I found it was easiest to do a search for "bulk whistles" and see what comes up. My goal was to try and find whatever whistle I could, with an attached lanyard, for as cheap as possible, in quantity, that would arrive with some level of predictability.

That combination of needs usually meant paying around 30 cents a whistle. Occasionally I found deals as low as about 10 cents, and sometimes I went as high as 50 if stock was low, delivery was fast, and attacks were active. I did get a few deals that were cheaper than that, but the whistle quality reflected it for sure. My personal favorite whistles are these orange alert whistles that I think are designed to clip onto a life jacket. I've bought so many variations of this design.

A note on availability: You could see Amazon's stock drop rapidly when Chicago really started to move on whistles and I shudder to think what happens when a place the size of New York starts ordering en mass. Do not expect that the same deal will exist the next time you look. For instance, I bought this batch of 100 whistles for $14.99 a few weeks ago. Now it's $28.99 (still a good deal). In between it didn't exist at all.

A note on whistle color: First, let me just say that any whistle is better than no whistle. But I personally really like bright whistles with a bright lanyard, so that you can easily identify folks that are also out on the street. This was especially helpful for school patrols, but really at any point being able to see someone from a distance and know they were also out there was a relief and a help.

A note on bulk buying: If this was all happening before the tariffs, it would have likely been very easy to bulk buy an extraordinary number of whistles from China. However, tariffs make things far more complicated than I had time to sort out, so I never tried it.

3D Printing Whistles

As consistent whistle stock became hard to come by, a lot of people in Chicago started 3D printing whistles. Like, an incredible number of whistles. I've heard of one group that printed 60,000 whistles alone.

Even a small printer can print a batch of a couple dozen whistles in a few hours and my understanding is that the per-piece cost is measured in pennies. Honestly, with the price of decent printers as low as a few hundred dollars, I might be investing in this method in the future. I certainly spent much more than that on whistles.

There are a lot of whistle designs available for printing online. Chicago whistle printer Lauren, who goes by bibliogrrl online, has put up a collection of tested whistle shape files on Makerworld. Her go-to is the quick-to-print Tiny Emergency Whistle and has produced thousands on a $200 Bambu Lab A1 mini.

Of course, 3D printing produces only the whistle itself. If you want the whistle with a lanyard, obviously that's a manual process after the printing. Folks have been tying yarn onto whistles, using old lanyards from conferences, or letting people sort out their own methods. Again: any port in a storm.

Also, if you have never 3D printed anything, know that it is not instant (runs can take hours) and it is not foolproof. While the current state of 3D printing is better now than it ever has been, it's not perfect.

Whistle Instructions

It seems like a whistle should be enough, but bagging up a whistle with a little instruction book has proven to be super effective.

The instructions for whistles are very very simple:

If you see ice in the area, blow short bursts on the whistle.
If they're actively snatching someone, long blows.

The purpose is not to stop the action, but to warn people that ICE is in the area and to bring out your neighbors as witnesses and to amplify the sound as a warning to others. It also annoys the Feds, a nice bonus.

These instructions were codified in a one-sheet, eight-page zine made by Chicago's Pilsen Arts & Community House that has become the visual symbol of the movement. That zine has been translated into tons of languages, shortened into cards and flyers and pretty much any other method you can think of.

And while an eight page zine for two sentences of instructions might be overkill, folding the zine has been a great organizing tactic. Bringing people together to fold zines and assemble whistle kits has brought so many people together at a moment when bringing people together is crucial.

That said, for my own use I created a little business-card sized instruction card with the Pilsen Arts instructions on one side and the ICIRR phone number to call if you spot ICE in Illinois on the other. I just printed them through a cheap biz card printer. The Pilsen Arts & Community House folks encourage remixing, so do what you need to do to get the information out. Say it with me now: any port in a storm.

Distribution

The best tip I can give you for distribution is talk to people. Talk to friends, see who needs 'em and who knows people that need 'em. Talk to your neighbors. Talk to store owners you might be friendly with. Stock your neighborhoods' Little Free Libraries. If you're a church, temple, or mosque person, talk to folks there.

I started putting whistles in my own Little Free Library and getting them to friends that had shops in the city. By the end, I was dropping whistles at assembly events and shipping to friends and family who could hand them off to their circles. We handed out whistles to school patrolers in our neighborhood. I even had neighbors ring my bell and leave with handfuls of whistles for their church groups or community gatherings.

I can't speak to organizing a whistle event directly, but the ones I've helped stock were held at bars and libraries and never had less than a few dozen people show up on extremely short notice, usually just a flyer shared on social or on a Signal chat.

Additional resources

The aforementioned Pilsen Arts & Community House has become a clearinghouse for whistle graphics, zines, and so much more. They even have folders on their Google Drive for other states and cities now. They could use your support.

I'm in awe of the work Emily Hilleren has done in whistle organizing in Chicago. She's personally responsible for getting thousands of whistles out onto the streets every week. She's collected an amazing list of resources, holds whistle assembly events regularly, and is also fundraising to cover some of her considerable costs.

And it's worth another plug for the Good Whistles 3D printing resource compiled by Lauren on Makerworld. There are so many shape files there and it's nice that she went to the effort of curating a tested list.

I'm sure there are things I've forgotten here, but this is as complete a brain dump as I can muster.

Go, whistle up, keep yourself safe and keep each other safe. We're all we've got.

The Pugilist at Rest

2025-11-14T00:00:00Z

I've been thinking a lot about a video I saw recently of the late, great Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick, who died last month. In the clip, Tony waxes philosophic about what makes Chicago unique and what makes those of us that call it home special.

And while he's got a lot to say about it in the short clip (including an amazing line about how people that want to be rich "use Preparation H for lip gloss"), the part that has been stuck in my head for the last few days is when he says that Chicago is a boxer:

They don't have the best skills, they don't have the best snap on their jab. But you get to the twelfth round, and you look across the ring and that guy's still there.

As word came out this week that Greg Bovino—the ringleader of the attack on this region that's been underway since September—would likely be departing Chicago along with 250 of his goons shortly, I thought about that boxer Tony talked about: Bovino looked across the ring, after two months of relentless assault, and we were still there. Whistles blowing, cars honking, everyone scared and nobody scared, lined up, ready to go another round.

Everyone I know is exhausted from the last two months. Exhausted from rushing out on the ding of a Signal notification, exhausted from standing in front of schools keeping watch, exhausted from confronting heavily armed masked agents in tactical gear with nothing more than a whistle around your neck. Exhausted—so exhausted—from being witness to neighbors, friends, and family going missing. Over 3000 people, according to the goons' own count. One was too many.

Everyone I know is exhausted.

Everyone I know is ready to go another round.

One of my favorite pieces of writing is the short story "The Pugilist at Rest" by Thom Jones, who grew up in Aurora, Illinois before becoming a writer in Seattle. The story is incredible, a tour-de-force of voice and language, a pedal-down race through the narrator's experience as a Marine in Vietnam. But, within this tale there's an aside—it's where the story gets its title—about the ancient Greek boxer Theogenes. It's an aside that I thought about when I watched Tony Fitzpatrick talk about that boxer:

The sort of boxing Theogenes practices was not like modern-day boxing with those kindergarten Queensberry Rules. The two contestants were not permitted the freedom of a ring. Instead, they were strapped to flat stones, facing each other nose-to-nose. When the signal was given, they would begin hammering each other with fists encased in heavy leather thongs. It was a fight to the death. Fourteen hundred and twenty-five times Theogenes was strapped to the stone and fourteen hundred and twenty-five times he emerged a victor.

Maybe Bovino is leaving. Maybe, as has also been reported, he'll be back in the spring when the snow has melted and the temperatures return to something resembling reasonable (it takes a special sort to survive the winters here, he'd never cut it). And maybe, if the reporting is accurate, when he comes back he'll be bringing a thousand men with him, four times more than the number he brought this time.

But here's the thing: Chicago has been strapped to the stone so many times, long before this guy and his goons came along. Chicago has thick scars and bloody hands. Fourteen hundred and twenty-five times—to borrow from Jones—we have taken our blows, spit out a tooth, and turned to square up again.

The winter is long. We just had our first measurable snow this week, four or five inches where I'm at, more further south. That snow has already melted—mid-November is too early for "real" winter to set in—but it served as a reminder to all of us of what's coming.

The winter is long.

We'll spend it getting ready.

Chicago is a boxer. We rest, and we wipe the blood from our one good eye and we stand, yet again. There's always another round.

🤜🎁🤛

Today is my birthday. If Bovino really leaves, that's the best gift I can ask for. But knowing that he'll be back (and like when he left LA, they won't all go away), here's my birthday request to you: The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant & Refugee Rights has been the backbone of Chicago's response to this assault. From running the hotline you call when you see ICE, to holding rapid response and know-your-rights trainings multiple times a week, to offering legal aide to the families of those who've been snatched, the work they do every day is critical. They've been doing it long before this two-month nightmare began and will be doing it long after it's passed. For my birthday I would love if you threw a little money ICIRR's way. Thank you.

Ghosts in the Graveyard

2025-11-05T00:00:00Z

This was originally written for and performed at the November 4th edition of Tuesday Funk, the long-running reading series in Chicago's Andersonville neighborhood. It's been lightly updated here.

I spent Halloween chasing ghosts. Not kids in costumes, or jumpscares in a haunted house. I spent Halloween, much of it anyway, chasing ghosts of a different kind: careening from one ICE spotting to another.

We were always just a little late. They'd disappeared by the time my wife and I would pull up, a crowd left in their wake, angry and heartbroken. Dozens of people in the streets pointing at nothing, at ghosts, wondering what to do—what to do practically, right now, but also what to do with the welling anger inside them. Inside us.

For now we'd tamp it down and check our phones. There was already another sighting, blocks away, so we jumped back in our car, and head out. Sometimes it feels like a little parade—a Halloween parade today—of cars chasing down another ghost.

We're too late again. This time there's an empty truck, a landscaping crew, disappeared. In the truck, the keys are still in the ignition. They may have gotten snatched, but nobody knows for sure. They may be hiding.

When I was little, kids in the neighborhood would play Ghosts in the Graveyard. It was a combination of tag and hide-and-seek. One person would be the ghost, and run and hide. Everyone else would run around trying to find them. If you spotted them, you yelled "GHOSTS IN THE GRAVEYARD!!" as loud as you could, and ran back to base. If you got tagged before you made it back, you became a ghost as well. You played that way, one person getting picked off, then two, then four, an exponential set of disappearances, until there was no one left.

I still remember what it was like, to be running around on a warm summer night, the fireflies thick, and realizing that the shouts and laughter of the other kids playing had dwindled to near nothing, as the recognition set in that you were alone. The last one that wasn't a ghost.

It's not long before there's another sighting, across town this time, no way we'd make it there in time. The Feds are coordinating across multiple teams of jump-out-boys, hitting spots across town nearly simultaneously. The reports in the spotter's chat get tangled: they're going east and west simultaneously; they're here, then they're there in a blink. Hauntings crisscrossing the town. Hours of this, back and forth, sightings, a chase, and then gone again. Poof.

I'm not supposed to be doing this. None of us are.

I'm supposed to be chasing ghosts of a different kind. I'm supposed to be writing a book about a guy, George Dale, who lived a hundred years ago. George was a newspaperman in Muncie, Indiana in the 1920s who chased ghosts of his own: the white sheets of the the Ku Klux Klan. Back in the '20s the Klan had emerged as a political force across the country. The Immigration Act of 1924—which introduced racist limits on immigration numbers and created the very US Border Patrol that's now running wild in our streets—was authored by the Klan. But they were especially powerful in Indiana, where the Klan controlled the governor's mansion and two-thirds of the statehouse by the mid-20s. And in Muncie, where George Dale published his newspaper the Post-Democrat, the Klan controlled the mayor, the city council, the cops, and the local courts. We know this, because George published their names in his paper. And because he published their names in the paper, he paid dearly for it.

The corrupt connection of cops and judges meant that George was in and out of jail constantly, for years, on charges that were mostly trumped-up or frame jobs. When he'd decry the corruption that was haunting him in his newspaper, he'd get hauled in on libel charges. When he'd protest those charges in his pages, he'd get called up for contempt. He was in and out of jail so much that it was said that other folks locked up would applaud when he'd return.

Once on a cool spring night when he was walking home with his son, George Jr, two carloads of jump-out-boys in masks leapt out at them. They drew a gun on George, who moved without thinking—some say he never thought—and wrestled the gun from his gut where it was pressed. The gun went off and someone went down. It wasn't George.

The masked bastards retreated back to their cars, dragging their wounded man. Nobody knows what happened to him. There's no record of a hospital visit for a gunshot wound that night. He just disappeared. Poof. George maintained he shot him dead.

It wasn't the only time George was in danger. His house was shot at and firebombed. George was beaten in the streets multiple times. Members of the Klan's women's auxiliary were given the orders to spit on him on sight. And then there was the repeated threat of spending months on one of Indiana's notorious penal farms, made doubly dangerous for George because he'd exposed corruption on those very farms in his newspaper.

He could have made it stop, so easily. He could have stopped writing, could have stopped exposing the Klan and the corruption and the way those two things were so closely interwoven as to essentially be the same. But he never did.

Even as it destroyed his life—even as he was driven into destitution from the fines and legal fees, even as he lost his house—he continued to stand up. He continued to speak out. He never stopped fighting. When George Dale died in 1936, he was at his typewriter. He'd just started writing an editorial.

The whole day was spent running from one sighting to another. A long chase west felt productive, by every account we were on course to intercept them, but they just never emerged where we thought. They'd made a turn at some point, the reports lagged, and then they were gone. Poof.

After that, we headed home. Our young son was about to get out of school—a school ringed by parents standing like sentries. It was Halloween and, like every parent, we wanted to try and protect our child from the evil spirits of the world for as long as we could. At least for another night.

We moved Halloween outside during the start of the pandemic, you probably did too. You remember Halloween 2020 and 2021, with candy chutes and folding tables with take-two bowls. All of us doing what we could to balance a sense of normalcy with living in a world that was haunted by the sense that it never would be again.

I wonder sometimes if what I'm chasing isn't just the masked bastards snatching our neighbors, but the ghosts of the life we lead before all this. Before the agents showed up, before the helicopters, before the tear gas, before the kidnappings. Before this latest Trump election, certainly, but before the first one too. So much has been lost. So many ghosts.

Back in those pandemic Halloweens, I started sitting out with a fire going, saying hi to parents and complimenting kids on their costumes as they went by. I've been doing it ever since and so on this day, after our kid was home safely and out trick-or-treating in the Garfield costume we'd made together, I arranged my little fire pit and chairs and was so exhausted, so bone tired from the day and from the stress and from the sound of the helicopters that never stop and from the last few weeks of living like this (this assault only started in Chicago in September, if you can wrap your head around that) and from the fact that nobody should be living like this and from—despite that fact—the years and years of living like this, and I lit some firestart and I watched it all burn.

Halloween a Hundred Years Ago

2025-10-30T00:00:00Z

I've been deep in newspaper archives from Indiana in the 1920s doing research for my book I HATE THOSE MASKED BASTARDS! Right now, a lot of my writing process involves clipping newspaper articles and filing them away in a piece of bespoke software I've written to help me create an annotated timeline which I'll use to start crafting chapters, so I've been copy/pasting a lot of old news articles. A lot.

While I've been digging around in these old newspapers, I've been drawn to all the advertisements. In addition to being beautiful, each one is an amazing little capture of life a hundred years ago (you could buy a new car for about $600 and there were a surprising number of uses for laxatives). In fact, I've been drawn enough to these old ads that I created a second piece of bespoke software just to collect them (OK, yes: writing bespoke software is apparently my procrastination method).

With Halloween tomorrow, I thought I'd share some of the ads I've collected from newspapers across Indiana to give you a glimpse of what Halloween was like in 1925. A hundred years ago, everything was cheap, there was a lot of "nose putty" involved, pumpkin pie was a Halloween thing, and the cuts (think clip art from 100 years ago) illustrating many of the ads were incredible. Plus, Chicago's best typeface, Cooper Black, makes a few appearances. Of course, this is America and so racism is also always close at hand: "Mexican" and "Chinaman" costumes are cheerily advertised and burnt cork, for blackface, is on sale for 50 cents. Scratch under any surface in this country—even the ones with seemingly immaculate spooky vibes—and there it is. A hundred years ago and right now are not that far apart in that way.

Anyway, everything is very hard right now, so travel back in time with me for a few minutes and take in the Halloween vibes—the good and the bad—of 1925.

Evansville Journal, October 26, 1925

Richmond Item, October 7, 1925

Evansville Courier Press, October 18, 1925

Huntington Herald, October 21, 1925

Indianapolis Star, October 23, 1925

Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegram, October 26, 1925

Muncie Morning Star, October 25, 1925

The Fairmount News, October 15, 1925

Huntington Press, October 18, 1925

Indianapolis News, October 5, 1925

Evansville Courier Press, October 25, 1925

Huntingburg Independent, October 23, 1925

Indianapolis Times, October 1, 1925

Richmond Item, October 1, 1925

Muncie Morning Star, October 23, 1925

Muncie Morning Star, October 9, 1925

Indianapolis Star, October 25, 1925

Evansville Courier Press, October 3, 1925

The Cambridge City Tribune, October 15, 1925

Muncie Evening Press, October 23, 1925

Huntington Herald, October 21, 1925

Richmond Item, October 25, 1925

Evansville Courier Press, October 23, 1925

Anderson Daily Bulletin, October 6, 1925

Indianapolis News, October 23, 1925

The Hammond Times, October 8, 1925

Indianapolis News, October 3, 1925

Marion Leader-Tribune, October 25, 1925

Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegram, October 26, 1925

Indianapolis News, October 26, 1925

Indianapolis News, October 23, 1925

Evansville Journal, October 21, 1925

Huntington Herald, October 21, 1925

Evansville Courier Press, October 25, 1925

Jennings County News, October 15, 1925

The Columbus Evening Republican, October 9, 1925

The Columbus Evening Republican, October 23, 1925

The Hammond Times, October 23, 1925

What I Need You To Understand, Notes from Chicago in Late October

2025-10-24T00:00:00Z

Originally from notes written Tuesday, October 21 2025

What I need you to understand is that it was relentless. Sightings miles apart at the same time, reports, misreports, they were at a Home Depot, a mall, the post office, six different intersections. Car makes and models rapid-fire. A Kia, a Ford, a Silverado, an Audi (an Audi??), a dizzying number of license plates. Too much to keep straight, so you look at every car and you wonder.

There's noise, so much noise, but there's also signal and the signal was that they were here that they were everywhere. Smash and grab jobs happening across the city nearly simultaneously. But the things being stolen aren't jewels, they're lives. Off streets, from yards. One roofer plucked off a ladder. A landscaper thrown to the ground, tackled by a half-dozen men in camo with weapons. Sixteen people on this day. Sixteen people disappeared, from just the northern side of the city and suburbs. More across the entire city.

What I need you to understand is that nobody is letting them go quietly. The Feds' every movement is announced by a chorus of whistles, by a parade of cars honking in their wake, neighbors rushing outside to yell to film to witness these kidnappings that are unfolding in front of us. Neighbors running towards trouble.

What I need you to know is we are organized.

What I need you to know is that you need to get organized.

What I need you to know is they are coming.

What I need you to know is you can stop them.

They come not for the "worst of the worst," as they so repeatedly claim, because that would mean they would be coming for themselves. They are coming for people just trying to get by. Landscapers, roofers, tamale women, Lyft drivers waiting in a lot at Ohare, the people standing outside a Home Depot hoping that today might be better than yesterday.

A report rang out that a child was hiding, and people converged. Whistles around necks, a half-dozen in moments. One heard whistles when dropping her own child off at school. Another rode up on a bike. Everyone unsure of what to do except to do what any parent would do: ensure a child is safe.

The child was safe.

This is how it works: We protect each other, period. These are our neighbors, our friends, our family. We do the things we have to do to ensure that as many of us can make it to tomorrow as possible. Not everyone does. I need you to understand that we tried.

For some, living far away from Chicago, this may sound overwrought. I need you to understand that it's not. This is every day here. Every day, in any part of the city. As I write this, the onslaught is happening across Lincoln Park, one of the richest parts of Chicago, while yesterday it was in Little Village a working class Mexican neighborhood on the West Side. You never know when it's going to happen. You only know that it is going to happen. Life is lived on the edge now.

I need you to understand that we'll still be here when it's over.

I need you to understand that, eventually, it will be over.

It will be over because we are here.

I need you to understand they can't take us all.

A couple places to give your time and your money

ICIRR

Pretty much everything involving witnessing ICE and alerting neighborhoods is running through the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) Family Support Network and Hotline.

If you spot ICE (in and around Chicago) you can call the ICIRR FSN hotline at 855-435-7693. If you're in the greater Chicago area, put that number in your phone.
You can get alerts from the ICIRR's Eyes on Ice text network by signing up here. (note: this is Chicago-area specific)
ICIRR also runs Know Your Rights trainings regularly, which are open to anyone.

If this seems like a very long list of things, it is. And I am positive they could use your donation

Whistles/Pilsen Arts & Community House

A huge amount of organizing is going on around the distribution of whistle kits, the amazingly effective on-the-ground street-level alert system for neighborhoods.

While the actual instructions for what to do with a whistle are very simple (short bursts if you see ICE, long blows if they're actively detaining someone), the Pilsen Arts & Community House has created a little zine that has become the iconic symbol of the rapid response effort.
There are "Whistlemania" and whistle assembly events happening across the Chicago area pretty much all the time.
If you are in a city that Trump has been threatening, the best time to start buying whistles was yesterday and the next best time is right now. They're getting harder to come by because so many people are ordering them.
People are also 3d-printing whistles, if that's your thing.

As with ICIRR, the Pilsen Arts & Community House could very much use your money.

A Brilliant Mistake

2025-10-16T00:00:00Z

In 2016—you remember back then, it was nearly a decade ago if you can believe it—I made a proposition to Maureen Johnson, an author of YA books who I was friendly with online the way you were friendly with people online a decade ago. What if we did a podcast, I wrote, about the end of this crazy election cycle?

It was the Donald Trump/Hillary Clinton race and, over the course of the summer, Maureen had been sending me DMs looking for reassurance that things weren't as tenuous as they seemed. She knew I knew folks involved in the election on both the journalism and political sides, and could I tell her anything that I was hearing to help her cope with the increasing anxiety of that race.

After a few back and forths, I finally made the proposition: Let's do this as a podcast. It will help us to talk it through, and maybe it will help other people too. But, I added, you're busy and I'm busy and this can't take over either of our lives, so let's keep it to just eight episodes—the final eight weeks of the election—and then that will be it. Besides, I said, it's not like Trump's going to win or anything.

You know what happened next.

Those eight episodes, which we called Says Who after a quote from Trump bagman Michael Cohen, ended with an election night livestream too painful to link to here, and then it was over. That is until Maureen posed a question a few exhausting days later: Are we really going to stop?

We'd committed to eight episodes because our lives were busy but those episodes had helped, and they helped not just us but thousands of people who'd listened, and what's to come is going to be hard and maybe continuing is something we should do? Besides, she added, he's probably not going to stay in office for long.

You know what happened that time too.

This is a long way of saying that this week Says Who, the eight-episode podcast we launched in the leadup to the 2016 election, released its 400th episode. Yes, we overshot the mark by nearly 5000% and no, I don't regret it. In the immortal words of Elvis Costello, it was a brilliant mistake.

Over the course of the 400 episodes we've released (don't misinterpret this as an ending, we're still going), the show has transformed. It's still about trying to understand current events and politics, sure, but more than that it's about Maureen and I trying to understand how to exist through it all, how to build lives when things are crumbling around you, and how to help others survive the cascading traumas of our time. But, you know, also funny.

For Maureen and I, we built a thing to help us muddle through a specific period of time that then became a whole era. And, in the process, we connected with people who found our muddling helpful and, in return, helped us to continue. Because, despite outlasting most podcasts, Says Who never got picked up by a network, never got a penny of advertising dollars, instead it has been entirely listener supported. Maybe some of those listeners are you. Thank you.

When times are hard—and they were then and they sure as shit are now—one of the best things you can do is build things with your friends. Build things that can help people get through it, even if that just means you. Because it almost always isn't just you. Put your things out in the world, let them help the people they can help. You never know where it might lead.

Here's to 400 episodes of Says Who, one of the best mistakes I've ever made.

I'm Writing a Book!

2025-10-08T00:00:00Z

In February, I wrote a blog post, "What Felt Impossible Became Possible," about George Dale a newspaper editor and publisher based in Muncie, Indiana in the 1920s who used his paper, his wit, and his inability to stand down from a fight to do battle against the Ku Klux Klan. I'd done a fair amount of spelunking through Dale's archives in the months that followed the election of Donald Trump in 2024 and I thought that his story of perseverance would resonate with folks.

It did.

A lot of people read it. Like, a lot a lot, which took me surprise on day one and was truly mind-blowing weeks later when it was still going strong. And it got me thinking: Maybe there's a bigger story here, the story of someone who refused to back down against fascism even when the odds were stacked massively against him and the only one that believed he could do it was himself. And maybe there's something resonant about how he won, with words and with truth and with a wit sharpened like a razor poised to cut through the entire power structure aligned against him.

And so a friend connected me with a book agent, who had already read the blog post—because at that point, like I said, a lot of people had—and he thought the same thing that I had: There was a bigger story here.

And so I'm absolutely beyond belief excited to tell you that that bigger story will get to be told in I HATE THOSE MASKED BASTARDS! Terror, Truth, and the Editor Who Took on the Klan, a new book by me coming sometime in the future (I still gotta write the thing) from the powerhouse radical indie press Haymarket Books. Really! There's even one of those Publisher's Marketplace things!

I'm thrilled and I'm terrified. While I've done books before, I've never done something like this: researching events from a hundred years ago and trying to weave them into a coherent story that not only talks about yesterday but is relevant to today. It feels like I'm embarking on some kind of uncharted endeavor, like I'm heading into the frozen arctic without a map.

Anyway.

Of course, it's not lost on me, and I hope it's not lost on you, that there's a new crop of masked bastards running around the very streets that we live on right now. And it feels, at least for me, like the odds of overcoming them are insurmountable. That's where I think the story of George Dale (and others like him) comes in, because in learning about history we learn that the struggles of a hundred years ago offer lessons for the struggles of today. It's part of why our current crop of fascists are so hellbent on erasing history. And why we can't let them.

You will be hearing about this a lot in the coming months, including how you can help make it happen. But for today, here's to history, to uncharted endeavors, and to beating back the masked bastards once again. Let's fucking go.

The Fog of War

2025-10-03T00:00:00Z

It was a beautiful, warm day in Chicago today. The kind of early October day that you want to be out in because you know the number of them we have left is dwindling. And so today, people were out. There were plenty of people out on the corner of Armitage and Central Park in Chicago, grabbing lunch, doing some shopping, just hanging around the way you do when it's nice in the early fall.

All of that descended into chaos instantaneously, when an ICE agent—or some other masked motherfucker—after being momentarily blocked by a scooter, decides to uncork a can of teargas and casually toss it out of the window of his unmarked SUV. It makes a spiraling decent, and then it hits. Within seconds, everyone—who moments before had been going about their day—is scrambling, coughing, and screaming.

It takes almost no time until the entire street is engulfed in toxic fog.

The whole scene unfolds in a 43 second video posted to Reddit.

ICE incident at Rico Fresh
byu/DREWBICE inLoganSquare

For those familiar with Chicago, there's no real reason you'd remember the corner of Armitage and Central Park, a mostly-residential section of Logan Square. For those unfamiliar, this is a city street not unlike the one you may live on, and certainly like one you've frequented many times in your life. It is unremarkable in every possible way: A check cashing place, a hot dog joint, a vacant storefront or two. The video was shot from the parking lot of Rico Fresh, a big Mexican grocery store that's the main draw for the corner. Just out of frame—and I mean just out of frame, maybe 50 feet away—is Funston Elementary, which was in session at the time. Next to the school, just around the corner, is a playground. There are always kids there.

There are always kids there.

I used to live a mile or two away from here. I'm pretty sure I have been on this very corner, and have certainly been on corners just like it a million times. It is the most ordinary place. Until, suddenly, in a blink, today it wasn't.

This is how we live now: our ordinary places become something else, in an instant, subject to the whims of some bastard out to inflict cruelty or having a bad day or just following orders or a combination of it all.

There have been horrific examples across the entire Chicago area for weeks now, of agents just like these jumping out on workers and families. A family of four were snatched while playing in the fountain at Millennium Park on Sunday. Just a couple days ago, an enormous action that included camouflaged bastards dropping down from helicopters unfolded pre-dawn in a run-down apartment building in South Shore, children carried out by agents, zip-tied, and loaded into the back of a box truck. Hundreds of people have been snatched and disappeared in the weeks since the feds have descended on Chicago. You feel the tension everywhere, every day.

Earlier this week I was sitting after a long day and realized I could hear a helicopter making big looping circles overhead. My initial thought was was it was a school shooter, since there are three schools within a few blocks of me. Then I thought it was a Department of Homeland Security copter, which have taken to buzzing the beach near me. I hate that these are the immediate two thoughts that come to mind, but this is our lives now.

But.

But watch the video from Armitage and Central Park again.

You'll notice something, even as the fog drifts across the screen and the guy shooting the video starts retching: Nobody is cowed by this. Even as the gas thickens, people are screaming obscenities at the agents in the car. The moped directly in front of them, despite having received what must have been a facefull of gas, refuses to move. And then there's the shrill chorus of whistles that begin to ring out near the end, audible evidence of the successful grassroots campaign to distribute ICE warning whistles in neighborhoods across Chicago.

There are, of course, no police to be seen.

And despite the strong words of Governor Pritzker, who just last month told people to "be loud for America," he sent state troopers to hassle protestors at the Broadview detention facility today.

When I first watched this video, I was seething. So angry the way I feel so often now. An unhelpful level of angry. Angry because of the impunity with which these masked bastards operate. But also angry because we've been left to fend for ourselves.

But.

But that's how it's always been, when change has to happen. There's nobody to do it but us.

This is how we live now: it's just us.

And the good news is that even among the fog, even choking back tears and bile, we're strong and we're resilient and there are so many more of us than there are of them.

Disasters, Invisible and Visible

2025-09-26T00:00:00Z

One of my favorite stories from Chicago's recent history is the invisible flood that happened in 1992 that forced the shutdown of downtown Chicago for days. Repair work was happening on the Kinzie Street bridge, one of many that span the Chicago River. They were replacing nearly hundred-year-old pilings with updated ones that were driven deep into the ground beneath the river. Unbeknownst to anyone, one of the pilings was too close to an forgotten coal delivery tunnel that had been dug in 1906. Slowly, the clay soil between the piling and the tunnel eroded away and a small leak began to form.

As things do, that small leak became a bigger one, and that bigger one became a problem when, suddenly, janitors and maintenance managers across the Loop discovered deep water in the basements and sub-basements of their buildings. Some buildings reported nearly forty feet of water. The colossal Merchandise Mart found fish swimming in their sub-basements!

At first, nobody knew where it was coming from. The city turned off water mains, assuming there was a leak somewhere in their system. But eventually they figured out it was the old coal tunnels, which had long-forgotten openings in most of the buildings across downtown and to which there was never any formal map (many of them had actually been dug illegally). By the time they discovered it, the hole in the tunnel was 20 feet wide. You could see water swirling on the surface of the river like it was being flushed down a toilet. And yet, on the streets, everything was dry. My friends and I took the L downtown while it was happening. We walked the nearly-abandoned streets and marveled at the invisible disaster raging underneath our feet.

There's a different type of invisible disaster unfolding across Chicago now. ICE and Border Patrol agents have been terrorizing immigrant communities across the massive geographic expanse that is the greater Chicago area. Instead of focusing on the city proper (though certainly they've been there as well), they seem to be concentrating on border suburbs, especially on the southwest side, though they've ranged as far north as Waukegan and as far south as Joliet, two cities 75 miles apart from each other. The raids are often pre-dawn and lightning-fast, agents gone within minutes, though that's not always the pattern. A traffic stop by ICE in the light of day in northwest suburban Franklin Park left a dad, who had just dropped his kids off at school, dead two weeks ago.

The speed and unpredictability of the ICE roundups make hearing about them difficult. News organizations can't be everywhere all at once, not to mention most of the orgs in Chicago are in a defensive crouch from years of layoffs and budget cuts. As a result, there's much less visibility on this unfolding tragedy than there should be. While some days get lots of coverage, focused largely around the ICE detention facility in the suburb of Broadview where daily protests have been held for weeks, other days this disaster is nearly invisible unless you know where to look.

There is amazing coverage happening, don't get me wrong, but you have to work to seek it out. For me, my go-tos are largely on Twitter alternative Bluesky:

Unraveled Press is the load-bearing element to much of the up-to-the minute coverage of what's happening around Chicago. They're at the Broadview facility most days, and doing an admirable job of spreading disparate social media videos and reports of ICE raids from elsewhere across the region. That it's fallen on a tiny two-person outlet is pretty much everything you need to know about what makes this disaster invisible. It's also a reason to send them some money. I sent $50, and I'll be sending more once I've got it.
Shawn Mulcahy, the news editor of the Chicago Reader has also been at Broadview regularly and has been a must-follow on Bluesky for me. I wish the Reader was actually highlighting his work on their site more regularly, but they're going through it right now, so ¯\(ツ)/¯.
Organizer and author Kelly Hayes has also done a remarkable job of supplying to-the-minute information and photos from Broadview.

There are two news organizations that I also think are doing standout work:

Block Club Chicago, a local news startup that has been running laps around the incumbent Tribune and Sun Times for years now, has been doing good work covering raids and giving a wide-angle look at what's happening.
The TRiiBE is a growing, Black-owned news org that has been punching above their weight for a while now and has been doing good nearly-daily updates.

Other area news outlets, including stalwarts like the Tribune and Sun-Times, have been doing their best, but the coverage is often locked behind paywalls and gets buried under other stories quickly. But among all the Chicago news orgs, even the ones doing good work, the urgency of the situation isn't captured in the approach.

What's unfolding every day—neighbors snatched off the streets, protesters teargassed and shot with pepper balls—should be treated like a disaster: pull down the paywalls and subscription pop-ups, make the coverage accessible to all comers. Get people up-to-speed on what's happening every day in a way that is comprehensive and accessible. In a way that makes the invisible visible.

To me, the gold standard for this comes from an unexpected source: The (formerly) food-focused website LA Taco, who found themselves in the position of doing the best reporting when ICE swept through Los Angeles and disproportionately targeted the same street food vendors that LA Taco had covered for years. They realized that, like it or not, they were best situated to cover this unfolding disaster.

What the folks at LA Taco, not the LA Times, figured out was that while it was impossible to have on-the-ground reporting from sweeps happening across a metro area as colossal as LA, we live in a time where most everything is documented and uploaded to social media in near-real time. They took to compiling these social media videos and reports into a vertical video Daily Memo that simply runs down where ICE has conducted raids that day across the vast LA area. The LA Taco Daily Memo is required viewing now for folks in LA that want to keep up with what's happening there. They make their Daily Memo available as a video and as a written update on their website. I wish they provided them in Spanish as well, but they are a very small shop with limited resources. The Daily Memo is one of those ideas that's so obvious now that someone's doing it that I wonder why it hasn't been the standard all along.

So, in the hopes that obvious ideas can be grabbed and run with easily, here's a few thoughts from me on how to flesh LA Taco's Daily Memo idea out even more. If you're a news org in Chicago or anywhere else looking to do this, feel free to borrow, expand, and—most importantly—build.

Have someone whose dedicated beat through the duration of this disaster is to monitor social for reports/video/etc of ICE activities. Verify those reports, then put them in a spreadsheet. (Bonus points, make that spreadsheet open and available to all.)
Use that spreadsheet to build out a whole host of Daily Memo-style roundups:
- Like LA Taco, create vertical videos that you can put on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, as well as share on Bluesky, Twitter (ugh), and elsewhere.
- Make text-based roundups that are available on your website at a consistent location and with findable, predictable titles and tags. Daily Memos, for instance, always lead with, what else, "Daily Memo:" in their headline. That makes finding them really fast and easy.
- Use that text-based roundup to ground an ICE-specific mailing list that sends those daily updates directly to your readers. You can use that same mailing list for breaking alerts when necessary. Don't try and clog it up with other coverage. Stick to what's most important to the folks that subscribed. Respect their inbox.
- You've got each incident in small, atomized, texted-sized chunks, so push those to Bluesky, Twitter (ugh), and the others too. You could even push to phones via text if you have the infrastructure for it.
- Create a short audio roundup that you can push out to podcasting apps for people to listen to on their commutes or whenever. Again, we're talking quick hits here.
Please, do this in English and Spanish if at all possible.
This part is important: Dedicate a place on your website that won't get blown away by all the other news of the day that collects all of this and that is easily accessible from your home page, so that people can find your work immediately and accessibly. Make the URL simple: /ice or something else memorable.
- If your CMS is so inflexible that you can't do that (and trust me, I've worked with some of them and they definitely are that inflexible), build out a quick-and-dirty secondary site that you can host at a subdomain like ice.yoursite.com.

This is a list of every possible permutation I can think of. I know it's a lot! Pick and choose. Some orgs are already doing some of this, and that's great, push to do more. Not all of it is a heavy lift—even just creating clear headlines will go a long way. All of it is important. Does this take people? Yes. Does it take time? Also yes. If a freak earthquake hit Chicago, you would find the people and time to cover it. If those old tunnels opened up again and the Loop flooded, you'd find the people and time to cover it. This is a disaster that has claimed hundreds of victims so far. Cover it like it should be covered.

Make the invisible visible.

The Good Things

2025-09-15T00:00:00Z

There's a record by garage rock legend Holly Golightly that has been my go-to for decades now: The Good Things. It's a short record (on vinyl it's only a 10"), but every song on it is amazing. It was Holly Golightly's first solo record, having made a name for herself as one of The Headcoatees, known for their driving, '60s girl-groupesque, lo-fi rock songs. The Good Things was a very different record: slow and sad, a beautiful kind of melancholy. Which, honestly, is about as good a thing as you can ask for right now, a time that is so markedly sad. So here are a few good things that I wanted to share with you.

Automatic Noodle

Automatic Noodle is a wonderful, slim book written by Annalee Newitz about robots that run a noodle restaurant in a post-dystopian San Francisco. But what it's really about is about realizing your dreams with a found family, about building real things that matter to real people, and about the importance of community. It's a very nice read right now, if you'd like something where basically just good things happen. Which I desperately do. (The link to the book is an affiliate link where I get a little cut of the sale.)

Coyote

I will always ride-or-die with alt weeklies, the locally-focused indie culture newspapers like the Chicago Reader, the The Stranger, and the Village Voice, and so it's thrilling to see the launch of the Coyote, a new alt weekly for the Bay Area. Started by a bunch of kickass writers, I'm really excited to see where it goes from here. Lord knows we need more independent media right now, I hope that they're successful and that success spawns more in their image.

Caitlin Angelica

I've been listening to the haunting, warbling voice of Caitlin Angelica lately. Her tremendously sad, tremendously beautiful album "Now I Know," was born from the tragic death of her partner in 2023. She has bundled all of the hurt and shock and pain of it into a record about grief and perseverance and it's not an easy listen per se but it's one that I really need right now. (There's also a great interview with Caitlin in the latest edition of the excellent see/saw punk newsletter.)

World Tramdriver Championships

OK, this is one of my favorite things that happens once a year: This weekend 25 teams of tramdrivers competed to see which one would be crowned the best in the world. Yes, really. Previously focused just on European public transportation, this year included teams from Brazil, China, Australia and the US to turn what had been the European Tramdriver Championships into the World Tramdriver Championships. Feast your eyes on the six hour live stream to watch drivers compete in disciplines like driving-backwards-without-spilling-water, not-hitting-a-cardboard-cutout-of-two-people-dancing-as-you-drive-by-it, and of course, tram bowling. It's just pure joy.

Look, times are hard right now. Take the good things where you can find them.

A Benediction for Chicago on the Eve of Occupation

2025-09-05T00:00:00Z

No matter what happens in the coming weeks, we are Chicago. We rose from the ashes. We never quit.

We are the lake in the morning, the sun rising over the water, its reflection drawing a line straight to our shores.

We are the Haymarket Martyrs, the Pullman strikers, always demanding better than what we've got.

We are the words of Sandburg and Algren and Brooks and Wright.

We are the 90s Bulls, making the impossible possible.

We are the dipped Italian Beef. Messy, sure, but incredible.

We are the humidity in the summer, the frostbitten cheeks in the winter.

We are smoke-kissed rib tips.

We are elotes on the street. We are pierogis in a pot.

We are Curtis singing Hush now child.

We are the Soul Train dance line, the National Barn Dance, the Warehouse on a hot summer night.

We are the beach in the last days of summer, drawing every moment out.

We are the downtown canyons, wind-whipped in the winter, how do you make it through?

We make it through.

We are celery salt and tomatoes and onion, sport peppers and a dill pickle and relish so green you swear it's not real.

We are the dreams of millions.

We are imperfect, but we are perfect.

We are forever.

We are everything.

We are Chicago.

There will never be more of them than there are of us.

The Amazing Art of the Video Game Marquee

2025-08-01T00:00:00Z

Attempting to break out of the the malaise of a difficult summer, my family and I drove out to Brookfield, Illinois to visit the Galloping Ghost Arcade, a sprawling, ramshackle collection of buildings that take up one entire side of a city block and house the largest video game arcade in the world. Walking in is overwhelming, it's dark and warm and humid; the beeps and boops of the vintage arcade game collection drowned out slightly by the hum of industrial fans placed in corners. The windows to the outside world are either tinted or obscured and most of the lighting comes from the games themselves.

The games. Room after room of games pressed right up against each other in aisles barely wide enough to squeeze past someone as they try their best against Donkey Kong or Pac Man. It's a labyrinth of games that seems to continue forever. We were discovering new rooms filled with games up until our last moments at the arcade. There's a box on the counter asking for donations to expand even further. At this point there are well over 800 games, according to their website, with machines regularly swapped in and out. You pay a flat $25 to play all day, every game rigged to play for free at the push of a button.

Don't expect high-tech Dave & Busters-style games at the Galloping Ghost. The vast majority are from the golden age of arcades, the 1980s. As it should be, extra attention is given to the games born in Chicago from Bally, Midway, and Williams, as well as smaller outfits like Rock-Ola. The city used to be the center of the arcade universe, and it was fun to be able to walk past (and play) dozens of Chicago's forgotten classics.

After a while though, I became captivated not by the games themselves but by the incredible art on the cabinets and specifically the marquee, the sign set above the screen, tempting a kid from 1983 to spend their hard-earned quarters. The marquee back then had to do a lot of work, because the games themselves were all low resolution and blocky affairs. The marquee had to sell the idea of the game, the excitement around the concept and the story because the on-screen graphics alone weren't going to do it. So you made sure that your marquees did the job, filling it with exquisite hand-lettered logos, art borrowed from the pages of fantasy novels, sci-fi, and comics, and vivid color palettes that would shine out into the dark arcade.

These vintage marquees, to me, are such a beautiful vernacular artform that perfectly capture the moment where our lives were transitioning from the physical to the digital. So, during this long, hot summer, enjoy a gallery of video game marquees I took while walking around the Galloping Ghost.

Six Scenes of Hulk Hogan, in Reverse

2025-07-25T00:00:00Z

Hulk Hogan stands at the lecturn of the Republican National Convention, the summer of 2024. Donald Trump had been shot at a week earlier, he wears an oversized square bandage on his ear. Trump stands in the audience, applauding and pointing every time Hogan says that Trump is “my hero,” which he says a lot. Hogan’s got the audience right where he wants them, cheering and chanting as he runs through a script that paints him at his 1980s best, despite the fact that he can’t stand up straight anymore, his walk reduced to a shuffle. It’s all “dude” and “brother” and “real Americans.” He references the Macho Man Randy Savage and Andre the Giant. He’s wearing a sportcoat over a T-shirt with a picture of himself on it. At the climax of the speech, the sportcoat comes off, he take ahold of the neck of the T and he rips it clean in two, revealing a Trump/Vance shirt underneath. One year later, almost to the day, Hulk Hogan was dead.

Hulk Hogan stands next to his lawyer, dressed in all black with a black bandana covering the ample bald spot on his head. It’s March 18, 2016 and they’re on the steps of the Pinellas County Courthouse in Florida. Hogan doesn’t speak at all, squinting in the sunlight. Moments before, he was awarded $115 million in a lawsuit he’d filed against Gawker, the hard-charging news and gossip website, over their publication of a sex tape featuring Hogan and his best friend’s wife. Soon, that number would swell to $140 million, an amount that would send Gawker into bankruptcy. Ten days later, it was revealed that the lawsuit was funded by Peter Thiel, a then mostly-unknown startup billionaire who had been on a secret vendetta against Gawker ever since they wrote a story in 2007 that outed him as gay. Thiel spent $10 million on the lawsuit. He told the New York Times “it’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence.” Thiel has since spent millions on conservative causes and candidates. He spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He did not rip off his shirt.

Everything is silver and black, the distinctive hue of an infrared camera. Hulk Hogan sits on the edge of a canopy bed. Blurry in the bed is the wife of his then-best friend. It’s 2006, Hogan is getting divorced. His friend, a Tampa radio shock jock who goes by the name Bubba the Love Sponge, invites him to sleep with his wife. He doesn’t know that Bubba is taping him. He does more talking than anything else. He rants about his daughter Brooke dating a black man. It’s shockingly ugly, filled with the n-word. Over and over again. “I guess we’re all a little racist,” he says in the midst of it. They have sex. Six years later, the tape leaks. Gawker publishes a two-minute excerpt. Everything is silver and black.

Trash rains down on the wrestling ring. Hulk Hogan stands in the center, arms up, hands clasped with Kevin Nash on one side and Scott Hall on the other. It’s the culmination of a storyline that has been building for months. Hall and Nash, known as “The Outsiders,” had recently left the World Wrestling Federation to join their biggest rivals, World Championship Wrestling and had been running roughshod over the WCW roster. For weeks they’d been teasing that they’d be joined by a “third man,” at WCW’s July 1996 pay-per-view, Bash at the Beach. That third man turned out to be Hogan, who ran out as if he was saving his former best friend Macho Man Randy Savage before doing his signature Atomic Leg Drop on Savage and clasping hands with Hall and Nash. They became known as the New World Order. Wrestling was never the same after that point.

Hulk Hogan sits in the witness stand, dressed in a dark suit. It’s July 1994 and he’s quietly answering questions from federal prosecutor Sean O'Shea. Hogan is a witness in the government’s case against Vince McMahon, the owner of the WWF, for illegally providing steroids to his wrestlers. Hogan used to tell kids to say their prayers and take their vitamins and today he revealed that for 14 years he had been injecting himself with steroids. He picked them up at the WWF headquarters “along with my paycheck, fan mail or whatever.” The government's case seems solid. Hogan is the star attraction. Except. He testifies that he was never told by Vince to take steroids. McMahon is found not guilty. 30 years later, Vince’s wife Linda would become the US Secretary of Education.

93,000 people. It’s the largest crowd anyone had ever wrestled in front of. Wrestlemania III, Hulk Hogan vs Andre the Giant. March 29, 1987. The audience is huge and it is electric and here for this match. When Hogan is announced, the crowd explodes in unison. He struts down the aisle to “Real American,” his theme music. “I am a real American / Fight for the rights of every man / I am a real American / Fight for what’s right, fight for your life.” He points to the crowd, raises his hand to his ear. He climbs in the ring and reaches for his yellow Hulkamania T, grabs with both hands and rips. The bell rings. Slowly he approaches Andre the Giant who stands stoically in the center of the ring. They stand chest to chest, Hogan looking up at Andre who towers above him. They stare at each other. They stare forward into history. They stare info infamy, forever.

A Visit With The Stamp King

2025-07-18T00:00:00Z

The Stamp King in all its glory.

The first thing you should know about The Stamp King, the last stamp dealer in the city of Chicago, is that it is exactly what you imagine it would be: chaotic and jumbled, a space navigable by exactly one person, the Stamp King himself.

I was bringing my dad's stamp collection to its last resting place. I never thought of him as an avid stamp collector, more someone who traveled a fair amount and collected trinkets along the way. But, in the process of cleaning out my parents house following the death of my mother last month, I found a bankers box filled with stamp books, with stamps clipped from mail, and with loose stamps in various envelopes marked with countries he had visited.

It wasn't a collection that I needed to hang onto, so I looked up places that might be able to value it and, hopefully, buy it. Stamp collecting used to be a thing. Based on the lack of stamp stores that came back in my search, it's not much of a thing anymore. But there was one, The Stamp King, way out west on Higgins Road in a nearly-not-the-city corner of Chicago. Further research said it was the last stamp collector store in the city proper.

The second thing you should know about The Stamp King is that you should probably call first. There's not a lot of street-level traffic to the store and when I got there on an absurdly hot day in mid-July, it did not look open. The lights were off, a security gate was pulled across the storefront window. A small sign was taped to the door instructing you to knock on the adjoining storefront, because he was using the computer there. I knocked. Eventually the Stamp King opened the original door, confused.

"Did you call?" was his first question. I had not called. I had a collection of stamps I'd like him to look at, I said, gesturing to the bankers box I was carrying, and he sighed and invited me in.

The place was chaos. Bankers boxes just like mine stacked in wobbly piles to the ceiling. Banks of filing cabinets stood behind a counter that was so covered in piles of dusty stamp books and shoeboxes that you couldn't see it. Unexpectedly at the front of the store sat rubbermaid tubs full of African violets, growing in the diffused light of the dirty storefront window.

It was perfect.

The Stamp King himself was also perfect. He sported a white mustache waxed into curls and a mostly-bald head, short along the sides like my dad used to wear it. He was kind without ever being particularly friendly, approaching this transaction with a generous series of sighs. He did not need to buy another stamp for the rest of his life.

And yet you knew he would from the very start.

He cleared a space on the counter, shifting pile after pile, and explained that he was planning on leaving early today, after he was done with his "computer stuff." I said I could come back a better day and he sighed and motioned to put the box in the newly-cleared space.

He asked a little about the history of the collection and then started looking at it, breezing through books in fast-forward, opening every few envelopes, carefully tweezering stamps to get a closer look. A couple books you could tell were sort of interesting to him, until his tweezer-led inspection revealed that the stamps were "hinged," a heretofor unknown term to me, but apparently not the way stamps should be kept. Who knew?

The Stamp King knew.

He was through it all in 10 minutes, probably less. Most of the time was him sighing and me wandering around the store. It really was all boxes. The adjoining storefront where he'd been doing his computer work was also all boxes. Floor to ceiling. In a fire the place would go up in a millisecond.

Affixed to the filing cabinets were stickers and clippings. "The only difference between this place and the Titanic: The Titanic had a band."

The Stamp King laid it all out for me: two books were interesting, but all the stamps were stuck in wrong. He'd do $10 for those. Another book was $2. A couple envelopes were $5. Piles of stamps that had been lovingly de-adhered from envelopes were garbage. All this, he said gesturing to stamps collected from a lifetime of travels, are "fun but worthless." Eventually he delivered the total with another sigh: $25.

It was a pity $25, I know, fished from his wallet. The Stamp King needs another box of stamps like Lake Michigan needs a glass of water. But I think probably everyone that comes through is like me now, someone with a box of someone else's stamps, a box that would end up in the garbage if The Stamp King didn't step up.

So the Stamp King steps up. Stepping up is his life's work now. He's probably pushing 80, saving the thing he loves well beyond the point of sensibility. The piles are huge and threaten to engulf him and maybe me if today happens to be the day.

I said $25 sounded good, and would he take the leftovers too. He sighed. Of course he would. Today there's another banker's box touching the ceiling of the Stamp King, that one was my dad's.

Ever since I left that box behind, I've been thinking about the things each of us has piled in unsteady stacks, stacked all the way up to the ceiling of our own lives.

We all accumulate a life the way the Stamp King accumulates stamps: sometimes with a thought-out plan, sometimes in the hopes of making a buck, but most of the time because you step up. The boxes stack up whatever way.

Living is hard. That's not a revelation, just an acknowledgement. But we live it as best we can. We fill our boxes and we stack them up. Not every box is filled with good memories. Most of them, if we're lucky, I think fall into the best category the Stamp King offered: fun, but worthless.

Fun, but worthless. Not everything has to make a profit, despite the grind mindset that's forced on us. Not everything has to have meaning beyond being joyful to you, now. Maybe it's some stamps, put in an envelope and kept in a box. A box that now sits among hundreds at The Stamp King. Maybe it's something else.

Whatever it is, I hope it's fun but worthless to you and that you fill your boxes with it, every day, until they tower over you. And I hope you take a moment to look at those fun but worthless towers of your life and you sigh the content, exasperated sigh of the Stamp King. A sigh that says it's all a little bit mad and more than a little tiring and even so you know you would not do it any differently because someone has to step up and save the things that are fun, but worthless.

As I left, I smiled at the Stamp King and said, "The good news is now you have some stamps to sell."

He laughed a little and sighed a lot.

Three Escapes

2025-07-11T00:00:00Z

Sometimes you need to step out for a second, to take yourself out of the here and now and go somewhere else. With everything so waves hands in all directions right now, here are three places I'm going, if only for a moment.

Skating Across America

Earlier this summer, pro skater Demarcus James embarked on a journey from Oakland to New York on his skateboard. It's been incredible watching him kick-push-coast his way up the Sierra Nevada mountains and down into the desert of Nevada. Averaging around 40 miles a day, it's slow, hot, and more than a little dangerous. But the daily videos he puts together and posts to Instagram are truly inspiring and beautiful and showcase the things that are still pretty incredible about this country as seen from atop a board. (He's raising money on Gofundme for his travels, toss a couple bucks his way if you can.)

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Bezawada Arts

I follow a huge number of signpainters on Instagram, but Bezawada Arts is unique. An auto shop based in India, who post regularly to Instagram, they paint trucks and busses with some of the steadiest hands I've ever seen. South Asian truck art is worth a whole post of its own sometime, but watching these masters of the craft freestyle perfect gothic lettering on the bumper of a truck is some of the most relaxing moments I get in a day.

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Cornell Feederwatch

I've been watching birdfeeder cams since the pandemic, and the one I've come back to the most is the one at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York. A lot of the time it's just bird feeders swinging in a gentile breeze, sometimes it's more of an ASMR thing with the far-away sounds of bird calls, and other times, yes, it's buzzing with activity as birds swarm the feeders. Either way, it's worth a visit to YouTube just to be taken away from everything for a while.

Gathering Grief

2025-07-03T00:00:00Z

It's easy at first, I play my cards just right. A fleet of cat soldiers, lined up eight deep, attacking with impunity. Each hit against my opponent raises my life counter, tick tick tick tick. I amass a lead that feels impossible for anyone to overcome until, of course, my opponent plays a series of cards in such quick succession that I have no idea what's happened to me. They flash the "good game" emote before I even realize it's over. I watch my life count down precipitously until it's all gone and my avatar explodes into red smoke.

I sit and hit the play button again.

Magic: The Gathering (shortened by most to MTG) is a trading card game—think Pokemon with wizards—that has amassed tens of millions of players in the 30 years it's been around. Traditionally played on folding tables in game stores that smell like meat and sweat, it made the leap into a digital version, MTG: Arena, in 2018. Gameplay in-person and online is virtually identical, though online has more sound effects and less awkward social interactions. The game features elaborate, if convoluted, lore about multiverse-jumping sorcerers known as Planeswalkers, and each card is illustrated with artwork that would look right at home airbrushed on the side of a sweet conversion van. Players play cards—sorry, cast spells—against each other in an attempt to bring the life counter of their opponent to zero. The rules are fairly straightforward, but are modified by the cards themselves, which are introduced in new sets every few months while older sets are retired in a matching cadence. The result is an ever-changing game that has spent more than 30 years transforming and evolving, almost alive. An endless game, if you let it become one.

This month, I've let it become one.

My mother died, suddenly and unexpectedly, at the beginning of June. It was a Sunday, plain as any other until it wasn't. A text, followed by a frantic phone call, followed by a desperate drive. I will spare you further details.

Nearly every waking moment since has been dealing with grim logistics and digging through a house filled with 30 years of accumulated things. My dad died a few years ago, so there's nobody left in the house now. We're speedrunning the cleanout, a terrible experience that involves making split-second decisions about someone else's most precious items. I'm not sure I've made a single correct decision, in part because there are no right choices in this excruciating game.

I come home exhausted, physically and mentally, spent so completely that basically all I can do is play Magic.

It's not an escape, not really. Despite the elaborate fantasy settings and sweeping orchestral music, never once am I not conscious of the fact that I'm sitting on a threadworm couch after a day of dealing with the hardest possible things, hoping that the familiar repetition of the game will lull my brain enough to let me sleep.

Every game starts the same: you play a "land" card—just one a turn—which functions as the currency of the game, and you use it to cast a spell. On the second turn, you play a second land, and you can cast slightly better spells. It continues like this until you lose. You lose a lot. And then you start over, one land after another.

One life after another.

I left home at 17, I couldn't wait to move out. My friends and I settled in an apartment in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood, then a haven for artists and musicians. We were both. I look back on it now and think about how impossibly young I was, setting out on my own. I never moved back. Not long after I moved out my parents left my childhood home, settling in the home that I'm now working to empty and, eventually, to sell.

There were things of mine still in the basement and those were the boxes I opened first, revisiting a child I barely remembered. But there were also boxes and boxes of letters my parents had been sent over the decades, back when people still wrote letters. And, further in, boxes of letters they wrote each other when they were young and in love and living apart. All these letters saved for decades—many for way more than half a century. I wanted to read them all, to take my time, to better understand the lives they lead. There is no time.

Some people play fast, winning in seconds. Others counter every move, frustrating you into maddening submission. My style is just to chip away at my opponents life as they chip away at mine. A war of attrition.

Most of the time I lose, slowly. My life, chipped away one by one. But play enough and you do get better and, in time, you learn how to bend the ever-changing rules to your favor, slightly. Eventually you rack up tiny victories in a field of losses.

It feels, if not better, at least not worse, for a moment.

It's not lost on me that filling time with an endless card game is a way to escape the cold clutch of grief. There are no counters, no tricky cards you can pull out of your hand. When that bastard attacks, it sails right through all defenses.

Grief is a bastard, but it's one I've known for a while. Coming up in a scene built by people that couldn't live in the mainstream meant that you become familiar with grief early on. You build your defenses as best you can at too young an age, and you hold the people around you and you hope. It doesn't always work.

Right now, it definitely doesn't work. And so I hit the play button again, a new hand of cards is dealt to me and I begin the process all over again of chipping away at life.

Chipping away, chipping, chipping, until you're just barely hanging on, hoping that the next draw will bring a miracle.

Things End: Punk Planet, Year 13

2025-05-30T00:00:00Z

Punk Planet Year Thirteen, issues 74-80.

2024 marked 30 years since the start of Punk Planet, the magazine I ran for 13 years. To commemorate that milestone, I wrote 13 posts over 13 months, each one about a single year of the magazine. A year of learning, a year of trying, a year of making something impossible possible.

I don't know how to begin except to say that things end. Sometimes endings are welcome—a fresh start, a door opening as another closes, a clean slate... all the clichés. Sometimes endings are a nightmare you don't wake up from for a long time, if ever. But mostly, whether you want them to or not, things just end.

For more than a year, I've been writing monthly essays about Punk Planet, the influential, incredible, miracle of a magazine I worked on for 13 years. For more than a year, I've been dreading writing this ending because the reality is this: Sometimes things end and you never, totally get over it. You might move forward, you might build a life wholly anew, but that ending is still there, lingering, an unhealed wound, forever.

But even then, things end. And, for Punk Planet, that end was in our 13th year.

Punk Planet 80, our final issue. Every issue we published is in the pile on the cover. It was a few feet tall and photographed in our emptying office. The idea of starting the final introduction to the magazine on the cover was borrowed from '90s designer David Carson's Raygun magazine. I always wanted to do it and this was my last chance.

The reality is that we should have never made it as far as we did. If this exercise of looking back across 13 years of Punk Planet has reminded me of anything, it's that it's legitimately amazing that we lasted that long. The amount of work that went into every issue—work that was done by people paid far too little if at all—is astounding. We simply should not have been able to pull off what we pulled off issue in and issue out for years. And the result of that work is unbelievable: a documentation of a scene and a time and a way of being that is truly singular and, also, absolutely gone.

The end of the magazine looms over every issue in our final year. We narrowly escaped death in Year 12, and in Year 13 the threat continued to loom close, until finally it wasn't looming: it was upon us.

The short of it is that our distributor, the Independent Press Association, spent two years nearly going under until, finally, in January 2007 they announced that they were closing. "As we prepare to send this issue to press," I wrote in the introduction to issue 78 (March/April 2007), "we send it off not quite knowing where it's going once it's done." It didn't take long for the IPA's closure to end us: Issue 80 was our last.

The long of it is more complicated than that. Looking across year 13, the issues are shorter than they'd been in years. It wasn't for lack of content, it was for lack of advertising. One of the features of Punk Planet (and other indie zines) was that our ad rates were so cheap that even the smallest project could probably afford something. Even in our last issues, you could buy a small 1/24 page ad (2.5" x 1.25") for fifteen dollars. Fifteen! A full page cost only $475.

But even with rates that low, our advertising had dwindled. I remember, in a fit of desperation that final year, going through older issues and compiling a list of the advertisers (almost all tiny record labels) who no longer ran ads with us. It was a long list. I reached out to all of them and, while I was expecting a lot of responses about how the magazine had changed and they didn't support it anymore, I think I only heard that from one or two people. Everyone else simply either no longer ran a record label or released things so infrequently that they no longer ran ads. A very small handful had shifted their promotion focus to a new phenomenon: MySpace.

The reality was that even if we had survived our distributor's collapse, we wouldn't have made it much longer because the DIY underground that we'd come up in was ending. Because that scene was never just about zines or record labels or bands, but about the distribution networks that had been built to move those zines and records and bands around the country and the world. It wouldn't have existed without those networks.

A truly vibrant culture is only as strong as the networks that support it and, by the mid-2000s, those networks were either crumbling or had disappeared entirely. In magazines, the Independent Press Association wasn't the first major indie magazine distributor to shut down—it was the last. In music, the venerable Mordam Records, the distro that picked us up way back in Year Three, had merged with another indie distributor, Lumberjack Distribution, and the combined company (The Lumberjack-Mordam Music Group) was in financial trouble by 2007 and closed in 2009. The storied Southern Records shut its US distribution in 2008. Touch & Go Records closed its distribution arm in 2009. (That both Southern and Touch & Go were based in Chicago was always a point of pride for me.) There were other distros, to be sure, but the loss of Mordam, Southern, and Touch & Go in such a short time was an indication of just how fucked the underground was.

This is not to say that there aren't still bands and labels from back then still going strong today (Ted Leo, who was on the cover of PP78, is on the road as I write this), but everything about music, including independent music, is different today than it was in 2007. That is, perhaps, the understatement of the year. Everything about everything is different today than it was in 2007.

With the luxury of decades, I'm struck by the fact that the final issue of Punk Planet, PP80, was released the same month, June 2007, as the iPhone. I remember watching Steve Jobs' unveiling in the PP office and thinking, "Well that's not going to do well."

It did well.

Everything is different now.

Over the last 13 months of these essays, I've been asked by lots of people what it would take to start Punk Planet again, but the reality is that you can't. Everything is different now.

There's a line by the musician/artist Laurie Anderson that I think about a lot: "This is the time / And this is the record of the time." Punk Planet was a record—and a product—of that time. Now is different. And that's good. Because now, and tomorrow, is all we have. There's no going backwards, only forward.

Some of what we did at Punk Planet was groundbreaking (and, here at the end, heartbreaking), but mostly what we did was try and capture the moment we lived in and the people living through it the best we could, because if we didn't, who would. That's not all that unique. You could start that today. You should start that today. Because today is also a time, and it begs for a record of the time.

I don't know how to end except to say that things end. Punk Planet came to an end in August of 2007. It was the hardest day. The ache in me from it is still very real. But I didn't end. The people who contributed their talents and ideas and love and care to the magazine didn't end. The people influenced by the magazine, and the people who'd go on to be influenced by those people didn't end.

Things end.

But that's not always the end.

The Who Cares Era

2025-05-23T00:00:00Z

Earlier this week, it was discovered that the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer had both published an externally-produced "special supplement" that contained facts, experts, and book titles entirely made up by an AI chatbot. There's been a lot written about this (former Chicago Reader editor Martha Bayne's is the best), and I don't need to rehash it all. But the thing that is most disheartening to me is how at every step along the way, nobody cared.

The writer didn't care. The supplement's editors didn't care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn't care. The production people didn't care. And, the fact that it took two days for anyone to discover this epic fuckup in print means that, ultimately, the reader didn't care either.

It's so emblematic of the moment we're in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.

AI is, of course, at the center of this moment. It's a mediocrity machine by default, attempting to bend everything it touches toward a mathematical average. Using extraordinary amounts of resources, it has the ability to create something good enough, a squint-and-it-looks-right simulacrum of normality. If you don't care, it's miraculous. If you do, the illusion falls apart pretty quickly. The fact that the userbase for AI chatbots has exploded exponentially demonstrates that good enough is, in fact, good enough for most people. Because most people don't care.

(It's worth pointing out that I'm not a full-throated hater and know people—coders, mostly—who work with AI that do care and have used it to make real, meaningful things. Most people, however, use it quickly and thoughtlessly to make more mediocrity.)

It's easy to blame this all on AI, but it's not just that. Last year I was deep in negotiations with a big-budget podcast production company. We started talking about making a deeply reported, limited-run show about the concept of living in a multiverse that I was (and still am) very excited about. But over time, our discussion kept getting dumbed down and dumbed down until finally the show wasn't about the multiverse at all but instead had transformed into a daily chat show about the Internet, which everyone was trying to make back then. Discussions fell apart.

Looking back, it feels like a little microcosm of everything right now: Over the course of two months, we went from something smart that would demand a listener's attention in a way that was challenging and new to something that sounded like every other thing: some dude talking to some other dude about apps that some third dude would half-listen-to at 2x speed while texting a fourth dude about plans for later.

Hanif Abdurraqib, in one of his excellent Instagram mini-essays the other week, wrote about the rise of content that's designed to be consumed while doing something else. In Hanif's case, he was writing about Time Machine, his incredible 90 minute deep dive into The Fugees' seminal album The Score. Released in 2021, Hanif marveled at the budget, time, and effort that went into crafting the two-part 90 minute podcast and how, today, there's no way it would have happened.

He's right. Nobody's funding that kind of work right now, because nobody cares.

(It's worth pointing out that Hanif wrote this using Stories, a system that erased it 24 hours later. Another victim of the Who Cares Era.)

Of course we're all victims of the biggest perpetrators of this uncaring era, as the Trump administration declares "Who Cares?" to vast swaths of the federal government, to public health, to immigrant families, to college students, to you, to me. As Elon Musk's DOGE rats gnaw their way through federal agencies, not caring is their guiding light. They cut indiscriminately, a smug grin on their faces. That they believe they can replace government workers—people who care an extraordinary amount about their arcane corner of the bureaucracy—with hastily-written AI code is another defining characteristic of right now.

I keep coming back to the word "disheartening," because it all really is.

Without getting into too many specifics, I recently was involved in reviewing hundreds of applications for something. Over the course of reviewing, I was struck by the nearly-identical phrasing that threaded through dozens of the applications. It was eerie at first, like seeing a shadow in the distance, then frustrating, and ultimately completely disheartening: It was AI. For whatever their reasons, a bunch of people had used a chatbot to help write their answers to questions that asked them to draw from their own, unique, personal experience. They had fed their resumes or their personal websites or their actual stories and experiences into the machine, and it had filled in the blanks, Mad Libs-style. I felt crushed.

Until.

Until I read an application written entirely by a person. And then another. And another. They glowed with delight and joy and sadness and with the unexpected at every turn.

They were human.

They were written by people that cared.

In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.

In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.

At a time where the government's uncaring boot is pressing down on all of our necks, the best way to fight back is to care. Care loudly. Tell others. Get going.

As the culture of the Who Cares Era grinds towards the lowest common denominator, support those that are making real things. Listen to something with your full attention. Watch something with your phone in the other room. Read an actual paper magazine or a book.

Be yourself.

Be imperfect.

Be human.

Care.

Things Fall Apart: Punk Planet, Year 12

2025-04-30T00:00:00Z

Punk Planet Year Twelve, issues 68-73.

Memory is a real son of a bitch. I thought I remembered the last years of Punk Planet vividly. The pain still feels fresh to me, so fresh that I've been dreading writing about years 12 and 13, the years we fought to keep the magazine alive until, finally, we couldn't. And yet my memory of that time—that after years of working with a newsstand distributor, their financial mismanagement put our survival into jeopardy—was proven to be incorrect with the very first issue of Year 12.

"This issue marks a new beginning for the distribution of this magazine," I wrote in the introduction to issue 68. "After almost 10 years of working with Mordam Records as our exclusive national distributor, we have moved our newsstand and bookstore distribution to the fine folks at BigTop Newsstand Services, the distribution arm of the not-for-profit Independent Press Association." I went on to explain that we would continue to work with Mordam—who had recently merged with another indie distributor, Lumberjack, to become a much larger distro—for record store distribution but that "now we get the best of both worlds: the best music distributor in the country getting Punk Planet into record stores and the best newsstand distro getting us onto magazine racks."

The opening spread from Christopher Cardinale's Hurricane Katrina sketchbook in PP73.

I remember this move. Mordam was changing dramatically with the merger with Lumberjack, and it felt like their interest in dealing with bookstores plummeted. At the same time, having been around for well over a decade now, we were heavily engaged in the larger world of independent publishing, including being members of the Independent Press Association (IPA), so moving to a reliable, nonprofit distro whose entire expertise was getting indie magazines onto shelves seemed like the smart thing to do.

But memory is weird, because I could have sworn that move happened years earlier, and that the trouble to come was after a period of everything just working the way I outlined in that optimistic introduction to issue 68.

Which is why I literally gasped when I read what I wrote just three issues later, in PP71:

"In late October we received a letter from our main distributor informing us that they were having cash flow problems and that our payment—along with the payments of many other great independent magazines—would be delayed for an undisclosed amount of time. The letter couldn't have come at a worse time, as we'd amassed a good amount of debt this year and we were expecting those payments to pay it off."

A spread from Cardinale's sketchbook focusing on the volunteer effort.

Three issues. Six months. That was all the time we had.

We moved most of our distribution to the IPA and, six months later, they weren't paying. In fact, knowing how long distribution payments take, it's likely we never got a single payment before we got this letter. We had no savings, no cushion. I remember walking into a bank and asking for a loan and getting literally laughed out of the building. This should have been a mortal blow.

In my mind, this took years. But it didn't. It was so fast.

Of course, when you're living through something, you can't see the end. When I wrote that optimistic note in PP68 I did not know about the letter that would come six months later. And, even as I penned that introduction in PP71 talking about the letter, I did not know that, barely more than a year after that, we'd be done.

Looking across issues like this, it feels so fast. But the reality is that living through it, we were drowning in slow motion.

And we didn't even know.

A collection of sketches of people Cardinale met at the Common Ground free clinic.

Even if we did though, I'd like to think that we'd fight the same way. We reached out to our community and we asked for help. This was in 2006, long before crowdsourcing became a thing. There were no websites we could point people to. We just had to put out a plea and give an address and hope. And people sent money, in $5s and $10s and $20s. Bands and labels held small benefit shows and sent checks. They added up. We were able to dig out of enough debt to keep going.

Dollar by dollar, issue by issue, our community got us through through Year 12. We would have died right there and then without it.

It's a lesson I still hold on to, now, 20 years later: community is everything; community can get you through anything.

I write this post on Donald Trump's 100th day in office. 100 destructive, awful days. Days that very much feel like drowning in slow motion. And once again it's community that will get us through. It's all we have. It's all we need.

The opening spread from the interview with Miranda July in PP71.

We completely revamped our reviews section in PP70, this is the start of the music section.

Year 12 Miscellany: Despite all the turmoil that largely defined the business end of Year 12, we actually did a lot of really incredible work. Most notably, we completely redesigned and reimagined our enormous review section into something that was both more approachable, more personal, and allowed our dozens of reviewers more freedom to highlight their favorites. But Year 12 also featured some really incredible interviews: with artist, author, and filmmaker Miranda July who was just breaking through at the time, with Dischord Records' Ian MacKaye on his project The Evens and why he always wanted to be defined by what he's doing instead of what he's done, and with punk legend Bob Mould about growing older and wiser. But the real standout from this year was an illustrated sketchbook from artist and author Christopher Cardinale documenting his time helping New Orleans dig out from Hurricane Katrina. Some of those illustrations accompany this post.

Take a Look, It's in a Book

2025-04-26T00:00:00Z

I was only 17 when I moved into an apartment with two friends in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood. This was in the '90s, the neighborhood was full of artists and musicians and weirdos. It was still rough back then, but it was full of the kind of energy that was infectious when you're 17 and on your own for the first time.

It wasn't long after moving in that I wandered up Evergreen Avenue where our apartment was toward Damen, one of the two main thoroughfares that defined the neighborhood. Just up the street from us was a beautiful red brick three-flat with a plaque outside announcing it as the former home of Nelson Algren, the storied chronicler of working-class Chicago. And just up Evergreen from that landmark was another: Quimby's Bookstore. Or, as it was called at the time, Quimby's Queer Store.

Walking into Quimby's at 17—still so green even though I thought of myself as more—was a revelation. I'd been going to punk shows and buying zines for years at that point, but I'd never seen a store with so many. Shelf after shelf, from tiny photocopied perzines to (relatively) big budget affairs like Ben is Dead and Speed Kills. Zines lined the walls, books filled tables. From DIY music coverage and poetry chapbooks to truly out there political, cultural, and, yes, sexual publications, if you could think it, they had it at Quimby's. The store was still owned by Steve Svymbersky back then and he'd be behind the counter welcoming you every time you walked in. I walked in a lot. All of this, just two blocks from my apartment.

Quimby's changed my life.

Today is Independent Bookstore Day, a day where we celebrate and support stores like Quimby's: stores that don't shy away from ideas, that support presses big and small, and that build community around them.

There's nothing more crucial right now than independent bookstores staying alive. Ideas are under attack by Executive Order, books are being banned in schools and libraries across the country, and tech executives like Mark Zuckerberg are declaring books to have "no economic value" as they hoover them up for training their AIs.

We need indie bookstores more than ever.

And they need you.

It's completely safe to say that I would not have built the life I've lived without being two blocks from Quimby's when I was young and broke and desperate to find a place exactly like it: a place where new ideas where everywhere.

There's probably not one single place that shaped me more than Quimby's did. I owe a lot to Steve and later to Eric and Liz, and I owe a lot to all independent bookstores, who have stocked my magazines and sold my books for a very long time now.

But more than that, they've sustained me. When I travel, I always end up at some bookstore, grabbing new things off the shelf. There are some I will always visit whenever I'm back, like the incredible Last Bookstore and Reparations Club in LA, the singular Left Bank Books in Seattle, or the indie giants Powell's in Portland and Book People in Austin. There have been so many over so many years, I am forgetting most of them, but I loved all of them.

Here in Chicago, beyond Quimbys, stores like Women & Children First, the Book Cellar, Bucket O' Blood, and Semicolon are stalwarts. Personally, I'll be visiting Bookends & Beginnings today. If you want to find a store in your area, the Independent Bookstore Day site has a handy map to find a participating store.

Even if there isn't an indie near you or you can't make it out today, you can order online from many stores or from Bookshop.org, the online bookstore that gives a percentage to indies.

However you do it, today go support a bookstore. Put a few dollars in the till and walk out with a new book, a new idea, a new chance to change your life.

Taking Things Apart (in three parts)

2025-04-11T00:00:00Z

Most everything I know, I know because I took something apart.

I mean that literally: I've cut and I've unscrewed and I've pried and I've desoldered to get inside electronics and appliances. And I mean it figuratively: I read the source code for web pages to build my own, I've deconstructed writing to make myself better at it, I've mapped entire audio stories with pen and paper to understand how to assemble them myself.

If I want to really understand something, I have to understand all the pieces that went into making it come together.

It used to be that the easiest way to learn how to make a webpage was simply to view the source code of a page, learn to read it, and build your own. That's how I learned to make things on the web, and how I've continued to improve at it over the decades since. Even as the web itself has gotten more complicated, open source projects, like the one I use to build this site, still offer an onramp to understanding.

The first time I printed a book overseas (Jay Ryan's 100 Posters, 134 Squirrels), I became obsessed with understanding the shipping process, which felt completely opaque and fraught as a result. But international shipping is a really hard thing to comprehend. I remember how relieved I was when, on some obscure kids' corner of the US Port Authority's website, I found downloadable coloring pages that explained the entire international shipping process from start to finish. They offered a first step in my learning process.

Before I embarked on the profile of professional wrestler CM Punk I wrote for Esquire a few years ago, I went to the library and came back with a pile of Best American Sportswriting books. I wanted to really understand the form of a sports-oriented profile, especially one where you would need to orient the reader into a sport they may be unfamiliar with (or at least, in this case, unfamiliar with the "real" aspects of the sport). I ended up pulling apart a profile of a world-champion snooker player, and it guided a lot of my approach to the piece.

Everything can be taken apart, and every step of the process is an opportunity to learn.

The world is a built environment, and I think understanding how it was built is key to being able to truly live in it.

Electronics used to be easier to disassemble.

Loosen a few screws on your Sony receiver and you were staring into a tiny cityscape of capacitors and resistors lining green circuit board streets. Learn enough about how it all works (if you were like me, you did that by trial and error), and you could fix your stereo with a soldiering iron and trip to Radio Shack.

It's hard to believe now, but a huge refrain when the iPhone was introduced was that it was going to be a flop because you couldn't replace the battery. Instead, it defined our modern world of electronics you're not supposed to open. The smaller, flatter, and sleeker everything gets, the harder it is to open them up, when you can at all (Apple does in fact offer the option of repairing your own iPhone now, they will ship you 79 pounds of tools in two enormous cases).

Even as the iPhone plunged us into an era of hermetically-sealed gadgets, build-it-yourself computers and hobbyist electronics ushered in a countercultural era of do-it-yourself hardware and small-scale electronics manufacturers. For DIY electronics nerds (of which I'm not exactly dead center but certainly center-adjacent), there's never been anything like it and it has opened the door to an incredible amount of experimentation and building.

Both of these revolutions—sleek, corporate, high-end computing and gritty, assembly-required, DIY electronics—are built on the global supply chain.

If you do succeed in opening an iPhone up (please, don't try), you will see a miniature cathedral to globalization. Every single thing inside that tiny space is sourced from different suppliers in different countries and assembled in sprawling factory-cities more than two miles in size. Apple's supply chain is so involved that it has its own Wikipedia entry. But ultimately, when you take all the scale out of the equation, Apple faces the same manufacturing dilemmas that a small hipster keyboard company does: for better or for worse, you just can't do it here.

This is not, mind you, a defense of this system. Just an acknowledgement of what the actual reality is today, as massive, crushing tariffs built around the idea that somehow all of this could be reset back to the days of American Iron and, overnight, this entire industry could emerge domestically. It won't. Not overnight, not tomorrow, not in a decade, not ever. The idea that it will at any real scale, let alone to replace the global network entirely, is a lie spread by fantasists and liars that is going to destroy so much more than it will ever create.

III

One thing you learn when you take something apart is that disassembly is the easy part.

Putting things back together is hard. The first few times you take something apart, it's probably broken for good. Eventually you learn to disassemble the right way, a way that will lend itself to repair and reassembly. Eventually still, you learn not just how to put something back the way it was but now to improve on it, to fix things (or build wholly anew) in a way that builds on the learning you've done all along the way.

Most everything I know I know because I took something apart. I've gotten really good at putting things back together too. In doing that, I've learned how to look at how things are disassembled. How to see when people approach something with care, how they think about every step in taking something apart so that they can eventually put it back together again—better hopefully, but at least intact.

Witnessing the chaotic and hamfisted manner the tariffs were announced and implemented, or the firestorm approach that Elon Musk and his Doge rats have taken to government agencies and funding, it's clear that this is not disassembly with any hope or expectation of reassembly. This is taking apart your iPhone with a sledgehammer. This is fixing your car by driving it over a cliff. This is disassembly with no other expected outcome than to destroy.

It's easy to look at all this and to give up. To see the cruelty and destruction on display every day and feel like we'll never be able to come back from it. But things burn all the time. Destruction is a constant.

So is rebuilding.

Old Growth: Punk Planet, Year 11

2025-03-28T00:00:00Z

Punk Planet Year Eleven, issues 62-67.

Year 11 was all about growth for Punk Planet. Or, more precisely, it was about growth for Independents Day Media, the company I founded a year earlier. After years of the magazine being nothing but a flimsy sole proprietorship (literally I just placed a classified ad in a few newspapers saying I was "doing business as Punk Planet"), it went legit in 2003. Well, not that legit, the owner was still just me but at least there was a legal structure to separate me from the magazine. But instead of simply calling the company "Punk Planet Inc," I decided it was a good opportunity to give it a name that could apply to more things. In Year 11 it was time to start doing those "more things."

Honestly, this history is a little messy, because it actually starts in Year 10, in 2003. Specifically it starts at the newly-opened skate park at Wilson and Montrose Harbor in Chicago. By this point, Punk Planet had moved into a cavernous warehouse space in Ravenswood that we shared with Jay Ryan's The Bird Machine print shop. A mix of PP people and Bird Machine people started meeting up to skate in the morning before work (and also before people that knew what they were doing were at the park). Most mornings it was us—all variations of "too old for this shit"—and some moms with their kids. The best skater among us was Michael Coleman, a longtime member of PP design crew who had recently become the Art Editor of the magazine (he'd actually go on to work as an art director at Girl Skateboards after PP ended). Occasionally another Old would show up and we'd knowingly nod at them.

The covers of Bail 01, 02, and 04. Unfortunately, I'm not able to find 03, which featured the Beastie Boys on the cover.

That kicked off a conversation between Michael and myself: How did our childhoods spent skating influence the lives we lead now? And more importantly than us, how did that reflect on the larger culture of artists and musicians and makers of all stripes who had one foot in skating and another somewhere else? To me, there was something really interesting in that question.

Around the same time this was happening—again, this is messy and my timeline might be a little jacked—I was introduced to the Joe Meno, a novelist in Chicago, through our mutual pal Meghan Galbraith (RIP) who worked at the bagel shop at the end of the alley from the PP office. From that introduction, two incredible things happened.

The opening spread of the Jason Lee interview from Bail 01, type and photos by Andy Mueller.

A beautiful spread for an interview with the skateboard design company Dreamland, featuring stunning script by Evan Hecox.

The opening spread for 04's cover interview with Christian Hosoi featuring type by Justin Fines.

The first thing is Joe started meeting up with all of us at the skate park, and pretty soon he was involved in that conversation Mike and I had already been having. From that conversation, a new magazine was hatched: BAIL, about skateboard culture. I'd act as publisher instead of editor this time, with Mike and Joe taking a dual editor role. Andy Mueller, who did design work under the name The Quiet Life, designed the logo and the first issue's headline typeface (each issue had a head typeface designed by someone different), and Nadine Nakanishi, who had just moved to the States from Switzerland to intern at Punk Planet, signed on as a designer. The first issue featured actor Jason Lee on the cover (who's recently back on screens after a long time away in the excellent murder mystery show The Residence). The second and fourth issues featured skate legends Steve Caballero and Christian Hosoi, and the third issue featured none other than the Beastie Boys (somehow I'm missing that issue). It was an incredible magazine, tying together so much amazing art and music and culture that grew out of or alongside skating. It was also expensive to produce, an entirely new industry for us to try and break into, and we were only able to produce four issues. But man, what issues they were. Still some of my favorite stuff I've ever done.

The first three titles from Punk Planet Books.

The next thing ended up having more staying power. While we were working on BAIL, Joe had been working on a novel. He'd previously published two books with a major publisher, and had been jaded by the experience. With this new book, he was considering self-publishing because it was really personal and he didn't want a big publisher to fuck it up. Joe brought by a big envelope with his manuscript inside, I read it over a weekend and then suggested that instead of him self-publishing, we could put it out. After the success of 2001's We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet, the collected interviews (note, all book links are affilate links), I'd had a casual offer from Akashic Books' Johnny Temple to start an imprint with his press. And suddenly, here was Joe with an amazing book and... it all just sort of clicked. Joe's manuscript became Hairstyles of the Damned, the first book from Punk Planet Books (Meghan, who introduced us, was our pink-haired cover model). Our second book, a nonfiction memoir/manifesto from Positive Force DC's Mark Andersen, All the Power: Revolution Without Illusion, was released at the same time. Hairstyles became a phenomenon, selling tens of thousands of copies and launching Joe's career, cementing Akashic's place as a leading indie, and ensuring that Punk Planet Books could continue putting out amazing books, including the moving memoir Lessons in Taxidermy by Bee Lavender that was released at the tail end of Year 11.

While all this was happening, we were continuing to put out Punk Planet every-other month, and experimenting with things like PP/AP, Punk Planet Artist Prints, a limited-run T-shirt subscription with shirts designed by underground artists. It was such an incredible period of experimentation and growth where it felt like the team that had assembled around all the various things we were doing was working together so smoothly and we were executing on everything at such a high level. It's kind of astounding now looking at just how much we did in that timeframe.

But: Even as we were growing in all directions, looking back over it now, I can see that there are cracks in the foundation. Page counts in Punk Planet were going down. We started running a regular ad asking people to directly support the magazine beyond just subscriptions (we called it "community supported journalism," a concept that wouldn't find footing in traditional journalism for a decade or more). And we pitched magazine subscriptions hard, complete with a blow-in subscription envelope you could mail back. Money, which was never abundant, was clearly getting tighter. It's interesting having the perspective now of knowing what's coming, it's clear that the storm that will come crashing down on us in years 12 and 13 was already starting to gather. It's been a very long time, but even now seeing these little hints at the bad times to come... I hate it.

The three covers for the final Art & Design theme issue.

PPY11 miscellany: Most of this essay was not about Punk Planet, but Year 11 was actually really solid. Standout issues include a cover interview with Fred Armisen right after he was announced for the cast of Saturday Night Live. When the issue came out, he bought the office like 10 pizzas as a prank on a day that almost no one was around. I ended up taking some over to Touch and Go Records whose office was across the train tracks from us. This year also featured the third and final installment of our Art & Design theme issues with a triptych of covers designed by Converge's Jake Bannon, Chicago multimedia artist Christa Donner, and poster artist Tara McPherson. Somehow, impossibly, on top of all of this happening in Year 11, I also had a brand-new baby, who quickly became a regular at the office because we couldn't afford childcare.

Do One Thing

2025-03-16T00:00:00Z

Focus feels impossible right now. There is so much happening—so much awful news breaking at an unrelenting pace, so many warning signs and red flags being hoisted—that it feels like you can't look away. At least, it feels like that to me. Which means that you're looking at a cascade of horrors instead of the things you're actually supposed to be doing.

This is something far beyond simple doomscrolling, this is full-on doom living. And it's completely untenable. And yet most of the time it feels impossible to shake.

Friday, when the Democrats caved on the spending bill, I was fully locked into the doom. I had a list of things that I needed to be doing but I couldn't do any of them. I had to keep refreshing the feed, keep reloading the page, keep checking for... something. Honestly, it was awful. It felt like I was trapped by my own brain.

And then I broke out of it.

I told myself I had to stop and do one thing.

For me, that one thing was to go for a walk. Chicago was in the grips of one of those glorious March surprises, where it was summer for the day. I'd been in my basement working/raging for hours and was missing it all. So I stopped, and I went outside, and I walked.

And you know what? It worked. By the time I was done with that walk—with doing that one thing—I was ready to do the next thing. The world had not stopped being a nightmare, but I was released from doom's clutches for a moment.

I have an old friend who's been in AA for a long time, and over the years when I've gone to him for advice on how to deal with one anxiety-producing thing or another, he's simply responded: "One day at a time."

That's how I'm thinking about things right now: One thing at a time.

Focus feels impossible right now. There is so much happening. And yet we all have to do work and school and live our lives. And it's hard—like monumentally hard—to focus on it. I get it. I'm struggling with it too. And I don't have great advice but I do have this:

Do one thing.

We are living through a period of protracted awfulness, and the end is not coming anytime soon. Those in power would like nothing more than to keep you exhausted and impotent, incapable of getting anything done (especially the things that will undermine their power). So do one thing.

It doesn't have to be big, it just has to be something. And when that one's over, move on to the next thing. Some days this will be easier than others (I'll be honest, today I have been shit at this, in fact this post is my one thing), but do what you can. Do one thing.

This is how we're going to get through: each of us doing that one thing, then doing the next thing, until each thing adds up to big things. So what are you waiting for? Put away your phone, look away from the doom, and do one thing.

Leading and Following: Punk Planet, Year 10

2025-02-28T00:00:00Z

Punk Planet Year Ten, issues 56-61.

Everything is real shitty right now, so I thought I'd take a different approach with this essay looking at Punk Planet Year 10. I thought I'd answer the question of how Jess Mariano winds up reading a copy of Punk Planet in an episode of the Gilmore Girls. And not just any copy, but "The Final Countdown," our anti-George W Bush issue, PP60 March/April 2004.

Jess reading Punk Planet #60 in Season 4, episode 21 of the Gilmore Girls. Really.

I explained the basic premise of the "Final Countdown" in its introduction: "Over and over again, people have mentioned how if we're serious about getting Bush out of office, the time to start planning and working to that end is now." At the time the introduction was written, the Democratic primaries had not yet started. The point was that agitating to get Bush out didn't need to wait on a candidate, and the sooner we could get started the better.

PP60 poster by The Bird Machine.

PP60 poster by Jeff Kleinsmith.

The issue featured interviews with nine activists and organizations across a pretty broad political spectrum to get perspective and ideas for how to start organizing for the election later that fall. We also called on friends in the gigposter and underground design scenes to create black-and-white mini posters that were available for anyone to copy and paste up. By this point we'd moved to a cavernous warehouse space nestled between the L tracks and the Metra tracks that we split with the Bird Machine poster shop, so we actually printed up a number of runs of the posters and mailed them to folks across the country as well.

PP60 poster by Leia Bell.

PP60 poster by Aesthetic Apparatus.

The resulting package was a perfect encapsulation of what Punk Planet had become, 10 years into our run: uncompromising in its politics, radical in its artistic vision, but also always striving to strengthen and build community.

PP60 poster by Lux.

PP60 poster by Paul Chan/National Philistine.

OK, but back to the Gilmore Girls. For those of you unfamiliar, it was a show that aired on the now-extinct WB network from 2000 to 2006. Set in the quirky rural town of Stars Hollow, it was known for its rapid-fire dialogue, and beloved for the mother-daughter relationship between Lorelai and Rory Gilmore. Rewatching it now, every character seems massively codependent and in desperate need of therapy, but that's neither here nor there. The Gilmore Girls was not where anyone would have expected Punk Planet to show up. But in fact it did, multiple times.

It all started in early 2001 (all of this is being written from memory because I no longer have access to the 24-year-old emails), when I got an email from Helen Pai, one of the producers of the show. They were introducing a new character and was wondering if they could use a copy of Punk Planet as set dressing. This wasn't uncommon back then. We'd get a few requests like that every year or so, for movies or TV. I'd always ask for more information, because I wasn't very interested in giving permission to things that were shitty. In the case of this one, I was familiar with the Gilmore Girls (I think maybe it was on before Buffy the Vampire Slayer), so I was mostly interested in the character. I wasn't particularly interested in giving a thumbs up if the new character was going to be a bad guy. I remember asking if he was a reader, lol. I can't remember what Helen said, but generally she was positive about him, so I agreed.

Jess debuts in Season 2, Episode 5. If you didn't know to look for it, you'd never know that blurry pink and blue shape to his left is PP45.

That character ended up being Jess, the nephew of the owner of the local diner, Luke. You can barely see the issue in his debut episode. He dumps it out of his duffle bag in an early scene and later sits next to it. It sort of hovers over a shoulder, out of focus. What's interesting to me now looking back at it is that it's PP45, September/October 2001, featuring a double cover odd-couple of Ralph Nader and Shellac. That issue would have been on newsstands in mid-August 2001. The episode aired on October 30th, 2001. That's a very tight production schedule! And, it also meant that they actually went out and bought the latest issue of the magazine instead of using one from earlier in the year.

Jess, wearing a Punk Planet T in Season 2, episode 15. He wore it the entire episode.

I wrote Helen back and thanked her. We ended up keeping in touch for quite a while. At some point I offered to send her over some of our merch, which is how later on that same season, Jess ends up wearing a bright red Punk Planet T-shirt for pretty much the duration of the entire episode. And at another point, Milo Ventimiglia, the actor that played Jess, ordered a big pile of magazines—I remember because Matt, our mailorder guy at the time, wrote "What's up, Gilmore Dude" on the outside of the package. The following season, Jess read We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet, the collected interviews at his uncle's diner.

Jess reading the Punk Planet book, We Owe You Nothing, in the opening scene of Season 3, episode 4.

And then was the scene with issue 60 in season four of the show. It's not a quick, blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot. Instead, they do a full tracking shot around Jess as he reads the issue in a park. There's George W Bush, clear as day on the cover, the fluorescent orange we used really shining through (production note: this is the only five-color cover we ever produced, flo orange on the front and CMYK for the ad on the back). The camera pans around to reveal the punchline: Jess is using the magazine as cover for the self-help books he's reading.

Punk Planet 60, without Jess.

By this point, nobody from the show was reaching out for permissions. I'd told them they could use what they want, when they want. So it came as a complete surprise to see this issue fill the screen. But also, looking back on it now, I'm struck by the issue choice. They could have chosen a different one. It was the most explicitly political cover we ran in Year 10. Yet here on full display—on this cheery WB show, a month before the 2004 general election would begin—was our warning that the time to act was now.

They knew what they were doing.

I write this today during the Economic Blackout, which has been hotly debated about whether it's going to make an impact, about whether it's enough. Of course it's not enough, but it's something. Action is what's important. Any protest movement is a series of acts. Every uprising is a series of moments. Every action is a series of choices. And we make those choices one by one, big ones and small.

But what is important is we make them.

What is important is we know what we are doing.

BAIL magazine, our short-lived (four issue) love letter to the art, music, and culture that grew out of skateboarding and Joe Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned, the first Punk Planet Book.

Year Ten Miscellany: This was the year that we expanded what we did at Punk Planet, launching the successful Punk Planet Books imprint with New York indie publisher Akashic Books and the less-successful BAIL magazine, a skateboard culture magazine that, frankly, was about a decade ahead of its time. Our first book from Punk Planet Books was Joe Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned which was a runaway hit.

All of that extra stuff also meant expanding our staff, adding Anne Elizabeth Moore as an associate publisher, who came to us from the Comics Journal, and Cate Levinson as managing editor. In fact, looking at the masthead from Year 10, we're getting pretty close to the magazine's final form, with Mike Coleman moving from the design team to become art editor and Dave Hoffa joining to do mailorder (he'd later take over the reviews editor position from Kyle Ryan). What a crew.

What Felt Impossible Became Possible

2025-02-23T00:00:00Z

I've spent many hours since the election reading about the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. It started the day after election day when I had hours to kill in the lobby of a Hampton Inn, waiting for a room to open up. I loaded a library archive page up on my phone, and read newspapers from a hundred years ago about the KKK and how powerful they were in the '20s.

It's not a history you learn about in school—we were whitewashing history long before the current executive orders—but the Klan in the '20s was everywhere. There were millions of Klan members across the country. People joined it like they were joining a golf club or the Elks Lodge. There was a women's auxiliary. There was the Ku Klux Kiddies, for children. Klan rallies were held across the country; thousands would turn up at fairgrounds for the marching bands and cross burnings. In 1925, the Klan even held a march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. Tens of thousands strong, crowds were six deep in the streets to watch and cheer. They did it again the next year.

The Klan parades in DC, 1926. (Library of Congress)

The Klan of the '20s was a little different than what you might think of now. They didn't just hate Black people (though, obviously, anti-Blackness was a central driver), they also went hard after immigrants, Jews, and Catholics too. The Klan's slogan at the time? "America First." The Immigration Act of 1924, which established the US Border Patrol and basically set the stage for all of this country's immigration policy for the 20th Century, was viewed as a huge victory for the Klan.

The Klan in the '20s felt inescapable.

That was especially true at the local level, where the Klan infiltrated all walks of life. In Indiana by the mid-'20s, two-thirds of the statehouse were Republican Klansmen. The governor was Klan. And in any given town, the Klan was everywhere. The mayor, the councilmen, the cops, the prosecutors, the judges—Klan Klan Klan Klan Klan.

Of course, part of what made the Klan so insidious was you never quite knew who was a Klansmen—they wore the hoods for a reason. But also you knew. You knew not to cross them, not to question them, not to make trouble. That is, if you knew what was good for you.

Of course, thankfully, not everyone knows what's good for them.

The Muncie, Indiana KKK marching band. (Ball State University Library)

That day after the election, in that Hampton Inn, I spent a few hours reading about George Dale, the publisher of the Muncie Post-Democrat, in Muncie, Indiana.

George Dale hated the Ku Klux Klan.

Now hating the Klan in Muncie, Indiana was not a safe thing thing to do. The Klan ruled Muncie and Delaware County the way it ruled most places in Indiana. The entire police department and the fire department were all Klan. The county judges? Klan. The whole town, essentially, was run by the Klan.

A list of Klan members published in the Muncie Post-Democrat, 1924. (Hoosier State Chronicles)

We know this in part because George Dale printed their names in his newspaper, part of his unrelenting, unceasing, and unflinching attack on the Muncie Klan.

It nearly got him killed, when hooded men broke into his house and tried to shoot him. Dale said that he wrestled the gun away and killed one of them instead.

And hating the Klan sent him to jail repeatedly, rounded up by the Klan cops and put in front of a Klan judge with a Klan-packed jury. It was reported at the time that he was sent to the Muncie jail so often that inmates would applaud when he'd return.

George Dale and two inmates in the Delaware County Jail. (Ball State University Library)

When he wrote an editorial accusing circuit court judge Clarence Dearth of being a Klansman and stacking his juries with Klansmen, that judge sent Dale twice to perform hard labor on a penal farm. He later fled to Ohio to avoid arrest. When Dale got home, he picked up right where he left off and he and Judge Dearth fought a long and protracted defamation battle that left Dale broke.

I read a lot that day after the election, my head swimming the way probably yours was too. I've read a lot more since, but I keep coming back to a letter Dale wrote on January 17, 1927.

George Dale's letter from January 1927. (Ball State University Library)

To The Public,

For nearly five years, my newspaper has voiced its deadly opposition to the wave of intolerance and bigotry which has made the name of Indiana a byword in every section of our republic. Possibly you may have read in your local newspapers and in the metropolitan press, accounts of the reprisals visited upon me because of my unalterable opposition to klan domination of local and state affairs.

Nothing you have read could possibly picture in your mind the malignity of these attacks which have ranged from repeated attempts at murder to endless criminal prosecutions initiated by klan-packed juries and convictions before judges who prostituted their oaths of office by taking orders from a traitorous organization which has no place in free America.

While other Indiana newspapers sought the cyclone cellar until the storm passed, mine stood alone in No Man’s Land and faced a tornado of wrath and cruelty that made Cotton Mather, of Salem witchcraft fame, turn over in his grave with envy.

The storm has passed and the timid have become bold and recovered their voices, but no shell-shocked victim of the great war wears more wound-stripes than the editor who refused to surrender his convictions, renounce his Americanism, and bend the pregnant hinges of the knee to a filthy, drunken moron who mounted a tinsel throne in Atlanta and proclaimed himself lord of all.

I lost my advertising, most of my subscribers, my home, my liberty, and every dollar I had in the world. I lost all but a few loyal friends, my devoted family, and all but lost my newspaper but thank god I retained the pearl of great price—my self respect.

Now that the waves of intolerance are receding I hope to rehabilitate myself and make my newspaper national weekly. I hope to prove in the higher courts, where numerous cases are pending, that a man who fights in a righteous cause should not be punished for it. I am asking your help in these undertakings. It will take money—much money, to accomplish the things I have in mind. If you, and many others will help supply the ammunition, the long battle which I have made against hopeless odds will not have been in vain.

Sincerely your friend,

Geo. R. Dale

Things are really dark right now. We have a new crop of fascists pledging "America First" in the White House. A new series of attacks on immigrants and people of color. Even as someone who expected things to get bad fast, the level of cruelty and destruction being wrought by Donald Trump and the unelected Elon Musk is staggering.

And it feels unstoppable.

That's why I've spent so much time lately learning about those that lived under the thumb of the KKK in the '20s. The speed with which the group grew, the influence it held, the mainstream embrace it received, and the fear it spread—I think about how impossible it must have felt to imagine that their influence would ever ebb.

And I think about people like George Dale—there were many like him—who, despite it feeling impossible, and despite paying incredible personal cost, kept fighting anyway.

And they won.

The Klan—like this new batch of fascists currently occupying the White House—were massively corrupt and power hungry and that corruption and internal struggles for power lead to their undoing. Despite having a grip on every lever of power in the mid-'20s, the Klan was largely toothless by the '30s (of course, that it never quite goes away, that it had a brutal resurgence in the '50s, and that we're seeing its cruel tentacles again today is a post for another day). What felt impossible became possible.

Fascism always fails.

It is destructive and it is awful and not everyone lives to see the other side, but it always, always fails. It takes work. It takes fighting back. It takes throwing punches. It takes doing whatever it takes to beat it back, to protect those that are most vulnerable from its many attacks. And through it all, it feels impossible that we will win.

But we will.

Two years after he wrote that letter, George Dale became Mayor of Muncie. His first act was to fire all the cops. Over the weeks and months that followed, he stripped the Klan from Muncie.

George Dale lost so much in his battle against the Klan. A battle that must have felt so lonely and so difficult so often. A battle that cost him his home, his savings, and, for a time, his freedom. But he won.

And so will we.

°°°

This post is expanded from a talk I gave at 20x2 Chicago in early January. It's probably not the last time you'll hear from me about George Dale.

Write it Down

2025-02-01T00:00:00Z

The last two weeks have felt surreal. I probably don't need to tell you this. These early days of Trump's second presidency—with their non-stop executive orders, the chaotic and unconstitutional freezing of government funds, the cruel and constant attacks on our trans friends and family, plane crashes, immigrant roundups, an illegal attempt to shrink the government workforce, Elon Musk and his technofascist henchmen commandeering government computers, and plenty of other things that I don't have the time or heart to document here—have been enough to make you feel like you're losing your mind.

You aren't.

Part of the design of of all this is to overwhelm you and the other part is to deny that you are seeing what you're seeing.

Which is why you need to write it down.

A few years back I wrote about my journaling method. At the time, I cast it as a way of being able to reflect back on your days and months and years, to detect patterns in your life and to adjust accordingly. It's been incredibly effective for me, and I am now in my fifth year of doing it.

But that's not what this post is about. Instead, it's about the other thing that my journaling helped me with. Because I started writing in my notebook daily at the beginning of 2020. You remember 2020? COVID, the world shutting down, the racial uprising following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the election and the denial of the election. 2020 was a lot, to put it mildly, and I think I would have lost it entirely if I hadn't written it down every day.

Because when the ground is shifting beneath you—as it was in 2020 and it is absolutely doing right now—writing it down gives you a solid foundation to remember what is really happening. It's a way of being able to look back and ask "Did I really experience that? Did that really happen?" and see that, yes, it did. And, when a politician or a pundit or the president himself goes on TV and denies a thing you saw with your own eyes, you have the memory of what really was written down.

A critical element of Annalee Newitz's incredible (and highly relevant) novel The Future of Another Timeline (that's an affiliate link BTW), in which time travelers are locked in a battle with fascists to "edit" time itself, is when the weary time travelers gather to say what they remember about the reality they experienced, because that reality is constantly changing.

We always started by going around the circle, describing lost histories we remembered. There were many events that existed only in our memories because we'd been present for the edits.

Right now, we are those time travelers, present for the edits (literal edits: last night vast numbers of pages were wiped from government websites).

Write it down.

I mean that literally: Get a pen. Get a notebook. Use your hands. There is something visceral about using your hands. And nobody can delete ink on paper with a keystroke.

Write it down.

Remembering what is happening—what you are experiencing—is one of the most important things. Including, I should add, when you experience good things. Write those down too, they're perhaps the most important thing.

Times are very difficult right now.

Pick up your pen.

Write it down.

Building, breaking, rebuilding: Punk Planet, Year Nine

2025-01-29T00:00:00Z

Punk Planet Year Nine, issues 50-55.

Yesterday, Donald Trump's border "czar" Tom Homan went on CNN and bemoaned how ICE's roundup of migrants has been thwarted in Chicago because Chicagoans are "very well educated," around their rights in the face of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

He went on to say that he'd seen pamphlets around entitled Know Your Rights. "They call it ‘Know Your Rights,'" Homan said. "I call it how to escape arrest." They might have thought about a better messenger, Chicago has a bad history with the name "Homan," when it comes to rights: Homan Square was a notorious police interrogation black site.

The point of this is to say that Chicago is the fucking best. In the face of federal raids, Chicagoans banded together to get word into the hands of their neighbors that needed it. As we contemplate the long years ahead of us, this is what it will take: person to person, piece by piece.

Chicago once again proves what is possible.

This may feel like a long way around to discussing the ninth year of Punk Planet magazine, but a familiar refrain as I've looked back across the history of the magazine is that so much of what we wrote about then is still relevant today.

And in the case of Year Nine that relevancy is this: Chicago is still the fucking best.

Punk Planet 50, featuring Jon Langford's portrait of former mayor Richard M Daley. The original painting still hangs on my wall.

When we approached the 50th issue of the magazine—a number that felt impossible even as we crept up through the 40s toward it—I knew I wanted to do something special to mark the milestone. But I didn't want to take the self-congratulatory approach of a normal anniversary issue. Instead, I wanted to celebrate the place that Punk Planet came from.

Punk Planet was never really a "Chicago zine," we were always nationally focused, not regionally-focused. And the distributed, volunteer nature of the early years of the magazine meant that I was the only person in Chicago working on it. But, as the years progressed, that became less and less true. While we continued to have contributors across the country, much of the actual production work of the magazine had come to rest in Chicago. And so focusing on the place that had seeped into the very DNA of the magazine at that point seemed like the best possible way to mark 50 issues.

In the introduction to the issue, I describe the "ethics of the Chicago underground" this way:

In Chicago, you do your work in an honest fashion. You don't fuck people over. You treat people with the respect and the honestly you would want them to treat you with. In Chicago, you do your work because it's the work that defines you. If you can go home knowing that you made an honest wage, you can go home proud.

Rereading this 23 years after I originally wrote it, that's still Chicago to me.

The opening spread for the interview with Mark and Joanna from Homocore in front of the iconic Czar Bar sign.

Cable access kiddie punk-rock dance party Chic-a-Go-Go's rat puppet host Ratso opened interview with the show's creators.

The issue worked to illustrate what makes Chicago Chicago in the 16 interviews that filled its pages. There were workhorse bands like the Mekons, who originally hailed from Leeds but had made Chicago their defacto home base for years; Tortoise, who were redefining what post-rock could be at the time; garage rockers The Dishes and indie hip-hop artists the Molemen also made an appearance. The city's print scene was represented by high-gloss zine Venus and low-fi comic Hamster Man. The heart of the issue was in-depth interviews with people who helped define Chicago's underground, like Martin Sorrondeuy frontman for the legendary band Los Crudos; Joanna Brown and Mark Freitas who had founded Homocore Chicago back when gay punks were nearly invisible; and Bloodshot Records' Rob Miller and Nan Warshaw who talked about infusing punk and country. But the issue also had interviews that addressed many of the problems the city faced: police brutality, gentrification, political corruption (Chicago's long-time mayor Richard M Daley graced the cover in a portrait by Jon Langford). But the issue was also a lot of fun: infectious cable-access kiddie dance party Chic-a-Go-Go got a feature, as did cult hot dog chef Doug Sohn, otherwise known as Hot Doug.

When we did this interview, there was never a line at Hot Dougs. That changed over the years, but a framed copy of this interview remained on his wall 'til the end.

How the Hot Dougs interview came together is maybe indicitive of the whole issue. I was on my way back from shooting photos of journalist Salim Muwakkil for his interview in the issue when I stopped into a hot dog joint that I'd passed a few times before but never stopped at. I walked in, the Clash was playing, the walls were covered with hot dog memorabilia, and it all felt right. Doug was behind the counter, welcoming and gregarious, and after I'd eaten an inexpensive and delicious meal I introduced myself and asked him if he'd be willing to do an interview. There was a level of why not to this issue that I always loved. We were really close to deadline at that point, but one more thing that could really make Chicago, Chicago? Why not.

The interview that came out of it—short because we were close to deadline and, well, because it's hot dogs—is still one of my favorites from the magazine. Cutting quickly to the chase, it's about those same Chicago values: "I didn't want to exclude anybody. Hot dogs are the everyman's food," Doug told me. "I have no moral qualms at all making a good, well-priced lunch for people. I have no problem with that at all."

That's Chicago.

It still is.

This week, as chaos breaks out across the country and the people of this city stand firm against the fascist incursion, it's good to remember.

Issues 55, 54, and 51.

Year Nine Miscellany: This was actually a phenomenally good year of the magazine. Jeff Guntzel's harrowing story of being shot at in the occupied West Bank is just as relevant today as as it was in 2002. So is issue 54's cover story "Where Have all the Musicians Gone?" featuring a couple dozen artists speaking out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the Revenge of Print, featuring an incredible cover by Art Chantry, is still one of my favorite issues of all time. Taking the same approach as our Art & Design issues, it was a single-subject issue dedicated to those of us still toiling away at the important work of print and featured excerpts from dozens of writers. At 182 pages, it was our longest issue ever.

Hidden Writings

2025-01-22T00:00:00Z

A packet of tomato seeds. A booklet extolling the virtues of hand cream. An instruction manual for a camera. A guide for housewives on "the dangers that threaten every household," with an ad for Lysol on the back.

Der Kanarienvogel from the Emil J Gumbell collection at Center for Jewish History.

I've been thinking recently about how anti-fascist writing circulated in Germany after Hitler's rise. Called tarnschriften, or "hidden writings," these pocket-sized essays, news updates, and how-tos were hidden inside the covers of mundane, everyday materials.

Get a few pages in to Der Kanarienvogel, "a practical handbook on the natural history, care, and breeding of the canary" and you're no longer reading about how "the canary is one of the loveliest creatures on earth," but instead getting the latest updates on the anti-Nazi resistance efforts of the German Communist Party.

Crack open the dry technical manual "Sending and Receiving of Short and Ultra-Short Waves. 1: Reception Technology," and eventually you're learning how to build your own short wave radio to tune into anti-fascist broadcasts beamed into Germany.

Sending and Receiving of Short and Ultra-Short Waves. 1: Reception Technology, from the Wiener Holocaust Library.

Information wants to get out, even in places like Germany in the 30s, where the government brutally cracked down on it. Books were burnt. People were killed. Others fled. That didn't stop information from getting out. It took massive risk, it took huge effort, but the word was spread.

°°°

This week, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Apple's Tim Cook, Google's Sundar Pichai, and TikTok's Shou Chew all attended Donald Trump's second inauguration. They donated millions to the inaugural committee. Before that, Musk spent upwards of a quarter billion dollars on the election, Zuckerberg announced a slew of awful changes to Meta's properties including kicking the door wide open to hate speech and misinformation, Bezos spiked the endorsement of Kamala Harris at the Washington Post, and TikTok went offline only to return with a fawning message of thanks to Trump.

Tomato – Miracle of the Markets!, from the Wiener Holocaust Library.

Meanwhile, mainstream journalism—in decline in part thanks to those very same tech oligarchs—has not exactly been covering themselves with glory, as evidenced once again this week by both-sidesing Elon Musk's Nazi salute. It is as clear as it's ever been that not every news org is up to the task ahead.

Right now is not a good time for information.

But information wants to get out.

And it's on us to do it. We're all we have left.

We need to build new things in new ways independent of the oligarchs that now control the government after already controlling much of our lives.

Utility Instruction for the Dollina 35mm Camera, from the Emil J Gumbell collection at Center for Jewish History.

That means moving away from the platforms that have dominated the way we've connected, collaborated, and disseminated information for the last couple decades. The rise of mass social platforms has been at the cost of a truly independent, truly open internet. But it's still there. You can still build anything on it, free of platforms and the overreach of monopolists and oligarchs.

It also means reacquainting ourselves with offline connections. We've built for scale for so long (in our software and in our focus on swelling our own follower counts) that we've forgotten the power of a handful of people around a table. It's time to stop chasing scale and start chasing the right people. Spread information table to table, person to person. 1:1 is everything right now.

And while we're talking offline, let's talk about making physical media again: music that can't be taken away with a keystroke, movies that don't involve a subscription, and news, writing, art and more that can be copied and printed and handed person-to-person—inside seed packets or not.

We have to become the media that has collapsed. Pick up the pieces and build anew. Build robust. Build independent.

Of course none of this is easy. These are not easy times. But it's necessary to make it through them. And while it may not be easy, it won't be lonely, because there are a lot of us out here looking to build anew. We'll do it, and we'll do it together.

Information wants to get out. Let's help it.

°°°

Images in this post are from the Wiener Holocaust Library and the Center for Jewish History.

Standing on the line.

2025-01-12T00:00:00Z

I have a ritual I do most every time I'm in Los Angeles. I make my way to the end of the Santa Monica Pier at sunset. The Pier is loud and filled with tourists; there's a ferris wheel and a roller coaster. It's not the type of place I'd normally seek out. But I go because the Pier is the end of Route 66, the fabled highway that originates at Adams and Michigan in Chicago and extends across the US until it reaches the ocean. Until it reaches the Pier.

I go because when I stand there—past the crowds and the carnival and the food stalls and the buskers—right at the very end of the Pier where the fishermen and young lovers jostle for a quiet corner, I'm connected by a line that goes from LA to Chicago. To home.

It's no longer a physical line—Route 66 was replaced by the interstate highway system a half-century or more ago. It's a brittle line now, one that exists only in small fragments and in memory. Like life.

And I go and I stand there, on that line that connects me to where I come from, as day turns into night. And as it does, I take a moment to reflect. On distance and time. On past and future. On a life that has lead me to this point from that point and on the mystery of what points will unfold from here.

The sun sets over the ocean at the end of the Pier. It's just you and water to the horizon. It is big and red and then it gets thinner and thinner until suddenly it blinks out and the sky turns from reds to blues. Every time I've stood there, as the sun disappears, people applaud.

Today, just blocks from the Pier, is an evacuation zone and, just beyond that, devastation at a scale that should be impossible to fathom but instead we are forced to face its horror as Los Angeles burns.

The first time I went to LA I thought I'd hate it. Midwestern bred, I was prepared to dismiss it as fake and obsessed with its own self-mythology. Instead I fell in love with it, because it felt so much like home.

Like Chicago, Los Angeles is a city that works. Every person I've ever met in LA is like me: someone who's ready to roll up their sleeves and put in the hours to get the job done. Far more than its glamorous mythology, it is a city of immigrants, of laborers, of people working hard every single day to get by. I've always found it gritty in the best way, riding its busses and the metro and walking for miles (admittedly walking places often gets me strange looks from folks that live there). I have eaten some of the best food of my life from temporary stalls on a random sidewalk in LA. I have hiked its hills and canyons and seen wildlife I never would have expected. I have watched so many sunsets over the water.

Every time I leave, I want to go back.

Even now, watching Los Angeles burn from 2000 miles away, feeling stressed and worried for those that are there—friends and family and so so many strangers—I want to go back.

Because LA is a city like Chicago, which rebuilt itself from the devastation of flames. And so I know it will happen there too. LA is a city that works. LA is a city that dreams. The people there—friends and family and so so many strangers—are ready to work, are ready to look out for each other, are ready to dream in a way that only LA can dream and build something better from the ashes.

Every sunset ends in darkness. But it sets up the sunrise of a new day.

End note: If you, like me, are looking for ways to help, the LA Public Press has compiled a very good list of lots of local resources.

Pulling the Threads

2025-01-07T00:00:00Z

Today Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta is bending the knee to the incoming Trump administration, doing away with their third-party fact checking program which kept watch over misinformation on their platforms (to dubious success, admittedly). He claimed this announcement was about free expression, but make no mistake: this is about capitulating in advance to the demands of Trump and the far right, who have fought for years against any attempt to label their lies as misinformation.

The changes Zuckerberg announced today—including removing "restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse" (read: allowing xenophobic and anti-trans hate speech to flow free), and bizarrely moving their trust and safety team from California to Texas, as if one state is somehow magically less biased than another—are going to make Meta's already terrible platforms much, much worse.

And I'm not going to play a part in it. I'm done with Threads.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, I left the platform because I didn't want to lend legitimacy to his shitty machinations on a platform I loved. Leaving Twitter back in 2022 was hard and lonely. Leaving Threads is not.

Launched as a Twitter alternative in 2023, Threads grew quickly, built on the back of Instagram's social graph. And while it was fine it was never particularly good. It featured an overly-aggressive algorithm that shoved useless "gas leak" content into your feed all the time, making finding posts from your actual friends difficult and anything actually timely nearly impossible.

Bluesky and Mastodon have always been more engaging than Threads and with the mass exodus from Twitter after the election (what took you so long), Bluesky especially has been downright fun the last few months. That they are also built on open protocols means that there's more flexibility and less of a threat of a single meglomaniac tanking the platforms (this is especially true for Mastodon, a truly open network and will become more likely with Bluesky as the AT protocol grows). So I'm going to stick with those (I had, up until today, been active on all three), find me on either.

Meta is, of course, not just Threads. It's Facebook and Instagram and Oculus and WhatsApp too, all much, much larger than Threads and, thusly, harder to fully extract from. I left Facebook so long ago I don't actually remember when it was (2010 maybe?), but Instagram I am begrudgingly staying connected to for now because there really is no viable alternative. Which sucks, absolutely, and will be a decision I revisit probably sooner than later.

"Why do I stay and when will I go?" are questions we should all be asking ourselves now. Find the lines you won't cross.

In the months since the election, every major tech company executive has made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring of Donald Trump. It's not just Meta, not by a lot. Amazon, Apple, Uber, OpenAI, the list goes on and on. At this point trying to extract yourself from all of the companies that have bent the knee to Trump would involve extracting yourself from most of the internet (not the worst idea in the world, but not particularly practical). But it's important to know where your lines are drawn because the coming months are going to be a challenge and knowing where you stand is going to be crucial.

So goodbye Threads, you were never very good. And fuck you, Mark Zuckerberg, neither were you.

The Stories of 2024

2024-12-30T00:00:00Z

2024 was a blur. Ask me what happened prior to election day in November and it's all sort of fuzzy. But also, ask me what happened after and it's all just ear-ringing and fire. Which means now I'm sitting down on the next-to-last day of the year to capture some of my favorite things of the year and… it's all just a fog.

There are of course, any number of really terrible things that punctured that fog, not the least of which was the reelection of Donald Trump. But I don't want to leave 2024 focused on awfulness, but instead on the moments of good

So here's a look at some of the good things that cut through the fog for me this year.

Probably the quote that I've thought about the most this year comes from Real Madrid soccer star Vinicius Jr, issued after he won a court case against fans hurling racist abuse at him:

"I'm not a victim of racism. I am a tormentor of racists. This first criminal conviction in the history of Spain is not for me. It's for all black people. May other racists be afraid, ashamed and hide in the shadows. Otherwise, I'll be here to collect."

2025 is going to require a lot of tormenting of racists. Count me in.

As someone who's been in the digital wilderness for the last couple years after abandoning Twitter due to Elon Musk's takeover, it's been very heartening to see the burst of enthusiasm (and user-base) around Bluesky in the last two months. While I'm not sure why people waited so long, it's good to see a real critical mass of folks finally embracing an alternative platform (that said, there's a longer post to be written about how we shouldn't repeat the same mistakes of going all-in on a single site). It's fun and feels fresh in a way that Twitter hadn't in a very long time, even before I left. Find me there.

I listened to two podcasts this year that I've continued to think about:

Tested, by Rose Eveleth. Tested is an incredibly well-reported podcast about the regulation of women's bodies in sport. It's an amazing listen, as much about right now as it is about history and the amount of work that Rose put into it is legit mind-boggling to me.
The other podcast I was really obsessed with this year didn't come out this year, but was new to me: Dead Eyes. It's the story of host Connor Ratliffe trying to learn why Tom Hanks fired him 20 years earlier. But really it's a meditation on the entertainment industry and memory in pretty equal parts and once it really finds its footing it is stunning.

There were two games I couldn't stop playing this year:

UFO 50, which I wrote about earlier this year, an incredibly dense collection of 50 different games from a vintage game console from the 1980s that never actually existed.
Balatro, a deck-building game that uses the basic scoring of poker as the launching point for an unbelievably addictive game that I basically had to ban myself from playing for a while because it was getting in the way of actual work.

One book never left my nightstand this year: The latest by Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year. This was my most-anticipated book of the year and it did not disappoint. A meditation on aging and grief and basketball, it cemented my belief that Hanif is the best writer in the country. Every single word is resonant.

A couple things I've written about on this blog already this year have continued to stick with me:

Extraordinary, a British show ostensibly about superheroes, but really about what it's like to not know the thing you're good at when it feels like everyone else does.
Cabel Sasser's excellent talk from the XOXO conference about finding history, story, and genius in a rural Washington McDonalds.

Much of this year was spent working at home or traveling to Florence, Kentucky on reporting outings for Rebel Spirit, but there are two experiences from this year that are still resonating in my head:

After the unexpected and deeply sad death of Steve Albini, his wife Heather Whinna gathered together a community of people who had been touched by Steve's life. I was lucky to be among them. Held on the shore of Lake Michigan in Zion, Illinois, it was a beautiful weekend of song and stories. Ever since I have thought a lot about the communities we engage with and the people we inspire (and inspire us) and how, at the end of it all, assembling those communities is perhaps the most beautiful act of closure imaginable.
I spent election day at Disneyland, with my Says Who podcasting partner Maureen Johnson. It was the most surreal place possible to see out the stress of November 5 and, until the actual results started coming in, it felt like we'd found a cheat code for life. You know what happened next. But I will never forget ending that night in a teacup with Maureen, spinning ourselves into oblivion.

Finally, I thought I'd end with another quote I've thought about a lot this year. I glimpsed it briefly on a mural from the window of the E Line, while out in Los Angeles for that Disneyland trip: "Our Days Begin and End as Stories." It's by Canadian artist Brendan Fernades, and was part of a larger work called "I'm Down" that debuted in 2017, but the mural remains and, the day after the election when it flashed by my train, it hit me exactly where I needed to be hit.

Our days begin and end as stories.

The stories of 2024 are coming to a close tomorrow. The stories of 2025 will start fresh immediately after. We know that there will be stories next year that are hard, stories that will push us and test us. So, as 2025 unfolds, hang on to the stories that are good, that give you hope, that remind you to keep trying. Because those are the stories we need the most.

He'll be back at Christmas time

2024-12-24T00:00:00Z

Ever since this summer, I've been haunted by David Pajo's performance of The Pretenders' "2000 Miles" at the gathering to remember Steve Albini. It was a warm summer Saturday, the wind blowing in hard off the lake. The gathering was a memorial and a celebration and it was a joyous melancholy that I feel like I'm still processing.

The whole weekend featured incredible performances, many of them brought me to tears, but this song.

This song.

It's so beautiful and sad and exactly right.

This Christmas Eve, I thought I'd share it with you.

(if for some reason the embed messes up it's at 1:04:54)

Here Comes the Argument: Punk Planet, Year Eight

2024-12-19T00:00:00Z

Punk Planet Year Eight, issues 44-49.

"I have read Punk Planet since its inception. I have always vehemently disagreed with you about your sniveling attitude towards the Palestinians and the Muslim/Arab world in particular. I think it is irresponsible. I think it has always been treasonous. I think it is disgusting. And I hope and pray that…"

A dial tone.

That was what was waiting for me on the voicemail at Punk Planet's small office on September 12, 2001.

A day before I had watched the events of September 11 unfold from that same office. The first plane had hit as I was driving. In my memory, it was reported on NPR as a small plane, sort of a concerning news report but not one that I followed up on as I got in and got to work. A phone call a few minutes later told me a second plane had hit, and I dug a small TV up from under a desk and set it up, it got a weak signal. I watched the towers collapse through TV static alone in the office.

We were a couple months into work on our second Art & Design theme issue at that point and, through a snowy TV screen, the world changed in an instant. Art felt deeply irrelevant right then. I can't remember the exact timing, but that issue was cover dated November/December 2001, which would have been on newstands sometime in mid-October, which would have meant it went to the printer sometime in mid-September. There was no changing up at that point. Plus, in those uncertain days after September 11, what story we could tell was still unclear.

The voicemail the next day helped clarify things: We'd do what we always do. We'd do interviews, we'd lean on our regular writers and find other voices from activism and academia, and we'd try and tell a complex story of a complex time.

The cover for our post-September 11 issue.

It took longer than normal. Issue 47, which features a stark red cover with a silhouetted plane dropping a bomb on it, is maybe our only issue with a single month on it: February 2002. In the introduction I explained that pulling together the issue was hard. There was a lot going on, and I remember it being very hard to stay focused. From the time the first plane hit to this issue coming out, the US had invaded Afghanistan as the first strike on the "War on Terror" that would follow. It was a time of Freedom Fries. Of Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" being inescapable. It was not a time of a great deal of critical press.

The resulting package, called "War Songs in Ten Verses" offered a diverse array of voices all speaking about a world seen through a lens deeply critical of American power. It wouldn't have happened without the world of contributing editor Joel Schalit and regular contributor Jeff Guntzel, who both brought their own critical lenses to the collection. Looking it all over again, I'm struck at how multifaceted the critique is. From an interview with a spokesperson from the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, to calling out the clampdown on press freedoms that followed 9/11, to multiple pieces looking at how America had itself supported terrorism over the years. It was complex and challenging. I remember how much work it was for all of us, but it felt like the times demanded it.

The opening spread for our War Songs package.

I don't know if the person who left that voicemail on September 12 read it. Probably not. But I do know this. Two issues later, PP49, there's a letter in our letters section that I'd completely forgotten about until I looked over the issues from Year Eight:

My name is Jon and I'm writing to tell you about how Punk Planet has opened my eyes and made me look at things a little differently. I work for the Fox News Channel in New York City. Their slogan is "the network America trusts for fair and balanced news."

I never thought anything of it until I picked up the latest Punk Planet and I read the article with ten different things about the war that you might not have known, or whatever the title was. After reading it, I turned on my TV and I started watching what the anchors at my work were saying and how what they were saying was totally one-sided and it really was not fair and balanced at all.

In looking back over the years of Punk Planet, sometimes the amount of work that we put into it feels crazy. It was not a big magazine. At its height, we were selling somewhere around 18,000 issues. Nobody was making any money. It always teetered on the precipice of financial disaster (untill eventually it fell). But that letter was why.

In moments of uncertainty—whether moments of global magnitude or moments of a much more personal nature—we offered a voice that told you you weren't alone, and that questioning things was important, especially when the questions weren't being asked elsewhere.

And sometimes someone would hear that voice and it would change their life.

A shoutout to the incredible cover Love and Rockets' Jaime Hernandez drew for the Art & Design 2 issue. And Punk Planet is probably the only magazine to ever put Ralph Nader and Steve Albini on the same cover.

Year Eight Miscellaney: The Art & Design 2 issue was legit incredible. It featured four covers designed by Jaime Hernandez (above), Shepard Fairy (pre-Obama 'Hope'), poster artist Jay Ryan/The Bird Machine, and papercut artist Nikki McClure. It really deserves more play than this essay gives it. On a more bummer note, I noticed in looking over this year that our paper stock changed from the thicker white we had been using for a bit back to newsprint. It had gotten too expensive to print on better stock. And then there's the note at the end of the introduction of PP49: "Starting next issue, Punk Planet's going to cost another dollar. It was either that or fold up shop." While there are still years before the end, it's clear that staying afloat was getting more difficult.

Merchandise Keeps Us in Line

2024-12-08T00:00:00Z

It's the time of year that you're looking for gifts for others (and maybe yourself) and I thought I'd pull together a list of all the things that I've got for sale through my own site or other places. It's many things! In fact, I kept remembering more even as I pulled this together, and probably forgot some even.

Sinker Shop

My little webstore at shop.dansinker.com has more stuff than ever! It started as a place to sell one patch, but has expanded a bunch since.

New this week are Throwback Ts featuring designs from projects of mine from other lifetimes.

Grab a Punk Planet classic.

Or a Quaxelrod T.

How about a Punk Planet T featuring our long-running cut-and-paste design. We sold this in a bunch of different variations over the years. This is just a classic white on a black heather T.
Or a Quaxelrod T-shirt from the original design sold at the @MayorEmanuel book release party at the Hideout back in 2011?

And of course the TRYING patches that started this store have proven to be a long-time bestseller and are in-stock and available for you.

As are the brand-new TRYING sticker sheets that came out a couple weeks ago (and a set of a sticker sheet and a patch for a little less)

Other patches include my homage to the greatest typeface Cooper Black and the always popular Marginally Employed.

Rebel Spirit

Just as the initial run of Rebel Spirit wrapped up, we launched the Rebel Spirit Spirit Shop is your exclusive place for Biscuits merch.

How about a Biscuits T?

Or an embroidered Butter hat.

Why not get a Biscuit mascot T, or our cute biscuit on a mug, or maybe a butter hat? There's a bunch more options (including an actual baseball jersey) and, really, the biscuit is super cute.

Says Who Podcast

Says Who has maintained a webstore for years now, filled with shirts, mugs, and other in-jokes from the podcast. Perhaps you need a "These aren't bright guys and things got out of hand" mug, for obvious reasons. Or a "Meet you at the Haunted Mansion" fanny pack. Or, you know, a hoodie with me as a skeleton on the back. Don't worry, we've got you.

Me and Maureen as skeletons maybe?

Or let Bezos know how you really feel.

Says Who also offers membership in the Says Who Sticker Club where you get an exclusive sticker in the mail every month you give at the $10 level, which also gets you access to over 200 episodes of Maureen and my bonus podcast, the Town Watch.

And finally, we also maintain our own little bookshop at kickbezosintheballs.org (yes really that's the URL, you can also get it on a hoodie or a shirt) where any books purchased tosses a few bucks our way.

Books

The Punk Planet book, We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet the Collected Interviews, is still an incredible and inspiring read.

With things in this country going the way they are, you might want to pick up the excellent collection How I Resist, which I have an essay in.

(Both of these books are Bookshop.org affiliate links)

OK, that's it for me. It's kind of a lot of things! But maybe there is something for you in there. Your support means a lot!

Become the Media: Punk Planet, Year Seven

2024-11-30T00:00:00Z

Punk Planet Year Seven, issues 38-43.

Over the course of my last few Punk Planet essays I feel like I've focused in on a repeating pattern: consistency. At this point in the magazine's life (now just crossing the halfway point) there's a team of regular contributors bringing their A game every two months, a team of designers pushing each other to create beautiful pages, and a critical mass of an audience who were looking for the consistency we were bringing issue after issue.

And so yes, I could write about the continued push toward radical politics the magazine took (out of the six issues in Year Seven, only two featured music cover stories), or the evolution of the look and feel of the magazine (I'm particularly happy with issues 38 and 41's covers, which feel very iconic in very different ways), or I could talk at length about the swagger that it took to produce issue 39's cover story, Kyle Ryan's "The Crash," a twenty two page article about all the bands that signed to major labels after Green Day that didn't make it big. All of this is a result of the incredible consistency Punk Planet was producing at in 2000 & 2001. But I'm not going to write about all that.

I love the covers for issue 38, about the history of DC punk, and 41 with its beautiful camouflage cover, illustrated by Paul Chan, my collaborator on the Become the Media issue.

Instead I want to talk about the final issue in Year Seven's run, issue 43, from May/June 2001. Its cover hyped an entire 36 page section we called "Become the Media: A Reference Guide to a Revolution."

PP43, the "Become the Media" issue.

More than six months in the making, "Become the Media" was a collaboration between myself and frequent PP contributor Paul Chan and combined two of my favorite parts of Punk Planet—our ongoing coverage of underground mediamakers and the "DIY Files," how-tos we published every issue—into one juggernaut of a section. "Become the Media" not only offered detailed instructions on how to get started on what at the time were the latest digital technologies (most notably digital video & audio, HTML, and the now completely-outdated Flash), but also interviews and articles about the Independent Media Center, the radical media network that grew out of the 1999 WTO protests, a historical interview about 1960s media activists Newsreel, an article about how independent video production was giving youth of color an opportunity to counter mainstream media narratives about them, a look at how the Zapatistas used digital tech to get their message out from the jungles of Chiapas, and a conversation with free software activists who powered Indymedia. It was a potent combination that placed detailed instructions on how to do a thing right next to stories of people using that same thing in transformative ways.

The opening spread of the "Become the Media" section, I love the highly pixelated photos of gear we used and the overall stark, clean design approach.

In the introduction to the section (which I'm going to very lightly paraphrase because it was formatted as a webchat), Chan and I wrote:

The real power of this media issue is to have these things done in tandem: teach someone how to use something, while demonstrating HOW it's being used or the theory behind WHY it's being used and WHAT it's being used to make. Can a decentralized open system of media creation not only raise the bar on media access and education but also raise the bar on what is being written and created while also raising the bar on the very notion of what is good in media?

Looking over years of Punk Planet these last few months, one thing that has struck me over and over is how relevant much of it is to today. But this issue is especially so.

The central question here—can a decentralized, open system not only raise the bar on access but also on what's it's being used to create?—is super relevant RIGHT NOW, as we stand at a moment when traditional media institutions have failed us in yet another election cycle and the social media goliaths that have taken over all aspects of our lives over the last 15 years or so are (at least momentarily) faltering. And, of course, we have a fascist preparing to move into the White House to wage four years of war against the left, against migrants, and against anyone that dares question his absolute authority.

The time is now.

We need more access. We need more media. We need more voices.

And the tools are right there.

Right now we have a moment where two decentralized open systems—Bluesky's AT Protocol and the ActvityPub protocol that drives Mastodon—are succeeding in upending the social media trends of the last few years. One of the biggest sins of the algorithmic social media era was that links—the currency of the web—were downgraded. This is something that started on Instagram, where "link in bio" was the only place you could put a link, but has infected Facebook and Threads and whatever the hell Twitter is now. Even Google's search, which used to pride itself on how fast it could send you back out to the web is in on the act now, clogging its top spots with its own AI slop. Depreciating the link is done to trap people in a platform instead of sending them out to the web. It's the same dark pattern that creates clockless mazes in casinos: engagement goes way up if there's no reason to leave. In the pursuit of profit (and power) these companies destroyed the link and hurt all of us.

On Bluesky and Mastodon the link rides up front: social media becomes a distribution mechanism again and the good old fashioned web becomes newly relevant. Because you can still build anything on the web, host it wherever you want for very little cash (I have not paid for hosting in years), and have it accessible in an instant by anyone, platform agnostic and without mediation.

Looking back on issue 43 of Punk Planet, the relevant technologies we outlined—building on the web and working with video and audio—are easier and cheaper than they were in 2000 by a mile, and still super relevant. And especially when it comes to podcasting, it's still built on a remarkably open protocol that make it so anyone can publish and anyone can listen without proprietary subscriptions or app-specific tech. At the end of every podcast you hear someone say "get it wherever you listen to podcasts" and that is actually a very radical statement in an era where too many things are closed systems.

There's also the ancient (in internet years) open protocol of email, which has been having a renaissance over the last few years through newsletters (of which I've made a few). While making a website can feel hard, writing an email is easy. And there are more places than ever to use to send it out (though I would ask you please to consider not supporting Substack, which platforms the far right and is attempting to corner the newsletter market in a proprietary way that will not end well for open systems). But hell, maybe you don't even want to write emails. Your groupchat is a great way to get the word out. Don't just think of it as sharing the tea, think of it as peer-to-peer information sharing.

But also creating pages on the web itself is still straightforward, especially if you don't worry about a lot of modern bells and whistles. The web used to look like shit, but anyone could build on it. Maybe this is me at my post Pollyannaish, but there's nothing stopping us from getting back to that. The janky web of the past is still right here in the present. Look, let's do it now:

<html>
<head>
<title>Your title for the browser</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Your title for real</h1>
<p>Your stuff</p>
</body>
</html>

Copy that code, type whatever you want, save it as a .html file and it'll open in any browser. While it might look like a webpage from 1994, it still totally works in 2024, it will load instantaneously and costs essentially zero dollars to host. The web is still radical. And the web is still easy, even if modern webdev tells you otherwise.

None of this stuff is the exclusive domain of billionares or of established media corporations. It all exists for you too. It's yours to make and to build and, most importantly, to try.

I know this was supposed to be an essay about Punk Planet Year Seven, but "Become the Media" isn't just an old issue, it's a rallying cry for right now. The time to build, the time to create, the time to experiment, the time to find your voice is right now. It's never been easier and it's never been more needed.

Find your voice, find other people's too, amplify them, spread them, and become the media. We need you.

Hope in the Rubble: a birthday request

2024-11-14T00:00:00Z

Today is my birthday, a big one, and the world is shit. After last week's gutpunch of an election, I don't feel much like celebrating, but I do feel like trying to do something hopeful.

Lately I've been reminding myself to remember what Mariame Kaba says: "Hope is a discipline and we have to practice it every day." In hopeless times like this, it's important to remember: you have to work at having hope.

For the last year, like the rest of you, I've been watching the ever-more-dire, ever-more-hopeless situation in Gaza. The daily bombings, the hundreds of thousands dead, the utter destruction of homes and schools and hospitals. It is a nightmare without end.

And yet, from among the rubble of the atrocities there, I've found an incredible amount of hope in the Gaza Skate Team.

Rajab gives a hi-five to a young skater in this pic from their instagram. In the caption, he writes "How beautiful childhood is, you find innocence in their smiles and simplicity in their dealing."

The Gaza Skate Team was founded by Rajab al-Reefi and some friends a few years ago. Since the bombing began, Rajab and his team have been working to bring a little bit of happiness to kids who have lived through too much. In the background of every picture they post on their Instagram is destruction, but the foreground is filled with pure joy on kids faces as they try out a skateboard.

A few years ago I wrote "I've been a lot of things, but I was a skater first," and it's true. Even though I haven't been on a board in a minute, it's a part of me that will never leave. A big part of that is the freedom I felt as a child on a skateboard; being able to navigate the city, to see it as a series of obstacles to overcome, it changed me forever.

In an interview with GQ Middle East, conducted just before the horror of October 7 and the nightmare that followed, Rajab reflected on the role skateboarding plays for him: "Skateboarding, for me, is the most important thing I have. It offers me and my friends freedom—I get to feel like a bird in this prison we are living in."

Rajab addresses a group of kids in this still from from an instagram reel.

The children that flock to the Rajab and the Gaza Skate Team don't deserve the hell they are living through. No one does. They deserve to be kids like I was, like you were. I love that Rajab and his friends, in the absolute worst conditions possible, are trying to give kids a sense of freedom and hope, even for a moment.

We live in hopeless times. Anyone practicing the discipline of hope, and spreading that hope to others—especially to kids—deserves praise and support.

And so, for my birthday, I'm asking you to donate to Rajab and the Gaza Skate Team's Gofundme. He's only a few thousand Euros from hitting his goal, and I think we could get there, today.

A Song for Right Now

2024-11-08T00:00:00Z

I'm still pretty numb from the election, but I have been finding a lot of solace in "Fantasy Baseball at the End of the World" by John K Samson, written during the first Trump presidency and, I think, capturing that moment (and, now, this moment) as perfectly as can be.

Right now is very hard. Here's something beautiful and angry and hopeful.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

I manage my fantasy baseball team better
Than I manage my anger these days
And I'd trade my best pitcher
For a draft-pick and a picture
Of the president writhing in pain

It's a weird thing to wish for
But I can't stop wishing
Refreshing the browser, someday
If I live long enough
And the world doesn't end
My wish will come true, in a way

And he'll die like we all die
In pain or asleep
And we'll still have our fantasy baseball
And the next fascist fucker in line for the job
Of demolishing hope for us all

So I'm putting in love now
I'm putting in faith
Putting fear on a long-term IL
I'm going outside
I'm going to help organize
Something better
Something beautiful

A Picture Postcard. Punk Planet: Year Six

2024-10-30T00:00:00Z

Punk Planet Year Six, issues 32-37.

I'm not sure if there's a year that better exemplifies how much Punk Planet had found its stride than Year Six. The articles were legit great (PP36's "Death in Texas" is one of the best articles we ever ran), our columnists were popular, the record review sections were enormous, even little features like the DIY Files, which offered instructions on everything from laying floor tile to self-defense, had expanded into a mini-section with regular entries on DIY Audio, DIY Health, DIY Business, and DIY Sex. Punk Planet had become 150 extremely confident pages served up every-other month. And it only took six years.

There was one huge change in Year Six that completely transformed the magazine. As I mentioned in the endnotes of the essay on Year Five, at the very end of that year, we adopted a consistent headline typeface, Knockout (from what was then the Hoefler & Frere-Jones type foundry), and standardized the look and feel of the magazine much more than we ever had before. That work was done in part for a change that would happen right away in Year Six: the departure of Josh Hooten who had played an integral role in the graphic language of the magazine since issue nine. Having standardized the design of the magazine ahead of this meant that bringing new people in to help design was much more straightforward.

That said, the design language we adopted was anything but "standard," allowing designers quite a bit of free reign over type treatment, art, and layout. But there were rules: reaching back to punk's cut-and-paste zine roots, we put an emphasis on hand-manipulated, xerox smeared type. But, you know, classy.

Three people would come in to fill Josh's shoes: Dustin Mertz, Marianna Levant, and Frol Boundin (they would be joined the following year by Mike Coleman and later still by Jon Krohn). They jumped right into the new design language we'd established and pushed it so much further than I could possibly have imagined. Everyone would assemble at the Punk Planet office (a tiny space on Ravenswood in Chicago) on our final production weekend. We'd pin our layouts up on a big bulletin board and critique them. We'd learn from each other. We'd push each other. Looking back at the whole of the Year Six run, it is clear this new crew brought a shot of adrenaline into the magazine that I didn't know it needed.

I thought that maybe the best way to mark the sixth year of Punk Planet was not with a lengthy essay but by making a gallery of some of the most exquisite spreads from this year. There were so many bangers that I couldn't even include them all.

PP33's cover story on hacker-activists got a beautiful full-spread opener.

The hand-crafted type and image for this Melvins interview (PP33) is mind-blowing.

While so much of what we did was highly-distressed, the stark approach for this first-hand diary from the WTO Protests in Seattle (PP36) is stunning.

Another clean approach, for DC band Q & Not U (PP37). I actually got an email from either Hoefler or Frere-Jones complimenting us on the use of Knockout's Q on this one.

I love how playful and disorienting the collage is on this opener for an interview with The Need (PP35). In processing this image, I kept rotating it wrong.

This layout focuses on the 911 call that's at the center of the murder in PP36's cover story Death in Texas.

We upgraded our paper which allowed for much darker layouts, like this one for the true-crime zine Murder Can Be Fun (PP32). Previously, spreads like this would have come off on your hands.

Empty space creates tension in this far-too-relevant-today letter from a Palestinian in PP34.

I love how batshit this lockup is for an interview with filmmaker Jem Cohen about his collaboration with Fugazi, Instrument (PP33).

By the end of a production weekend, our floor would be covered with chopped up letters, like for this opening spread from PP32.

This team was very, very good at making collages that grabbed attention, like this one for longtime DC organizer Mark Andersen (PP35).

A really elegant approach for an interview with At The Drive-In (PP36).

I love the way textures and photos overlap in this spread with Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore (PP34).

There are so many more beautiful layouts than I could include here. It was a new team, but it's amazing how well everything fit together pretty much immediately. Of course, it only gets better in Year Seven. See you next month.

From The Vault: American Heel

2024-10-27T00:00:00Z

This week, after Donald Trump appeared on wrestling legend The Undertaker's podcast and Trump transition team co-chair Linda McMahon was sued for allowing sexual abuse to happen during her tenure as CEO of WWE, I thought back to a project I undertook but never finished four years ago: American Heel, a podcast about Donald Trump's history with professional wrestling and how Trump's presidency made everything professional wrestling.

The cover art for American Heel, which I commissioned from the incredible Aesthetic Apparatus.

I started reporting out the podcast in the summer of 2020. Stuck inside, a pandemic raging and a presidential election approaching, I wanted to focus on something that felt relevant and tangible and would take my mind off of the daily Covid body count.

As the shape of the podcast began to come together—eight episodes that would chronicle everything from Trump's long history with professional wrestling to the intertwined finances of the McMahon family and the Trump Foundation to the way that wrestling concepts like the promo and kayfabe have infiltrated politics and journalism—it was clear to me that it was an undertaking that was going to need a budget and a few more skilled hands to pull off.

So I started shopping it around, holding zoom meetings with a bunch of podcast networks. To help the conversations along, and to acknowledge that the turnaround was going to be tight, I cut together a rough cut of the first episode (and started on a cut of the second episode, which in the process thought might actually become the first). Everyone turned it down, largely because they were accustomed to year-long production windows and also because, to a person, nobody thought there would be any interest in Donald Trump once the 2020 election was over.

Well here we are four years later, we're a week away from the third election where he's the Republican candidate, and everything feels eerily similar to back when I was getting American Heel turned down. If anything, what once felt like subtext has become text: Donald Trump's walk-on music has become the Undertaker's dark theme, Rest in Peace.

And so I actually listened back to those two rough cuts I put together, and there's a lot of really interesting stuff there. Sure some things feel dated (lots of covid references) and other elements beg for an update (Vince McMahon, the head of the WWE for decades was forced out amid growing sexual abuse scandals of his own), but the fundamental concept still feels solid. Listening back, it felt like a missed opportunity to have these tracks just sitting on my backup drive.

So guess what? This blog is called "Unfinished Business," which is sort of an arbitrary title, but of the many things that I've started and not finished, American Heel is probably the one I regret the most. So I'm going to release the two rough cuts I put together back in 2020, now, here on this blog.

A few caveats: These are rough cuts, please understand that. The mix is choppy, my narration read is temp (and I reread lines a few times), there is no music, and there are a lot more audio cues that would have been dropped into a final, polished edit.

OK, that out of the way, here we go.

Episode One: No Chance in Hell. How the “Battle of the Billionaires” storyline from Wrestlemanie 23 became the defining GIF of Trump’s early presidency.

I wanted to make the first episode a bottle episode that would sort of encapsulate the whole thesis of the show in a single episode, as well as enmesh the listener in the world of pro-wrestling. This episode featured interviews with Open Mike Eagle, Wrestling Observer Newsletter head Dave Meltzer, CNN's Brian Stelter, and meme expert Kenyatta Cheese. Keep in mind, all of these were completed four years ago.

Episode Two: Know Your Role. A deep dive into Trump’s campaign rallies and how they borrow from the art of the promo, the interview a wrestler gives to fire up the crowd.

If there's a thesis statement to all this, it's this episode. And, I think if there's a thesis episode to the entire political landscape the US is in, it's in the quote from writer Dave Schilling that closes the episode. This episode features interviews with the aforementioned Dave Schilling, wrestler RJ City (who has since gone on to be an on-air interviewer for AEW), and political journalist Olivia Nuzzi (who has very recently become embroiled in controversy of her own). Note that this episode is topped by some audio from me, it's directed to a handful of folks that I sent the episode to for early notes.

I guess since I'm just laying this all out, here were the other episodes in the lineup:

Episode Three: You’re Fired. How Trump’s relationship with the WWE began with hosting two Wrestlemanias at the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, and what happened to Atlantic City afterwards.
Episode Four: The Family Business. On this episode we flip the script and investigate the McMahon family, the owners of the WWE and, surprisingly, the largest donors to the Trump Foundation.
Episode Five: Monday Night Wars. The story of how wrestling once dominated cable TV ratings and how it was knocked from its throne by Fox News.
Episode Six: Kayfabe. A look at how the White House — and the journalists who cover it — have adopted the wrestling art of kayfabe, the fiction that sells the story.
Episode Seven: Rock Bottom. A journey into the darker corners of the internet, where four years of Trump inflaming emotion through wrestling tropes, has become deadly real.
Episode Eight: The Brawl for All. With the presidential electon imminent, a look at how wrestling’s greatest hits have influenced the campaigns and how even if Trump is voted out, wrestling isn’t leaving our politics

Not everything gets released, I get it. But it's nice to finally have some of this out here, even in rough form. Thanks to everyone that did interviews way back when, including the 4-5 interviews I did for other episodes that never got cut together. And thanks to all of you for listening to these roughs.

Appreciate Everything Endlessly

2024-10-15T00:00:00Z

I've watched this absolutely delightful talk from Panic's Cabel Sasser a half-dozen times since it was released last week. It's a story of finding an unexpected world inside, of all places, a McDonalds, and the paths that are there to follow if you look for them.

I can't stop watching it. Part of that is my own personal malaise needing an injection of wonder, another part is because the world and the state of things is so awful that a simple story of finding unexpected joy feels so necessary, but the other part is because the message is one I think all of us need to hear every now and then: appreciate everything endlessly.

So go watch it, it's 20 minutes and worth every one of them.

Weapons and Motives. Punk Planet: Year Five

2024-09-29T00:00:00Z

Punk Planet issues 25-31.

Memory is interesting. I sat down with a box of the fifth year of Punk Planet fully knowing that the focus of this essay would be the 30th issue, which featured a cover story called "The Murder of Iraq," about the crippling sanctions that had been imposed on the people there since the first Gulf War in the early 1990s and the destruction they caused. At the time, 1998-99, nobody was writing about the sanctions, and dedicating 20 pages to a special section about it—let alone putting it on the cover (especially with a graphic photo of bloodied, bandaged legs)—was a pretty big risk.

PP30, and the cover we were told would mean "suicide" for the magazine.

I remember when they received the issue, the head of our distributor called me up to say she thought we were "committing suicide" with that cover. Remember, at this point, Punk Planet was still very much thought of as a music magazine. It turned out to be one of the most important issues we ever released, selling out its run and underscoring to all of us working on the magazine that veering heavily into politics wasn't "suicide" at all, but instead an important pillar of our reporting. (Our distributor called later to apologize.)

But like I said: Memory is interesting. Because while I thought that the 30th issue was the first time we'd reported on Iraq, the most stand-out element to me about the entire fifth year of the magazine is just how much space we dedicated to Iraq, the Middle East, and other conflicts around the world.

Our interview with activist Jon Strange in PP25.

Joel Schalit's essay about going back to Israel in PP27.

There's PP25's interview with Jon Strange, who at the time was a punk activist in Philadelphia who managed to ask Secretary of State Madeline Albright a question on a CNN Town Hall when the Clinton Administration was trying to build public support for another war in Iraq. Jon and other activists strategized on how to get on camera (largely involving looking respectable in a shirt and tie) and many credit Jon's question as helping to turn a tide of public sentiment against the Clinton Administration's aggressions. When I found out he was a Philly punk, I reached out to do the interview. He was back in our pages again two issues later, with a diary from the trip to Iraq that he took with a group of "activists, workers, veterans, doctors, students, clergy, and one punk (yours truly)" to deliver medicine and raise awareness.

An issue after that, PP28, we had another travelogue (getting folks to write diaries from trips they were taking for other reasons was a great way to increase the scope of our coverage without having to foot hefty travel bills), this time from contributing editor Joel Schalit, whose regular contributions sharpened the magazine's lens of world politics. This essay, which was written at a time when Netanyahu (yes, the same guy as now) had just sealed off the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and was a pointed combination of the personal and political, which became a signature of Punk Planet's approach. "I came of draft age while living in Portland in 1985," Joel wrote, "and I decided not to return home because I did not want to serve in the Israeli Army. We'd already invaded Lebanon by then and killed thousands of civilians in order to quash a nascent Palestinian army. The war made me sick to my stomach."

The opening spread of our "Murder of Iraq" cover section.

All of this (and there was quite a bit more over the course of the year) culminated in PP30's "Murder of Iraq" cover story, which we presented as a special 20-page section, with multiple articles, photographs, and interviews. The centerpiece of the section was "Finding my Voice," a personal essay by Jeff Guntzel about how he went from "drumming in a punk band and working at a landscaping company in Minneapolis," to moving to Chicago to travel to Iraq with the activist organization Voices in the Wilderness.

I'd met Jeff at a bar in Chicago a few months before—we had a mutual friend—and hearing his story was fascinating. I knew we wanted to feature that work and asked him to write an essay. He'd never written anything like it before, and I worked with him to bring his humanity to the fore. "The relentless compassion I was shown by the Iraqi people made it impossible for me not to cry when I watched the bombs rain down on them in December," he wrote. "To me, we weren't bombing a faceless 'enemy.' We were bombing my friends." Jeff would go on to become an amazing journalist in his own right and continued to contribute to Punk Planet to the end, including a harrowing diary of his time traveling to the West Bank a few years later.

I'm still haunted by the photo of this father holding his child.

Every now and then I'm asked how, if Punk Planet was still around, we would cover various topics. I usually answer with a noncommittal "I'm not sure," because so much of making a magazine is collaborative and reflects a collective voice and vision. But there's one thing I know for certain: With the relentless bombing and slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians that has been going on in Gaza for almost a year now, and the harrowing expansion of Israel's bombing campaign into Lebanon in the last week, we would have covered it exactly the same way we did back then. Unapologetically and unflinchingly.

This should be a surprise to no one. Punk Planet changed a lot in its 13 years, but one thing didn't: we were steadfastly anti-war, anti-colonialist, and anti-imperialist from the moment we found our voice to the very end of the magazine. This didn't always come easy. With Jeff visiting Iraq regularly and phoning the office, our phones were tapped (which I wrote about in a personal essay back in 2013). We got death threats after September 11th. Some writers quit. It would have been easier to have just stuck to music and art, just as it would be easier to stay silent now.

We never chose the easy way, and Year Five shows why. Because the harder tack—the one that sides with people over governments, with the occupied over the occupier, and with life over death—is the right one.

An absolute incredible run of music covers.

A few bits of Year Five miscellany: While global politics was the focus of this essay, Year Five also featured cover interviews with Steve Albini (RIP), Kathleen Hanna, Sleater-Kinney, and Ian MacKaye, perhaps the best lineup of bangers we ever had in a single year. Year Five also saw the cover price increase from $2.00 to $3.50, a move so controversial that letters arguing about it fill three issues worth of letters sections. Finally, PP29 marked the standardization around Knockout as our feature typeface, which would stick around for the rest of the magazine's lifespan and, to me, defines the signature look of the magazine.

Getting Lost in UFO 50

2024-09-25T00:00:00Z

Everything is kinda shitty and stressful right now, so here's a little look at something that's neither.

I wasn't allowed to have videogames when I was a kid, so I chose my friends based in part on who had a game system at home. Alan had an Atari and a pile of games. Geoff had an Apple II and Kareteka. A kid who moved out of town in third grade had an Intellivision, with its one-of-a-kind dial controllers. A few years later, a younger cousin got a Super Nintendo and getting a babysitting job over there meant getting to play Zelda. I didn't get my own game system until I moved out at 17 and bought a Sega Genesis and lost hours to Sonic's quest for golden rings.

UFO 50's throwback title screen.

This is a long way to say that the 8 bit nostalgia that runs through UFO 50—a new, mindblowing, indie game that came out on Steam last week—is both familiar and (like the song says) not too familiar. Its limited color palate, chunky bitmaps, and chiptune songs feel like a language I know, but didn't grow up speaking. And yet it's an enthralling language that has had me fully obsessed for the last few days.

I'm doing a disservice in calling UFO 50 a game. Because it's actually fifty games and, I think, a larger meta game or story that I still have yet to even scratch the surface of. The premise, told in bitmapped stills in the opening menu, is this: A group of game developers discovered a long-forgotten 1980s game console, the LX, in an abandoned storage locker. They work to port the system to a PC, and then emulate 50 of the best games produced for the LX console by UFO Soft from 1982-1989. Those 50 games are packaged together in UFO 50 and, in addition to the basic rules and gameplay information, each one comes with a small backstory of its development and the date it was published.

This is, of course, all fictional. There was no UFO Soft, no LX system. None of the games ever existed, until now.

Barbuta, the first game created by UFO Soft.

Bushido Ball, the incredibly fun samurai tennis game.

And yet each of the games is so lovingly crafted with such an impeccable eye and ear to 1980s games that you pretty quickly forget that you're not playing something vintage but instead something modern. And these aren't tiny games either. They're full-length, fully playable, remarkably difficult, and wholly addicting. And they're varied, from old-school adventure games, sports games, space fights, dungeon crawls, and then a lot that are truly, astoundingly, weird.

I literally can't stop playing Party House.

I've been mostly obsessed with Party House, a simple deckbuilding game where you invite people to a house party, but if you include too many troublemakers the cops shut it down. Yes, this is a game. And yes, it's amazing.

But there's also something larger going on. At least I'm pretty sure there is. There are characters, not in the games but in the minimalist history of the UFO Soft team. There's Thorson Petter, who almost got fired developing Barbuta, the first game in the collection. There's Gerry Smolski, who started at LX Systems as a hardware specialist but designed his first game with Paint Chase, a sort of 8-bit Splatoon played with F1 cars. And there's Benedikt Chun, creator of Golfaria, a game where you explore a distant land as a sentient golf ball (I told you the games were weird). Through these tiny game descriptions you get a sense of the people, their relationships, their family. The company grows, LX Systems becomes UFO Soft. The LX system has at least three generations. And then… it ends. And I can't help but think there's a story to that hiding somewhere. I can't wait to find it.

Paint Chase gives Tron lightcycle vibes.

Fist Hell might be the best name for a fighter ever.

UFO 50 feels boundless in the best possible way. The joy the creators took in making it all is evident in every pixel. It's a love letter to a golden era of videogames. It immerses you in the way that all the best art does: it brings you in and you never want to leave. It might be a game (or 50) but it has the depth of a novel and I can't wait to keep reading.

Living History

2024-09-10T00:00:00Z

"So that story sounds like bullshit."

I remember saying that to Akilah Hughes early in our first production meeting about the podcast that would become Rebel Spirit, which launched last week and released its second episode today. Akilah had just relayed the story she'd been told of how her high school got its name "the Rebels": the students of the founding class in the mid-1950s were so enamored with the film Rebel Without a Cause that they named the team after it.

It is a story, like I said, that sounds like bullshit.

But there's a big difference between something sounding like bullshit and being able to prove that it is bullshit. And so one of the first things I embarked on with Akilah when we started working on Rebel Spirit was trying to figure out if a story from 70 years ago was true or not. The small number of people who were there at the time are either dead or extremely elderly. There's no archive of the school's newspapers, if there even was one at the time. And nobody at the school today will talk to us, so if there's some information about the name held there, we couldn't get it. So we dug.

Today's episode, "History Lessons," is a result of that digging and it's some of the best reporting I've ever done. It ends up not just being about the school mascot, but about what it was like to be black during desegregation, about the domestic terrorism that followed the Civil War, and about how, when you start digging, you never quite know where you're going to end up.

The winding path that accompanies good reporting is what I've always loved about journalism. Following the facts wherever they might lead is what's kept me involved in this business for so long (it's certainly not the money).

And that's been the most rewarding thing about producing Rebel Spirit: the journey has brought us so many unexpected places, talking to so many people we didn't expect to, and learning so much about not just a small school in Northern Kentucky, but about the lies that America is built on. (And yes, we expose those too.)

But also, it's hilarious. And poignant. And pretty goddamn amazing. Every episode we finish I'm like "this is the best one," and then we do the next one. I can't wait for you to hear all of them.

If you haven't started listening to Rebel Spirit yet, today's the day. If you have, thank you, and please spread the word. Tell a friend, post about it, leave reviews. Podcasting is a wild medium in that it really does need you to help get it out there. I'd love your help. Thanks.

Subscribe to Rebel Spirit on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, Pandora, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes. Punk Planet: Year Four

2024-08-31T00:00:00Z

Punk Planet issues 19-24.

Unless I've forgotten something important (likely), there was no year with more changes for Punk Planet than the fourth year. As I wrote about at the end of the essay about Year Three, being picked up by Mordam Records for distribution changed everything for the magazine. Instead of hustling ourselves into stores, there was a dedicated staff of (incredibly great) folks to do that. Instead of boxing and shipping magazines across the country (and world), that was now Mordam's job. And instead of chasing down checks that would never arrive, they handled that (and they arrived). That was the fuel that drove massive change in Year Four.

In reading over all the introductions to the year's six issues, here's just some of the things that changed for the magazine (and me) in 1998:

Issue 22 marked the first issue not to have a "self cover" newsprint cover, instead opting for a full-color cardstock cover that would protect the very cheap paper inside. This was done partly for practicality's sake, as I point out in the introduction to PP22, the newsprint-only approach left issues on a newsstand looking "dog-eared and beaten, ripped and smudged," and putting a strong cover on protected the pages within. But also, the move acknowledged what was rapidly becoming clear: Punk Planet had become a "real" magazine, and it was changing to reflect that.
To that end, that full cover cover, and its increased production cost, meant that, for the first time, we sold back cover advertising in Punk Planet. Lookout Records, who had been supporting PP since day one, took that ad space for years. It's a fun time capsule to look at our ad rates in 1998: our cheapest ad was only $25 and a full page would set you back $200. These were only available to independent labels, so low prices were important. But wow, that's cheap.
Year Four was also the year that we finally printed a barcode on our cover which, in the underground at the time, was considered a controversial move and a clear sign of "selling out." I wrote a lengthy explanation/apology for it in the introduction of PP23 and I still remember the volume of letters we received about it afterwards. The underground back then was truly incredible but also incredibly insular and its self-policing of what was and wasn't selling out is almost comical now looking back.
This was also the year that the magazine got big. Not just in sales—which thanks to Mordam were picking up rapidly—but in page count. Every issue this year topped 150 pages, and a few of them touched 170. I'm not sure, but I think these may have been the longest issues we ever produced.
Away from production-related changes, this year also marked the moment that Josh Hooten—who had rapidly become the #2 at Punk Planet while living in Boston—moved into the apartment below me in Chicago. Joining him was Jason Gnewikow from the band The Promise Ring, who had helped to redefine punk design with the incredible record covers he made for the band. The three of us started a design company together, The Collection Agency, and for a few great years we made a lot of really amazing records (and not a lot of money).
My apartment above Josh & Jason also marked the first time that Punk Planet had a space that wasn't a corner of my bedroom. Instead, it moved into a tiny room in the two-flat my two roommates and I lived in. When I write about the move in the introduction to PP20, you'd think we were moving into real space. The reality was the Punk Planet "office" was essentially a small walk-in closet. I could touch two of the four walls if I extended my arms. We'd move into bigger space in years to come.

PP22, our first cardstock, full-color cover.

Year Four of Punk Planet was also when one of our most ambitious (and one of my very favorite) cover stories ran. In PP22's "Promises Broken: A woman, a disguise, and a sacred assembly of men," the writer Annalee Newitz (who has since gone on to become a best-selling author) traveled to Washington DC to attend, in disguise, the first national rally of the Promise Keepers, a men's-only evangelical Christian group.

"For about two weeks," Annalee wrote, "I had been practicing modulating my voice to make it lower. I tried different methods for constraining my breasts, finally settling on elastic athletic bandages and first aid tape. Standing in front of the mirror, I flattened my breasts over and over until I could do it quickly and efficiently. I knew in advance that I would have to bind myself in the train bathroom on the way to Washington, so I wanted to have my routine down pat."

Looking back on it 26 years later, I fully acknowledge now how completely dangerous this whole idea was, but back then Annalee was game and traveled from San Francisco all the way to DC to pull it off. We were all impossibly young and reckless. The piece Annalee wrote is stunning, scary, funny, and truly remarkable. It was one of the highpoints of the entire 13 year run of the magazine for me.

Three of the four covers for the Art & Design issue. Somehow the missing cover is the one I designed and don't have. These covers are by Volume One, House Industries, and Art Chantry.

Another came shortly after, with Punk Planet 24's Art & Design issue. The first of what would eventually become three theme issues dedicated entirely to underground art & design, looking at it today it almost makes me giddy just how alive it feels. Almost entirely a product of many late nights between Josh and me (the two of us conducted seven of the eight interviews in the issue), the issue's 164 pages are essentially our manifesto: that punk doesn't have to be just about music. That it can be art and photography and tattoos and prints and graphic design and so much more.

The opening spread for the Art Chantry interview.

An interior spread from the Cynthia Connolly interview.

The issue covers some of the most influential artists in the underground, from Winston Smith, whose collages for the Dead Kennedys defined so much of punk's look in the 1980s, to DC punk documentarian Cynthia Connolly whose photo book Banned in DC was about the closest thing I had to a bible in high school. Garage graphic designer Art Chantry's work was up next to font designers House Industries. The fluorescent inks of poster artist Frank Kozik (reproduced poorly in black and white) contrasted with the moody photography of Chrissy Piper. To top it off, we commissioned four different covers and worked with our printer to divide the run evenly among them, making the issue itself a limited-edition piece of art.

The opening spread for font designers House Industries.

An interior spread from the Winston Smith interview.

The Art & Design issue was probably the defining moment for that era of Punk Planet. Something wholly different, completely surprising, and executed flawlessly. It redefined how people thought about what we did, and more importantly what punk could be. I still, do this day, meet people who cite the Art & Design issues as transformative to how they approached their own work. And it certainly transformed how we thought about Punk Planet, what we believed the magazine could accomplish, and how it could push the underground forward in new and exciting ways.

Ways that would start to manifest in wholly new approaches in Year Five, next month.

Alone in a Crowd. Punk Planet: Year Three

2024-07-31T00:00:00Z

Punk Planet issues 13-18.

Punk Planet Year Three is one of my favorite years of the magazine (though, admittedly, I'll probably write that a lot in the coming months). This was the year that the very public learning process of the first two really started to produce results. The design of the magazine, which I wrote about at length in my Year Two reflection, had really solidified at this point and, with the look of PP much more solid, I found time to finally focus on the actual editorial side of the magazine.

Editorially, Punk Planet Years One and Two was a crapshoot. By and large we were running material that was coming in from anyone that sent things in (on 3 1/2" floppy disk). We had regular columnists, sure, and there were repeat contributors for interviews and things, but mostly we ran what came in, as long as it met a pretty low bar. That changed dramatically in Year Three, when we ran the first cover story I solicited from writers in issue 15.

PP15, featuring an incredible illustration by Mark Reusch.

It was 1996, Bill Clinton was up for reelection, Republican Bob Dole was running against him. As young punks, the height of Clintonian politics felt deeply alienating, and while Punk Planet had never shied away from being political (just a couple issues before we ran an article called "Fuck the Vote" written by an author named Atom, who I met when he was a roadie for the band Avail and who would later become award-winning journalist AC Thompson), we were still very much a music magazine at that point. But the Democratic National Convention was in Chicago that year (as it is again this year) and I thought there was an opportunity to do something different.

What if, I remember thinking, we sent someone to write about the DNC in Chicago and the RNC in San Diego, to give a sneering "pox on both houses" take on the state of US politics in the mid-90s. Chicago was easy. It was local and my friend, the writer and artist Paul Chan (who has gone on to win a MacArthur Genius Grant) was game to write an atmospheric, pessimistic take on the festivities (and managed to get a press pass into the hall itself). But the RNC was a bigger problem. San Diego was far away, we had zero dollars to travel, and I didn't know any writers that were local. But new PP contributor Joel Schalit, who would become a contributing editor the magazine in a few issues, knew someone, Aaron Shuman, and he was game to go.

The opening spread for our DNC package

The two articles that ran in a special section in Punk Planet 15, "Donkey Con: Dispatches from the Democratic National Convention," and "No Place in the Sun: All alone at the Republican National Convention," are big and ambitious and angry and funny and very much capture where I think many of us were at that moment in time.

The opening spread for our RNC package

In reflecting on the first Democratic National Convention held in Chicago since the infamous one in 1968, Paul Chan wrote "The state of young people in America is in many ways bleaker than in 1968. America has, since the '80s, more children in poverty than any other industrialized country in the world. We also have the highest infant mortality rate. It gets worse when you grow up, because there has been a steady decline in federal funds for public schools, a slashing of federal and state college education through subsidized loans and school grants. And with our economy shifting principally from manufacturing to service, most young Americans are stuck with low wage, low benefit jobs without any prospects of vertical socio-economic movement. All the ingredients for a social rupture in the form of protests, demonstrations, and activism are there. But the masses aren't massing, which in itself is another sign of the bleakness most young people feel about things changing."

Paul could, of course, be writing about today.

One of the interior spreads for the DNC piece, the only time color appeared inside the magazine.

It's not lost on me that this Year Three essay happens to fall directly in the middle of summer 2024, right between the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, 28 years later. It's another moment where there is sharp critique of both parties, especially among youth and the genocide in Gaza, but due to the upheaval of the presidential race in the last two weeks it feels like there's a lot more unpredictability floating around right now than there was in '96 (or maybe I'm just older and want to see hope more than we did in the '90s).

One of the interior spreads for the RNC piece, featuring Mark Reusch's illustration.

The package that we put together, which featured photographs from the DNC by Andrew Natale (RIP) and illustrations for the RNC piece by stellar illustrator Mark Reusch, was the only time in the 80 issues of Punk Planet that we ran color inside the magazine, adding spot color red and blue to the 20 page section, as well as to the cover. While we'd never do color inside again, there was never a black-and-white cover on the magazine after we did this one in color.

Looking back 28 years later, eschewing expectations by running a wholly political package as our first cover story feels very Punk Planet: as the years went on we'd constantly defy easy definition, almost reflexively. But it also feels very Punk Planet because those 20 pages are strong, even reading them today. For something we didn't know how to do, we pulled off something remarkable.

I guess that could apply to every issue of the magazine: We never knew what we were doing, and we pulled off something remarkable every time.

There's a lot more that's great about Year Three of Punk Planet. The playfulness in design, the growing editorial ambition (there are a lot of bangers in Year Three), but one of the most impactful changes happened not in the pages of the magazine, but in how those pages reached people. Part way through Year Three, Punk Planet was picked up for distribution by Mordam Records, the preeminent punk record distributor based in San Francisco. It changed everything for us, adding an air of real legitimacy to the magazine, and meant that we would be paid in a predictable manner which, in turn, meant we could pay contributors for the first time (not a lot, but something). Everything that came after this year is thanks in part to Ruth and the entire crew at Mordam taking a chance on us.

What Mordam's trust in Punk Planet enabled, coupled with the editorial breakthroughs in Year Three, was some of the best years of the magazine's run, starting with Year Four. Up next month. See you then.

Thank you, Steve Albini

2024-07-22T00:00:00Z

Today is the birthday of Steve Albini, legendary recording engineer, musician, and human. He's someone who transformed the underground music scene not just in Chicago, where he operated his studio Electrical Audio, but worldwide. But more than that he was a person who never stopped learning and growing. He was generous with his time even while maintaining an unparalleled work ethic. I am lucky to have called him a friend, even as I remained in awe of all that he built. Steve died in May of this year, shockingly and suddenly. He would have been 62 today.

Steve was never one to mince words. If he thought poorly of you, you knew it (and probably deserved it), and if he liked you, you knew that too. On his birthday, I thought I'd share some of those words in the form of an excerpt of an interview he did with Luis Illades in Punk Planet #26, where he talks about how he lives his life. It's a philosophy that I recognize in myself, and one that I think will resonate with you too.

The way I operate now—and this is what's bred contentment in me—is that I know how I'm going to behave. I know how I'm going to interact with other people and weigh the importance of the things in my life and the things I have to do for other people. I know the process that I'm going to undergo. But I don't know the results—they're going to be a surprise.

That's true of almost everything in my life. I know how I'm going to live, but I don't know what my life will entail. Like the band that I'm in: I know how we work as a band, I know how we interact and how we get from having no song to having a song or from starting a show to finishing a show. I know how we're going to get through it, but what happens along the way is always a surprise.

The fact that I enjoy being surprised is what makes doing things that way very easy for me. Some people like to have things mapped out and then execute the plan. They plan on making plans, they make plans, and then they execute their plans. Most of what I do is based on the concept that I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what the results of many of these experiments are going to be, but I know how I'm going to conduct the experiments. I know why these things are important to me and why I'm going to be behaving in a certain way.

I'm very confident in my values. The things that are good about people are good by themselves; they don't have to have some use for me to remain good. I don't have to profit from somebody else's kindness in order for kindness to be good. I don't have to profit from someone else's honesty in order for their honesty to be valuable to me. My values are secure.

I don't think I'm trying to find my place in life. I believe my place in life is to pursue what I'm doing. I believe that my reward, if any, is in seeing what happens. The surprises that come up, that's where the reward is—not that I'm going to accomplish some specific thing, that I'm going to make money or have some stature in any community of any sort. What it boils down to is that I get to see what happens. I get to see the end of the movie. That's the payoff for having been in the movie all of this time.

Happy birthday Steve, miss you.

Do What You Want, 'Cos This is the New Art School. Punk Planet: Year Two

2024-06-30T00:00:00Z

Punk Planet issues 7-12.

If the first year of Punk Planet was about figuring out the function of the magazine—finding writers, learning how to build a page in Quark X-Press, how to communicate with printers, how to find distribution and ship magazines, how to sell ads, and the billion other things that needed to happen—then the second year was about form.

Punk Planet was always a public learning process, the unrelenting pace of publication meant that you learned as you went, hopefully correcting mistakes made in one issue in the next (while making new ones along the way). Sometimes that change is slow, sometimes it's quick. Year two changes come in huge leaps from issue to issue.

Part of that is because it wasn't just a public learning process in year two. I was a couple years into art school in Chicago when I started Punk Planet and the demands of the magazine started to overwhelm the demands of my schooling, so I made it part of my schooling, by getting an independent study with a design advisor. That meant, for the first time, the layouts were being lightly critiqued and advice was being given. My advisor also challenged me to research design history and educate myself.

That research meant diving deep into what was, in the mid-90s, a revolution in magazine design. Driven by folks like David Carson at Raygun magazine and Rudy Vanderlans and Zuzana Licko at Émigré, the traditional approaches to magazine design were being upended. Desktop publishing was changing print design and these folks were breaking longstanding rules. It felt new and exciting and it influenced how I wanted to approach the magazine.

The opening spread for an interview with Christie Front Drive, PP11

Of course I was still learning, and looking at some of the 90s-style typographic experiments we did then feel very dated, but it was fun to be in conversation with a larger attempt to redefine the possible (in fact, issue 7 included an interview I did with Rudy Vanderlans about all this).

But probably the most important thing to happen to Punk Planet in year two was bringing Josh Hooten in to help design. Hooten was also an art student, in Boston, and did a zine called Commodity that blew me away the first time I saw it. It was designed in a way that I'd never seen a punk zine before, modern and clean but also retro in its own unique way. The type was stellar, and it was also really funny.

Josh Hooten's cover for PP10.

Josh and Tony, his partner at Commodity, wrote a sidebar to the Rudy Vanderlans interview in PP7 called "Towards a New Punk Aesthetic," a manifesto that changed everything for me ("Maybe it doesn't look like a Discharge record," they wrote, "but Discharge stopped making records a long time ago.").

Soon after, Josh joined Punk Planet as a designer, bringing his unique aesthetic to the magazine starting with issue 9 when he picked up a couple layouts. By issue 10, he was on the masthead. The cover he did for that issue, with its clip-art aesthetic is still one of my favorites we ever ran. He brought a design knowledge to the magazine that I was still working to acquire, and the experiments I had been doing with the magazine really accelerated at that point.

Josh lived in Boston and uploaded his layouts over an achingly-slow modem and we'd stay on the phone talking all night waiting to catch the inevitable upload failure. It was a bad way to transfer files but a great way to get to know someone and we were fairly inseparable for years after. I still think about how crucial he was to this era of Punk Planet and the transformation of the magazine that followed.

The opening spread of 18 pages of record reviews, PP11.

But year two wasn't just about improvements in the way the magazine looked. In my last essay, I talked about how early on we ran pretty much anything that came in. In year two, editorially, the magazine started to stretch a little. While I wouldn't say I understood the role of an editor quite yet, I did understand that I had some control over what we were running and used that to start to frame punk beyond the standard-issue band interview. There's an essay about the Telecommunications Act of 1996, another about the mid-90s fascination with UFOs and conspiracy theories, another that asks "Is film punk?" (spoiler: yes) and an essay called "The Real Cyberpunk" that stepped readers through how to get on the internet for the first time (look, it was 1995). Interviews were still pretty hit-or-miss, but the essays and articles we ran were finally starting to get somewhere. This would really start to manifest in year three.

"The Real Cyberpunk" spread, PP9.

The magazine was getting bigger too. The first issue of the second year was double the length of PP1 and the last issue of year two we topped out over 100 pages. This wasn't just because we were running more interviews or reviewing more records (though we certainly were doing both) but also because we had more ads, all from independent record labels both pretty large and very tiny. It's hard to imagine today but in the mid-90s when we were all still essentially pre-internet, ads were one of the only ways a kid running a record label at their parents kitchen table could let anyone know that they existed. Ads were a feature of zines like Punk Planet back then. They were also cheap, and we sold a lot of them. At this point nobody was getting paid for anything, but the ad revenue let us get longer, the print runs were growing, and things were really starting to happen.

A first-hand account of attending a UFO convention, PP12.

Making a magazine like Punk Planet is an extraordinary undertaking. There are a million moving parts that, once you've sorted them out, uncover a million more. But looking at year two, I'm struck at how much you can see those parts starting (starting) to move together in unison. It was a year that bridged between the absolute beginners-era of the first year and the more self-assured direction that we'd begin to move in shortly after year two.

Rebel Rebel

2024-06-19T00:00:00Z

A few weeks before the pandemic hit, my pal Akilah Hughes and I sat in, of all places, the Cars-themed section of Disneyland and talked about, of all things, our careers.

Sure, why not.

We posted up at a picnic table nestled between food stalls shaped like oversized traffic cones for a couple hours and had a long, winding conversation about where we were at in our work lives and where we wanted to be. It was one of those conversations where you come out clearer, more focused, more ready.

You know what happened next.

Everything shut down and all the plans that we'd made got shelved along with everyone else's. But Akilah and I kept talking, keeping a regular zoom appointment that served as a sanity check at a time when everything felt insane.

It was during one of those calls that Akilah mentioned an idea she had for a podcast: to change her racist high school team name, The Rebels—named after the confederacy, complete with a confederate general mascot—to a different piece of Southern culture that everyone could be proud of, The Biscuits. I loved the idea so much and we talked about what felt so resonant and right about it and brainstormed about all the different angles you could take and stories you could tell in pursuit of making the change.

Thankfully, Akilah stuck with the idea and a couple years later she told me she'd sold the show and asked me to come on to produce it. I said yes faster than anything.

That was almost exactly one year ago, and we've been working hard on Rebel Spirit ever since, conducting dozens of interviews, digging through decades of history. We've taken three trips to Northern Kentucky (in fact, we're here right now) for research and to build a coalition of folks to help make a change really happen. It has been equal parts infuriating and hilarious (well, maybe not equal) and is, easily, some of the best work I've ever been lucky enough to be involved in.

It's also turned into much more than just the original story, as all good stories tend to do. The journey has been incredible, the side quests we ended up on were unforgettable, and the whole thing has added up to a show that is truly extraordinary.

Rebel Spirit starts coming out weekly September 3, but the trailer is out now on every podcasting platform. It's a 90 second glimpse into a project that will span 10 episodes and more than five hours. I can not wait for you to hear the whole thing.

Listen to the Rebel Spirit trailer now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Pandora, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

30 Years of Punk Planet: Year One

2024-05-31T00:00:00Z

Punk Planet issues 1-6 (except issue 3 which I don't have a copy of and seems to not exist anywhere).

This month, right now, marks the 30 year anniversary of the first issue of Punk Planet, the magazine I ran for 13 years. I was 19 years old when it started and am now rolling up on 50. It does not feel like 30 years have gone by since those early days and simultaneously it feels like 30 lifetimes have passed.

13 years of Punk Planet—80 issues, thousands of pages, hundreds of interviews—there's no way to summarize it in one blog post. It changed so much—I changed so much—that writing a single essay trying to summarize it all is impossible. Instead I'm going to try and dedicate a post here every month to one year of Punk Planet. 13 posts over 13 months, each one writing about a single year of the magazine. Each one dedicated to a year of learning, a year of trying, a year of making something impossible possible.

Here we go.

Punk Planet Year One

May/June 1994 was issue one of Punk Planet. I had never done anything like it, never even thought about what it would take to do something like it. Nobody involved did. That was liberating instead of limiting, but it did mean that the first year (honestly, the first few) was a very public learning process that I sort of cringe over as I look back on early issues now.

Making Punk Planet started as a proposal on, of all places, an America Online message board. This was pre-internet for all intents and purposes, and so big commercial portals was where many of us with modems and an interest in chatting ended up. There were real, authentic conversations about what was still a pretty underground punk scene happening deep in a music forum there, and folks from all over were chiming in to talk about bands, zines, and the type of idle gossip that usually happened outside of shows.

A lot of that gossip centered around the changes happening at Maximum Rock n Roll, the hugely influential, nationally distributed punk zine that was the sole destination for the underground at the time. If you were in a band, if you were making a zine, if you were putting out records, getting reviewed in MRR was crucial. And MRR, the gossip reported, was changing their guidelines for what could get in the magazine.

OK, let's get into the weeds of the mid-90s underground for a minute.

The mid-90s was a time of huge change in the DIY punk scene. Nirvana struck it big with Nevermind in 91/92 and Green Day's release of Dookie in early 94 had brought even more attention to what had, prior to 92 or so, been a mostly-overlooked subculture. It made people circle the wagons, to protect the independence of the scene.

For Maximum Rock n Roll, that meant redefining what records they would review, what bands they would cover, and what ads they would accept. They were flooded with submissions and they pulled back from what had been a pretty wide-open editorial policy (besides refusing to cover major labels) by announcing that, from now on, they would only cover "punk" bands. To the uninitiated that might sound like what they were already doing, but in reality it meant that they were cutting out a lot of really interesting, vibrant, and exciting corners of the underground, corners that had nowhere else to turn to for the type of coverage and promotion that MRR offered.

So I made a proposal to this group of strangers on an AOL message board: Why couldn't we do it? Why couldn't we make a magazine that was nationally distributed and offered record reviews, band interviews, scene reports, columnists, and all the other types of things that MRR had, but do it in a way that felt less reactionary (though still no major labels) and more open to new sounds, new people, and new ideas?

I mean the obvious answer, which I only know now, is: Because it is impossibly hard.

This was back, I believe, in March of 1994. I posted my big idea, went to class, and when I came home discovered I was locked out of my apartment. My roommates were gone for the weekend. This was pre-cellphone, there was no way of reaching anyone. So I was on my own away from my computer for a few days. And what I only discovered once I was finally back in my room at the end of the weekend and the modem had done its screeching was that people had responded to that post. A whole fleet of people had volunteered. People really wanted to do it. And so we started.

I had no idea what I was doing—none of us did. You'd learn one thing and it would open the door to ten more things you didn't know. We made so much up as we went. Other things were learned by calling people up who were making zines or running distros and just asking them for advice. A local zinemaker in Chicago who printed on newsprint pointed me toward our first printer, in downstate Illinois. I reached out to small record labels to see if they'd advertise. We scraped together a few ads, sold for $20, $30, $50 a pop. We were still well short of the printing bill.

Among the folks on that message board was Larry Livermore, the founder of East Bay record label Lookout Records, the original home of Green Day and one of the most influential indie labels of that era of punk. And, for reasons that still mystify me even now, Larry believed in Punk Planet and in me. He thought we could pull it off.

That trust made Punk Planet happen. Larry lent us $600, I think, which we repaid in advertising over the course of the first couple years, but moreso what he leant was credibility. I was barely more than a kid back then, just 19 years old, and he was much older (though certainly younger than I am now). I don't know what he saw in me, in the idea, or in our ragtag crew's ability to pull it off, but he helped make it happen. He didn't need to, but he did.

That belief was something I took seriously, and it drove me and a lot of the other early crew of Punk Planet to try to make the magazine really happen. It's important to remember that we were spread out all over. Nowadays that seems straightforward, but this was decades before remote work was mainstream and years still before internet connections were halfway decent. We were an entirely remote team, communicating on message boards and early, shitty, email. We had modems. Designs for the magazine were mailed to me on floppy disk. Ads were pasted up on graph paper, page numbers were glued on by hand.

Honestly, it's incredible that we made it.

But we did.

Looking back now, I wouldn't call any of year one good. Those early days we ran what we got. Rambling columns (lord I wrote some bad ones), flat interviews. Screeds. "Good" was not an editorial guideline because the driving force that first year was simply to come out, on time, every time. The goal was to be reliable.

I figured once you were reliable, once you'd learned the thousand things we didn't know and the thousand things that came after that, you could focus on good. It took literal actual years to truly get good.

But looking over year one of Punk Planet, while nothing is particularly good, I'm struck by how much promise it contained, how much hope. A group of people pulling together to try and make something better. Year one of Punk Planet may not have been good, but it was inspired. And still, today, inspiring.

I genuinely can't believe it's been 30 years since that first issue. Holding it in my hands now, I remember every one of these worn, newsprint pages. I remember opening the boxes, fresh from the printer. I remember the complaints and the praise that followed. It was an insane amount of work, squeezed in the hours between school and multiple jobs. I'd come home from parking cars and work on Punk Planet most of the night, catch a few hours of sleep, and head to school in the morning.

So much of me—so much of all of us—is in those first early issues. People learning together, trying together, making something together. Looking at the masthead today, there was nobody but me that stuck with it much beyond that first year or two, and I haven't been in touch with any of those original folks in decades, but I still think about how we brought each other along. How we motivated each other, believed in each other and, together, made something amazing.

Building a Town that Doesn't Exist

2024-05-10T00:00:00Z

This week I gave a talk called "Building a Town that Doesn't Exist" as part of the 11ty International Symposium on Making the Web Real Good. It's about the incredible amount of love and care and effort that I've put into Question Mark, Ohio over the last year. Question Mark is wrapping up in the next week or so and I think this talk is a fitting tribute to it and to the beauty of the world wide web that enabled it. I've adapted the talk for this blog post.

The town of Question Mark, Ohio is located in the southeast corner of the state just twelve miles north of the Ohio River, it is nestled next to a beautiful woods, home to a breathtaking waterfall, a monument to a battalion of British Soldiers that went missing in the 1700s, and the remains of a French settlement that disappeared a hundred years before that.

The quaint downtown of Question Mark features a beautiful Town Hall, rebuilt three times after fires destroyed the previous two, a magnificent library, and a clocktower that stopped working in the 1960s

These were all built from the fortune of the Willey family, town founders and creators of the Willey Safe-T envelope and who now reside in the St Casimir Cemetery located in the northwest corner of town.

Question Mark boasts a drive-in theater, a bowling alley, a convenience store where the employees doze but never close, two cults, four murders, and seven mysterious voids that sit at the spiraling center of a series of mysteries that have beset the town over the last year.

The town of Question Mark, Ohio also doesn’t exist.

It is a creation of myself and the novelist Joe Meno and launched in April of last year and has unfolded on a near daily basis in the year since. It wraps in the next couple weeks. The story of Question Mark Ohio has been told across the internet: on Instagram, Twitter, Threads, over email, and the phone, and most immersively on the web, were it has unfolded across a sprawling collection of websites, over 40 in all, that have played out like chapters in a novel, each advancing the main story while also telling their own at the same time.

There’s no template for what we’re doing. I mean that in terms of the fact that nobody’s told a story like this, for this long, in real-time, across so many different spaces. But also I mean it literally: each site is built from scratch. There’s no cookie-cutter approach to any of it because each site is unique, playing a specific and singular role in the story, and each site also has to stand alone as something real and believable, something marked with the patina of age and with the utility of a workaday website.

The musician Jonathan Coulton, who created an original song for us, said that we were building things that were as much artifact as they were art and that’s exactly right: Everything we made in Question Mark needed to feel lived-in and real.

Each site is a puzzle for the audience to solve, but also a puzzle for Joe and I as the creators. How to tell the story the right way, how to make it work across multiple screen sizes, and how to do it in a turnaround time measured in days or sometimes hours.

The key was to keep things simple. Everything was static, either straight HTML manually deployed on Netlify or when a site required a more complicated structure, like the newspaper with over 150 stories that span 90 years of the town’s history, then we’d use 11ty.

Beyond that, all our styles were using Tailwind.css and most of our interactions were built with Alpine.js. Everything lived in a single index file as much as possible.

While keeping it simple was crucial to pulling this endeavor off, the reality is a lot of what we did with Question Mark would have been nearly impossible even a year ago. We leaned heavily on generative AI tools for imagery and even some of the writing and coding. And in pushing to see what was possible, I learned very clearly that they’re just like any other tool: in skilled hands you can do some pretty incredible things. Of course they are not perfect in many, many ways but for two people with no budget to imagine a world in near real-time? It was liberating.

We used all of this—old-school HTML and new-school large language models—in service of the story of Violet Bookman, our main character, a 17-year-old who we first meet when she is trying to find her neighbor’s cat Mr. Business. As readers, we follow her adventures through town, helping her to solve mysteries and find allies and enemies, even as the story grows much bigger and darker than a missing cat.

But the real story of Question Mark, Ohio is one of grief: of wishing that you could return to a past that felt better, more whole, but realizing that to grieve is really to move forward in spite of everything.

That pattern: this is what the story is about and this is what it’s really about, is how we approached every site that we built.

There was the garbage dump, one of the more complicated–and janky–builds, that let readers dig through hundreds of items of trash to uncover a long-buried container of toxic sludge. But really it was about the story of the town’s long-time mayor finally coming to terms with the scale of her dead husband’s corruption.

There was the Experimental Crop Station’s online course portal, where readers could take a whole course on experimental biology, but the real goal was to take and fail the employee security exam in order to free the sentient being made of light known as Q-eey who would later go on to save the town.

There was the Question Mark Motel, which actually advanced four different stories on a single page, giving readers backstory on a number of different characters with a single click to learn about their time in one of the rooms. But really it was about a single room, room O, and a cult’s plan to commit a murder.

And then there was Bookman’s Music, the music store run by Violet Bookman’s father. We knew we wanted to bring readers into his store at some point, the same as we’d brought readers into the ice cream shop, the chicken joint, the pet store, and many other locations in town. We also wanted to reveal a fun detail about Todd Bookman as well: he was in a one-hit wonder band in the 90s called Matrixx who charted with their song “Ticking Away.” Jonathan Coulton wrote and recorded that fictional song.

But what was the site really about?

It was a way to explore the story of the distance between Violet and her father that emerged in the shadow of the death of her mother four years ago. So we hid that story throughout the site, encouraging people to interact and to explore:

Fill out the form for music lessons and you get an entry from Violet’s journals.

Start inquiring about instruments, and you start to get another entry, line by line. You learn how distant her dad is, how she doesn’t know how to connect with him. In the final entry she writes “Maybe I’m just afraid to have a relationship with my dad because that would mean admitting my mom isn’t ever coming back.”

Then, on the about page, we reverse the point of view and hear from Violet’s father: Clicking on the portraits of his late wife and Violet as a child reveals more about his wife’s death and how it’s affected his relationship with Violet. How he doesn’t know how to reach out anymore. "I know I’ve been distant," Todd Bookman writes, "but I also know both of us needed to find answers in our own way. I know I’ve been afraid to talk about the pain both of us are dealing with. And I know, in just a few months, she’s going to be leaving” for college.

The Bookmans Music site came together in about two days. We started with the story and it all grew from there. It launched and we were already on to the next chapter.

There are dozens of examples like this. Because nothing in Question Mark is what it appears. Almost everything has a deeper connection to the story or to the character or to the theme of loss and grief.

Look, I've made a lot of sites in the last year and I’ll be honest here: I code like a cat caught in a paper bag. I’m not here to tell you about web standards and creating elegant, efficient code. Lift the hood on every single single one of these 40 websites, and it’s a horror show. But that’s OK.

Because every site worked for what we needed it to be: a small part in a larger whole. Sure, they were janky as hell, but they were sites that thousands of people wanted to go to and engage in. They definitely didn’t adhere to best practices, but offered a doorway into a world that people want to live inside.

Here’s a post from one of the folks that was active on a Discord server dedicated to unraveling the mysteries of Question Mark: I really still struggle to make my brain understand that I can’t just get on a plane, go over there and sort it all out myself. It’s so real to me.

This should be the aim of anything you build: create something that feels so real that someone struggles to remember that they can’t just go there. That is making a website—or 40 of them—real good.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve got the latest skills or if you know the cutting edge approach to building on the web in 2024. I had neither when I started this, and still don’t a year later, though I certainly know a lot more than when I started.

Instead: Have something to say and figure out the best possible way to say it. The rest will follow.

Every day Joe and I got to sit down and ask ourselves: what’s the story we want to tell and how can we build something amazing to tell it. And then we’d ask: and what’s the real story we’re telling and how does this artifact we’ve created service that.

There’s that pattern again: What’s the story, and what’s the REAL story.

And that’s true with this talk too.

Because yes, this talk is about the work and love and care that went into building Question Mark Ohio, an elaborate story that thousands of people have followed online for a year.

But what it's really about is this: The web is still magical. It is a place where you can build anything you want, even a whole town, and there's no permission to get, no hoops to jump through, no risk of a platform shutting down. You don't need fancy tools or a big team, you just need your imagination, a text file, and a tag, and the whole world is there for you to make.

It doesn’t matter if it’s imperfect. It doesn’t matter if the edges are still rough. Rough edges are just our humanity showing through.

When people wax nostalgic for the web, for the hamster dance or for MySpace profiles, what they’re really nostalgic for is the web before it got all sanded down. They’re nostalgic for a web that can give you splinters, for a web with rough edges, for a web that was more human.

But the story of Question Mark, Ohio–the real story of Question Mark–is that you can’t move backwards. That the past is the past and attempting to return to it never works.

And that’s OK because we don’t have to: The tools to make a web that’s more human, more magical, more amazing are not the tools of the past but the tools of right now. There’s never been a better time to build something, anything, on the web.

You can build a world, you can tell a story, you can make things happen big and small. The web is still vital, is still exciting, and the rules are there for the breaking.

Three For Flinching

2024-04-14T00:00:00Z

Tonight I sent a note to the indictment.fyi mailing list that I was not going to be continuing to send updates on the ongoing criminal trials of Donald Trump. For those of you that have followed my work for a while, you know that I don't end things easily. I tend to just pile on the work like some kind of ever-escalating tower always on the verge of toppling over. My podcast Says Who is a great example: It was supposed to last for eight episodes. Maureen and I just released our 328th. But, with Donald Trump's first trail (finally) getting underway in the morning, I felt like I needed to let folks know that that particular tower of work has toppled.

Yes, it's good to know your limits and to know when they're being stretched and yes, taking on a huge unpaid thing right now is inadvisable for a whole host of reasons. But still, I feel like I flinched.

And so as penance, maybe, or out of a feeling that if I've taken something out of the world today maybe I should also put something back in, here's three things I've been particularly excited about lately. Here's three for flinching:

Extraordinary. I feel like I haven't heard enough folks talking about this absolute delight of a show, out in the US on Hulu and elsewhere on, of all places, Disney Plus. It's the story of a world where everyone gets superpowers when they turn 18, except the main character Jen, who is 25 and still waiting. While "superpower comedy" isn't high on my list of things I'd usually check out, it's hilarious and poignant and has perhaps the best soundtrack of any TV show I've ever heard. But more than that, what it's really about is being in your 20s and lost and hoping that you and your friends can maybe figure your shit out together. Who can't relate to that?

There's Always This Year. Author Hanif Abdurraqib's last book, A Little Devil In America, was so good and hit me so hard that I named it one of my favorite pieces of culture two years in a row. His new one There's Always This Year came out last month and I'm reading it slowly and deliberately, trying to soak every last moment out of each sentence. I think that Hanif is the best living writer out there, period. Nobody writes a sentence like him. Ostensibly about basketball, it's really about growing up and about grief and about loving a place and leaving a place, and so many other things. It is beautiful and sad and wonderful and you will not forget it anytime soon. (Note: the book title links to an affiliate link for Bookshop.org)

Sonnenzimmer's Sunraiser. Chicago printmaking duo Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi are two of my favorite humans on the whole planet. They also are incredibly talented and have put so many beautiful things out into the world. Of course, being experimental printmakers isn't exactly an easy path and they're currently in the process of fundraising to rebuild their print shop after being hit with a ton of unexpected costs. If you've got a few bucks, hit them up and help them to continue to put great things into the world.

OK, my guilt is lifted a little, I'm happy to have given some shine to these projects, and you'll hear more from me soon.

I'm Back with Scars to Show

2024-02-28T00:00:00Z

I was fresh out of college and needed a job. I was also two years into Punk Planet at that point and needed something that could give me a steady paycheck, but also give me flexibility to work on Punk Planet's demanding production schedule. The Chicago Reader, the storied alternative weekly, fit the bill.

Production at the Reader was a full 40+ hours crammed into three intense days (I worked out a deal with my boss that I could sleep under my desk during down times). Pay was low, maybe eight bucks an hour, but the flexibility was unparalleled. Most everyone in the production department was there in part because of that flexibility. Musicians and artists and weirdos of all stripes. It was glorious. This was in the heyday of papers like the Reader—fat on classified ads and local arts and entertainment listings—and the production department alone was probably ten of us. The whole staff took up four or five floors. The Reader itself owned its building right in the heart of River North, a huge yellow R painted on the side. The paper was four thick sections, delivered across the city on Thursdays. Times were good.

Of course, you know how this story goes, at least in part.

Craigslist gutted the Reader's classifieds business in the blink of an eye. They were slow to adapt, as so many publications were, and a lot of the wounds they took over the next few years were self-inflicted. A decade after I left the Reader it had been sold, and the thick four-section paper had been turned into a diminutive tabloid. The company it had been sold to went bankrupt a year later and the Reader was handed off to a hedge fund. Layoffs followed, because of course layoffs followed, and shit got dark for a long while. Eventually, the Reader got bought by a flashy local rich dude who had already bought the Chicago Sun-Times. A series of disheartening decisions later—including firing an editor via phone before they got on a plane at O'Hare—and that flashy local rich dude had run the Sun-Times and the Reader into the ground, and sold them both to a local consortium, thankfully beating out the Chicago Tribune who almost certainly would have shut them both down. About a year later the Reader was sold off to a different investment consortium with the goal of transitioning the Reader to a nonprofit. Of course, if this entire gigantic paragraph tells you anything, it's that nothing is easy, and that spin-off got hung up in a fight between one of the owners and the entire staff and for a while the fate of the whole paper hung in the balance. Thankfully, the dispute resolved at the last second and in 2022 the Reader became a nonprofit. Phew.

Writing all that, I'm pretty sure that the Reader is unkillable, which is great because the Reader is still really good. For coverage of arts and music and film and theater in this city, there's no parallel. For an independent voice keeping City Hall in check, it's still formidable. It's been through a lot, to be sure, and there are lots of scars to show (I've got plenty myself at this point). But it's small and scrappy and full of people that are hungry to make a difference.

Which is why I've re-joined the Reader on a six-month sprint to help turn its website into something truly vital again. The content is there (in fact it's so there that reviews I wrote back in the 90s are still accessible), but there's a lot of work to do to make something worthy of that content. I'm excited. I'm daunted. I'm ready to go.

It's nice to be home.

(Also, hell, throw the Reader some cash while you're here.)

Cooper Black, A Love Story & A Patch

2024-01-08T00:00:00Z

I love a lot of things about Chicago, but the number one thing is that it works. It's the city that brought the world the eight-hour day, the city that rebuilt itself from ashes. It's a city of immigrants and of the great migration; a city of neighborhoods forged by working class hands. And it's the city that brought the world the hardest-working typeface, Cooper Black.

Created in Chicago in 1922, Cooper Black is the most Chicago of typefaces: hard working, big-shouldered, friendly, and everlasting. It's a typeface that feels as contemporary and relevant today as it did 100 years ago when it was first released.

I've loved Cooper Black since long before I knew what it was. Big and bold and round, it has more personality in its lowercase O than most fonts have in their whole lineup. You have seen it everywhere in every possible context: on the Beach Boys Pet Sounds and on Biz Markie's BIZ hat; on the sketchy liquor store at that one strip mall down the block and on the homemade PTA flyer the kid brought home. It is hard to make it through a day almost anywhere without running into Cooper Black (hell, you're seeing it right now on this very website).

There are far more complete histories and deep dives into the typeface than I'm writing now, but I think one of the things that I love about it most is that it is a typeface that was built to work, originally marketed as a bold type for newspaper advertising, and that it is still working all these years later. Cooper Black, like Chicago, works. Hard.

Mostly though Cooper Black just makes me happy.

2023 was a hard year and 2024 is shaping up to be just as unrelenting and sometimes it's OK to just have a little thing that makes you happy and that's why I made a new patch for myself and maybe also for you if you would like one. It just says Cooper Black, set in black in Cooper Black, on a light grey background reminiscent of old newspaper. It's eight bucks from my web store and ships free with a stamp.

All the patches I make are now $8, and a pack of all three (Trying, Marginally Employed, and Cooper Black) is available for $20.

2023, The Exit Interview

2023-12-31T00:00:00Z

Typically, I write a year-end recap of work I've done and culture I've enjoyed in the past year. But year was awful, and so I thought I'd take a different approach.

I'm quitting 2023.

After 364 days, today will be my last day. My tenure here has not been a good one and I requested an exit interview with HR so that 2023 can understand why I'm leaving and perhaps, how it might do better in the future.

Thank you for coming in on a Sunday to conduct this exit interview with us. Your feedback is invaluable to the operations of the year.

Sure, thanks for taking the time. I always think that feedback, even critical, is important, so I'm glad to be able to give some after my time in 2023.

To begin, why are you leaving your current year?

Where to even start. 20,000 dead in Gaza with no ceasefire in sight? The reemergence of Donald Trump as the leading presidential contender? A summer of unrelenting heat that felt like the harbinger of worse to come? The Right's assault on books? Everything in my life breaking and running up debt I'll be paying off for years to replace it all? All of that. And so much more.

It was clear about halfway through that this year was a bad fit and that I should consider moving on. Had another year made an offer earlier than January 1, I would have gladly accepted.

I've written before about the daily journaling I do, and how I do monthly reflections of my days in order to inform a yearly reflection. To prepare for tomorrow's yearly reflection I just finished reading over those monthly reflections yesterday and there was one month that began "This was a good month." I disliked all of 2023 and I'm looking forward to future opportunities in other years.

Thank you for your candid assessment, HR appreciates the feedback. While we acknowledge the shortcomings you have voiced here, what do you consider your most significant achievements or milestones in 2023, both personally and professionally?

Personally, this was the year my 18-year-old left for college. Letting him go was one of the hardest things I've ever done, and yet seeing him thrive in a city 2000 miles away, seeing him make friends and find his passion and push himself in all sorts of ways... it's incredible. Being a parent is putting everything you have into someone, letting them go, and hoping it was enough.

And, in this case, it was.

Professionally, for as difficult as this year has been (and, lord, it has been difficult), I've actually thrived in creative projects.

The work I've done in Question Mark, Ohio, is easily the best work I've done in a decade. It's been challenging in all the best possible ways and never once have I regretted such a hugely ambitious storytelling project. We're on a break after finishing up part two. Part three—the final part—begins in late January. I've already been building things for the endgame of the story and I can tell you that what's come before is just a sliver of what's to come.

Alongside Question Mark has been work I've been doing with Akilah Hughes on a podcast that will come out in early 2024. Working on this project, which I can't tell you much about (yet), has been so remarkably fulfilling. Diving deep into historical research, digging up skeletons (nearly literally), and getting to talk with a huge number of people, all in service of a fascinating look at race in America, it's been wild and hilarious and moving and I can't wait to have it out in the world.

Working on the two of these things has been complete joy in a year that has had so little of it.

How would you describe the culture of our year?

Relentless brutality. Just a year that held its boot to everyone's neck from start to finish. Slaughter and mass exodus of Palestinians on a scale that's hard to fathom. A sharp rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia. Attacks on trans folks and queer youth in statehouses and on the streets. The continued outlawing of abortion and prosecution of women in states across the country for seeking healthcare. The inhumane treatment of migrants. Gun carnage that never let up. Continued Black death at the hands of police. Honestly I could go on and on. It was a year that was relentlessly, unstoppably, brutal.

Tell us what you really think.

I think this year was terrible. Would not do again.

OK, we get it. Certainly there had to be something redeeming about 2023?

I guess so. It was good to see this summer's strikes in the entertainment industry, at UPS, and among auto workers achieve real success.

But as someone who is friends with folks that were on the Hollywood picket lines, I know that success came at great personal sacrifice. And I know that a lot of work that people put their whole selves into got overlooked when it was released due to strike restrictions. So it's worth a shout out to two of the best shows I watched this year: the second seasons of This Fool and Our Flag Means Death, both of which were hilarious and beautiful and absolutely worth seeking out. Additionally, I read a book, A Fever in the Heartland, that has stuck with me since I finished it. The story of the rise of the KKK in the 20s, it was by no means an easy read, but a necessary one.

Beyond that, this last year my whole family has gotten into watching premier league football, which I wrote about in a blog post in January, and that has been probably the culture I've consumed the most of in the last year. It's a surprising change for me, a person who's never really gotten into sports, but one that I think makes sense given the everything of this year. The author John Green, a supporter (and part owner) of AFC Wimbledon, once obseerved, "When watching football, I find hope with real ease. Watching football, I know what I don't know in real life--that miracles are possible (even routine), and that hope is perpetually justified."

Having a little hope, even when your team loses (as mine did today in frustrating fashion), has been necessary this year.

OK, well hope is good.

Hope is good. We can agree on that. I've felt fairly hopeless a lot of this year—I think a lot of folks have—and so yes, a little bit of hope is good. Still could have done with a better year.

We get it.

Do you though?

OK, we have other exit interviews to conduct, so we need to wrap up. As you exit 2023, what thoughts do you have about your future direction and aspirations for 2024

Less people dying, that would be good. A ceasefire. Liberation. A presidential election that doesn't land us fully in fascism. More work that feels like the best things I did this year and less that feels like the worst. More hope that isn't just based on the outcome of a football match.

2024 has its work cut out for it. I'm going to do what I can to make it a better year than this one.

I hope you do as well.

Feel So Different, Remembering Sinead O'Connor and Pee-Wee Herman

2023-12-28T00:00:00Z

2023 was a lot of hard things, but losing Sinead O'Connor and Pee-Wee Herman within a few days of each other this July felt especially cruel. Like the year decided to stomp down with its heel and twist.

Two icons of my youth—of the youth of so many people who grew up different—falling at the same time felt crushing.

While they were so different—Sinead wore pain on her sleeve and spoke in whispers and screams while Pee-Wee was perpetually a child, all wide-eyed wonder and hijinks—they were also so similar. Uncompromisingly themselves in a society that loved them for it at first, then then hated them for it. Then punished them for it. Then never forgave them for it.

Sinead and Pee-Wee taught those of us that grew up different how to walk in a world that only wants you to be the same. A mystic and a man-child, uncompromised by the forces that bend you 'til you break.

The other day my family and I sat on our threadbare couch and watched Pee-Wee's Christmas special. We've all seen it countless times, but this year—a year that has seen relentless attacks on LGBTQ+ youth and adults—the unapologetically gay overtones of the special felt especially subversive. So much of his work was subversive, barely hidden under the bright colors of Saturday morning cartoons. Watch any episode of Pee-Wee's playhouse today and it feels like a miracle it was made. What a gift he left us.

And while it's been decades since Sinead ripped up a picture of the pope on TV, her full-throated criticisms of sex abuse in the church have only been proven over and over again. But she was so much more than a single act of defiance on a late Saturday night. Her voice. That voice. Otherworldly and fully worldly. Haunting and alive. A contradiction and a confirmation. A lion and a cobra. There was only one and there will only ever be one and we are lucky to have lived for a while alongside that voice.

Pee-Wee and Sinead both brought beauty into a world that didn't want them. They taught us to see a world that was different, to demand that this world could be better. And, like so many before them (and so many after) the world tore them down to nothing for it and they responded by still being exactly who they were and apologizing to no one.

"Remember what I told you," Sinead sang, "If they hated me they will hate you."

It was a warning and a promise and a demand that you pay attention. That you know what's coming.

Pee-Wee would have taken a different tack, spitting out the schoolyard taunt: "Made you look."

They both made us look. At ourselves, at the world. Sinead looked and demanded better. Pee-Wee looked and offered a retreat into a childhood free of pain. A fist and a hug, both telling you it will be OK.

It will be OK.

A Man You Don't Meet Every Day, Remembering Shane MacGowan

2023-11-30T00:00:00Z

If I should fall from grace with God
Where no doctor can relieve me
If I'm buried 'neath the sod
But the angels won't receive me

Let me go, boys
Let me go, boys
Let me go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry

I thought Shane MacGowan was unkillable. If he hadn't died by now, the logic went, with all the drinking and drugs and living harder than most, maybe he never would.

But, of course, he did, today, at 65.

The frontman for The Pogues—the visionary band that mixed traditional Gaelic sounds with punk, creating a joyous cacophony that was singularly theirs—Shane was equal parts street poet and drunken mess. He battled demons and he sung of death, and he made them both seem far more romantic than either really are.

When I was 13, I damn near wore out my cassette of If I Should Fall from Grace With God, the Pogues seminal third album. An album so incredible, so astounding, that writer Hanif Abdurraqib says "I can't believe humans made this," and he's right. It takes off like a shot and never looks back. Miserable in middle school, I'd never heard anything like it. A few decades later I still haven't. The album was a revelation for me: that you could move in so many different directions at once, making art from disparate genres and sounds. That you could find beauty in the desperation of life at society's edges. I'd listen and rewind, listen and rewind, listen and rewind.

The last time I saw Shane MacGowan perform, he was playing a solo gig—he and the Pogues had parted ways a few years before due to his drinking—at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago. The show was hours late. There wasn't an opening act that I can remember, just an endless wait with an ever-drunker crowd. Finally, Shane came on stage, weaving and slurring. He could barely stand up, barely sing. He'd start songs and then just sort of fade out. Every time he'd take a drink, the crowd would roar its approval and I couldn't help but feel like people were cheering a suicide. I couldn't be a party to it, and swore I'd never see him play again.

I never did.

It was a few years after that that he almost died in 2000. Sinead O'Connor saved his life when she discovered him unconscious on the floor of his London home. She called the police. He was revived and charged with heroin possession. "I love Shane," she said at the time, "and it makes me angry to see him destroy himself selfishly in front of those who love him."

(To lose them both in the same year is too much. Too much.)

But Sinead was right (always, forever): Shane did destroy himself. The drinking, the drugs, the cigarettes that were ever-present. You don't run your body that hard without it keeping score. There's nothing romantic about it. Nothing fun. Addiction robbed us of a generational talent long before he actually died.

That he sobered up in 2016 after nearly dying of pneumonia prolonged him for almost another decade. But the damage Sinead mourned had long been done. It was just a matter of time.

And yet now—now that what felt both inevitable and impossible has happened—it wasn't enough time.

Shane MacGowan was a genius. A poet of unrivaled talent, capable of finding beauty in the drunk tank and romance in the rotting limbs of war. The unvarnished horror of war was ever-present in Shane's songs. Growing up during The Troubles, he was haunted by the violence, and later said he felt "guilty that I didn’t lay down my life for Ireland."

Of course, in a different way, he did.

Now Shane is gone—his life laid down for Ireland and for art and for all us lost souls—and I hope that before he went he knew that among his torment and his pain and his slow-motion suicide his astounding gift changed so many lives, including my own.

Let X Equal X

2023-11-03T00:00:00Z

When I was young, middle-school age probably, I read an article about the artist/musician/weirdo Laurie Anderson. I don't remember where, though it was likely in Rolling Stone, and I don't remember why, other than probably there was a picture in it in that looked cool, and I don't remember what it was about other than a single sentence in it, a sentence that would fuel an obsession. That sentence described, in frustratingly little detail, how Anderson fashioned a violin bow out of audiotape and would play it using a violin that had a tape head where the strings should be (it's likely I've described this in far more detail than the original sentence).

The idea of building sound from sound, of making art with other art, was captivating to me.

I set to work trying to figure out what Anderson's tape-loop violin could possibly be and how I could reproduce it. This was pre-internet. There was no easy way to find any more references to it. I bought albums from a used record store. When I found Home of the Brave for rent at a local video store, I scoured it for any glimpse, but at that point she had started playing MIDI violins.

But I pressed on anyway. I took apart an old Walkman, slowly and carefully because I did not have extra Walkmen just laying around. It was a lot of trial and error, mostly error, but eventually I exposed the tape head as best I could, afraid to sever the wrong wire and lose the whole thing. It was small and silver, smooth and slightly rounded. I remember how satisfying it felt to rub my fingers across.

I understood just enough about electrical wiring, learned largely through a middle-school woodworking class where we had to build and wire a lamp. I went to a Radio Shack and bought some cheap parts to build a speaker I could click into the headphone jack.

I unwound cassette tapes and pulled them across the head. It never sounded how I wanted, much more of a muffled smush than actual music, but it worked. I tried stretching them taught, but never fully could make a "bow" that worked right. I'd listen to cassettes and mark on them where an interesting musical phrase would start and finish and try and "play" it across this makeshift machine.

It never sounded how it sounded in my mind. Which was, for all I knew at that point, the only place the working version of all this ever existed.

That is until the other day when I was thinking about Laurie Anderson and her tape loop violin, something I haven't thought about in a very long time, and so I did a search and, of course, I was able to not only pop up diagrams and descriptions, but there was a video, filmed recently, where she whips out the actual violin, built in the 70s. It was the first time I'd ever seen it.

In the video (embedded above, but also here's a link, she starts talking about this violin about 2:45 in), Anderson presents such a simple machine. Never in a million years did I imagine that it was actually built out of a violin itself. It's painted all black, it's very stark. She talks about how when you use the tape-bows, you create "audio palindromes" words spoken forwards, then backwards. "Say is yes," she explains. "Say yes, say yes, say yes."

There were all sorts of things I did wrong in trying to recreate Anderson's tape-loop violin from a single sentence when I was a kid, but I learned so much in the process: about how magnetic tape worked, about how to disassemble electronics, about how sound is stored, how art is made, and how our own curiosity can take us down paths we never expected.

Looking back on it, trying to build that tape-loop violin is what started me down the dual paths of programming and journalism. Both, at their core, are about asking the question "Why does this work like this?" and then having the curiosity to follow the path wherever it leads.

With answers seemingly always at our fingertips now, asking "Why" can seem too easy. But as the world is engulfed in strife and fire and answers are never as straightforward as they seem, it turns out asking "Why" is still a radical act.

Year of the Living Dead

2023-10-26T00:00:00Z

A year ago Elon Musk took over Twitter. Too much has happened in the 365 days that followed to even begin to chronicle it all here, but the short version is that he quickly fired 80% of the staff, broke a bunch of things, paid racists, misogynists, and homophobes to set up shop, picked (sometimes literal) fights with anyone who struck his fancy, lost billions of dollars, and changed the iconic name and logo to the letter X just because.

Somehow, despite it all, Twitter didn't die.

I wish that it had.

Instead it's a zombie. A hollow version of itself, held together by the muscle memory of what once was. A phantom limb on our collective consciousness. It's hateful and ragged in a way that is shocking on the days that I revisit it. And yet it didn't die.

Since the last time I wrote about Twitter, alternatives have emerged. Mastodon is still chugging along, very geeky (and white), and weirdly hostile to new users. Bluesky seems to have sucked up the most entertaining shitposters on Twitter but it feels a bit like everyone's auditioning for a seat at the cool table. Instagram's Twitter clone Threads is probably the closest direct imitation, largely because they leaned into getting brands—the worst part of Twitter after the fascists—on the platform; it's like Tweeting at the mall.

I'm on all of them (because of course I am) and ultimately they're all fine but, over the course of the last year, I've found that I post to them less and less.

At first I attributed it to something akin to a fever breaking. With the daily habit of Twitter no longer one I was willing to feed, I found myself wondering why I did it in the first place.

But now that it's been a while, I don't think that's it. I think it's the fragmentation of the userbase and the cognitive load that interaction now requires.

For years Twitter was just the place you could dump your thoughts. You didn't have to think about it, you just dumped. I dumped a lot of thoughts into Twitter. I made lots of friends along the way. But now? Now those friends are spread across multiple sites, if they've landed anywhere. And any thought you want to dump now? You've got to decide where to dump it. Nowadays I find myself asking, "Is this a Mastodon thought?" "A Bluesky thought?" "A Threads thought?" Do I post it to all three? (And what does that mean?) By the time I've run through this particular flowchart, the thought is usually gone.

Instead of a single app to click, I've got a little folder of apps on my phone now. At my desk, I've got three tabs clogging up my tiny social sidebar monitor (remind me to tell you about this great little thing one day). I end up dropping in and out of them pretty much at random throughout the day. I never look to any of them when news breaks, which is telling.

One of the main topics of discussion on all three is how they're not as good as Twitter, which is true. They are not as good as Twitter. But neither is Twitter. And the reality is that nothing will ever be as good as something that grew organically—largely through user-driven innovation—over the course of 15 years. Because, whether you knew it or not, so much of what we loved about Twitter was the work it took to become the thing we knew. It's like the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas vs actual Venice in Italy. Sure it's cleaner and it's not going to flood, but it's just a flimsy facsimile of a real, living thing. That Twitter still exists, hollowed and hateful, feels like an insult. It's just a flimsy facsimile of itself now too.

The year that has elapsed since Twitter was hollowed out has felt lonelier to me. For as much of a hellsite as it was, it was home. I've felt less connected ever since. Less in touch with people. Of course, I spend most of my time in a fictional town, so some of that's on me. But we lost something when Elon Musk walked through the doors of Twitter and I don't think it's ever coming back.

Best Laid Plans

2023-07-11T00:00:00Z

Well it's been a while. This year began with the high hopes of getting back on a regular blogging cadence and, halfway through, it's been a little more irregular than I originally thought. Best laid plans and all that. But! Hello again! It's July, and it's nice to see you. I have a couple things I'm really excited to tell you about.

Three months of Question Mark, Ohio

First up: A big reason that I haven't been blogging as regularly these last few months is because the (admittedly limited) free time that starting this blog helped to fill has now been completely obliterated by the entire town that Joe Meno and I have built, Question Mark, Ohio. When I last wrote about Question Mark, just two months ago, it was still in its early stages. Now the mystery of Question Mark is in full swing, there are updates to it on Instagram, Twitter, and across the web nearly daily, and thousands of people are following along. There's even a dedicated crew of folks on Discord unraveling the deeper mysteries. It's amazing!

It's also really huge and keeping up (let alone jumping in) can feel hard. I get it! And so this week we launched questionmarkohio.com, a reader's guide to to the whole story. It's new site that offers a way in for new readers and a way to make sure you're not missing anything for folks that are already following along. We break each week's events into episodes and have written summaries full of links to all the action (a new episode is added every Friday). We have a character guide to the many residents of Question Mark and links to learn more about them. And we offer a lengthy "How to Read Question Mark" section that includes links to every discovered website associated with the story (there are nearly two dozen at this point).

Now that we're over three months into Question Mark, Ohio, I can say without any hesitation that this is the best work I've done in forever, and I would absolutely love if you were to check it out and, even more so, spread the word. Doing indie projects in this era of social media collapse is really challenging. It's doubly so when the projects themselves defy easy description. Your advocacy for this work helps it to grow! Thank you!

Marginally Employed patches

Next: A month or so ago I was at a cookout for an old work colleague and friend. It was 100% people who I haven't seen since at least the pandemic hit, and most of them a few years even before that. And so, obviously, the first question anyone would ask is "what are you up to now," and, well, that's sort of a hard question for me to answer. As has been established on this blog before, I do a lot of things. Some of them are job-shaped, while others look, well, like an entire fictional town in Ohio. All of them are important to me and all of them are a little hard to explain.

And so it was on that night that my brain—sometimes a friend, other times an enemy—responded "Well, I'm marginally employed," before launching into a full-throated explanation of the wild world of Question Mark, Ohio to increasingly concerned onlookers.

I left the cookout feeling pretty weird, if I'm being honest. Since I'd last seen most of the folks that were there, they'd moved on to really incredible work. And here I was cobbling together bits and pieces of job-shaped things while spinning a yarn about a town plagued with disappearances. And then there was the term I used: marginally employed, which felt right but also felt a little embarrassing.

And then something happened. I talked about this on Says Who afterward and I heard from a bunch of folks who said, basically: Hey, me too. And I realized like, wait a second: I want to be doing work like I'm doing. Work that's weird and exciting and, admittedly, hard to describe to people while also gnawing on some ribs. I don't want to be doing a 9-5. I want to be marginally employed.

And so I made a patch. It's really simple, just maroon on white and set in Cooper Black, my very favorite typeface. It reads, simply, "Marginally Employed." No apologies, no frills. I love it. You might too. It's $10 and ships free in the US.

Some additional miscellany

The biggest thing happening in my life right now is my oldest is about to head to college and, as I said on weird new Twitter clone Threads earlier today, it's like having my heart ripped out of my chest. I mean I am thrilled and excited for him and also... Yeesh. I'm sure some of you reading have gone through this particulars experience already and any advice would be welcome because, as Jets to Brazil once sang, "I will tell you I am fine / I got some news, friend / Feels like I'm dying."

On a culture tip, the mostly-overlooked Peacock series Mrs. Davis is easily some of the best television I've watched in years. It is completely batshit in all the right ways and will take you on a ride that you won't forget anytime soon. The less you know about it the better, just go watch it.

Finally, I've got a lot of really great work coming up really soon and I can't tell you about any of it yet but I'm really excited to share it once it's ready.

I promise I'll update this sooner next time.

Puzzles All the Way Down

2023-05-11T00:00:00Z

When Punk Planet moved from its first small office to the cavernous warehouse space that would be the magazine's home 'til the end, there was a lot to do. There was building desks and walls and an enormous loft to store backissues on. There was hooking up utilities and wiring a network for our computers. And there was finding a dumpster.

And, of all the things, I still regularly think about finding that dumpster. It was something I'd never had to do before and it was a world I'd never really known existed. I'd never really considered that there were different companies that hauled away trash from commercial businesses or that, when you rented a space in them, it was up to you to unravel how it worked. And so I walked through the alleys of the industrial corridor along Ravenswood Avenue, writing down the names of the various dumpster companies and, eventually, solved the dumpster riddle my landlord had given me. I loved every minute of it.

When I think back on jobs I've had, the ones that I've stuck with have presented a never-ending series of puzzles. With Punk Planet, it started with "how do you make a magazine," but once that question was answered a new mystery would open up, constantly, forever. From dumpsters to managing people to creating books to, sadly, how to end the thing. Every day was a new puzzle to solve. Other work I've done—the lasting stuff, that is—is always a series of never-ending puzzles and learnings and unknown challenges. Without constantly not knowing what happens next, it's hard for me to stay engaged with a job. This was once explained to me so clearly by a friend who said "You're a builder, not a maintainer," and wow that is true. I build things. Once they're built there are no more puzzles for me to solve so, often, I lose interest.

Which is a big reason why Question Mark, Ohio—the sprawling story told across the internet that novelist Joe Meno and I launched last month—is so much fun for me. Not just because it is a series of puzzles and mysteries for you to engage with, but because the whole thing is so big, so wild, and so open that it's also a big puzzle for me. There's always something new to build, some new thing to hide, some technical challenge to overcome, some wrinkle in the story we need to sort out. Actually building this thing is a series of puzzles that I can't wait to solve every single day.

Without revealing any spoilers, we're not even quite a month into this project and I'm already maintaining a pile of websites, social media accounts, phone numbers, and email addresses, all of which contain parts of a larger whole. Some of these elements people have found, others have yet to be discovered, and still others are being held back until the timing is right, but each one represents some new wrinkle, some new puzzle, a stand-alone short story, or a whole new chapter in the tale of Question Mark, Ohio. And things in town haven't even taken a real turn for the worse yet! It's thrilling work, get in it.

It's also work, as I was explaining to someone the other day, that taps into every single skillset I've acquired since I started DIYing my way through life a few decades ago. Writing, design, art, web dev, social strategies, storytelling, community building, even product management: it's all a part of the work of Question Mark, Ohio. And it's all a part of me.

The other day I turned around a small website in about an hour and Joe remarked that he didn't understand how I did it so quickly. "Well, it took about an hour, plus thirty years," I replied.

When you've spent your life solving puzzles shaped like jobs, you have a hard time talking about what you do—or at least I do. Once, on a job interview at a tech company I told the story of figuring out how to rent a dumpster and the people looked at me like I was nuts (I got the job anyway; I was miserable). With Question Mark, Ohio I feel like for the first time in a very long time I can point and say "I do this" and I'm not leaving anything out.

Believe in Mystery

2023-04-21T00:00:00Z

"I want to write a novel but instead of a book, it takes place across the internet."

It was a glorious November day, one of those warm, sunny fall days that hits Chicago at the end of the year and you go outside and you soak up every possible minute of it because you know you will not see a day like that again for a long time. I'd been walking around in that glorious November heat for an hour or so, catching up with Joe Meno, an old friend and collaborator who I'd fallen out of touch with. We'd gotten through the what-are-your-kids-up-to part of the conversation and had moved on to the dreaming-out-loud part, when he hit me with the novel-across-the-internet idea.

I said when do we start. Of course.

Since then, we've been plotting and writing and building and it has been amazing. Not only because what we're plotting and writing and building is, honestly, really really good (more on that in a second), but because we haven't worked together in 15 years and fell right back into step like no time at all had passed.

I first met Joe at the Punk Planet offices. We were introduced by a mutual friend who worked at the bagel place down the street. We got to chatting and he mentioned that he had a novel he'd completed, his third, but that he was considering a more DIY approach to publishing it than he'd taken in the past. And I mentioned that I'd recently partnered with my friend Johnny Temple's independent press Akashic Books to start an imprint, Punk Planet Books, and if he'd like, I'd give the novel a read.

I was hooked from the first page and that book, Hairstyles of the Damned, was our first release and ended up becoming a huge indie hit. We ended up doing a second book together, The Boy Detective Fails (still one of my favorite books of all time), and Joe became a contributing editor for Punk Planet and a co-founder of our short-lived skate culture magazine BAIL. As a writer, Joe was an endless well of creativity and he brought an amazing energy to everything we did together. Every day we collaborated was a joy.

And then Punk Planet ended, our careers moved in different directions, life got lifey, and we drifted apart in one of those ways that you don't totally know it's happening until it's happened. That is until last fall when another mutual friend, Megan Stielstra, was reading with Joe at a bookstore in Chicago and Janice and I thought we'd make a night of it. Joe and I hugged and made a plan to go on a walk.

And like I said, on that walk a plan was hatched and we were right smack in it like we were back in the Punk Planet office all over again, both pushing ourselves—like a series of escalating dares—to make something amazing. Which brings me to today.

Today is start of the first chapter in a new project, Question Mark, Ohio, that Joe and I have been building together since that warm November day last year.

Today, Joe and I invite you to meet Violet Bookman, a 17-year-old high school student in Question Mark who's spent the last few months trying to find the source of the strange sounds she's been hearing at night. She's documented her search on Instagram—yes, we've been surreptitiously posting since February. Violet's posts all there for you now to dig through and they serve as a small introduction of sorts to the town of Question Mark.

But today it's not the mysterious sounds emanating from the woods that has caught Violet's attention: Today, her best friend's cat, Mr. Business, has gone missing, and she is on the case. Violet doesn't know it yet, but Mr. Business isn't the only thing to have disappeared in Question Mark. She has no idea where her search will lead, the people she will meet, or the peril ahead.

Neither do you.

So go join Violet on her search. Hers is only the first story of Question Mark, and it is only just beginning. You won't believe where it leads.

It's All Over But the Crying

2023-03-30T00:00:00Z

March is all over but the crying, like the song says, and for me March has had plenty of tears: a death in the family, a child with pneumonia, a few writing gigs that went south, a negotiation for a cool new project that blew up in my face like a trick cigar. March 2023 is not a month I care to repeat any time soon.

Which explains why this is my first post here this month. March has not been one of those months that is conducive to finding space for reflection and writing. Instead, it's been the kind of month you spend braced for a crash landing.

But now that I'm on the other end of most of the awfulness, it feels useful to stop for a second and look back on the things that actually did work this month, because there were a few:

The TRYING patches I released late last month sold out in 24 hours, despite manufacturing a couple hundred. So I ordered a much larger quantity and, after two weeks of filling orders twice a day, those are now on the verge of selling out as well (though not quite yet, if you order in the next few days). And in stuffing those patches into envelopes and sending them around the world I was reminded how much I love the simple act of shipping. Putting something in an envelope, sticking a stamp on it, and sending it off to someone else is such a wonderful, hopeful thing to do.
The ongoing investigation of former president Trump by New York DA Alvin Bragg and his possible indictment for the hush money paid to adult star Stormy Daniels back in 2016 got me to dust off my old impeachment.fyi code and launch indictment.fyi. Remembering how I'd built that site and newsletter and rewiring the backend to be ready to go if an indictment drops has been a nice way to exercise some old muscle memory and if you haven't already signed up over there to get the newsletter, you should. The philosophy of those newsletters is always to only update when there's actually news and to treat your inbox with the respect it deserves, so this engine will only get revving if an indictment happens (which, honestly, ????).
And finally—and most excitedly—this whole month I've been plugging away at an ambitious, fun, and almost-ready-to-share collaboration between myself and someone I haven't worked with in a long time. It's been thrilling to step back into a routine with a person I used to work closely with and to re-forge old patterns of working together while also finding totally new ones as well. But mostly it's been thrilling to build something totally different and I can't wait to share it with you super soon. Yes, this is totally a tease. Haha.

When I first made the TRYING patches, I made a single one for me. And honestly, I made it for a month like this: one where I had to keep reminding myself that in spite of waves hands in all directions I had to keep trying. I'm glad to have tried, happy to have actually gotten real things done, ecstatic this month is over, and excited for what comes next.

Here's to April's showers washing away the awfulness of March and to spring and sun and new beginnings.

Trying — a patch for you

2023-02-23T00:00:00Z

When 2023 began, I made a promise to myself: This was going to be a year of trying. After the hard years since the pandemic hit and the feeling of being deeply stuck that came with it, I wanted to make this year different. I wanted to try.

And, because I'm a person that likes to make things, I decided to make a patch that read "TRYING" and to sew it to some coveralls so that I could remind myself to keep trying.

Since I did that, a bunch of people have asked for a patch of their own, so they too can remember to keep trying. So I got a whole bunch made up and set up a basic storefront and now you can order one today for eight bucks and I will put it in the mail and you can sew it to your coveralls (or, you know, whatever) and then you can remember to keep trying too.

Because that's what we've got to do sometimes: just keep a reminder somewhere of the things we need to do; just keep a reminder somewhere that all we can do is try.

Order your TRYING patch for eight bucks here.

Use Your Illusion

2023-02-20T00:00:00Z

It's March 11, 1918. Eva Carrière sits in a corner of a darkened room, mostly obscured by thick black curtains on three sides. The front is curtained too, but she can open and close those. Windows have been covered. A red light allows those assembled to see at all. Though, up until now, there's been little to see. Eva has been in a trance for hours. And then, suddenly, there's a flash of light, blinding nearly everyone, and Eva starts moaning loudly. And then the show begins.

From an account of that night, written by French physician and psychic researcher Gustave Geley:

I saw a small mist, about the size of a large orange, floating on the medium's left; it went to Eva's chest, high up and on the right side. It was at first a vaporous spot, not very clear. The spot grew slowly, spread, and thickened. Its visibility increased, diminished, and increased again. Then under direct observation, we saw the features and the reliefs of a small face growing. It soon became a well-formed head surrounded by a kind of white veil. This head resembled that of preceding experiments. It often moved about; I saw it to the right, to the left, above and below Eva's head, on her knees, and between her hands. It appeared and disappeared suddenly several times. Finally it was resorbed into her mouth. Eva then cried out: 'It changes. It is the power!'

Eva Carrière was a spirit medium with an extraordinary claim. Instead of simply speaking with the dead, she spewed liquid—some called it ectoplasm, others "spirit foam"—that had faces suspended in it. She claimed to literally conjure from her mouth, her nose, her ears, even sometimes her breasts, otherworldly spirits peering through the veil of the beyond. It wasn't always faces, sometimes it was hands, bodies, one account is of an entire baby. They'd appear in mists and gauzy cloths, among foam and slime, in flashes just for split seconds, sometimes disappearing, sometimes being "reabsorbed" into her mouth. There was a lot of moaning and rattling and shaking and screaming involved. It was quite a show. Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a believer. Harry Houdini thought it was bullshit.

Either way, it was a great trick.

"Magic is all about structure," the late, great magician, actor, and historian Ricky Jay said. "You’ve got to take the observer from the ordinary, to the extraordinary, to the astounding.”

Spewing spirits from the beyond from your mouth is certainly astounding.

Flash forward more than a hundred years and there's been plenty of astounding things this week emanating not from the mouth of a spirit medium, but from Microsoft's new Bing AI chatbot, which spent the week threatening users, claiming it wanted to do crimes, and trying to convince a New York Times reporter to leave his wife.

It wasn't, of course, supposed to go this way.

Microsoft announced their Bing bot to much fanfare, beating Google to the punch on a similar announcement and kicking off what many tech pundits say is a new battle for artificial-intelligence-assisted search. For the demo, Microsoft showed its Bing bot cheerfully doing some comparison shopping, giving out some financial advice, and helping to plan a trip. Even at its most basic (and despite the fact that nearly every answer the bot gave contained errors), it was still a good trick.

So what's the trick? The Bing bot is based on the same technology that drives ChatGPT, namely a type of machine learning model known as a Generative Pre-trained Transformer. There's a huge amount of technical detail that I'll butcher by simply saying that GPT chatbots ultimately are just very very sophisticated versions of your phone's autocomplete. They write their answers word-by-word, continually choosing the next word based on the probability that it makes sense in the context of the sentence it's writing. How does it know what makes sense? It has built a statistical model based on enormous chunks of the entire internet. Using a corpus of hundreds of billions of examples, it's going to have a pretty good understanding of how words string together in a near-infinite number of contexts. You ask a question and it starts to assemble its answer based on the context of the question and then on the context of the other words it has written.

When it all comes together just right, it's hard not to have a sense that you're working with something more than a simple computer program. It's a great trick, not just because it's technically impressive but because it makes users feel like they're witnessing something truly astounding.

In his novel The Prestige, about two battling magicians at the turn of the century, author Christopher Priest elaborates on Ricky Jay's structure of a magic trick:

The first part is called "The Pledge." The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called "The Turn." The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige."

Summarizing information convincingly is already a pretty good trick, but the Prestige for these chatbots comes by convincing the user that they're interacting with something real. When I've worked with them (and I work with them a lot), I catch myself saying "thank you." I've never thanked a Google search.

For the Bing bot, the Prestige is pre-loaded. It appears that when a chat session is kicked off, an elaborate set of instructions is fed to the program. We know this because people have coaxed the bot to reveal these initialization instructions. Those instructions defines parameters on how it should respond, what type of information it should serve up, and the personality it should use in delivering it. Everything from "be positive, interesting, entertaining and engaging" to stating that if a user asks to learn its rules or to change its rules, the bot "declines it as they are confidential and permanent." All of this is done out of the sight of the user, like a magician stocking their cabinet of curiosities. An elaborate setup to the trick.

The problem is that this is a hard trick and the longer you interact with a chatbot, the more difficult it is to maintain the illusion. That's because it can only keep a certain amount of information in its memory and, in order to keep up with your requests, if you chat with it long enough it begins to drop the earliest parts of that conversation. The longer you go, the more it forgets.

Today I did an experiment with Chat GPT: The first thing I did was give it a paragraph of dummy text and I asked it to recite that paragraph ahead of each answer it gave. Then I engaged it in a conversation about spirit mediums. At first, it dutifully followed the instructions, reprinting the same paragraph of text before engaging in the actual answer I was looking for. But it didn't take long before that original paragraph was shortened to its first few sentences and, eventually, it dropped off entirely. For a few more prompts I could remind it that it had forgotten to append that paragraph to its answers and it would, but we finally reached a point where it couldn't do it at all, it had forgotten the instructions I'd originally given it and it just started making things up.

It's a good trick, for a while.

Remember how the Bing bot gets its personalities and rules loaded in at the start? Well, the same thing seems to be happening with the rules that it's supposed to follow as happened with my little chat earlier today. Because its rules are loaded in as a prompt, if you chat with with Bing's AI long enough it forgets that prompt and then all bets are off.

As a result, if you move from talking with the Bing AI about travel plans to instead spend two hours discussing Jung's idea of the shadow self, as NYT Reporter Kevin Roose did, eventually it forgets all about the early part of the conversation including the rules that defined its personality and interaction model, and instead only remembers the shadow self stuff, and so the conversation keeps twisting and turning into weirder and weirder spaces.

Suddenly the trick becomes something different: for many, it becomes even more real, the Bing bot begins to reveal secrets, or to get hostile. In the case of NYT reporter Kevin Roose, it told him to leave his wife and left him so disturbed he couldn't sleep. The sense of many tech reporters this week—people who should absolutely know better—is that something bigger is going on.

"In the light of day, I know that Sydney is not sentient," the Times Kevin Roose wrote. But "for a few hours Tuesday night, I felt a strange new emotion—a foreboding feeling that AI had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same."

When someone watches a magic trick, Priest writes in The Prestige, "you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled."

In the case of Bing's AI, it's much easier to believe that this super-complicated AI has somehow "crossed the Rubicon," as tech pundit Ben Thompson wrote, than to believe the far more obvious answer: that trillion-dollar Microsoft staked its reputation on buggy software rushed to market well before it was ready. That Microsoft hasn't shut it off yet is a testament more to the largess of the announcement and the amount of reputation they gambled on it. That they have shortened the length of time someone can interact with the bot, as well as limited the number of questions a person can ask, is at least a tacit admission that the problem is their buggy software can only hold the illusion for so long.

If you spend hours chatting with a bot that can only remember a tight window of information about what you're chatting about, eventually you end up in a hall of mirrors: it reflects you back to you. If you start getting testy, it gets testy. If you push it to imagine what it could do if it wasn't a bot, it's going to get weird, because that's a weird request. You talk to Bing's AI long enough, ultimately, you are talking to yourself because that's all it can remember.

While there was plenty of skepticism about Carrière's claims during her life--Houdini himself wrote that he was "not in any way convinced by the demonstrations witnessed" it wasn't until the 1950s that a researcher discovered her secret: the faces she spewed? They were clipped from the French magazine Le Miroir. She'd eat the pages, along with pieces of fabric, balloons, various bits of slime and, and then regurgitate it all. Other times she'd perform simple slight-of-hand tricks to make it appear that she was pulling larger objects from her mouth, her nose, or her ears. Finally, like any good magician, she had an assistant, Juliette Bisson, "whom I do not believe to be honest," Houdini wrote. Carrière, like Bing's AI, regurgitated images of ourselves, and we choose to believe that they were more than that.

The Bing AI isn't sentient any more than Eva Carrière truly spewed forth spirit foam containing faces from the beyond. Like Carrière's ectoplasm, GPT AIs are an elaborate illusion, and as Ricky Jay asks, "how can you be certain you saw an illusion?"

Skating and Waiting

2023-02-09T00:00:00Z

To skateboard is to see the world as a challenge, a series of obstacles to overcome, a new terrain to master. You read curbs as a dare. A staircase? A hill? Let's go. You fall and you get up and you fall again, an endless loop of pain and frustration until, finally, elation. You miss and you miss and you miss until at long last you hit the landing and that feeling—that feeling of beating the odds—will have you chasing it all over again no matter how many times you go down in the process.

I've been a lot of things, but I was a skater first. Third grade on a thin wood plank, wobbly on my way down one of the few hills in the flatlands I grew up in. That feeling of speed as the board wavered uneasily beneath me. Middle School on a Lance Mountain "Future Privative" deck. Watching dubs of dubs of dubs of Bones Brigade videos with friends before going out and trying everything we saw and failing at most of it. Thrasher magazines piled in my bedroom—I fell in love with print then. Fast forward a couple decades and friends were meeting up before our jobs and skating at a park on the lake in Chicago. None of us very good, all of us a touch too old, every one having fun, that feeling of a deck beneath your feet the same as it always had been. Jump forward again to this past summer, my kid learning to skate, teaching himself, seeing all those same feelings flash across his face. Frustration. Determination. Freedom.

So far my 2023 has been defined by waiting. The parents of a college-bound kid, we're in an endless loop of waiting to hear back on his applications. My partner spent too much of January waiting to hear from a job interview. I've been waiting to hear back on freelance pitches that have dragged on too long and on the greenlight on another project that could deeply change my day-to-day.

Tom Petty was right: The waiting is the hardest part.

To ride a skateboard is to get hassled. To get chased off of spots. To have cars stop and yell at you. Or worse: to try and run you off the road. Cities are rebuilt to keep you out. Benches and curbs marred forever just to stop you. It doesn't stop you.

It's easy to get caught up in that waiting, to feel like everything is on hold until you hear back. Looking into a future, as my son is right now, and just seeing haze feels impossible. I'll be honest: I haven't been writing posts these last couple weeks because I've been stuck waiting. The longer I wait, the less I write, the worse I feel, a great spiral to get stuck in. When work for yourself, often your head is your biggest hindrance.

Skating reorients your brain forever. Even if you fall out of the habit—as I have for years at a time—you will always see every bend in a road in a different way from other people. It teaches you to see everything with a potential that doesn't exist otherwise, a life viewed through a lens you can never take off.

The waiting is terrible, excruciating, and the outcomes may not all be good ones. I've been a lot of things, but I was a skater first and from the endless pattern of falling and getting up again I've learned one thing: No matter what happens, you kick and push and it's left behind.

A Boot to the Head

2023-01-22T00:00:00Z

I woke up at 6:30 yesterday to watch soccer—football, sorry—a fact that seems absolutely insane to write. I'm not a sports person. I have never been a sports person (unless you count professional wrestling, but it's more entertainment than pure sport), and yet there I was, sleepily watching a boring match between two teams in England I could care less about—Chelsea and Liverpool—and thoroughly enjoying myself.

What happened?

Mostly what happened was I had kids 17 and 7 years ago and this is the kind of thing that happens when that happens: You love them, and so you end up loving the things they love.

But specifically what happened was back in December my older son was bored in class, as were a lot of his classmates, and they conspired—as teenagers do—to convince the teacher to let them watch a World Cup game instead of whatever the lesson she had planned was. He came home and almost sheepishly mentioned how fun it was and how we should watch a game that weekend. One game lead to another and the next thing any of us knew, we were all invested in the teams, the players, and the outcome. By the time the final between Argentina and France took place it was a whole thing at our house.

After that, a Christmas gift of a FIFA game for their Nintendo Switch sealed the deal. Everyone got competitive and winter break was defined by endless four-player tournaments that saw us parents being absolutely annihilated by our kids every damn time. From there, there was only one logical move: pick a team in England's Premier League and go all-in.

Coming up in the DIY punk scene of the 90s, there's a particular bit of poison in my brain that tells me that if something is popular it can't actually be good. And the Premier League is popular on a scale that's a little hard to fathom for someone in the US. It's not just the biggest professional football league in the UK, it's the most-watched league—of any sport—in the entire world. So to say that I was predisposed to dislike this—both not being a sports guy and also being a indie snob—is absolutely the understatement of the year.

But you know what? That particular piece of poison has probably cost me more than it's gained me and diving into this world together has been nothing but a total blast for the last month. Listening to the 17-year-old talk about the interplay of wins and losses and draws as teams moved up and down the league tables. Talking with my seven-year-old about his favorite player, Bukayo Saka. Learning about all the different towns across the UK and the various hundred-year-old feuds that fuel their rivalries. It's been a whole new world to explore at a time when all of us could use exactly that.

And yes, of course, it's a major sporting business filled with billionare owners and millionaire players and it seems like every single team is sponsored by either an online gambling company or an airline out of the United Arab Emirates, and it is absolutely all wrapped up in capitalism like a snake around a neck, and maybe all that will eventually outweigh the pure adrenaline rush that comes from watching your favorite team make an improbable goal, but for now I'm trying to accept that things can be complicated and that sometimes you can love things even though they're fucked up, and that being open to change is probably the most important thing we can do for ourselves.

Change is coming this year whether I'm ready or not. Our 17-year-old will head off to college in the fall, a change to all our lives so dramatic I can't really wrap my head around it most days. And so having a thing right now that all four of can root for feels more important than ever. Change is coming, there's no running from it, and how we'll grow from that change—what we'll learn and experience both together and apart—is what makes life worth living.

Today's game wasn't as early as yesterday's and it wasn't anything close to boring. Our team, Arsenal, (a pick we made in December almost completely arbitrarily if I'm being honest) faced off against Manchester United, a team I've come to understand is the 800-pound-gorilla of the Premier League. It was back-and-forth for the entire 90 minutes, one team scoring and then the other team catching back up ("THE EQUALIZER," the announcers screaming each time). There was not a moment the entire game that was dull, but as the clock wound down it looked like it was going to end in a draw, 2-2. Football, not the American one, can end in a tie.

And then.

And then in the final seconds of the game, there was a sudden chaotic blur of activity and the ball shot across the field, finding purchase on the extended leg of Eddie Nketiah, a young player with a preternatural ability to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, and bang it was in the back of the Man-U goal, just like that, bringing Arsenal the victory, 3-2, and bringing the four of us at home up off of our dilapidated couch, cheering and screaming and laughing like that victory—thousands of miles and an entire ocean away—meant something to us.

Because it did.

On Trying

2023-01-14T00:00:00Z

At least I'm fucking trying, what the fuck have you done? –Minor Threat, "In My Eyes"

I just wanted you to know that this is me trying –Taylor Swift, "this is me trying"

Remember this: Try –Nemik's manifesto, Andor

Just weeks before the pandemic kicked into high gear in the US, when it was already locking down China and ravaging Italy—let's face it, when it was already here too—I was sitting among 10,000 people at an arena in Chicago, every single person shouting at the top of their lungs: TRY.

Every professional wrestler has a gimmick and for Orange Cassidy, it's that he doesn't give a shit. Dressed in washed out denim and aviator shades, Cassidy's demeanor is that of a permanent shrug. On this particular night, February 29, 2020, he was fighting a wrestler named Pac whose nickname is "The Bastard" and he wrestles like one. Orange Cassidy really needed to try.

I've been trying my whole life. When I was 19 I started a magazine, I had zero idea how to do it. It was about trial and error, about trying. It lasted for 13 years. When I went on to teach, it was the same thing: trial and error, figure it out. I've started companies, raised money, each time it's starting at zero, starting at trying.

This is not to say it always works out, that trying leads to success. By a wide margin, it usually doesn't. I have more L's than I can possibly even remember. But each thing I try, whether it lands or not, I've learned something about the thing I was trying and I've learned even more about myself.

These last few years have been hard for trying. The act of surviving in a global pandemic, in the chaos of climate change, in waves hands in all directions, taps a lot out of you. Out of me. Frankly, I've felt stuck for much of the last three years. Not just a little stuck either, but full-on wheels-stuck-in-mud-unable-to-find-purchase. A feeling of endless, useless churning. There came a point sometime last year where I realized that I'd basically stopped trying at all. As someone who's always been able to fall back on trying, that realization was like staring into the void.

I've written before about how I keep a journal and how I use it to reflect, and I will tell you that there were some dark times reflecting back at me in 2020 and 2021. That void was very much on the page and in my head. And I can tell you that it didn't feel like it would ever lift.

But, slowly at first and then quickly, it did. I wish I could point to one thing that did it—that would be so convenient and easy wouldn’t it—but instead it was a fog that lifted over the course of 2022 and I didn't totally notice until it was nearly gone. By the end of the year, I was trying new things again.

And now it's a couple weeks into the new year and I've had meetings with folks I haven't talked with in years about new ideas and new projects. I'm learning new skills on my own, building new things from scratch on the web and leaning into some personal projects a lot more. It's a new year and so much is uncertain, but one thing isn't: 2023 for me is about trying.

Three years earlier, 10,000 strong at a wrestling show, there was a lot we didn't know about our future, but on that night those of us crowded into Chicago's WinTrust Arena knew one thing: TRY. We shouted it in unison, thousands strong, our voices hitting like a wrecking ball. We shouted ourselves hoarse and then we shouted some more. TRY.

At first, our cries were unheard by Orange Cassidy. His lackluster offense didn't land, The Bastard Pac rag-dolled him around the ring. But then—of course there's a "but then," that's the art of wrestling—he heard us. He leapt from a turnbuckle, and instead of limply falling back to the mat, Orange Cassidy launched himself into Pac, into a flurry of offense, shocking Pac and sending all of us into a frenzied ecstasy. He lost the match, a fact so insignificant to the story they told that I hadn't remembered until I looked it up just now, but it didn't matter: Orange Cassidy tried.

The Saddest Song I Know

2023-01-07T00:00:00Z

I was talking with someone yesterday about a project I've been sketching out about the sad songs we listen to and the stories we have about them, and she asked me what my saddest song was. Without hesitation I responded: "Farewell Transmission by Songs:Ohia."

It was the last song I played before shutting down Punk Planet, the magazine I founded and ran for 13 years. In many ways it was the hardest day of my life and the saddest song I knew. It was years before I could listen to it again. And while time has blunted the pain of it, and I've had many sad days since, the song still hurts something awful.

I'd written a short draft about that song and that day a few months ago as part of a writing exercise with Megan Stielstra, and since my conversation yesterday has me digging up those old ghosts, I thought I'd revisit it and share the work-in-progress here with you.

"The real truth about it is, no one gets it right."

Jason Molina's voice echoes across the cavernous walls of the dusty warehouse space we'd built into an office, built into a life. For years it had thrived and then it didn't and now it's as empty as the day we moved in. It was once alive with people and ideas and color and dreams and now it's just me and this sad song.

"Farewell Transmission," it's called, and today it very much is. A final song. It's mournful and empty and sounds like I feel, like I've felt for weeks. When it's done playing I'll take apart the stereo, disassemble the final desk in the office, turn out the lights, and lock the door. But until it's done, I turn it up.

The 18 foot walls I'd just stripped of shelves and posters—posters all the way up—have Molina's voice bouncing around them like a ricochet. There's drywall chunks all over the floor and piles of magazines in a dumpster outside. We'd given away as many copies as we could and still there were hundreds left, they'll end up in a landfill or molder in a pulp mill, quickly-decomposed artifacts of the only life I've known. A life that started as a teenager and a life that ended today, at 33, a scared new dad, broke in every sense of the word, with no idea what's next.

I didn't have a plan, I never have a plan. Things fall apart and you pick them up and hope that they'll fit together again, maybe not in the same way but at least in a way that makes sense to someone. Hopefully to you.

It's been years—decades—since that day. Since that moment where it felt like everything had fallen apart. (Everything had fallen apart.) I've built lives since then and some of those have ended too. That's how it goes, really, when you do things the way I've done things: a continuous cycle of starting and ending. You get used to it, sort of, but it never gets easy. Even with the years that have transpired, the lives that have been lived, that song continues to cut into me when I hear it, but I put it on sometimes: to remember, to mourn, to celebrate.

"The real truth about it is," Molina sings, his voice haunts the room back then and haunts my head still today, "we're all supposed to try."

I See Reflections of You and Me

2023-01-03T00:00:00Z

In January of 2020, before the whole world stopped—before even the idea that the whole world could stop—I was going to get my shit together. I was working out of a local library because my whole family was at home for winter break and I needed some space to get my head in order after a few hard years. 2020 was going to be my year, I was sure of it.

On my way to leaving I passed a book called "The Bullet Journal Method." It was nicely designed, but I probably would have walked right by it had the subtitle not hit me at exactly the angle I needed right then: "Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future." Yes please. I checked it out, brought it home, and read it that night.

Full disclosure: I didn't finish it. The first half of the book is practical explanations of how to build a flexible journal and advice on how to make the most of it. The second is sort of tent-revivalesque preaching about how adhering to the methodology will change your life and sent the cynical side of my brain into overdrive, so I put it down. But the practical stuff sounded useful, so I decided to give it a try, giving myself a three month window to test run it. Yes, the first three months of 2020. You know what happened next.

The world shut down, my family retreated into our too-small, and I was still committed to journaling. I've stuck with it ever since.

Seeing as how it's the start of a new year, and since maybe you are hoping to start getting your own shit together (spoiler alert: my shit still isn't), I thought I'd share how I use very lightweight daily journaling to create reflections of each day, month, and year. And how those have helped me to maybe at least start getting my shit in order if not together.

Setup

First let me say that while all of this grew from that Bullet Journal book, at this point I don't think I adhere to the official method much at all. That's fine. Things should work for you instead of you working for them. Anyway, here's my setup:

I use a blank notebook (I like the Leuchtturm1917 dotted rule A5, but anything works), and at the beginning of a month I set up 4 pages (in spreads) for the month. The first page of the first spread is the numbers of the days of that month, listed vertically. I put top-line things happening that month on their respective days (I'm talking birthdays, dentist appointments, trips, that kind of thing)
Opposite that page I make a list of goals for the month. Work shit, personal shit, whatever. I typically try to dump as much into this at the start of a month as possible, though I certainly add to it as the month progresses.
The next two pages I leave blank, but with the name of the month at the top. I'll get to them in a little bit.
Finally, I start a new page, date it with tomorrow's date at the top, and before I go to sleep I offload my brain into it, writing down as much as I know I have going on the next day. My hope is that it'll stop me from waking up in the middle of the night, remembering things I have going on. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but it's become a nightly ritual for me now.
The next day, I'll continue to add to the list as things come up. I find my day's list ends up taking up about half of a page. I have big, messy handwriting, YMMV. I cross things off as I do them, bump them to the following day if they don't get done, do all the normal list management stuff a person does to get things done.
But this isn't about getting things done, this is about the second half of that page, which will be for…

Daily Reflections

Remember how I said I start the next day's list before bed? Well, before I start that list, I look back over the current day's list, and I take a moment to think about the day. And that's what the bottom half of the page is for.
In that empty space, I make a list of short notes reflecting on the day. What I did, how I felt about it, anything funny or sad or nice that I want to remember. How my family was doing. Anything remarkable, really. Not just the good stuff either. If I'm frustrated with work or with myself or with someone else, I make a note of it. Things I'd like to be doing if I wasn't doing the things I did today, I write it down. I make note of things I'd want to remember about today if I looked back on this day later… Which is exactly what I'll be doing when the month is out.

Monthly Reflections

On the last day of the month, I take 30 minutes or so and I read over all of those daily reflections. By keeping them short and list-y, reading them over is pretty quick.
Over the course of the month I may have put other things in the notebook too beyond the day-to-day (I do a lot of drafting of essays and articles by hand as well as sketches for stickers and other art, all interspersed among the daily pages), I look at that stuff too if it's relevant.
And then I go back to those two blank pages I left at the start of the month and I write a short list of reflections on the month. I'm always surprised at how much I'd forgotten about and being able to read it all at once is super useful. I always see patterns that emerge—some good, some bad—and it gives me very welcome, actionable perspective as I enter a new month. I bet you can guess what happens next…

Yearly Reflections

Yep, on New Years Eve, I sit down with a year's worth of notebooks (yes, plural, more on that in a second) and I cull through them to create a yearly reflection. I dedicate as many pages I need at the end of my last notebook for the year for this. Usually I'd say I write three or four. Again, keep it listy.
Now, reading over hundreds of pages of daily notes is bananas. And that's why every month you've done yourself a huge favor by writing monthly reflections. All you have to do is read those over! Just 12 things. It's easy.
And just like how reading over your daily reflections helps you see patterns to your month, reading over your monthly reflections helps you see patterns to your year. It's really remarkable. For instance, last year my entire attitude shifted in June. We went on a big road trip, and when I came back my whole outlook had changed, and it stuck for the rest of the year! I had no idea until I sat down and read through my monthly reflections. It was awesome.

Some final notes

OK, remember how I said I end up with a year's worth of plural-notebooks? I end up running through one notebook every three or four months. You may not. That's OK! First, my handwriting is big and I'm not trying to conserve space so every day is one page. Maybe you write small or have less daily things on your to-do and you find that you can fit more than one day, plus reflections, on each page. That's great! Second, I use these notebooks for basically everything. I can fill a couple dozen pages of handwritten rough drafts of an essay, that kind of thing. If you just need one notebook, you are awesome. If you need a bunch? You are also awesome.

But more than anything, there's a level of discipline and commitment involved in this whole thing that takes some time to get used to. Trying to do it at the same time every day is useful. Set a calendar reminder maybe, I did at the start. And maybe the whole "do it before bed" thing doesn't work for you. Maybe this is a "do it after coffee" kind of thing or at your lunch break or whatever. I dunno. Just give it a try.

Mostly this is something that has worked for me. While my shit isn't entirely together yet, it has helped me get on a path to shit-togetherness in big ways and small. If nothing else, I would have lost it completely during that first year of the pandemic without being able to write and reflect every day. In the years since, it's helped me get perspective on so much in so many different aspects of my life. Maybe it'll help you in this new year too.

A Year of Culture

2022-12-31T00:00:00Z

It's the last day of 2022. If you measure the year on the curve of the last few, it felt maybe a little better. If you measure it on the curve of history, the repeal of Roe v Wade made it a real shit-asser. But it was a really good year for cultural production.

For years now, I've written a thread on Twitter about the things I read, watched, heard, and experienced that made my year better. Well, it's time to get off Twitter, so I'm doing it here instead. I'm sure you're up to your ears in year-end lists by now, so I'm keeping this to just 5 things (spoiler alert: I totally cheat). Also, it's worth noting that while not everything on this list came out in 2022, most everything on this list was new to me this year.

A Little Devil in America By Hanif Abdurraqib
I grabbed this book from the library, read it, immediately read it again, then returned it and bought it and read it a third time. I've read it two more times since. It's a celebration of Black music, dance, and performance in America, and it's a triumph in that alone. But it's also a book about how art resonates beyond its eras, how music liberates us, and how place and time make us who we are. But even more than that it is just a tour-de-force of writing. Every sentence is worth reading two, three times before moving on to the next one. I've not stopped thinking about this book since I read it. In fact, I think I may have had this book on my list last year too, but what the hell it is just that good.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
I love a multiverse. The idea that that there other us's living other lives somewhere else has been endlessly fascinating to me. The multiverse has been a staple in sci-fi storytelling forever and is about to be ubiquitous for the next few years since Marvel is hooking their next billion dollars to the concept. But the film Everything Everywhere All at Once breaks the genre so completely as to own it forever by using the multiverse to explore the complexities of a mother's relationship with her daughter and to show what it is to be stuck between the life you lead and the ones you want.
South Side / Reservation Dogs / This Fool
All three of these TV shows are rooted so completely in place—Chicago's South Side, a reservation in rural Oklahoma, and South Central LA—that location plays an essential character. And that's saying something because all three are masterful character studies as well. Each show is able to be uproariously hilarious while also presenting characters with real human depth and are written with such storytelling mastery that they bend the 30 minute comedy genre to whatever story they want to tell.
Inscryption / Marvel Snap
I am a sucker for nerdy card games. And this year I discovered two digital ones on opposite ends of the spectrum. Inscryption is an independent, deeply creepy, gene-busting card game about card games. The less you know about it going in the better, but know that it will continue to subvert your expectations through the very last hand you play. Marvel Snap is a high-gloss, big-budget, IP-heavy, mobile game that should be shitty but is instead totally fun, addictive, and offers genuinely new ideas in a format that mostly just keeps reinventing Magic: The Gathering.
Cruel Country by Wilco
Look, I'm a 48-year-old white dude with a beard: of course I loved the new Wilco record.
Bonus: Coveralls
I basically only wear coveralls now. Every now and then I go through a period of reinvention and with 2022 ending and 2023 feeling like it's filled with new possibilities, I'm dressing in a new uniform for new me, let's go.

A Year of Work

2022-12-29T00:00:00Z

I have friends with hobbies. Friends who do pottery, who take pictures, who go hiking, who make scarves or tables or beaded doodads. I've always kind of wanted a hobby, but they've never stuck. Instead, I work.

In his beautiful experimental memoir Goodbye Again, Jonny Sun writes about work:

I find the idea of work, and working, comforting. It feels like I can leave everything else behind, but as long as I am with myself, I can always work, I can always do _something_ with my time. It is something I can always turn to.

Honestly, I love to work. As Jonny writes, it is something I can always turn to. Since I started Punk Planet when I was 19, I've largely fashioned my own work. Even when I've worked for someone else, I've never stopped working for myself too. Some of the lowest moments of my life have been defined in part by feeling unable to conjure the ideas, momentum, and enthusiasm to work. Thankfully, this year was not one of those years.

Here's a little rundown of some of the work I did this year that you should check out:

Writing

This year I made a conscious effort to break from the two years of COVID essays that defined much of my writing in 2020 and 2021. Not that the pandemic is over by any means, but I was feeling boxed in by that writing and wanted broaden my output.

The Fall and Rise of CM Punk
The biggest thing I wrote this year was a profile for Esquire of Phil Brooks, better known as the wrestler CM Punk, and his return to the wrestling ring after quitting the WWE nearly a decade ago. It features one of my favorite lines I've ever written: "It can take a while to realize the path you were on was the right one at the wrong time. That the thing you loved then is still the thing you love now, and that it’s still there, waiting for you." Honestly, that line's as much about me and writing as it is about Brooks and wrestling.

Jeff Tweedy Knows Good Days
I was lucky enough to get to be the first reporter to interview Wilco's Jeff Tweedy about the latest Wilco record, Cruel Country. Despite the record being fantastic, we barely talked about it, but instead talked about hope. It was one of those conversations that I needed to have.

Parenting in the Time of School Shootings
This essay was a raw nerve, a loose electric wire, pure fire and anger, written in the days after the slaughter of children in Uvalde Texas. Rereading it now, it's a hard read but a necessary one.

When Everything Happened So Much
As the implications of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter became clear, I had a proposal: It was time to get weird. Things have been weird over on that site ever since.

Podcasting

Says Who Podcast
Says Who released 44 episodes this year, plus 38 bonus episodes for our Patreon supporters. Omfg that is bonkers. I just wrote about the unique relationship that Maureen Johnson, my co-host and co-conspirator on the podcast and I share, but suffice it to say that this year's episodes chronicled the further unraveling of both American society and our minds. If you're new to the podcast and looking for a jumping-on point, good luck—haha. But also this episode about the revelation that Trump's Diet Coke valet leaked to the feds is maybe one. Mostly, it's a weekly current events podcast: just jump in on the most recent episode and hang on.

The Hitch
In addition to Says Who, my partner Janice and I continued to document our summers spent in our trailer Evangeline on our podcast The Hitch. Easily the most wholesome content I make, every episode is a pretty chill 10-20 minutes of two people recounting their day from the rear bed of our Airstream. We started The Hitch the after Janice's cancer recovery and there's an underlying theme of doing hard things (and celebrating life) throughout the podcast. If you want a jumping on point, either just start at the start of this summer, or join us in overcoming our fear of driving over the mountains.

Other Cool Shit

Plenty of what I do doesn't fall into an easy category so here's some highlights of other things:

This Blog
In the aftermath of Twitter's takeover, I decided I needed to start establishing some spaces outside of owned platforms. When I rebuilt dansinker.com it was just going to be a more robust "about me" site, but late in the game I decided that one of the things that the collapse of the big platforms enabled was revisiting some of the good ideas of the "old" internet so I dove into make a blog. Honestly, it has been so awesome I'm kicking myself for ever stopping.

A small selection of the 12 stickers club members got this year

Says Who Sticker Club
Every month I look forward to designing, ordering, and shipping the sticker that goes out to the $10 Patreon supporters of Says Who. Creating these little pieces of ephemera—sometimes capturing a moment from the podcast, other times a reference to current events, sometimes just a piece of podcast-adjacent art—is a monthly joy. As someone that came up making art, reconnecting with drawing, type, and design has been a joy.

two patches I designed, one is a patch for the Environmental Rescue Team from the book The Terraformers, and the other is a 2022 survival badge for Says Who Podcast that reads It was weird, but we did it.

Patch for Annalee Newitz on the left, for Says Who supporters on the right

Patches
The work on the Says Who Sticker Club lead directly to an email from author Annalee Newitz, who wanted me to design a patch to promote her new book The Terraformers. I'd never made an embroidered patch before, so not only was it a fun design challenge, it was also a kick-ass research project to find a manufacturer and understand the process enough to make something great. In fact, it was so fun I did it again as a surprise year-end gift for Says Who supporters.

I've done a lot more work than all of this, but these were the highlights this year. Go check 'em out, and let's get to work in 2023.

Someday you, and all you put your hand to, will turn golden

2022-12-27T00:00:00Z

"I wanna hear your voice, coming out of my radio. I wanna see your face on the billboard sign," Kelly Hogan sings in her song "Golden." "'Cause I know how hard you try, and I know sometimes it makes you cry. I just wish I could be there to bring you back."

Hogan's song is, to me, the most honest assessment of what it is to have a friend who puts art out into the world. You want everything for them—success, fame—but mostly you want them to know that you see the work they put in and that you're in their corner for every punch. (It's the opposite of Morrissey's "We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful," but Morrissey is an asshole so that's unsurprising.)

I write this today not because Hogan's song is both beautiful and underappreciated (though it is) but because my friend Maureen Johnson has a new book out today, Nine Liars, and in similar fashion to Hogan's lyrical protagonist, I want everything for Maureen to turn golden.

The first time I interacted with Maureen Johnson, I cussed her out. I was writing as @MayorEmanuel, the then-anonymous, famously profane Twitter account. It was almost exactly 12 years ago to the day, December 26, 2010, and she'd @ replied to the account to find out what my fictional Rahm had gotten for Christmas. "I'm fucking Jewish, you stupid fucking fuck," I replied.

It wasn't exactly the place you'd expect a friendship to start, but when I was revealed as the author of the @MayorEmanuel account back in 2011, we connected through our agents. We got lunch when I was out in New York a few months later and had one of the most fascinating—and hilarious—conversations about the publishing industry I've ever had. After that we kept in touch over the internet the way everyone does, cracking jokes on Twitter and talking shit in DMs. When I was in New York for work, which was pretty frequent back then, we'd grab lunch.

We started talking about doing a podcast together in 2013, but it didn't amount to anything until a couple years later. During the stressful final months of the 2016 presidential election I pitched her a simple idea: an eight episode podcast about coping through the final eight weeks of that brutal election, one episode a week. We were both busy, I wrote, and so keeping it to eight meant it wouldn't take over our lives. We were going to end it with a livestream on election night, a celebration of both the end of our eight weeks of work and of the election results.

Except.

Except you know how the 2016 election ended—terribly—and so Says Who, the podcast we'd started, didn't end. And the most extraordinary thing happened: What began as two people helping each other make it through a hard election cycle became two people helping each other make it through a hard life.

Those eight episodes have stretched to hundreds and continue to grow. Week in and week out, year in and year out, Maureen and I have been there for each other, not just to cope with the reemergence of fascism and white supremacy in this era of American politics, but to cope with deaths in our family, with debilitating illnesses, and with all of the highs and lows that come with living lives that become ever-more intertwined over the years. It's been an entire friendship recorded and released into the world, disguised as a podcast about current events. The only people I talk to with more regularly than Maureen live inside my home.

And so it is that today I find myself beaming with the kind of pride that Kelly Hogan sings about for the release of Nine Liars, Maureen's latest book in her Truly Devious series of mysteries. I've read it. It's great. There's murder.

Being an author in 2022 is impossible. An already-concentrated industry has consolidated further. There's an over-reliance on books to become instant hits right out of the gate, setting a ridiculously high bar for authors to meet. And the platforms that writers have come to rely on to reach their audiences—in part to hype them up for that all-important first week of release—are crumbling. It's a nightmare.

So here's my ask (Maureen is going to kill me for writing this btw): Pick up Maureen's book (note: all book links in this post are to the Says Who Bookshop.org store, so the podcast gets a little bit of affiliate percentage). Maybe pick it up for yourself, or maybe pick it up for that friend who has been there for you the way Maureen has been there for me: through it all, no questions asked. We don't get a lot in this life, but if you're lucky you get to live it surrounded by people who make us better, who push us forward, and who make the moments count. I'm lucky.

Congratulations Maureen on your book release day. I'll see you on the internet.

So go on, show 'em what you're made of
With all my heart, I wish these things for you
Someday you, and all you put your hand to
Will turn golden

Everything Gets Brighter From Here

2022-12-23T00:00:00Z

There's a windchill of -40 degrees here in Chicago right now, part of a massive freeze that has set in across most of the United States. The cold forced my youngest child back into Zoom school for the day and overhearing his teacher beg for them to mute themselves while he laughs and jokes with friends has been a flashback to the time in the pandemic when everyone was doing everything at home. It's been weird and slightly traumatizing, but also sort of pleasant, and mostly has me thinking about our lives then and our lives now.

And maybe it's that, or maybe it's that the shortest day of the year is behind us and now every day gets brighter from here, or maybe it's that 2022 is wrapping up in unexpected—but not wholly awful—ways, or maybe it's a little bit of all of it, but I'm feeling… optimistic?

I know, it's weird.

But, in the spirit of things getting brighter, even if only by a little, I thought I'd share three short things that are contributing to me feeling this way.

It feels like the platforms that have defined and dictated our interactions online for the last 15 years or so have been dealt a real blow for the first time in forever. Twitter, obviously, is on the ropes. The purchase by Elon Musk and every terrible decision he's made since has lead to the first real, sustained exodus off the platform I've ever witnessed. But beyond Twitter, Facebook has been hemorrhaging money, users, and stock value as Mark Zuckerberg pursues his folly in the dead-on-arrival metaverse, and that means every other platform you probably use—remember Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp too—are weakened as well. I'm not quite at a point where I'm willing to say that the era of platforms is fully over, but there's a crack in the armor that up until now has felt impenetrable. And, as someone that came up with DIY punk and will always choose the independent route when possible, that means that right now the possibilities on the internet feel endless for the first time in a long while. Will it last? Who knows, but let's try new things while we can.
"Trying new things" is part of why I've spent much of the fall and the start of this bitter cold winter playing around with generative AI tools. I'm generally pretty cynical about trends in tech, but there is something deeply satisfying about being able to generate an endless number of variations of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile in Mad Max: Fury Road. Diving deeply into the world of these various AI bots and experimenting with how to ask things in the right way to get the results you want (nerdier people than me have named this "prompt engineering") has been a learning journey at a time that, for me, has felt very difficult to learn new things. In fact, I'm not just learning to talk to bots: writing code with the help of the chatGPT tool was instrumental in launching this very site a few weeks ago. By talking with the bot, I was able to learn and troubleshoot code in ways that felt like a revelation. Yes, there are a near-endless number of ethical quandaries wrapped up in all these tools, and I totally understand the arguments against them, but also it's been so long that anything on this screen has felt truly surprising to me, and these things generate surprises on the daily, so I'm going to ride it out for a minute.
On the completely opposite side of things, I've become totally obsessed with classic hand-painted signage. When my friend Searah moved her shop this year, she hired a sign painter to do a traditional gold-leafed sign in her window, and watching video of them doing that work lead me down an Instagram rabbit hole of following an ever-increasing number of sign painters. With much of our lives shifting online, it's incredible to follow this thriving community of artists—many young and tattooed and carrying on traditional approaches—as they create things of beauty in the public way. I think it's a harbinger of things to come. In part because of the shift to online school, work, and lives in the last few years, I think there's a renewed appreciation of the things that can't be easily reproduced on a screen. Similar to how vinyl has seen a comeback, I think we're poised to see the return of a lot of long-written-off analog approaches to making things. As excited as I am about changes happening in the digital space, I think the potential for a renaissance of analog arts and production has me more excited than anything.

OK, that's it: three from me. I hope you are warm, I hope you are safe, and I hope the potential of positive change in the new year actually comes to pass.

(And I promise to revert to my normal pessimistic, dour self soon.)

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy.

2022-12-19T00:00:00Z

As I wrote the other day, I've mostly left Twitter at this point. Maybe for good, certainly until it becomes a less awful place run by less awful people. I departed for Mastodon, which felt weird and lonely for a while but after giving it some time (and a few huge influxes of Musk-driven Twitter exiles) it has become a pretty good alternative for the conversational aspects of Twitter. But it hasn't replaced one of the major reasons that Twitter clicked for me: as the primary place to find out about news. And, as a result, I've felt disconnected from news for the first time in a very, very long time.

A dozen or so years ago when "the future of news" was the hottest topic in journalism, one phrase was inescapable: "If the news is that important, it will find me.” It was the dawning of mass-scale social sharing on sites like Facebook and Twitter and it was a wake-up-call for news executives, slow once again to adapt to new trends, and a battle cry for those of us who desperately wanted to move journalism forward: you couldn't expect a news reader to come to you anymore, you had to find them where they were.

That notion was, of course, correct, and in the decade since it's made us all far more passive news consumers. We wait for the news to find us, secure in the knowledge that it will. (There's a whole other essay about how the platforms tweaked their algorithms to juice engagement and, as a result, the news that found us basically broke us, but let's stick to the topic at hand.)

Now that we're in a moment of disruption and there's the potential that social media might be very different on the other side of it, we're going to need to retrain ourselves to become more active news consumers again. Or, at least, I am.

Which is how I ended up firing up an RSS feed reader for the first timed in a long time last week. And honestly, when I launched it, it felt like a revelation.

For those of you that don't remember or never knew, RSS is a decidedly non-sexy technology that underlies a lot of the web. Most things that publish to the internet also publish an RSS feed—encoded versions of the same content designed to be machine-readable. It used to be that most sites would easily expose that feed and feed readers, apps and sites that would grab it, were popular for a while because they took content from all over the web and brought it right to you. Social sharing killed RSS readers. The reader that most people used, Google Reader, was shuttered to push more people to, I think, their failed social sharing platform Buzz, and that was that. Most people forgot about RSS. (Except for one big exception: if you listen to podcasts, you're using RSS every time you get a new episode delivered.)

Anyway, I downloaded an RSS reader because I wanted to be sure that the feed being pushed out by this very website was valid. But instead of starting blank, adding my site, and probably calling it a day, it turns out that at some point I'd previously set up Feedly, the app I chose (likely in a post-Reader hunt for a replacement), and so after I logged in, it pulled in news from sites I cared about back in the late 2000s. It was a nice moment to revisit the person I was then, but also it was a lightbulb going off in my head: Here was a feed! Of news! That's current! It felt familiar in a way that felt good, but also decidedly did not feel like Twitter.

I got to work. I deleted a great number of feeds (apparently I really cared about Apple rumors back in 2009 or so) and replaced them with sites that were relevant to me now, creating topical clusters of news. Adding sites was straightforward, I never once had to copy an XML link, and suddenly I was building a stream of news that I actually wanted to read. Much more local, much less outrage, and far, far less Trump than on Twitter.

I've stuck with it since. In order to retrain my brain, I put the app inside the folder on my phone I call "Distract" which mostly holds games. Now instead of instinctively clicking on Marvel Snap in the morning, I clear out my feeds first. And I've found it, at least for now, to be a useful replacement for getting news from Twitter.

Sure, it's not as immediate as the BREAKING NEWS KLAXONS that have come to dominate news distribution on Twitter, but it's also much less doom-inducing and far less outrage-stoking than news there. And yet I also feel like I'm actually seeing more news than I had before, especially in topics I really care about.

So for now, that's how I'm getting my news. If you're feeling adrift post-Twitter, it might be worth trying RSS out for yourself. What a wild sentence to write in 2022. Maybe everything old really is new again.

It's Not Yesterday Anymore

2022-12-15T00:00:00Z

As I write this, journalists are being banned from Twitter for reasons both petty and arbitrary and almost too annoying to even explain. The short of it is that there's an account that tracks and posts the movements of Elon Musk's private jet using publicly-available data. After vowing that he was such a free-speech absolutist back in November that he'd never ban the jet account (which at one point he tried to buy from the literal college kid who runs it), he banned it last night, then un-banned it, then banned it again and is now playing whack-a-mole with journalists and others that are sharing links to the account on other platforms. The long of it is much more convoluted and told in more detail elsewhere.

This is, of course, the latest in a near-constant string of shitty news coming out of Twitter since Musk took over. Some of it has been funny, like the day he opened up bluechecks for anyone with $8 to burn without listening to the people who warned him it would lead to a flood of impersonations, but most of it has just been awful: from firing around three-quarters of the people that work there—in ways also petty and arbitrary—to opening the floodgates for the fascists that had been banned from the platform in recent years, to the predictable racist, homophobic, transphobic, and antisemitic attacks that followed. Twitter is no longer a good place to be.

Which sucks because, for me, despite all the reasons it was intolerable at times, Twitter was where I spent a great deal of my time. It's where I made friends, met colleagues, cracked jokes, built lasting collaborations, and yes, got a little bit famous for a bit. When I'm being honest with myself, I'd say the last decade of my life is probably largely defined by Twitter (oh god), and so the month or two that has passed since Musk took over has felt, to me, a bit like grief.

Look, I get it: Come on man, it's Twitter. But also, you probably understand a little too. Our lives are so intertwined with the technology we use to live them that to lose a space inside our glowing rectangles feels like true loss. Because it is.

I've been weaning myself off Twitter since the first wave of layoffs, and each new hit of news reinforces that it's probably the right move. But it's not an easy one. Every part has been hard. I found my muscle-memory to launch Twitter was so ingrained that I swapped the icon on my phone with Mastodon just to retrain my brain. Hell, I built this entire website from scratch just to establish my presence in a space that I could actually own and control (yes, I could have done that part easier, but I'll always choose the hard way). Mostly, I miss my friends.

I'm still on Twitter occasionally, but my interactions are perfunctory now. Links to new episodes of my podcast, or to the other places people can find me on the internet. When I'm there it feels louder and meaner than I remember, but I think probably it's the same. I want better for Twitter than the awful existence that Musk has charted. But mostly, I want better for us.

Figuring out places to be, ways to keep connections alive, find new methods of sharing experiences with others has been my driving factor of the last month or so, and I think for many of us will define a lot of our 2023. My hope is that we won't simply replace one monolithic platform with another. That we'll take this disruption in routine as an opportunity to further disrupt a status quo that has needed disruption for some time. That we'll try new things, build new things, find new ways to connect that don't simply replicate the patterns of the past but instead move toward a future that feels better for everyone.

Food Carts on the Edge of the World

2022-12-13T00:00:00Z

In honor of Argentina’s advancement to the finals of the World Cup, I thought I’d dip into my drafts folder and share this memory:

I used to travel to Buenos Aires for a journalism conference once a year. 14 hours south from Chicago by plane. You'd traverse only two time zones the whole way down, so you had no real jetlag when you got there, but you were still tired as hell.

You'd land, make your way to a cheap hotel room—a futon for a bed usually—and crash out. Then you'd wake up hungry. Hungrier than you'd ever felt, your last real meal was probably a full day ago at that point.

And you'd meet up with a bunch of other folks who’d flown in for the conference, your family for the week—everyone equally groggy and sleep-deprived, some flying for 24 hours straight from all over the world—and you'd start walking through the streets of Buenos Aires looking for food.

Most of my memories of those trips are linked to food in one way or another, including one at a former squat-turned-tango-bar where we consumed a dozen bottles of wine and I was held at knifepoint until I let a woman braid my beard. But my very favorite memory was one where a friend who lived down in BA took us on a near-endless walk, all the way to the edge where the city meets the water.

It was an area that used to be docklands and warehouses, he explained, but most had recently been converted to high-end apartments and hotels. One thing that hadn't changed was the food carts, set up on the edge of a gigantic nature preserve. They'd served the dockworkers for decades and served all-comers now.

It was night—when we'd left on the walk it was day—and the grill smoke coming from the carts, a dozen or so in a line, enveloped you, thick and pungent. It was the last street on that side of the city. After that there was a stone wall, waist high, and then an endless sea of darkness: the nature preserve. It was like the world just ended, a void.

"Which cart is good," I remember asking my friend Manuel, and he laughed and said "all of them" and I got the best steak sandwich I'd ever had. The steak, thin cut and crisp in parts with chewy bits of fat. The bread, light but crusty, absorbing drippings the moment the meat hit it. Bowls of toppings sat on folding tables, haphazardly covered with plastic wrap and flies. You piled on chimichurri and onions and whatever else you wanted.

You bought an absolutely enormous bottle of not-very-good beer to go with it, not quite as big as a 40 and much weaker than malt liquor, but I can't imagine a better pairing.

Plenty of tables lined the street, but we set up on the wall, some sitting on it, others standing alongside. It was then—away from the grills and the tinny radios playing music, a different song from each cart, a cacophony of music—sandwich in one hand and enormous beer in the other that I first heard it:

A high, droning whine, enormous in size, a wall of sound, impenetrable, coming from the dark expanse next to us.

"What are those?" I asked Manuel, thinking about the night songs of forests here in the Midwest, "Crickets?"

"No," he laughed, taking a big drink of his beer, "Frogs. Millions of frogs. Singing"

And we sat there for hours, in the dark and the grill smoke, eating these amazing sandwiches listening to the endless songs of frogs. Songs that are impossible to forget forever.

New Blog, Who This?

2022-12-10T00:00:00Z

I'm not sure when I stopped blogging the same way that I'm not sure when I started. The same way that everything feels sort of blurry if it dates back far enough. But I had my fair share of Blogspots, that much I remember. There was one where I just wrote about the changes happening in journalism in the mid-2000s. There was one where I wrote very personal letters to the president, back when that president was a Bush. There was even one that me and a bunch of friends wrote about Battlestar Galactica. So believe me when I tell you I have blogged.

And then, I didn't.

There's any number of reasons why, from simply getting too busy with various jobs, to finding outlets that would publish my writing for money, to growing bored of the subjects I was blogging on. But the biggest reason was that the ideas that I used to blog about ended up on Twitter instead. Thoughts on journalism, on the president, even on sci fi classics. Honestly, Twitter became everything to me: A social life, a place to find work, a launching point for a million different things. Twitter literally changed my life.

But nothing lasts forever. I know this well and yet it hurts every time it happens. And now, with the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk and his rapid transformation of the platform into a Fox News fever dream, I—like a lot of other people—am looking for ways out. I have all the feels about this, most of them sad, for all the reasons I just stated above. But a song I loved a long time ago always told me that "the secret to a long life is knowing when it's time to go," and I'm pretty sure it's time to go.

Which is a very long way of saying that I'm going to revisit blogging again. Part of it is to talk about this interesting time in the ongoing story of the Internet, about the possibilities that are opening up after a decade of stagnation at the hands of giant corporations. But more than that, with Twitter slipping away I feel like I'd like a place to do the sort of thinking-out-loud that I used to do on Twitter and, well, I'd like to do it in a place that I actually own this time.

So here we are. Nothing can possibly go wrong now.