What to Do With Our Covid Rage by Sarah Smarsh Sarah Smarsh has been one of the more astute writers about culture clashes in the Midwest, especially among low-income citizens who feel left behind and whose anxiety change is ruthlessly … Continue reading Outside Reading — Missed Shots edition
I don’t know if it’s entirely fair that a bad this prolific is also this good. Continue reading This Week’s Model — Big Thief, “Little Things”
Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too. Harry Shearer is one … Continue reading Laughing Matters — Stereo 105
I read a lot of comic books as a kid. This series of posts is about the comics I read, and, occasionally, the comics that I should have read. Not too long after Roy Thomas stepped down as editor-in-chief of … Continue reading My Misspent Youth — What If #1 by Roy Thomas and Jim Craig
During a time when he was beset by controversy — the type of phony controversy manufactured by the right wing with the relentlessness that the Hershey company brings to the production of chocolate treats, but controversy nonetheless — James Gunn … Continue reading Now Playing — The Suicide Squad
This series of posts covers my long, beloved history interacting with the medium of radio, including the music that flowed through the airwaves. Because of a task I’m gladly — gratefully even — taking on this week, my mind is regularly … Continue reading Radio Days — 90FM’s Top 35 for August 9, 1991
317. Violent Femmes, Hallowed Ground (1984) “We’ve been betraying people since the second album,” Gordon Gano told the Orlando Sentinel a few years after the Violent Femmes’ sophomore release. “With every album, people come up to me and say things … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #317 to #315
Unvaxxed, Unmasked and Putting Our Kids at Risk by Jessica Valenti And here we are, stalled out in the emergence from a devastating pandemic — and indeed regressing — almost entirely because insidious opportunists and complete crackpots, most residing on … Continue reading Outside Reading — Delta Force edition
On the song “Superhero,” Ani Difranco writes about the experience of falling in love despite her determination to avoid such entanglements. Among its lyrics is a couplet that captures the way the world seems to transform around anyone who’s so … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Chubby and the Gang, “I Hate the Radio”
Lucy Dacus writes songs as if her heart depends on it. On the new album Home Video, her third full-length studio effort, Dacus excavates her past. By her own reckoning, the lyrics across the album are almost entirely preoccupied with … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Home Video
