Literary,
Journalistic,
Irreverent Yet Oddly Serious
- …
Literary,
Journalistic,
Irreverent Yet Oddly Serious
- …
Literary,
Journalistic,
Irreverent Yet Oddly Serious
You should write down your dreams
then destroy what you wrote…
— Ben Lerner
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THE LEDE
New and Noted
April 13, 2024Came the photograph of Yassir Arafat giving blood, at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, arm...April 13, 2024Gershon Baskin The 2011 Hamas-Israel hostage deal, which I helped negotiate, set a price of...April 12, 2024Mikal Gilmore It was on July 20, 1963, a little more than a year after my father had died in...March 24, 2024Catherine Tumber Remembers Christopher Lasch Christopher Lasch was spared the Web-powered...More PostsThe Fiction Issue 2024
Lawrence Osborne, MG Vassanji, Elizabeth Evans, Baba Badji
Lawrence Osborne For several years Hilal ran a boat hire out of Qantab beach, taking rich...M.G. Vassanji It was January 1972. Pakistan had recently, only the previous month, lost a...Elizabeth Evans The following extracts come from the novel DANIEL ELLSBERG’S PSYCHIATRIST by...Baba Badji Chapter Eleven : Aunty Salymata After years, I finally found the courage to go...FIRST PERSON
More PostsFICTION
TRUTH SPEAKS LOUDER THAN FACTS
In the novel, Libertyville, two young men, a British reporter and a West African coup leader form...Tom Piazza I had the idea for The Auburn Conference at the beginning of November 2018, driving...POLITICS
Aren't We Better Than This?
More PostsWORLD
YEP, IT'S OUT THERE AND MORE INTERESTING THAN LIFE IN THE U.S.
MOVIES
While Second and Third Wave feminists argue over whether Margot Robbie was too damn beautiful to...Yeah, Get Over It No Explanation Necessary What the Right-Wingers Said A good dad in the U...March 14, 2021Jan Oxenberg In 1992 I was an indie filmmaker in New York with a first feature about to be...ENVIRONMENT
(THE PLANET IS DOOMED, OF COURSE, BUT WE STILL CARE)
Phinney v. The World
THE DEBUNK
SOMETIMES IT'S SO DAMN OBVIOUS THAT THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM IS WRONG
You don't want to hear this. Neither do we. But you've been reading the same news stories:...Indrajit Samarajiva Include us? In what? Colored people and women have always been included in...Phinney Somewhere in the World
Our fearless correspondent in Washington, D.C. and sometimes Ukraine
There are no published blog posts yet.THE DEAD
December 2, 2023December 2, 2023September 29, 2023More PostsPOETICS
More PostsMUSIC
The Soundtrack for Your Seclusion
March 18, 2023March 5, 2023February 4, 2023More PostsTHE NUMBERS
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October 28, 2022April 30, 2022May 10, 2021May 9, 2021STORIES WE LOVE
The Best of Substack & Elsewhere
Yes, we curate. But no table service.
Fall/Winter Issue: ESCAPE
Blanche McCrary Boyd I don’t know why everyone hasn’t been watching women’s professional...Brian Cullman “Oh, I went to Jajouka a long, long time ago," Ornette said. "Why?” I was with...Mike Medberry Jessica Keetso grew up in the shadow of Black Mesa, a high plateau on the Navajo...Terrence Moore My involvement with combating the coal mining and power plants in the Four...Steve Erickson Jean-Luc Godard 3 December 1930 - 13 September 2022 The New Wave’s head to...Roger Benham Early morning at our last campsite in the Canadian Rockies, Bow River Provincial...Anna Gotlib Anna Gotlib is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College CUNY,...LONG PLAYER
sometimes it takes more than a meme
DREAMING THE PANDEMIC
Send us your pandemic dreamsplaguejournal@gmail.com
MONEY
Lack of money is the root of all evil
- George Bernard Shaw
(What he really said: Money is harmless, but the fear of lack of money can create wars and decimate whole nations of people.)
February 21, 2021February 15, 2021June 16, 2020May 2, 2020Listen to Steve Erickson read his JOTPY essay "Fear"
Special Section
An Hallucinyx: The Last Four Years
SCAMS
So Many We Can't Keep Up
Bringing Out The Dead
Obits, Epitaphs, Anecdotes, and Near-Misses
David Phinney is a reporter's reporter. He's worked for ABC, NBC, CBS, BBC, the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Phinney's stories on unfair labor practices and poor treatment of foreign workers contracted to do construction work in Iraq have been the subject of congressional inquiries, ongoing US Justice Department criminal probes and investigations by U.S. Inspectors General. He's on his way to Ukraine and sending news to the Journal via Twitter.
Bill Moyers has a hard-on for a guy named Steve
Why America's conscience is shining a spotlight on Blackstone Equity's Steve Schwarzman
July 11, 2020June 16, 2020The Week's Best Podcast
Nina Kruscheva on Putin, U.S. overreach, and the post-Ukraine World Order
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July 3, 2022Read more...It's already happening.... ‘We Buried Him and Kept Walking’: Children Die as Somalis Flee...May 10, 2021Read more...Apparently a lefty who likes beer. Somehow his tweets and retweets provide a precise snapshot of...Read more...Even if you don't dig AOC, you have to admit she's a master of social media. Satire rules, and...Le Petit Mojave Tailgate Concerts
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40 Days and 40 Nights
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The Origin of Drawing (Dibutades and the Shepard)
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Stay home Stay Safe
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Domestic
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Adam and Eve
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The Annunciation
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War of the Worlds
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Vanitas
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Pietá
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The Lonely Fortune Teller - After George La Tour
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Salome
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Portrait of Charlotte Corday
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Apollo and Daphne
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Pandora
Day 19
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas
BREAKING
SHORT TAKES ON THE NEWS
Trump Appointee Kills Baby Chickens
The U.S. Postal Service has already removed sorting machines and mailboxes all over the country. Sorting machines that can handle 35,000 pieces of mail a day have been dismantled and thrown out. Despite Postmaster Louis DeJoy's assurances that mail-in ballots will be delivered efficiently, one observer called a California postal facility "Armageddon" with dead baby chicks, rotting fruit, and clouds of gnats. LA Times story here, our breakdown of the war against the post office here.
Want more?
The backstory: Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was tasked with getting the new postmaster to stack the U.S. Postal Service board with loyal Republicans, including allies of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
According to the Washington Post, Mnuchin was determined to oust the former postmaster general, Megan Brennan, who had risen through the ranks. The New York Times reported that he called a meeting that wasn't subject to "sunshine" laws requiring transparency. It's not clear whether this was legal.
David Williams, the former Postal Service inspector general and the board’s vice chairman until his resignation in protest in April against Mnuchin’s involvement, told House Democrats that Mnuchin demanded that new governors “come to his office to kiss the ring and receive his blessing before confirmation.”
Mnuchin was the CEO of Golden West, a bank that aggressively pursued foreclosures in the 2008 economic crisis. See more in Homewreckers by Aaron Glantz.
The Case for Punishment
Humans are infinitely adaptable, they say. Now we appear to be getting used to living with Covid. Although infection and death rates are rising steadily in the U.S., airline travel has nearly doubled. It's not necessarily that we're safer, but that we're becoming numb. When we do something and we aren't punished--immediately--we tend to do it again, much like children, the experts say. So the idea of giving people fines and tickets for unsafe behavior doesn't just earn money for strapped cities and towns. It just might save us from ourselves, according to the Washington Post.
Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border
How many times have we read the same story? Migrants dying as they struggle to cross the inhospitable Sonoran desert in the summer. The New York Times calls these deaths a pandemic: Biblical, tragic, and like many Covid losses, unnecessary. While we attribute a certain number of Covid deaths to theTrump administration's irresponsibility, these deaths of desperate people crossing the desert--and there are thousands each year--are the result of equally criminal negligence by four presidents, including Bill Clinton's. Will immigration, once again, fall through the cracks in a Biden administration? Kudos to the Times for a deep dive that you can read here.
For more, read Luis Alberto Urrea's book The Devil's Highway.
Ira Silverberg
How to Have a Happy New Year
Acerbic yet heartfelt. What more can one say?
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