Writing & Editing for Washington Think Tanks

As an op-ed commentary writer and self-described policy geek, the idea of working for a Washington, DC, think tank always appealed to me. Researching policy, cranking out white papers, immersing myself in the newspapers and media websites looking for insight, ... the "Think Tank" is where the intellectual geeks go to geek out. From Brookings to RAND, the think tank landscape of the nation's capital is an appealing spot for the perpetual graduate student who likes research and debate.

So, I have always kept an eye out for those positions, though I never really pursued that life with any serious intent. My teaching and administrative career with writing gigs mostly as a hobby worked quite well for me, especially during the last couple decades raising a family. However, LinkedIn currently has two postings for assistant editors at a couple of premier DC think tanks, one of the right and the other on the left. 

First up is an Assistant Editor of Communications position at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

American Progress has an immediate opening for an Assistant Editor to join its Digital Communications team. The Assistant Editor serves primarily as a copyeditor for American Progress, helping assure the quality of publications ranging from research reports to daily columns. Working in a fast-paced, journalistic environment, the Assistant Editor also helps with the daily production of the website. The successful candidate will be driven by American Progress’ mission to improve the lives of all Americans through bold, progressive ideas, as well as strong leadership and concerted action, with the aim of not only changing the conversation, but changing the country.

• Copyedit American Progress’ products, including reports, issue briefs, columns, and other content for both print and web.
• Copyedit, post content on, and update AmericanProgress.org and other American Progress websites.
• Maintain the house style guide and its grammatical and style standards.
• Maintain accuracy and overall quality of publications.
• Write headlines, blurbs, and photo captions, and select photos.
• Work on the conception and execution of special websites and projects.
• Provide operational support to the Digital Communications team, including scheduling meetings; processing and filing forms; managing pipelines; tracking invoices and payments; and providing other administrative support when necessary.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

And, secondly on the other side of the aisle at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute is a posting for Editorial Assistant/Associate in the Editing Services Department.

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is seeking a full-time, in-person editorial assistant or editorial associate in the Editing Services department.

AEI’s Editing Services department works with scholars, authors, and staff to help communicate their ideas with maximum clarity and impact. The department is responsible for editing and coordinating the production of books, reports, and other research projects. In addition, the department edits shorter materials, including website copy, email newsletters, event materials, scholar biographies, and press releases. The editorial assistant/associate will edit materials of varying lengths, styles, and research areas, ranging from short, informal promotional materials to extensive academic reports.

This position requires exceptional editing and writing skills, including mastery of English grammar, familiarity with the Chicago Manual of Style, excellent attention to detail, and strong organizational and communication skills. It also requires the ability to maintain quality in a fast-paced, high-volume environment. Editing experience in a professional or academic environment is required, and an interest in public policy is strongly preferred.

Now, both of the positions appear to be entry-level as editors rather than writers and researchers. But, of course, that is how you start out. And editing is truly one of the best practices for becoming a better writer.

Federal Train Horn Rule -- A Public Nuisance

Nothing rattles me quite like a train horn.

As a new resident of Fort Collins last August, I was thrilled with my new home in northern Colorado, ... and then a train rolled past my apartment in the wonderfully vibrant Old Town neighborhood, and I felt like my head was going to explode.

In case you are unaware, train horns blast at a rate of 100-110 decibels, which is far beyond any safe level for human ears. In downtown Fort Collins, the railroad crosses a 1.7 stretch with a dozen intersections, and the DOT mandates repeated horn blasts as the train passes numerous residential units. Thus, a train engineer blasts the horn 40-50 times in under two miles. When the horn can be heard for miles, those blasts are absurdly excessive. My own residence was less than forty feet from the tracks -- a situation that is nothing short of clueless and more likely negligent for city leaders and zoning officials. On my second night in Fort Collins, my wife and I were jarred from sleep by 100+decibel train horns at 11:20PM, 12:20AM, and 4:20AM. When we began testing the noise, we had decibel meters that were showing levels at 110 db inside our apartment and nearly 140 db on the balcony outside.

By the time we moved to a new apartment a month later, I had become well-versed in the policies and politics of trains and the federal train horn rule. And the whole thing still mystifies me. Specifically because residential areas can seek relief from the rules, but it's up to the whim of the Federal Railway Administration. And, I have to say, it's rather absurd that the entire city of Chicago has a train horn waiver, but a small town in Colorado can't get one. Additionally, when a city requests a waiver but requires construction mandates to meet requirements, the cost falls on the town. If it's a federal mandate, it should be federally funded. 

In 2015 the City of Fort Collins applied to the Department of Transportation for a waiver from the train horn rules to establish a quiet zone in a residential area. The city presented a well-researched and supported proposal, asserting the requirement for train horns was unnecessary. The DOT bluntly and summarily dismissed and rejected the waiver, stating the request and conditions were "not consistent with railroad safety." But what about the safety of the hearing and health of residents forced to endure dangerous decibel levels, with no knowledge of when a train will pass? 

While the city of Fort Collins submitted a rebuttal in 2016, there has clearly been no progress or resolution of this issue. Just for perspective on "decibel levels," I've learned that a released 2005 government memo on the CIA interrogation program at Guantanamo Bay established that in detention, the use of "loud sounds" would not exceed 79 decibels. So, as you can imagine, I am quite astounded that the DOT would mandate train horn blasts of 100+ decibels within feet of American citizens' residences.

Wanna Write for VOX?

As a freelance writer, I am always on the look-out for intriguing writing gigs, and the role of op-ed commentary writer is in many ways a dream job -- albeit one I've never actually pursued or practiced full time. Still, a recent posting on LinkedIn for a write job caught my eye:

Senior Writer/Editor, Today, Explained Newsletter at Vox Media, LLC

Vox is seeking a creative, flexible journalist to lead the Today, Explained newsletter, our flagship daily email product.

This job will include both editing and writing: you should see yourself as the host of the newsletter, with the responsibility of helping the audience understand the biggest news stories and conversations affecting our world. This might mean finding an angle to write your own original news analysis, doing a quick Q&A with a Vox journalist, or assigning a short piece to someone else in the newsroom, then editing it for publication. You’ll be responsible for the newsletter as a whole, and for ensuring that it’s consistently engaging with the news and the zeitgeist, and that the reading experience feels creative, fresh, and surprising.

We’re looking for a sharp, nimble editorial thinker — a strong writer and a sharp, creative editor — who can work with us to set a strategy and direction for the newsletter, then carry it out from day to day. Flexibility and creativity with formats is a must. You should be eager to try new approaches to bring clarity and understanding to our audience: curious people outside of the media bubble who want to be informed, not overwhelmed..

In all honesty, this sounds like a great gig, remote freelance writing with benefits. Op-ed commentary is definitely my jam, and it's where I found my voice as a writer. While I struggled for many years mistakenly thinking I was a novelist -- a common aspiration for many high school English teachers -- it was a piece for the Denver Post and a subsequent role as a regular writer in their Colorado Voices program that led me to the writing that had always most appealed to me, the newspaper column.

Everybody wants more of "Nobody Wants This"

Ah, the beloved rom-com.

It waxes and wanes, and there are charmingly simple and formulaic ones, was well as delightfully innovative and complex versions. And Netflix's latest blockbuster series Nobody Wants This is a beautiful synthesis of both those descriptions. Season two of the series featuring the "hot rabbi," played poetically by Adam Brody, and the "sappy shiksah," played by a charming Kristen Bell, returned last night, and the show made a strong case for dismissing the sophomore slump and picking up where the energy left off while also daringly subverting the momentum from the season one finale.

Lili Loofbourow of the Washington Post weighed in on the season premiere with a thoughtful and nuanced look at the show that viewers just can't get enough of: 

The rom-com has been overdue for a resurrection. Many have tried. Few have succeeded. There’s something about the format, which whimsically (and paradoxically) elevates one particular love story as both exceptional and representative, that feels anachronistic. Tropes that used to work fall flat in the modern era. Maybe the issue is that we’re so steeped in relationship discourse that patterns have become wearily, rather than charmingly, recognizable.

Still, sometimes you want something frothy. Something that brings back a little of that cosmic love stuff. Enter “Nobody Wants This,” Netflix’s ratings-busting extended rom-com. Now in its second season, the Los Angeles-based comedy stars Adam Brody as Noah, a soulful, open-minded rabbi who falls for Kristen Bell’s Joanne, an agnostic, Instagram-savvy, stylish sex-and-relationships podcaster. No one in Noah’s family — or synagogue — wants them together (hence the name), and much of the series deals with his agonized desire for Joanne to convert to Judaism so they can have a future that doesn’t cost him his calling or his career.

The first season ended with one of those epiphanic, nonsensical endings rom-coms so often deliver, with one character delivering a wholly uncharacteristic speech and suddenly — in what we have been taught to regard as a romantic gesture — waving away everything that was previously important to them. There’s even a chase after leaving a party. The feel-goodery is insubstantial and unpersuasive; it’s a badly executed capitulation to older rom-com conventions.

To its credit, the second season starts by highlighting, italicizing and bolding exactly how unsustainable that resolution was. The first episode, “Dinner Party,” is an obvious wink to the legendary episode of “The Office.” And while it’s not quite as disastrous (or funny), it’s close: Noah and Joanne discover that they interpreted the terms of their reconciliation in the finale quite differently. The misunderstanding isn’t an especially logical one, but it does reflect how people tend to hear what they want to — and perhaps forget exactly what they said in the heat of the moment.

High Point U -- College or Country Club?

Is High Point University the new "It School" for the offspring of the nation's wealthy elite? According to a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, the small North Carolina liberal arts school is where "half of Wall Street sends their kids." And just check out this lead:

On a typical weeknight, students at High Point University might sit down to filet mignon at “1924 PRIME,” the on-campus steakhouse. This isn’t a mere perk. Servers are told to coach the young diners on body language, professional attire, which fork to use and when to salt their food.

It is one of the striking amenities at High Point, which prides itself on preparing students for the rigors of a career—and has also become a favorite of affluent families. “Half of Wall Street sends their kids to this school,” President Nido Qubein says in an interview.

Now, we all know college life is not what it used to be ... at least for those of us Gen X or older. In the past couple decades as university enrollment (and costs) have soared, colleges have amped up amenities in all sorts of ways, from condo-style dorms to high quality, even posh, fitness facilities, and dining halls that more closely resemble the ever-popular food hall culture in America. And, I won't deign to criticize these changes as a waste of time or money. ... or take the pedantic angle that "they're supposed to be there for an education."

But, what has happened at High Point in the past twenty years is a truly fascinating story. The college was facing declining enrollment and fading significance, and the new president Nido Qubein made a conscious decision to rebrand the campus and aim for the small number of wealthy families who could pay full price tuition. Clearly, his gambit paid off. 

The Princeton Review has ranked it the best-run college and the campus has garnered praise for being the most beautiful campus with the best dorms in the country. As the Wall Street Journal article explains, 

Dozens of carefully manicured gardens adorn the lush grounds. Students are almost always within earshot of a fountain; Qubein says the water has an energizing effect. Classical music plays around campus, and there are six outdoor heated swimming pools, each accompanied by a hot tub. “Most high-paying jobs and everything are in nice environments,” says freshman Alexander Kirchner. “Just being used to it, walking around in it, helps the psyche a little bit.”

Granted, there are caveats to choosing this apparent oasis, not the least of which is location. Access to an engaging area off-campus is highly appealing to many students, so the thought of attending school in mostly rural North Carolina (High Point is located southwest of Greensboro) might be a turn off. That said, I went to school at the University of Illinois, which is a thriving area with a twin cities of Champaign and Urbana just a couple hours south of Chicago. But it is basically surrounded by two hundred miles of corn and soybean fields in every direction. 

My own kids attend school in Washington, DC and New York City, so I know the appeal of a more connected campus. But outside of that issue, and the fact that High Point-U is not exactly a national or international name brand in terms of diploma recognition, the little school in Carolina is starting to build a name for itself.

We Are Lady Parts -- Pure Punk Poetry

A sitcom featuring a young, female Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering who becomes the lead guitarist for an all women fem-core Muslim punk band in London -- that is the pitch, and I absolutely loved it from the opening three-chord downstroke. 

We Are Lady Parts (wow, what a title), a British TV show from creator Nida Manzoor, is an incredibly unique and innovative piece of television with clever writing, smart social commentary, witty quips, tight filming, and some truly kick-ass music. Having finished up its second season, and only available for streaming on Peacock, Lady Parts was so intriguing to me, I was willing to sign up for the channel just to check it out. 

It did not disappoint. 

Amina Hussain. 26. Capricorn. Finishing a PhD in microbiology. Prone to excessive sweating, secret American folk-guitar-playing in her wardrobe, and husband-finding. Desperately seeking a nice Muslim boy with eyebrows you can hang on to. No, strike that! What she wants is to join an all-female, Muslim, post-punk band called Lady Parts. Truly, this is the British-Asian comedy series you’ve been waiting for your whole representation-starved life. And yes, I am addressing my own young self here.

We Are Lady Parts is a rowdy, spoofy, extremely silly and surprisingly sweet Channel 4 sitcom written, directed and produced by Nida Manzoor (Doctor Who, Enterprice). Her first series deserves to secure her reputation as a rising star. To put it as bluntly as one of Lady Parts’ songs (such as Nobody’s Gonna Honour Kill My Sister But Me), we have not seen anything like this on mainstream British TV: a comedy in which Muslim women are permitted to be funny, sexual, ridiculous, religious, angry, conflicted. Themselves, basically.

There is truly "nothing on TV like 'We Are Lady Parts.'"

When I sat down to watch the first season a little over two years ago, I was expecting to be amused, perhaps charmed. And there is certainly a whole lot of subversive humor in the series, which was created by the British Pakistani writer-director Nida Manzoor. Two of the first songs we hear Lady Parts perform are “Ain’t No One Gonna Honour Kill My Sister but Me” and “Voldemort Under My Headscarf”; a rival Muslim punk band introduced in Season 2 is called Second Wife. But We Are Lady Parts is so much more than a collection of jokes about the absurdities that young Muslim women often encounter. By turns raucous and earnest, the series is unlike anything else on TV right now—in part because it doesn’t consider representation to be a worthy end goal of its own. Instead, the show allows its characters to riff on their identities in ways that reflect how young people actually talk to one another, without becoming didactic or self-serious.

Louvre Heist -- Made for the Movies

It never really happens like it does in the movies ... until it does.

The daring robbery at The Louvre in Paris on Sunday seemed like a plot taken straight from an action film. In just under seven minutes, thieves parked a truck with a cherry picker bucket lift outside the museum, using a construction site as cover, raised themselves up to a window, which they quickly broke through, and in a coldly professional manner lifted priceless jewels including nine pieces from France's legendary Crown Jewels. And it took place in daylight hours, just moments after one of the world's most famous museums opened, an incredibly popular tourist destination already filling with visitors.

The thieves allegedly fled on mopeds through the busy streets of Paris, if that's not a poetic and cinematic ending. I mean seriously. Can't you see it? You've seen it countless times before.

In classic pop culture fashion, it didn't take long for writers to begin listing favorite heist films, like this piece from the New York Times: "Watch These Six Heist Movies". And that got me thinking about some of my personal favorites. Of course the Oceans Trilogy immediately springs to mind, and I have always been a fan of the updated Thomas Crowne Affair with Pierce Brosnan and Renee Russo. In fact, the TCA remake of the original Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway film was so good that studios are remaking the film again, this time starring Michael B Jordan.

When I think about what we find so appealing with the heist movie, I think about the thrill of a roller coaster and the classic line from Bender in The Breakfast Club: "Being bad feels kind of good." And, of course, there must be an element of the anti-hero - a character who is outside of standard conventions but has some redeemable qualities with which the audience empathizes. It's a cool conceit -- we want the bad guy to get away with it.

Marc Maron packs up the podcast

"W-T-F"?

No, seriously. Have you heard the news? Longtime podcaster, comedian, and all around interesting dude Marc Maron has wrapped up his well-known and widely respected podcast "WTF with Marc Maron."

The New York Times recently sat down with   Maron to discuss the decision to end the influential podcast that has informed and enlightened, engaged and entertained, amused and even annoyed, millions of Americans for the past sixteen years.

On a drive to lunch one sunny recent afternoon in Glendale, Calif., the comedian and actor Marc Maron was contemplating the term “burnout,” trying it on and inspecting it from different angles, like a new pair of pants he wasn’t sure were to his taste.

Maron had used the word a few times in a June episode of his podcast, “WTF With Marc Maron,” in which he announced that he and his founding producer, Brendan McDonald, would be ending the influential show after 16 years. Many responses to the news had echoed the term (including Howard Stern’s “I was burned out in 1996”) and now Maron seemed to worry that he’d sounded weak, or self-aggrandizing.

“The fact is, we’ve been doing this a long time,” he said, turning the wheel of his tan Toyota Avalon, a graveyard of empty seltzer cans, coffee cups, and Zyn packets. “And now we kind of want to live our lives. That may be burnout, or it may just be the natural course of things.”

This cycle of conjecture and revision — Maron grasping for, and occasionally reaching, some kind of emotional truth — was the essence of “WTF.” Over more than 1,600 episodes, he engaged in raw and personal dialogues with a staggering array of comedians, artists and public figures. Among them were Robin Williams, Lorne Michaels, Louis C.K. and Barack Obama, who became the first sitting president to appear on a podcast when he was a guest in 2015.

I have to be honest about this post -- I've never listened to Marc Maron's podcast. In fact, I've never really listened to any podcasts. For someone who loves talking and engaging in discussions and debates, I am surprisingly uninterested in podcasts. That said, if I were to listen to one, Marc Maron's likely would have been a top choice. Maron seems like the kind of guy that I would generally agree with and even when I didn't would respect his criticisms and counterarguments. And I have enjoyed Maron's stand-up, which I see more as spoken word monologues.

I guess what's also interesting is that numerous people over the years have suggested or observed that I should have a podcast. As an English teacher who basically organized his instruction around Henry James' description of being "a person on whom nothing is lost," my Socratic approach the English classroom certainly would lend itself to the podcast model. Of course, many students and colleagues might also observe that my class was not so Socratic as it was "listen to Mazenko and then respond." And I have several text threads with various friend groups whose banter certainly reads like many podcasts.

That said, there's a part of me that considers the whole podcast idea a bit of a mindless time wasting. I know I feel that way about the talking heads on television news, an issue I wrote about for The Villager a couple years ago. Seriously, do we really learn anything from listening to a few other people just ramble around in casual conversation. Or, is it all just "infotainment"? Listening to loose conversation is certainly not enlightening in the way a lecture or presentation or even a TED Talk can be. The Lyceum Movement in American history -- a key venue for the lectures of Henry Thoreau -- was arguably an enlightening and educational experience for its audience.

So, I don't know. I don't think adding podcasts to my daily life is ever in the cards. But I won't discount the impact of Maron's podcast run, and I don't doubt it's leaving a bit of a hole in American culture.

The Pop Punk Superman Movie

Who knew we needed a pop-punk Superman? 

Well, in an era -- perhaps the tail end of one -- where Marvel Comics dominated everything, DC Comics was sort of an afterthought in terms of big blockbusters, and the Man of Steel had become probably the least cool of the superhero genre, it seems like a reboot and makeover is just what Superman and movie audiences needed.

I'll be honest, I did not see the latest rendition of Superman that hit movie theaters this summer, and I didn't really have any interest in it. But, then I ran across this cool piece of commentary on NPR from Ann Powers - "Why the World Needs a Pop-Punk Superman" - and I am definitely intrigued. The film is now on my to-watch list. And the inclusion of the Teddybear's song "Punk Rocker (ft Iggy Pop)" on the soundtrack as the closing credits song is an added bonus.

Like so many hope-seeking people sweating out this summer, I plunked down my dollars last week to see director James Gunn's Superman. I showed up for the superpup Krypto, but found the old-fashioned Earth-saving shebang to be a balm — a sweet shot of moral clarity at a time when that can seem to be in short supply. And I joined the chorus of surprised chuckles when the scene destined to go viral arrived. In it, reporter Lois Lane and her metahuman lover are sharing a moment of vulnerability that turns into a low-stakes but highly revelatory argument. Wondering what he sees in her, she calls herself "just some punk rock kid from Bakerline," to which he indignantly responds, "I'm punk rock!" Then they're off, thrown into one of rock and roll's classic showdowns, between a "real" punk who found her tribe in the underground and a former clueless kid who probably bought his first Ramones t-shirt and Green Day CD at Target. It's a great early-in-the-relationship values check, as two people still feeling each other out voice their anxieties in the form of a tussle over definitions.

And Powers at NPR is not the only one weighing in with some interesting thoughts about the pop-punk angle of the new Superman. Author, music critic, academic, and lifelong punk Gina Arnold also noted the merging of what would seem to be arguably disparate and contradictory traditions with the inclusion of punk references in one of the nation's oldest superhero comics - the archetypal hero of "truth, justice, and the American Way." In her substack post "Man & Superman: 'Superman' and the Politics of Punk," Arnold explores the inspiration and effect of James Gunn infusing the Superman story with the punk ethos.

I don’t feel qualified to write about movies, especially “Superman,” but I do feel qualified to muse at length about the brief but apparently important reference to punk rock that is threaded throughout “Superman,” because I am the (co) editor of the Oxford Handbook of Punk! If the movie had confined itself to the brief exchange between Lois and Clark/Superman, where she says she’s a punk rocker and he says he likes punk rock too, and then she mocks the bands he names that he likes, saying, “that’s not punk, that’s corporate pop sell out stuff!” (or something like that), then I might just have passed on by. The exchange seems to be shorthand for character-building: Lois is supposed to be edgy, and Clark is supposed to be square. And maybe that is the purpose of the exchange, although if so, I still think it’s kind of interesting that the term ‘punk’ has taken on that shading. But later the theme continues when Clark announces to a skeptical Lois that exuding kindness is being punk rock.

I feel like that’s a lot of air-time for the idea of punk, at least in a movie that has nothing to do with punk, and who’s original texts predate the genre by many years. My friend Marie, who is associated with DC Comics, tells me that the director James Gunn used to be in a punk band, which may explain his interest in inserting this concept here, and I appreciate that impulse. I have all these great ideas (and scripts) for movies about those days, and I know, and James Gunn knows, there’s no actual market for them. Punk has to be inserted like a virus into other texts for it to have resonance.

But what is being punk, or rather, what does it mean NOW, as opposed to then? People have always accused punks of being phony in some way, because of the way they dress - and the subsequent revelation that it is actually more “punk” to not be punk is another oft-bandied about interpretation of the genre. In some ways Superman’s defensive words are just a gloss on that, but it also touches on what I have always thought was a major a part of punk philosophy: in the world of punk, all the outsiders (and let’s face it, being an alien from outer space makes Clark Kent the ultimate outsider) are now on the inside, and here on the inside, love will prevail.

Appreciating Wayne Thiebaud

Wandering into the Allicar Art Gallery on the CSU campus in Fort Collins, I ran across a pretty cool painting of Wayne Thiebaud's, and it reminded me of how much I enjoy this artist's work. Thiebaud's work in a variety of media, using vibrant colors to depict simple objects from everyday life, is not only visually appealing but also symbolically or metaphorically engaging as a reminder of the art and beauty that is always around us. 

Clearly associated with the Pop Art movement, Thiebaud was not only prolific but widely influential in contemporary pop art. But as WashPost art critic Philip Kennicott observes in this cool profile from 2012, "Wayne Thiebaud’s artistic eye was so much keener than pop art confections." Honestly, until I read Kennicott's piece, I couldn't fully articulate why Thiebaud's work is so appealing and also important. But I was struck by his observation that:

We need art because we are not particularly good at looking at the world. We see things all the time, yet when some truth finally registers in the mind, we say, “I see,” as if our eyes were closed before this epiphany.

What's the deal with Coffee?

My definition of bliss is a slice of strawberry-rhubarb pie, a cup of dark roast coffee with heavy cream, and a cool piano jazz trio in the background. 

But while the pie is mostly a seasonal thing and the jazz is simple ambiance, the coffee is a non-negotiable. That's true for millions of Americans who relish and even rely on a daily cuppa joe. In fact, it's the one thing that, according to a recent piece in The Atlantic, consumers seem unwilling to give up, even as price shocks, trade wars, and industry changes are making the ubiquitous beverage a more complicated choice.

Coffee is in trouble. Even before the United States imposed tariffs of 50 percent on Brazil and 20 percent on Vietnam—which together produce more than half of the world’s coffee beans—other challenges, including climate-change-related fires, flooding, and droughts, had already forced up coffee prices globally. Today, all told, coffee in the U.S. is nearly 40 percent more expensive than it was a year ago. Futures for arabica coffee—the beans most people in the world drink—have increased by almost a dollar since July. And prices may well go up further: Tariffs have “destabilized an already volatile market,” Sara Morrocchi, the CEO of the coffee consultancy Vuna, told me. This is a problem for the millions of people who grow and sell coffee around the world. It is also a problem for the people who rely on coffee for their base executive functioning—such a problem that Congress recently introduced a bipartisan bill to specifically protect coffee from Trump’s tariffs.

The reporting on the coffee crisis has been growing in recent years, but it has picked up considerably since April with the imposition of tariffs on a product that simply isn't grown in the United States. And the idea that Congress comes together in a bipartisan bill to exempt coffee from tariffs gives you an idea of just how sacred that beautifully bitter beverage truly is.

Thursday is the Best Day of the Week

I love Thursdays.

Thursday is a day of infinite possibilities, and it has long been my favorite day of the week. 

Now, obviously, people will reasonably argue that a workday, a school day, cannot be as great as a weekend. Even Friday has to be better because while it's a work/school day for most people, it's also the kickoff to the weekend. Friday night is always a party, and for good reason.

But hear me out.

If you are having a busy week with a lot on your plate, then a Thursday offers the chance to get good work done, and you still have a day to finish up before the weekend. So Thursdays can be very productive -- no sense of panic because there is still time in the week. 

On the other hand, if you are having a miserable week that seems like it will never end. If it's the kind of day that has been Tuesday three days in a row, then Thursday offers some relief. When you wake up on Thursday, you realize, "Ok, I just have to get through today and then tomorrow is Friday." And Fridays are always awesome because nothing has to be done on Fridays -- whatever is left over can be pushed to Monday.

We all know Mondays are the absolute worst, and Thursday is the furthest thing from Monday. And let's face it, while Fridays are great, and Saturdays are pure joy, there is always the creeping feeling that Monday is coming soon. As wonderful as Sundays can be, there is an impending gloom over getting up Monday morning. 

But none of that anxiety messes with a Thursday. On Thursday, the long dreary week is beginning to fade in the rearview mirror, and the glorious weekend is just peeking over the horizon. 

So, enjoy your Thursday, arguably the best day of the week. 

Indie Bookstores You Should Visit

Like many people, whenever we travel and explore a new town or region, the local independent bookstore is mandatory destination. There is nothing better during a leisurely stroll through an unfamiliar neighborhood than to happen across a quaint, cozy, comforting bookstore. I'm not sure what it is for bookies that makes walking into a bookstore feel like coming home, but I always relish those first few steps inside the door. What displays are front and center? Which books have the curators deftly placed to invite a glance, a perusal, a skimming of pages?

Living in Denver for many years, we were blessed with a truly legendary indie store, The Tattered Cover. It's an impressive institution that can hang with the best of the big indie stores known nationally, like Powells in Portland, The Strand in New York City, City Lights in San Francisco, and of course Shakespeare & Co in Paris.

Some smaller but well-known indie stores I've had the pleasure of visiting include Books are Magic in Brooklyn and the wonderful Left Bank Books in my beloved St. Louis. Some spots on my wish list included Parnassus Books in Nashville and Painted Porch in Austin.

Don McClean & the story of American Pie

"It could be the greatest song in music history."

That praise comes from none other than Garth Brooks, one of the greatest songwriters and performers in music history. And he's talking about "America Pie," the richly textured tale from Don McClean about "the day the music died." And the song is undoubtedly one of the most well known in the history of American music. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who, if prompted, could not finish the refrain of the song:

"Bye, bye, Miss American Pie; drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry; them good ol' boys drinkin' whiskey and rye, singing this will be the day that I die, this will be the day that I die."

McClean recently "took the stage to sing the song with another artist," something he has done only twice in fifty-five years. And Guitar Player magazine caught up with the legendary singer who revealed some interesting facts and insight into the song.

Don McLean scored more than a hit when he composed “American Pie,” the tune he released as a single in 1971. He also created an iconic cut that has continued to resonate with the public some 55 years later. Generations since its original release, “American Pie” is an anthem known and loved by members of every generation.

The tune offers a kaleidoscopic ride through the social unrest and changes brought about in 1960s America. McLean was famously reluctant to discuss the song’s enigmatic lyrics for years, preferring to let its mystery endure. But even while he kept mum about the meaning behind its words, “American Pie” remained the centerpiece of his live performances, a showstopper that got everyone in the venue singing along.

Despite the song’s popularity — second only to that of his 1972 hit "Vincent" — McLean never sang it with another artist until his 1997 performance with country artist Garth Brooks. At the time, Brooks was at his peak, with Diamond-certified albums like No Fences (1990) and Ropin' the Wind (1991), playing major stadium tours, and holding a record-setting Central Park concert in 1997. Which is why singer Jessie Murph’s show on September 27 was such a big deal.

The rising star used her sold-out show at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium as an opportunity to bring out McLean for a rare performance of “American Pie,” making her only the second artist in 55 years to perform the tune with him.

The 20-year-old singer/songwriter wrote in her Instagram Stories, “I have so much gratitude in my heart today. Last night was so magical and incredible and sparkling, I feel like the luckiest girl on earth.”

And, you may not be aware (I wasn't) that a documentary was released about the song back in 2022. It's  an homage to the song, of course, an exploration of the lyrics and story behind the stories. And it is a testament to the career of Don McClean, who had one other widely known song with the elegiac Vincent, released in 1971. 

Few songs are so easily identifiable and singable as:

Gregg Deal, Indigenous Punk Rock Artist

Indigenous artist, activist, spoken word performer, and punk rock front man for his band Dead Pioneers, Gregg Deal is impressive. He's a big deal. And, if you're in or around Los Angeles in the next month, you owe to yourself to stop by the Adler Smith Gallery in Santa Monica for the latest installation of Gregg's unique, and uniquely powerful, art exhibit "The Others."

If you've followed this blog or my writing with Westword Magazine in Denver, you know I am a huge fan of Deal and have covered the band Dead Pioneers several times in the past year. And I will continue to follow the band as they work on their third album for Hassle Records, following a strong response to the second LP Post-American and a string of live shows in promotion that included opening for Pearl Jam and touring Europe with punk legends Pennywise and Propagandhi.

But today on Indigenous Peoples Day, I am thinking about Deal's visual art and his series "The Others" which first caught my attention years ago before I met him or the band had formed. The series is a powerful statement about Native American stereotypes, white supremacy, cultural appropriation, and the power of punk rock. In the series, Deal has taken offensive "cowboy and indian" comics from the 1940s and reappropriated them with a reversal that features the Natives winning. Each of the image's speech bubbles features punk rock lyrics that resonated with Gregg from his youth.

In Deal’s own punk way, The Others points to an ongoing struggle for liberation from white settler-colonialism and violence. For The Others series, Deal appropriates individual panels of comic book illustrations from the 1940’s and 1950’s, changing out the dialogue of each speech balloon with lyrics from late 20th century punk rock music—bands such as Dead Kennedys, Misfits, Marginal Man, and Operation Ivy (I’d recommend exploring some of the musical inspiration on your way to, or while viewing the work). Grit is apparent in Deal’s delivery. Stencils, aerosol, and hand-painted words appeal to a non-conformist sensibility, enhancing the overall subversive message.

Take a few moments and listen to Gregg discuss that series at the opening on October 11.
And of course continue to follow his impressive career both as an artist and musician. 

Thriller Master Dan Brown is Back with a Secret

I can still recall reading a review of a new and intriguing thriller called The DaVinci Code from a relatively unknown writer, Dan Brown. I'm fairly sure the review was on Salon.com, and I was curious enough to check out what became a true publishing and mass media phenomenon. 

Now, Dan Brown and his alter-ego - globe trotting Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon - are back for another smart thriller exploring history and mystery. I say "smart," and that may leave many readers rolling their eyes, to be sure. For, Brown has been widely criticized for his literary style, or perhaps lack of it. He is truly a great storyteller even though he's not a great writer, per se. But the "smart" descriptor has to do with his topic matter -- history, language, symbols, secret societies, religious texts and iconography. And, of course, the power of the written word.

That's the angle New York Times critic-at-large A.O. Scott takes in her recent review of Brown's latest offering The Secret of Secrets:  Book Review: ‘The Secret of Secrets,’ by Dan Brown - The New York Times. 

You will find many astonishing sentences in “The Secret of Secrets,” Dan Brown’s latest TED-Talk travelogue thriller. One that caught my eye arrives early in the book, at the beginning of Chapter 7: “The world’s largest book publisher, Penguin Random House, publishes nearly 20,000 books a year and generates over $5 billion in annual gross revenues.” This is a purely factual — and, as far as I can determine, accurate — statement, and therefore a particular kind of Dan Brown sentence.

Of course there are other varieties, including ones that start with a breathless adverb (“impossibly,” “remarkably,” “conveniently”); ones that burst into excited italics; ones that are entirely in italics. Brown is above all an action writer, and his hero, Robert Langdon, is continually in hot pursuit of whoever is hotly pursuing him, whether in Florence, Rome, Barcelona or some other popular tourist destination. The nearly 700 pages of “The Secret of Secrets” zigzag across a hectic day, mostly in Prague, during which guns are fired, locks picked, hidden passageways discovered and shocking revelations delivered on the run. The hyperactive plotting runs on hyperventilating prose.

But a Dan Brown caper also runs on a certain kind of intellectual fuel. Since Langdon is, by profession, a professor (of symbology, at Harvard, in case you need reminding), his adventures are punctuated, or you might say padded, with brief lectures on a great many topics in history, science, philosophy and real estate.

GoGo Penguin - the Jazz Trio You Need

Sometimes you don't even know you were missing something in your life until you find it, ... or perhaps it finds you. That's how I felt the first time I heard the jazz trio from Manchester known as GoGo Penguin. The song was GGP's "Hopopono":

I had the pleasure of catching the innovative and highly entertaining trio on their North American tour when they stopped by Boulder Theater on November 5. I was surprised to hear it was the third time the group has played there, and the 90-minute set did not disappoint.  Touring in support of the new album Necessary Fictions, the guys played pretty much non-stop, offering many new selections from the release to a nearly packed house.

GoGo Penguin have already given us one album, Everything Is Going To Be OK (XXIM, 2023), following the departure of their original drummer Rob Turner and the arrival of Jon Scott. With its tendency to introspection, ‘Everything’ marked a successful new start for the trio of Scott, pianist Chris Illingworth and bassist Nick Blacka.

After touring the album worldwide, the three of them considered their musical direction anew. Illingworth and Blacka re-equipped their studio in Manchester and started jamming. Scott joined them after a few weeks and throughout 2024 the three took their time to work on new pieces. Necessary Fictions is the result, which sees them invent their version of GoGo Penguin.

The sound is recognisable, of course: strong piano lines, powerful bass and novel drum parts. However, their new album dives headfirst into adventure. Illingworth has been exploring synthesizers and uses them brilliantly, while Blacka and Scott are in top form.

From the opening track Umbra, it’s clear that the sheer joy of playing is renewed, and with that the emotion and all the fantastic builds and crescendos that make their tracks hard to resist. Fallowfield Loops follows on seamlessly. Vintage GoGo Penguin, rock solid.

M*A*S*H Still Resonates, ... & Likely Always Will

Years ago, when my children were still young, but old enough to watch and appreciate movies and television from my youth -- say films like Ferris Bueller's Day Off -- my wife and I introduced them to one of TV's longest-running and most endearing sitcoms, M*A*S*H.

And they loved it, just as we did and knew they would.

Truly one of the most significant and impactful television sitcoms in history, it streams on Hulu, and my wife and I still tune in and watch a couple episodes a week. The show is every bit as good as it ever was. For a show centered on a group of army doctors and nurses during the Korean War, the entertainment value is actually quite an interesting study. M*A*S*H is hilarious and poignant, heartwarming and heartbreaking, deeply thoughtful and wildly wacky, honestly insightful on the human condition and hilariously honest about everyday life.

This week, esteemed linguist and social commentator John McWhorter published a piece in the New York Times about 10 Old Television Series Every Kid Needs to Watch. Surprisingly, he didn't include MASH, though he conceded his actual list is much longer than ten, and his commentary led me to pondering just how it is that MASH still "Holds Up Fifty Years Later":

Few, if any, sitcoms that began more than half a century ago can claim to be as great as M*A*S*H was. Despite airing throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, and centering on a war that began and ended approximately 70 years ago, in many ways, it feels like a timeless show. It was a TV version of the 1970 Robert Altman movie of the same name, which itself was an adaptation of a 1968 novel called MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors. That novel was based on the real-life experience of former military surgeon turned author Hiester Richard Hornberger Jr. during his time spent serving in the Korean War, and so both the movie and the TV show center on a group of doctors and other medical staff in South Korea, with M*A*S*H's cast shown to work at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in South Korea. As striking and effective as the movie can be, the TV show takes what works about the film and makes it even better. It's a little less abrasive and crude, given it was broadcast on television, and features new takes on the characters that make them more sympathetic and endearing. Beyond the character development, the TV version of M*A*S*H also shines for its expert balance of comedy and drama, its bold anti-war themes, and its willingness to experiment with the TV format. Not every aspect has aged perfectly, but the vast majority of the time, M*A*S*H.

6 Gallery -- Seventy Years Ago Allen Ginsberg "Howl"-ed

"I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix, angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night ..."

It was 70 years ago on October 7, that Allen Ginsberg "Howl-ed" for the first time. The poetry reading at 6 Gallery is a monumental moment in American lit, and it was recreated fictionally in Kerouac's Dharma Bums. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Rexroth, Snyder and others met for a reading that in many ways kicked off the Beat Generation.

Beat scholar David Wills recently published a book about that historic evening, and to promote the book and the evening, he recounted the history in a cool piece for Quillette:  "A Subterranean Celebration: How the 6 Gallery reading in San Francisco on 7 October 1955 changed the counterculture."

On 7 October 1955, Allen Ginsberg gave the first public reading of “Howl” at the 6 Gallery in San Francisco. It was only his second poetry reading and he had little reason to feel it would be successful, yet a year later he was a minor celebrity and two years after that he and his Beat Generation friends were a national obsession—loved, loathed, imitated, and parodied. That reading started the San Francisco Renaissance, too, and helped to turn the Bay Area into a literary centre. It would not be long before the Beats spawned the beatniks, who arguably became the hippies.

It can be tempting to look back at events of great historical importance and feel that they were somehow inevitable, and yet that is not true of the 6 Gallery reading. In fact, its success was wildly improbable. The poets on stage that night were mostly unknown and untested. They read difficult work that should have had very limited appeal. Nor was the gallery itself a venue one would associate with era-defining moments. And while the city held some appeal as a place for the visual arts, it did not have a great literary history.

The 6 Gallery opened in October 1954 and was named for the fact that it had six founders: five young painter friends from near Los Angeles who had teamed up with one of their teachers at the California School of Fine Arts: a poet called Jack Spicer. In their final year of studies, they decided they wanted a place to display their work and Spicer encouraged them, suggesting that they expand the gallery’s function to include not just visual art but poetry. This was not as revolutionary as it perhaps sounds. Prior to the 6 Gallery, the building at 3119 Fillmore had been home to King Ubu, which was also an art gallery that one artist recalled was “primarily devoted to poetry reading.”

David Wills is a fascinating individual and a true scholar of the Beat Generation. His book about the night will undoubtedly enlighten and entertain even the most knowledgeable and passionate of Beat fans.

China Races past America & into the Future

The future is on the Pacific Rim.

I've been hearing that since at least the early 90s when I was living the twenty-something expat life, teaching English in Southeast Asia. The late '80s had definitely put the spotlight on the economies of the East, with Japan bursting ahead technologically and buying up huge amounts of American real estate. Granted, that run became stagnant just as the Sleeping Giant began to wake.

Washington Post writer Fareed Zakaria has always had his finger on the pulse of emerging political and economic issues, and he made a statement with his book The Post-American World, which wasn't as much about the waning of the United States as it was "the rise of the rest."

And no place is rising higher and faster than China. In a recent opinion piece, Zakaria notes "As America fumbles, China races ahead."

Xi is building the future while Trump pushes tariffs and fights the woke wars.

For about a decade, the United States has been comforted by the notion that China had lost its way. After 35 years of astonishing growth, Beijing stumbled internally and abroad. Its leaders cracked down on some of the country’s most innovative sectors, from technology to education, driving entrepreneurs into exile or silence. Its “wolf warrior” diplomacy alienated its neighbors from India to Australia to Vietnam.

That era is over. China’s leaders have corrected their course.

Last month, while President Donald Trump accused nations at the U.N. General Assembly of being hopeless failures and harangued the United Nations for not hiring him to renovate its headquarters decades ago, President Xi Jinping put forward a Global Governance Initiative, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the U.N.’s founding. He proposed strengthening the multilateral system along a series of dimensions, positioning Beijing as the constructive, agenda-setting superpower.

How Bari Weiss Took Over the Media

Bari Weiss is punk rock.

There's really no other way to explain what Bari Weiss has accomplished in the past four years since very publicly resigning her (relatively new) position as an editor for the New York Times. The DIY ethic and fiercely independent spirit with which she launched The Free Press and rode it to a practical coup in the corporate news world is about the most punk-ass thing we've seen in media in a long time.

With the recent announcement from Paramount that Weiss has been named the editor-in-chief of CBS News, the frenzied rumblings of the journalism world have been trying to figure out just how the forty-one-year-old writer stormed the gates of the Fourth Estate and won.

Since its founding in 2021, The Free Press has amassed more than 1.5 million readers and $15 million in annual subscription revenue, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s finances. In an interview, Hamish McKenzie, a co-founder of Substack, called CBS’s acquisition of The Free Press a “strong recognition that we’re in a new generation of media now.”

“What is undeniable is The Free Press built a new media business in a time when everybody thinks the news is dying as a business — and got it to a place of flourishing in a space of three years,” he said.

It's rare that disruptors are so effective so quickly in challenging institutions like the media. When The Free Press first came on my radar, I immediately thought of Arianna Huffington and the Huff Post. However, Huffington had quite a different starting point, obviously, with significant advantages over Weiss in terms of establishing a name and a news site. And, to be honest, I was never a fan of Huffington and her site which I believe took advantage of writers and certainly exploited many of them, making an obscene amount of money while paying virtually no one for the content.

Weiss deserves props for taking what amounts to a newsletter on the emerging platform Substack and turning it into a thriving news site which clearly filled a niche and a gap in the world of online freelance journalism. And with a prolific publishing schedule and podcast, she definitely put in the time and the effort to quickly build and grow her own unique platform. This was nothing short of pure DIY hustle, and Weiss carved out a market where none had existed.

Granted, as impressive as Bari Weiss' success with The Free Press is, the new leadership gig with CBS News is drawing serious scrutiny and criticism, and it undoubtedly should. Weiss is definitely a skilled writer, editor, journalist, and entrepreneur, but nothing in her career yet truly qualifies her to head one of the major news and media organizations in the world. And, while her greeting letter to her new team was certainly appropriate with many valid positions, her continued connection to The Free Press and its incorporation into the Paramount/CBS orbit is rather suspect. 

While The Free Press is in many ways a fresh and valued voice in the media landscape, it is by no means an unbiased, non-partisan, "fair & balanced" news site. The same goes for Weiss herself. And it's entirely fair for anyone to have and promote their ideas, perspectives, angles, preferences, and attitudes. In fact, that is the job of commentary writers, the side of journalism from which Weiss comes.

So, it will certainly be interesting to see what comes next for Weiss and The Free Press. It's definitely been a raucous and impressive ride so far.

Alex Honnold to Free Solo a Skyscraper

Wait, what?

According to Outside Magazine, the legendary rock climber and free soloist Alex Honnold is going to free solo climb Taipei 101, the tallest building in Taiwan, and once the tallest in the world.

Alex Honnold—yes, Mr. Free Solo himself—will star in a two-hour live TV show on Netflix in 2026, during which he will scale the tallest skyscraper in Taiwan (gulp) without any safety ropes. Yep, Honnold will go buildering on a very tall building on live TV, and he will do it while adhering to the risky climbing style that made him famous. According to a news release published by Netflix, the ordeal will be titled Skyscraper Live, and it will be staged on a building called Taipei 101, which stands 1,667 feet fall and has 101 floors. In the release, Brandon Riegg, the vice president of nonfiction series and sports at Netflix, called the whole thing an “adrenaline inducing spectacle that you can’t look away from.”

For those of you who don't know, Alex Honnold is an incredibly famous rock climber who climbed the infamous El Capitan in Yosemite without any ropes. It was one of the most incredible feats of athletic skill and human endurance that anyone ever imagined. The feat was captured on film in the documentary Free Solo, which went on to win the Academy Award.

Sneakers - Robert Redford's Sleeper Classic

In the recent passing of "the Sundance Kid," accolades for a legendary career have offered a wide array of choices for some of Redford's greatest roles. From The Sting to The Way We Were to The Candidate to The Natural, I have many favorites. But in the early '90s a seemingly obscure little spy film - a light thriller - came out that featured a pretty stellar cast, and it's one of my most favorite Redford pics. The film, of course, is Sneakers, and it not often mentioned, but also not unappreciated in the Redford pantheon.

Redford’s ability to mix Hollywood charisma with human vulnerability drives Sneakers. After its place setting opening, Sneakers follows Martin’s team as they’re coerced by what appear to be NSA agents into stealing a secret codebreaking device from a brilliant mathematician (Donal Logue, back when he could be cast against type). Along with help from Martin’s sometime girlfriend Liz (Mary McDonnell), the team attempts their goal by duping a gullible scientist (Stephen Tobolowsky), getting pulled further into post-Cold War intrigue and coming face-to-face with a surprising mastermind (Ben Kingsley).

At the time, some viewers complained that Sneakers failed to challenge Redford, that it just asked him to repeat beats from his ’70s paranoid movies. However, with two decades of age on him, Redford was even more equipped to balance his charisma with humanity. As thrillers of the era grew more slick, with big stakes and fancy technology—Enemy of the State, Mission: Impossible, The Long Kiss Goodnight—Redford’s ability to ground Bishop and his wacky pals made Sneakers stand out all the more.

Sneakers never stops insisting that Martin has remarkable hacking skills, that he’s fundamentally a good man against powerful forces. And Redford can embody those admirable traits. But throughout the film, Redford finds ways to keep Martin human: the way his shoulders slightly drop when Liz reminds Martin that he messed up her relationship, the tightening in his jaw as Martin waits to learn if his friends will take on a risky job that would clear his record, the slight lean back when Martin realizes the mastermind’s identity.

As Sneakers repeatedly shows, Robert Redford was a movie star, remarkably handsome and blessed with endless charisma. But by pairing him with oddball character actors and having him play a real person in a heightened story, Sneakers also proves that Redford was a proper actor, able to remain a human being, even when idolized on screen.

Stick, a heartwarmingly funny golf story

Owen Wilson just amuses me. 

Whether he's playing a beach bum in the Elmore Leonard-inspired The Big Bounce from 2004 or playing along with buddy Vince Vaughn in the huge hit Wedding Crashers, Wilson seems to always being playing his stock "awh shucks character," and yet the charm never fails to make me smile.

With his most recent role playing a washed-out professional golfer, he entertains with a limited comedy series The Guardian is calling "the Ted Lasso of golf."

I’ve never met a golfer in real life. I’ve always assumed I’m the wrong demographic – perhaps in terms of age, or class or at least tax bracket – or perhaps my lack of athleticism is so aggressive that it has prevented me from becoming friends with anyone with even the mildest sporting proclivity for all my life. Instead, I have essentially taken Mark Twain’s word for it that golf is a good walk spoiled, and gone about my days.

Now, however, I think golf may be the spoiler of a good new comedy drama. Stick, it’s called – a deadening name – and it stars Owen Wilson as washed-up golf pro Pryce Cahill. He had a televised meltdown during a tournament at the peak of his career (“He triple-bogeyed his entire life”) and is now reduced to selling golf kit, giving lessons to rich old ladies and hustling for cash in bars. He is also going through a divorce, and still living in the former marital home that his wife Amber-Linn (Judy Greer) – with whom he is still on good terms, bound as they are by a shared sorrow – now wants them to sell.

A golf course can make "fore" some great comedy going back to such classics as Caddyshack and Tin Cup, and while the mentor-prodigy can be a tired and cliched formula, Stick manages to stay fresh and clever and ultimately entertaining, especially with a great turn from Marc Maron as the wise, loyal, and sardonically jaded sidekick.

A Pynchon Primer, or speaking of conspiracies

Well, he's done it again.

The master of the truly inexplicable yet compelling novel of postmodern weirdness, Thomas Pynchon has just released upon the literary and pop culture world his ninth novel. Still blowing our minds at the age of eighty-eight, Pynchon's latest novel Shadow Ticket is  a detective novel featuring "criminal cheesemongers, Jazz Age adventuresses, Hungarian magicians," and according to Washington Post books writer Jacob Brogan it is "bonkers and brilliant fun."

I was first introduced to Pynchon during my undergrad years in a contemporary novel class where we read the reasonably accessible Pynchon novella The Crying of Lot 49. I wish I knew enough then to really appreciate what the teacher was offering. For, it was nearly a decade later in grad school that my cohort read and literally devoured V.. Some of the discussions are still rattling around my head. And I appreciated the class because, like most, I would never have truly understood what Pynchon was doing without multiple viewpoints.

Which leads me to this excellent Pynchon Primer put together by New York Times critic-at-large A.O. Scott.

Since the 1960s and ’70s, when he made his name with “V.,” “The Crying of Lot 49” and the 900-page, National Book Award-winning “Gravity’s Rainbow,” Thomas Pynchon has been tagged with various highfalutin epithets: experimental writer, postmodernist, systems novelist. Gore Vidal, writing in The New York Review of Books in 1976, assigned Pynchon to the “R and D (Research and Development)” wing of contemporary literature. For Vidal, the opposite of R&D was R&R — the kind of fiction people might read for pleasure.

Nearly 50 years and five novels later, we can say that Vidal was half right. While Pynchon is properly celebrated as a formidable literary innovator, he is less often recognized as a great entertainer, a master of R&R. His books are challenging, mind-blowing, precedent-shattering — all of that, yes. They’re also a lot of fun.

 

Is the PRC monitoring this blog?

So, ... not to sound too conspiratorial or anything, but after I blogged about the two new films spotlighting Taiwan and its struggle with Chinese intimidation, the traffic to this blog plummeted by 90%.

So, perhaps I should have titled this: "Is the PRC blocking access to this blog?"

I mean, I have to be honest in that when I was writing the blog post about the film Invisible Nation and the new Netflix series Zero Day Attack, I did pause for a moment wondering if posting about Taiwan and two films that the PRC definitely does not like could possibly affect my blog traffic. 

While my traffic fluctuates a lot, and this is not a widely read blog by any stretch, the numbers had been quite good the past couple months. And it's not news to anyone that the PRC's digital surveillance program and bots are vast. 

But, I figured, ... come on. A Teacher's View is a small teacher's blog, and news of the Taiwan films is already out there. 

And, yet ... traffic is way down.

REM touring again? In 2026

Released in 1986, Life's Rich Pageant, is a pivotal REM album, and it is in many ways the breakthrough work for the legendary Athens band who had ruled college radio for many years, starting with the release of Murmur in 1983 (or for the true believers Chronic Town, the EP released in 1982). 

LRP was somewhat of a new direction for the band, as Mike Mills noted a desire to move out of its murkier sound, and with singles like "Fall on Me" and "I Believe," mainstream listeners got a first taste of Michael Stipe lyrics they could actually understand. 

Now, with the 40th anniversary of the LP that many considered one of the most important releases of the 1980s, especially in the alternative rock world that was emerging, there is a tribute tour lining up to celebrate LRP with a concert performance of the album in its entirety. So, are the boys from Athens reuniting for a reunion tour?

Of course not.

One key reason REM is the iconic band it is, is because it ended its run as gracefully as any band has ever done and has remained true to its commitment to never tour again. For, as Peter Buck explained on 60 Minutes, "It would just never be as good."

However, fans can experience a great show celebrating the album with the tour from Michael Shannon & Jason Narducy, who have true musical chops, a great reputation as performers, and experience putting on shows of an REM album that are so inviting sometimes the band itself shows up and joins the party.

Scrubs is Coming Back

"Paging, Doctor Cox. J.D. and Turk are back."

For several years in the early 2000s, Scrubs was one of the smartest, funniest, timeliest, and at the same time occasionally most poignant situation comedies on television. In fact, I find the first three seasons to nothing short of brilliant. And, like several other shows of that era, Scrubs was the vehicle for access to some incredible indie music. In fact, I'm sure the first time I heard "New Slang" by the Shins was in an episode. (And of course the song also featured in Zach Braff's wonderful indie film Garden State).

The series had clearly run its course by the time season eight rolled around. In fact, I am a firm believer that most series peak in season three. However, the show has lived on in streaming, and Turk and JD (Donald Faison and Zach Braff) have continued to live in the TV-sphere by regularly popping up as themselves in television ads for T-Mobile. 

And, now, the gang is reuniting for one more season.

Given a straight-to-series order by ABC in July, the new series will follow JD Dorian (Braff) and Christopher Turk (Faison), who scrub in together for the first time in a long time- medicine has changed, interns have changed, but their bromance has stood the test of time. Characters new and old navigate the waters of Sacred Heart with laughter, heart and some surprises along the way.

While I am not generally a fan of remakes and reboots and rehashing the past and trying to recreate the magic, I am kind of excited about this news. I mean who wouldn't be when looking back at some great moments in a special sitcom like Scrubs.