A clipping of the fight advertisement that ran in the _Muncie Evening Post_ , September 2 1931.
_As part of the process of researching and writing my book about the Klan-fighting editor George Dale, I've been penning short character studies and historical sketches most every morning. It's been a nice way to get into form—like training for a fight—and a way to work through ideas on tone and voice…
My well-worn copy of _The Westing Game_.
_Foundational Texts is a monthly essay series that looks at some of the culture that shaped me and how it still resonates today._
_Read all the installments: Jan: Jenny Holzer | Feb: The Goonies | March: The Channel 5 News Team | April: The Cave of Time | May: The Westing Game_
"The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset…
Arsenal's stadium in the rain. (pic CC 2.0 by Paul Hudson.)
It had all come apart.
It was supposed to be easy for Arsenal, the 140-year-old British football club from North London. They'd been on top of the Premier League for months now, a final christening in a years-long attempt to reach the top and win the league trophy for the first time in over two decades. Three years in a row they had…
Behind the scenes on the photo shoot for our Season 2 art.
This weekend, thousands of people marched across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama to protest the rapid-fire eradication of black congressional districts across the South following the Supreme Court's latest salvo against the Voting Rights Act. The Pettus bridge is the site of Bloody Sunday where, in March 1965, marchers for…
I am embarrassed at the state of these g's but the only way to get better is to try.
Back when this site was new, I wrote a post called "On Trying," an attempt at capturing my belief that _trying_ is everything. Back then, we were a few years past the awful height of the pandemic, the election that ushered in Trump 2 was still in the future, and things hadn't fallen apart as completely as they…
Words all the way up. (pic CC by beggs )
_Foundational Texts is a new monthly essay series for 2026 looking at some of the culture that shaped me and how it still resonates today. This is the first of 12 monthly installments._
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…
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_
📺
Channel One
I was raised by the Channel 5 News Team. A latchkey kid whose…
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…
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…
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…
"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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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. This is the second of 12 installments,last month I wrote about the artist Jenny Holzer._
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 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…
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…
It takes just two pages before you're forced to make a choice in the Cave of Time.
_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 | April: The Cave of Time_
What if you could change everything?
That…
The speech referenced below really begins at 28:25, and this should play at that point but you know how technology goes.
It's never lost on me the miracle that is the library.
I've been spending quite a bit of time in them lately (more than usual, that is), as I've been getting deeper and deeper into research for my book. Every time I go into one I'm amazed all over again that the space is free…
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…
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…
The Bevidere Daily Republican might be a small paper but they wrote a hell of a headline.
They came in waves. The Interurbans—electric trains that crisscrossed the Midwest back then—came from Michigan and Ohio and from across Indiana. Hundreds arrived on a train hired special from Chicago. And on the roads there was car after car after car, hulking and black, and overloaded with Klansmen.
It…
