If you read *anything* by me this long, hot summer, read this: “Skin in the Game: An American Gothic in Black and White,” my essay on the murder of Trayvon Martin. It’s a polemic, it’s cultural criticism, it’s personal history, it’s Southern Gothic in the greasy faced, lynching-postcard mode, it’s the muck that came up […]
 Zaniest. conversation. EVER. Mark Frauenfelder, the Dick Cavett of Nonlinear Talk and host of the Boing Boing podcast GWEEK, engaged me in the most deliriously free-associated, brain-ticklingly delightful interview I’ve ever conducted.  Keywords (for the time-starved): Bunuel’s recipe for the Platonic ideal of the martini, Norman Rockwell’s dark side, the horror of Disneyland […]
Shameless Exploitation Dept.: I’ve Tweeted about the importance of paying writers. I’ve been twitted about *not* being able to pay photographers. Now, I’m doing The Bad Thing Again: advertising for UNPAID (but, I hasten to say, NOT unremunerated) labor. I’m looking for a detail-oriented, responsible transcriber, preferably a writer, grad student, or the like, to transcribe […]
Read the inaugural installation of “Mythologies,” my irregular series of interviews with cultural critics, at Thought Catalog. First up: food scribe and cultural historian Josh Ozersky, the Macaulay of offal, talking about food and gender: Playboy‘s role in changing men’s perceptions of food and cooking, the post-’70s shift in American attitudes about the unmanliness of […]
A mini-festo for the digressive essay: “But I Digress: On The Point Of Not Getting To The Point,” new, now, at Thought Catalog. The Shining, Stanley Kubrick. Copyright Stanley Kubrick; all rights reserved. Teaser: “The digression must wander off the point only to fulfill it,” Lopate insists; in contradistinction, the digressive essay makes a point […]
LIVE, NOW: ALL THE YOUNG DUDES: WHY GLAM ROCK MATTERS [KINDLE SINGLE]. BOING BOING‘s inaugural Kindle title, and my latest. Currently out of print. Design/illustration: Mark Frauenfelder. © Mark Frauenfelder; all rights reserved. From the Amazon blurb: “All the Young Dudes,” glam rock’s rallying cry, turned 40 last year. David Bowie wrote it, but Mott […]
“Thank God I’m an Atheist: Bunuel’s Last Laugh,” the second installment in my “Self-Help for Surrealists” series is live, on Thought Catalog, HERE. Nut graf: Buñuel is a philosopher – a moral philosopher, to be exact, albeit one who makes his case with gleeful, Surrealist savagery, using images dredged from the depths of the unconscious. […]
DOWNLOADABLE* NOW, at http://amzn.to/ZxSYPE, MY FIRST E-SINGLE, a longform essay called “England My England: Anglophilia Explained.” (It’s available at iBookstore, too, I’m told, and coming soon to B&N.) What do you get for your $2.99? Nearly 8,000 (!) words of brow-furrowing about why some native-born residents of our Shining City Upon a Hill, where All […]
Now, on BOING BOING: My essay on the mad poet Gerard de Nerval’s famous “lobster walk.” (The first in a series of ha-ha-only serious attempts at “Self-Help for Surrealists.”) Teaser: “Before Rimbaud, before the Surrealists, there was Nerval (1808 – 1855), living his life as if it were a lucid dream. Of course, it didn’t […]
At Boing Boing, “The Kraken Wakes,” my belle-lettristic (yet exhaustively reported) science feature on the first-ever footage of Architeuthis, the giant squid, in its deep-sea element. Chromatophores flashing from iridescent silver-gold to gunmetal blue, the animal danced in the dark, an emissary from a sunless, starless void. … “The color was utterly different than any […]