The Covid pandemic is not over, and may not be over for a long while yet. But with vaccination rates up, this might be a good moment to pause and think about what a microscopic virus has done to our world. Already there’s a literary pandemic of excellent books emerging, …
Read More »Farewell, Anita Lane: A Storm in the Form of a Girl
The music world has lost a true icon: Anita Lane, the Bad Seed who helped redefine the spirit of evil in rock & roll. “Once there came a storm in the form of a girl,” Nick Cave famously sang, and for many fans, Anita Lane was that storm. She was …
Read More »The Power of Deja Foxx
Deja Foxx was unpacking in her dorm room to start her sophomore year at Columbia University when Meena Harris DM’d her about working on her Aunt Kamala’s presidential campaign. “I just started repacking,” Foxx says, laughing. “I wasn’t going to sit in a classroom and talk about Plato and Aristotle …
Read More »Morgan Wallen's Label Suspended Him 'Indefinitely.' Here's What That Means — And What It Doesn't
In the four days since Morgan Wallen was captured on camera saying a racial slur, blowback from the country music industry has been sweeping. He’s been exiled from country radio, major talent agency WME dropped him as a client, and his record deal — a joint partnership between Big Loud …
Read More »Surprise! Surprise! Republicans Care About Deficits Again!
On Monday, President Biden met with 10 supposedly moderate Republicans in the Oval Office to discuss their scaled-down $618 billion Covid-relief proposal. Even though the economy is still reeling from the pandemic and tens of millions of Americans are struggling to feed their families and put a roof over their …
Read More »Ja Rule, a Robinhood User Since 2014, Calls GameStop an 'Uprising'
Unfettered froth and chaos hit Wall Street this week. What started as a Reddit group of retail investors pitching money into “meme stocks” like GameStop quickly snowballed into a David-and-Goliath story involving multibillion-dollar hedge funds, government agencies, and even U.S. senators. On Thursday, investment app Robinhood abruptly delisted stocks with …
Read More »Lorde's Voyage to the End of the World
I’ve been obsessed with Antarctica since I was a kid. Growing up in New Zealand, the race to the South Pole is mythologized like the U.S.-Soviet race to the moon — two explorers, one British, one Norwegian, locked in a breathless, romantic fight for national honor. I always rooted for …
Read More »Why the Band's 'The Last Waltz' Is the Best Concert Movie of All Time
“This film should be played loud!” It’s a cliché now, a concert-movie disclaimer that’s become the equivalent of that hippie-dippy tagline from those Freedom Rock compilation ads (“Well, turn it up, maaaaan.”) But in the late Seventies, when it first flashed onscreen in all white font against a stark black …
Read More »Joan Baez on the 2020 Election and Painting Portraits for Social Change
Since retiring from touring last year, Joan Baez has shifted her creative focus to painting portraits. In the years before her farewell trek, she’d sit on her tour bus and paint before shows. “I wasn’t paying any attention to the concerts, really,” the folk icon says over Zoom from her …
Read More »How Donald Trump Plans to Overthrow American Democracy
Unless we awaken, the American people may well be sleepwalking into an electoral coup d’etat. If their own words are to be believed, Donald Trump and his operatives have been preparing for the election heist for some time. The rough model will be the 2000 Bush V. Gore election, when, …
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