Status Update 2024 was a year of both disappointments and surprises. Some of them good surprises, many of them bad. and there's a still a week to go, so who knows what will happen. Anyway, it's list season, and I have some lists of my favorite
The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins is one the most haunting books I've read in recent years. It's about the Cold War-era, US-backed mass killings of suspected communists around the world. Between 500,000 and 1.2 million people were killed in Indonesia alone between 1965
Missouri House Republicans voted to defund libraries, but defend 12 year olds getting married. That’s right, the GOP thinks it’s fine for parents to force their kids into what amounts to sexual slavery, but the chance of seeing a drawing of two naked men kissing is a line
This is an excerpt from my work-in-progress murder mystery novel Good People Do Bad Things. In this scene, the narrator Miles is a journalist interviewing Orion, the former front-man of the defunct 1990s industrial rock band Servitor. The conversation has turned to magic and the occult. -- “Are you familiar
I feel like Alexander Reed’s book on industrial music, Assimilate, explained my whole life to me. Reed writes that industrial music recognizes that “we’re born into a hierarchical network of control systems from which it’s our impossible duty to escape.” That intuition could explain my interest not
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We’re frequently exhorted to be thankful for what we have. “You have a roof over your head, a refrigerator full of food, and a gaggle of gadgets and streaming services, what more could you want?” Our guilt over our discontent soon becomes a new source of discontent, spawning a
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Dear Senator Wyden, We spoke several times when I was a reporter for Wired magazine about net neutrality and technology policy topics. But today I’m writing to you in my capacity as a citizen of the world. I have rarely reached out to your office outside my role as
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Some journalists have a strict writing process. I don’t. I just start writing wherever I can. Many journalists like to start with what’s called the “lede,” which is an intentional misspelling of “lead” and basically means “introduction.” Others like to start with the “nut graf,” which is the
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Note: I originally sent this to my newsletter February 2, 2019. I sent it again in May, 2020 following 36,000 news media employees, including me, losing their jobs amidst the pandemic. I sent it once again in May, 2023 with the following preamble: Newsroom layoffs have been in the
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A few years ago Re/Search founder V. Vale asked who the next William S. Burroughs or J.G. Ballard are. “Who are the people alive on the planet who are predicting the future as well as Burroughs and Ballard?” he pondered. What follows is an expansion of my response
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I read A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel DeLanda earlier this year. I’d worried that it might not hold up 20 years after its initial publication. The idea of applying systems theory to social science is no longer novel, and I’ve read DeLanda’s markets and
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I’ve been thinking about Ethan Zuckerman’s paper on the roots of the crisis in trust in journalism. Zuckerman connects the bottoming out of trust in the media with the loss in faith in institutions in general, including the government, labor unions, schools, and big business. It asks more