Radical Grammar

Radical Grammar Pre-Week 3 NFL Power Ranking

Keep in mind these rankings are based on the teams' performances on the field this season, and take no other facts under consideration. 1.  49ers 2. Seahawks 3. Raiders 4. Chiefs 5. Vikings 6. Bengals 7. Bills 8. Eagles 9. Jaguars 10. Bears 11. Patriots 12. Ravens 13. Jets

Between Chapters

Bestselling author Zibby Owens has always had a remarkable gift for sharing life’s most relatable, unvarnished moments with a warmth and openness that make readers feel seen. For years, she has championed other storytellers, but in her highly anticipated new memoir, Between Chapters: How I Started Over, Took Some

Thunder Road and the Bowery

Bob Dylan released Blood on the Tracks that January, and it stands, even now, as arguably one of the greatest breakup albums ever recorded, a set of songs written in the aftermath of the collapse of his marriage to Sara Dylan, delivered with a lyrical precision and emotional devastation that

Three Days Gone

Oh, the comforting, mathematical certainty of the thriller timeline. We know the rules completely by heart, don’t we? If a vulnerable child goes missing in the very first chapter of a book, the clock must immediately start to tick with the ferocious, buzzing intensity of a microwave defrosting a

The Fall, and the Shark

On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks rolled through the heavy steel gates of the presidential palace in Saigon, and the images that came out of that final, frantic day — American helicopters lifting desperately off the roof of the U.S. embassy, chaotic crowds trying frantically to scale the perimeter

Secrets

In the modern era of American governance, where the formal lines of the Constitution meet the messy reality of human ambition, no single figure has chronicled the internal mechanics of power with the steady, institutional authority of Bob Woodward. For more than half a century, while administrations have risen and

Court and Spark, and the Sound of a Country Catching Its Breath

Joni Mitchell released Court and Spark in January 1974, and it’s worth concentrating on the album specifically because of what it represented in her own arc as an artist. For years, the prevailing consensus around the California singer-songwriter movement was that authenticity was directly transactional with exposure. The

It's All About the Players

Let’s not screw around here. If you grew up loving baseball—truly, deeply, down-in-your-gut loving the game—your Sundays weren't defined by church bells or family brunches. They were defined by the weight of the newspaper hitting the porch and the frantic scramble to

The Year of Living Suspiciously

Three films. One calendar year. Chinatown, The Conversation, and The Godfather Part II, all released in 1974, and all three now sitting comfortably on essentially every serious list of the greatest American films ever made. I don't think any other single year in Hollywood history has produced three

Rock*

There is a mostly unexamined consensus that historical reality is a fixed object. We tend to view history as a series of heavy blocks that could only have dropped into place exactly the way they did. You have the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, which leads to the collapse

The Reckoning

By the summer of 1974, the vast, slow-moving story this series has spent five straight chapters meticulously describing—the leaked Pentagon papers, the bungled burglary at the Watergate complex, the hyper-focused metro reporters who simply wouldn't quit, the riveting Senate hearings broadcast into virtually every American

NFL Picks Week #2

Bills* over Lions Falcons* over Panthers Bears* over Vikiings Eagles over Titans* Steelers over Patriots* Packers over Jets* Bucs* over Browns Ravens* over Saints Texans* over Bengals Jaguars over Broncos* Chargers* over Raiders Cowboys* over Commanders Seahawks over Cardinals* 49ers* over Dolphins Chiefs* over Colts Rams* over Giants * - home team

The Many Private Lives of Missy Cooke

Oh, how the tech industry loves a whiz-kid origin story. We are endlessly fed the mythology of the brilliant, sleep-deprived college dropout who builds a multi-billion-dollar empire out of a suburban garage on pure, unadulterated hubris. But what happens when the empire is already built, the

The Dark Side and the Kid from Asbury Park

Pink Floyd released The Dark Side of the Moon that March, and the scale of its eventual commercial life is almost impossible to overstate — it would go on to spend over seven hundred weeks on the Billboard album chart, a run so long it stretched across nearly the entire remaining

Redwood

The Untold Story of the Cold War's Most Extraordinary Spy In the blistering heat of Tehran in 1981, Major Vladimir Kuzichkin was the finest Soviet intelligence officer on the ground, a man whose official duties involved running spies in the chaotic wake of the Islamic revolution while secretly

Fear, Faith, and the Old Neighborhood

The Exorcist opened in December of 1973 and did something almost no horror film before it had managed — it convinced serious critics, serious audiences, and even the Catholic Church itself to take it seriously as a genuine work of art rather than dismiss it as disreputable genre entertainment. William Friedkin,

Radical Grammar Power Rankings, week #2

O.k., here are Tim’s NFL power rankings after one week.  Keep in mind these rankings are based on their play on the field at this point in the season, they do not reflect any other factor. Also, my type of rankings usually begin to settle into a closer

American Caesar

Folks, gather around. Let’s talk about a little thing I like to call the "American Experiment." You remember experiments, right? High school chemistry? You put a bunch of volatile chemicals in a flask, you heat it up, and half the time it blows a hole in the

The Year America Watched Itself on TV

Nothing can convince you for how strange it was to live through the spring and summer of 1973, when the Senate Watergate Committee hearings, chaired by the courtly, Bible-quoting North Carolina Democrat Sam Ervin, were broadcast live on national television and an enormous share of the American public stopped

ER: The Oral History

The movies have always been terrified of the truth of a hospital. For decades, Hollywood treated the emergency room as a sterile stage for melodrama, a place where doctors with perfectly parted hair delivered grave diagnoses in hushed, theatrical tones, and patients died gracefully with their makeup intact. It was

Ziggy Played Guitar

1972 was about building up the armor to tell the truth. If 1971 was the year of the diary entry baring her—Joni Mitchell baring her soul, Marvin Gaye weeping for America—then 1972 was the year music realized a mask could reveal more than a bare face ever could.

The Bookshop Woman

My Year Transforming Lives–One Book at a Time In the neon-washed, consumerist labyrinth of Tokyo, there exists a peculiar sanctuary called the Village Vanguard—an iconically eccentric bookstore where Nanako Hanada had long anchored her identity. She was a woman who lived by the printed word, curator of

The Godfather and the Truth About Power

March, 1972. The Godfather hits the theaters. Three months later, a bunch of low-rent burglars get caught sticking their noses into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate. Now, the simpletons and the mainstream media like to look at that and say, "Oh, wow, look at the

A Rainy Night in Georgia

The December 2000 murder of Derwin Brown in DeKalb County, Georgia, represents one of the most chilling intersections of municipal corruption and political violence in modern American history. Brown, a veteran law enforcement officer who had just been elected sheriff, was gunned down in his own driveway, struck by a

The Morning After / Juwan Tee'z Nutz

Last night was pretty good. A local watering hole and a few fellow members of the 2026 4692 Fantasy League Draft. The rest online and in contact via chat. Wings, burgers, and greasy cellphone screens. Life was good fourteen hours ago. Now I wake up and examine my roster. Fuck.