American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed

Isaac Fitzgerald spent his childhood obsessed with Johnny Appleseed. It wasn’t just the Disney version; it was the way his father told the stories, turning a guy who planted trees into a family legend that represented the itch to just leave home and see what else was out there.

Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast

(Available July 14, 2026 from Knopf) For more than three decades, Paul Skalnik roamed the Gulf Coast lying about who he was. He passed himself off as a fighter pilot, a high-rolling oilman, a criminal defense attorney, an undercover agent, and a terminal cancer patient. In these guises he

My Year Using AI To Do (Almost) Everything by Joanna Stern

From the book publicity: You’ve heard the hype: AI will make us healthier, give every child a personalized tutor, run our businesses more efficiently, return hours of free time to our overworked brains, and make discoveries previously unimagined by humankind. The AI future is going to be unlike any

(One of) My Favorite Writer(s): Rick Bragg

Rick Bragg is a product of the red clay in Piedmont, Alabama, a place where the dirt dictates the terms of your existence. In the Calhoun County hollows, life is governed by a specific set of physical constraints: the weight of a pine log, the heat of a mill floor,

The Man Nobody Killed: A Haunting Book That Reclaims the Life of Michael Stewart

It’s rare to find a writer who can take a forty-year-old court transcript and turn it into something that feels like it’s happening right in front of you, but Elon Green has a real gift for that. With this book, he’s trying to reclaim the

The Mitigation Strategy: Clarence Darrow and the Invention of the Modern Defense (Part 2)

The legal reality for Leopold and Loeb was defined by the public mood of 1924 Chicago. State’s Attorney Robert Crowe possessed a complete confession, physical evidence linked to the defendants, and a motive rooted in cold intellectual vanity. Under Illinois law, the standard outcome for the premeditated murder of

The Arrogance of the Superman: Leopold, Loeb, and the Fatal Flaw of the "Perfect" Crime (Part 1)

In 1924, Chicago was defined by the physical distance between the South Side’s industrial centers and the private wealth of the Kenwood district. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb lived within a self-contained social ecosystem where high IQ and significant inherited wealth created a total detachment from the city’

The A&R Alchemist: Fifty Years of Soul, Grit, and the Philly Groove

Joe McEwen’s Tastykakes, Soul Songs and Shining Stars is the culmination of fifty years spent inside the machinery of American music. A Philadelphia native who rose to become a powerhouse A&R executive at Columbia, Sire, and Verve, McEwen has assembled a lifetime of liner notes, personal essays,

Happiness Included: Jan Brady and Beyond

Eve Plumb has spent five decades as a cultural Rorschach test for the American middle child, but the career that started at age six was never as simple as a sitcom trope. Before she was cast as the girl permanently trapped in Marcia’s shadow, she was a veteran of

Creativity and the Eccentric Mind

In The Danger to Be Sane, Rosa Montero dissects the porous border between the creative engine and mental fragility. Moving past the standard tropes of the tortured artist, Montero utilizes a blend of neuroscience, psychology, and literary forensics to examine how the brain operates when it isn't tethered

A Short, Strange Trip

The 1971 expedition to La Chorrera was supposed to be the Big Bang for the human mind. The McKenna brothers and their crew of psychonauts hit the Colombian mud with a theory, a stash of chemicals, and a plan to crack the skull of reality. They weren’t looking for

Burn It All Down and Start Over

A Radical Grammar Op-Ed The American political system is broken, and we’re long past the point of just trying to fix it from the edges. We’ve spent years watching the people in power turn the government into a private club. While regular folks struggle to pay rent,

In Praise of John Cusack

John Cusack has always looked like a man who just remembered he left the oven on, and frankly, that’s exactly why he’s one of the few actors who feels like a person rather than a piece of high gloss corporate hardware. While his contemporaries were busy sculpting their

Why We Still Need the Ritual of the Record Store

You're late; RSD was last Saturday.... The vinyl record is a relic that refuses to die, and once a year, we turn it into a religious experience. Record Store Day isn’t really about the music—not in the way the purists pretend. It’s about the ritual.

The Night the Lights Went On in Major League Baseball

Excerpt from Cramer's Choice: Memoir of a Baseball Card Collector Turned Manufacturer by Mike Cramer. Many a president has thrown out a ceremonial first pitch. On May 24, 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt threw a ceremonial first switch. Roosevelt's action at 8?30 p.m. at the

Surviving the Season: A Chill Way to Keep Your Sanity on the Sidelines

Review of the book Surviving Soccer: A Chill Parent's Guide to Carpools, Calendars, Coaches, Clubs, and Corner Kicks by Karen Scholl If you’re currently powering your way through the week on nothing but cold coffee and the sheer grit required to coordinate three different practice locations in

Author Karen Scholl

You talk about the "youth sports industrial complex" in the book. When did it finally click for you that "Elite" is just a marketing buzzword used to separate parents from their money rather than a real description of how an eight-year-old plays? As someone

Bering Sea King, Baseball Card Legend

Excerpt from Cramer's Choice: Memoir of a Baseball Card Collector Turned Manufacturer by Mike Cramer. Like a lot of boys born in 1950s America, my first love wasn't a girl: it was a baseball card. To me, a pack of Topps cards wasn’t just cardboard

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Looking Grift Whores in the Mouth

by Brent Sanders (who also wrote the headline) We should’ve known when they chose Cleveland.  No offense to the good folks there, but Memphis is where Rock and Roll was born, goddammit. Chicago? Sure. New Orleans? Yeah. Detroit? Maybe the best Rock and Roll city of ‘em all.  But

Wayne Perkins (1951-2026) / Sid Krofft (1929-2026)

Wayne Perkins: The Invisible Architect of Rock Beyond his studio credits, Wayne Perkins was a man of remarkable "almosts" and hidden contributions that shaped the sound of the 1970s. * The Muscle Shoals Prodigy: Perkins started his professional career at just 15 years old, sneaking into the legendary Muscle

Hope on the Clock: A Masterclass in High-Stakes Desperation

The lights in the room are bright enough to melt the botox from a billionaire’s forehead, which would be great television. It’s hard to hide a lie under a thousand-watt spotlight. This whole circus is just a masterclass in high stakes desperation, fueled by grit, cheap smoke,

Neon Nerves and Paper Scars — A look at the best books and films hitting the street through April 30

The next two weeks are a jagged bit of road—the space where the winter’s prestige baggage gets dropped off and the summer’s big-budget noise hasn't quite arrived. It is that rare pocket of the year where the industry stops playing for the trophies and

Cheap Eats and Charred Edges: The Common Man’s Guide to Not Starving

The kitchen used to be a place where I went to perform high-stakes chemical experiments that usually ended in a smoke alarm serenade and a very expensive pizza delivery. For years, the culinary world tried to convince me that if I wasn’t using a sous-vide machine or

Book Review

Great Stories, Grating Sounds: The Polished Pablum of the AOR Era

A Radical Grammar Book Review By Brent Sanders In the intro to Raised on the Radio, his sprawling oral history of the top AOR (album oriented rock) artists in the late-seventies/eighties, Paul Rees suggests the music they made was as culturally significant as punk or heavy metal or

Sports

A Season on Ice: Velocity, Vows, and the Fragile State of the Billion-Dollar Ballpark

The air around the ballparks this April carries that familiar, deceptive scent of hope, though if you’ve been paying attention to the casualty list, it smells more like a hospital ward. We are barely a few weeks into the 2026 season and the narrative is already less about who’