Paranoia as an Art Form

Watch enough films from 1971 in a row and a pattern emerges that no single director planned but that the entire industry seemed to arrive at simultaneously, almost as if the culture's growing suspicion of its own institutions had leaked directly into the water supply every studio in

The 10:12

Are you ready for your next book club screaming match? Because it has arrived on the 10:12 from Manchester. In a publishing landscape currently choked with generic psychological thrillers featuring unreliable women drinking too much wine in suburban kitchens, comes a genuinely electrifying novel that trades domestic paranoia for

Plot Twist

Life, Craft, and the Messy First Draft: A Memoir on Writing Let’s skip the academic fluff and get right to the point. If you spend any time browsing writing blogs, you know the internet is absolutely flooded with literary theory. It is taught by people who have never actually

Radical Grammar NFL Picks Week 1

These picks are straight-up. I'm not smart enough to create spreads, nor do I want to. Seahawks over Patriots Rams over 49ers Bears over Panthers Bucs over Bengals Lions over Saints Texans over Bills Ravens over Colts Jaguars over Browns Steelers over Falcons Titans over Jets Chargers

The Year Rock Music Grew Up and Never Looked Back

Look, I know I made an aggressive, line-in-the-sand case for 1970 being the single greatest year in the history of recorded music. I stand by every single word of it. But I need to be brutally honest with you about something. It’s a bit uncomfortable for

The Year the Curtain Parted

If 1970 was the year the sixties finally, officially expired, 1971 is the year America discovered it had been lied to systematically, and started acting like it mattered. On June 13, 1971, the New York Times began publishing what would come to be known as the Pentagon Papers, a classified

The Other Side of the Dream

There are drummers who keep time, and then there are drummers who create an engine room so fierce, so relentless, and so utterly full of life that the entire band has no choice but to become legendary just to keep up. Clem Burke was the latter. For over fifty years,

Week #1 NFL Rankings

Here are my totally imperfect NFL team rankings as we enter week one of her 2026 season. Who am I? Why do my rankings matter? Well, they don't, except to me. But I think it might be fun to check in here every week and see how my

First Act

I spend a decent chunk of time every day looking for books I think people might like if they could only know they exist. It works like this: I see a book that I think readers might like. I research a little deeper than the brief promos found on the

The Death of Innocence

There is a version of this story—the story of 1970, the moment the sixties finally, officially gasped their last—that gets told as pure tragedy, a slow-motion funeral procession with no redemption at the end of it. I’ve resisted that version throughout this entire account, and I

Punk in 50 Pieces

Punk Rock, Post-Punk, New Wave, and the Five Years That Changed Pop Music Forever There is something fundamentally irrational about commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of a cultural phenomenon whose entire ideological premise was that nothing, under any circumstances, should ever survive long enough to have an anniversary. When the

The Best Music Ever Made

I want to make an argument here that I know invites eyerolls from people who weren't there and have decided, somewhere along the way, that nostalgia is the only possible explanation for anyone claiming a specific era of music was the best one. So let me make the

The Strip Club Heiress

The Jet Strip, My Father’s Conviction, and the Murder of Mac McKenna The California sun bakes the asphalt, but inside the club, it’s a perpetual twilight of neon and cheap perfume. When nine-year-old Laurel Woods first stepped into her father’s establishment, she didn't

The Movies Nobody Expected

Part 4 Hollywood in 1970 was a studio system having a nervous breakdown in slow motion, and that breakdown, as it turned out, was the best thing that could have happened to American cinema. Here's the context you need, because it explains everything that follows. By the end

Receipts from the Bookshop

Escape to the breeze-swept English coastline with Receipts from the Bookshop, a tender, hilarious, and deeply affectionate love letter to independent bookshops and the eccentric, tight-knit communities that bring them to life. Set against the salty air and charming Victorian streets of Lytham St Annes, this irresistible memoir

The Hippie Infrastructure

There is a fifty-year-old belief about hippies that goes something like this: a bunch of stoned kids in tie-dye sat in muddy fields, thought they were changing the world, and then grew up to become investment bankers. This punchline has calcified into received wisdom across sitcoms, op-

The Playbook

They built the machine to keep everyone in line. A hard salary cap. Revenue sharing designed to prop up the dead weight. Rule changes hammered out specifically to neuter dominance and drag every franchise down into the Sunday-afternoon mud. The National Football League doesn't just want parity

The 1970s - part two

The Year the Floor Dropped Out Nineteen-seventy didn't start with a bang so much as it started with a trapdoor dropping out from under the floorboards. April 30th. Richard Nixon gets on the tv to tell the country he's shoving the war right across the

American Scoundrel

Roy Cohn was never elected to anything, and that was always the point. He did not need a title, a constituency, or a committee chairmanship when he had a telephone, a dry martini, and an absolute indifference to the rules that governed everybody else. For four decades, from the dark

The 1970s - part one

Chapter One: The Hangover Every decade thinks it invented the wheel. The fifties looked at televisions and Gibson guitars and acted like they had been hauled down from a mountaintop, the eighties acted like greed was a patented product, and everybody since has looked backward with that specific, thick-headed

Under Story

Listen to me, you miserable, oxygen-thieving apes. Crawling out from beneath your damp stones to stare blankly at glowing rectangles while your world quietly rots around your ankles. You think you’re safe in your climate-controlled cages, don’t you? You think the edges of the map are

NFL 2026 Preview

Today, the Los Angeles Rams & the Seattle Seahawks Just when you thought Les Snead and Sean McVay had exhausted their supply of Hollywood-budget plot twists, they pull off the ultimate cliffhanger. When news broke that Aaron Donald was officially ending his retirement to sign a one-year deal,

I Shoot Rock Stars

The Wild Adventures of a Music Video Director It is difficult to overstate how thoroughly the visual language of the 1980s music video hijacked our collective imagination, mostly because we were too busy staring at the screen to realize we were watching the birth of modern identity. Before MTV started

I Will Follow You Anywhere

The True Story of the 9/11 Responders Who Took On Congress On a Tuesday morning in September, a steel beam weighing four tons dropped out of the sky and pinned John Feal’s foot to the ash of Lower Manhattan. That was the easy part. The real catastrophe began

2026 NFL Preview

Today, the Houston Texans and the Buffalo Bills The Houston Texans in 2026 are essentially a high-end stereo system hooked up to blown-out speakers. Everyone keeps staring at C.J. Stroud and talking about him like he’s the second coming of architectural modernism, and he might be.