I Won’t Lie to Anyone I Wouldn’t Punch
Violence is, at its core, about controlling other people. It’s perhaps the rawest expression of control. Pacifists have done an enormous amount of work detailing all the ways that violence wrecks havoc...
View ArticleThe Only Time I’ve Seen the Dead
“You poor drowned rats,” our savior told us. “You have to let me take you home.” It was raining and it was winter and we were huddled in the dark under the awning of some convenience store somewhere on...
View ArticleIn the Shadow of Bluebeard’s Castle
“Those who make revolution half way only dig their own graves.” —Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, 1793 “No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is...
View ArticleWhy Did You Sink the Red October?
I think this story about Finland starts in Sweden. It was 2005, and I was twenty-two. At ten or eleven at night my bus crossed the bridge from Copenhagen to Malmo. The border police got on, singled me...
View ArticleWhat Are We Going to do About These Concentration Camps?
The first time I saw the Klan, I was ten years old. My brother and one of my sisters were in the car, and my dad was driving. We were stopped at a light and maybe five Klan members in full regalia were...
View ArticleAfraid of the Woman in the Mirror
When I was a kid, I was terrified of the woman in the mirror. Say her name seven times in a dark bathroom while spinning. She’ll appear. Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary. I never did it. I also, for a good...
View ArticleA Man Named Gray
There are, presumably, a lot of men named Gray. This is a story about one of them. His name doesn’t really have any particular metaphorical importance. He’s not subdued or subtle or medium or...
View ArticleHow to Live Like the World is Ending
The world might be ending. * * * There’s a commonly replicated piece of anarchist folk art that means a lot to me. I don’t know who drew it. It’s a drawing of a tree with a circle-A superimposed. The...
View ArticleIn Defense of Hope
Let’s talk about hope, for a moment, because a lot of days recently hope feels like the only thing that matters. It’s easy to let it slip away from us. I haven’t lived through events like this before,...
View ArticleArt and the Void
When I was younger people used to say “all the great artists are crazy” and that used to scare me a little bit, because I wanted to be a great artist but I didn’t want to lose touch with reality....
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