2010: Year in Review

This was an unsettling year, not just for me, of course, but for anyone concerned about the state of the arts and politics at the federal and civic level. Throughout 2010, my creative output was scattershot at best, waylaid by a seemingly never-ending series of personal and professional setbacks, many of which I wrote about [...]

Alternative Mathematics

“Popescu began to talk about a Romanian mathematician who lived from 1865 to 1936, a man who spent the last twenty years of his life devoted to the search for some ‘mysterious numbers’ hidden in a part of the vast landscape visible to man, though the numbers themselves were invisible and could live between rocks [...]

Jack London’s San Francisco Stories Now Available

In retrospect, what amazes and flatters me the most is that editor Matt Asprey’s labor of love — an almost complete collection of Jack London’s writings about San Francisco and the Bay Area environs — began with an essay that I wrote in 2003 for an Irish literary journal, Dead Drunk Dublin, titled Ghost Land, [...]

The Quiet Australian

I am proud to announce that Pop Matters is now running a fascinating literary-minded travelogue that I commissioned two months ago from my friend and colleague Down Under, Matt Asprey; the whole thing started out as a personal e-mail update from Matt that was compelling enough for me to ask Matt to shape it into an essay [...]

“The New Homeless” Updates

This afternoon, with Katie Euphrat, video journalist for the Las Vegas Sun, in tow we paid for the first week’s rent on our Extended Stay hotel in Las Vegas; essentially it’s a studio apartment with fridge, microwave, stove, basic cable, wireless internet for five bucks a week. It will do for now. It must do [...]