Two Trace Stories Revisited for Momentary Relevance

The last few days I have been working on an essay for the Re:Print department of Pop Matters, tentatively titled Ernest Hemingway’s Mystic Communion; the topic, inspired by Terry Mort’s non-fiction work, The Hemingway Patrols, concerned with the celebrated author’s quixotic pursuit of German U-boats off the coastal waters of Cuba during World War II, [...]

Storm Over the Land

No, that header is not a reference to current events but the title of Carl Sandburg’s masterwork, Storm Over the Land, a reworking of his 1940 Pulitzer Prize-winning opus, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. In the first of a series of articles marking my return to Pop Matters after a long absence, I share some [...]

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 [...]

“The game is afoot, Watson …”

I’m very pleased that the contentious New Homeless series for the Las Vegas Sun is finally complete and out of the way – at least the substantive bulk of it; there has been talk of a fourth and final segment when we are ready to pull up stakes and leave Las Vegas for Los Angeles but I [...]

The New Fascism

“This is the sign we were waiting for—the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America’s conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country’s legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America’s streets, sanctioning the physical [...]