I’m not much for magic, although I love “believing” the magician, probably out of sympathy for the performer. I don’t try to figure out his or her tricks, and I don’t feel cheated. I tried to watch Guillermo Del Toro’s adaption of Nightmare Alley, an epic novel about the rise and fall from grace of… Read More

I smelled the rubbery stink of an overheated engine. Read More

Antofagasta is a northern port city in Chile. Read More

The Brown family, a farming family with roots in the American Revolution, invited my family to watch the McCarthy hearings on television. We didn’t have a TV and, like most of the established families in our little Massachusetts town, the Browns wanted us to know they didn’t like Joe McCarthy and his witch hunt one… Read More

I write to change the world. Why do I want to change the world? Because it needs it. Read More

Please note that the word "justice" never appears in this broadside. Read More

He never talked to me about girls or women or sex or marriage... Read More

It was a cool gig, for sure. Read More

A woman holds a child in a paint-scabbed bunker beneath a burning steel mill. She is surrounded by children made oblivious by trauma. I try to imagine the shock waves from exploding bunker buster bombs that must travel through the reinforced concrete and steel floors and collapsed factory roof above her head. I can’t imagine… Read More

I’m connected to you. Intimately. I don’t just stick my viral tongue down your throat and dive into the gooey mucus of your lungs. I don’t just rabble rouse such a riot among your antibodies that they rise up and blindly attack their host, your body. Your own rogue antibodies kill you. Go figure.  I… Read More