One of the most striking elements of After the Lights Go Out is its intertwined corporeal and psychic depth. Vercher separates muscle fibers and draws blood, enticing the reader to the violence of X’s world without celebrating or vilifying it.
Last week I had the pleasure of being a guest on the Southpaw podcast discussing my book, muay Thai training, mental illness, and my political trajectory. Sam is a phenomenal interviewer who opened up space for deeper reflection on my experience and managed to corral me when my flight of thought wandered a little too […]
James Tracey interviews Madelyn Mae (Heather Squire) for the Howard Zinn Book Fair’s Books to the Barricades podcast. Get Hard Bones as an e-book, printable PDF, or spoken word on Youtube.
For what the ancients called “the sins of the fathers” we today call ‘intergenerational trauma’. For what the ancients called “sin” we today call ‘epigenetics’. History matters because it’s not about the past, it’s about us. — Pongadisorn Jamerbsin Trauma is real. Ask someone with a PTSD diagnosis what it feels like when they are […]
Meritocracy is one of the great fictions of late capitalism in the US, a shiny chrome paint job obscuring the gutted interior and rusted out chassis of society. Our collective allegiance to the myth that wealth and power are doled out on the basis of individual merit, rather than inheritance, nepotism, and structural advantages, keeps […]
I am writing this now, one day after I decided to go full no-contact with my family of origin, because I am still so close to the feeling of “before”, which I know will fade with time. Two days ago I anonymously published a short essay detailing some of the abuse I endured throughout my […]
As I write this conclusion in the little bedroom of the Covid-safe friend pod, Trump and his followers are waging yet another war on reality, denying the legitimacy of Biden’s election victory. More than 100,000 cases of Covid-19 are reported every day in every part of the US. The 24 hour cable news cycle is […]
I originally set out to write a short essay about unemployment and positive psychology. It’s not as if I haven’t written about these things before (like on the eve of Occupy Wall Street), but my return to an unemployed state (“job hunter”) this summer very nearly made me forget something important: the lack of living […]
Everything we do on a personal scaleTaking ‘we’ to mean everyone who ever existedIs the basis for everything wrong in this worldAnd of course everything are right as well. -Citizen Fish, “Small Scale Wars” This last six weeks has been an era, crammed into a collection of moments and meetings, distilled into a concentrate of […]
(from The Joke by Milan Kundera, quoted in Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich) I am not on the cutting edge of anything, which is why two important books that came out in the last year are suddenly on my mind now after a recent afternoon at The Strand: The Adventures of Unemployed Man by Erich Origen & Gan Golan and Bright-sided: […]