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How to Report the Truth in the Age of Trump
Sarah Glidden’s Rolling Blackouts couldn’t be more timely: a defense of journalism in the form of an extended work of graphic nonfiction, or, in other words, a book that cannot help but blur the lines....
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How to Be a Patriot in America
I. On the morning of the inauguration, I drove my wife and daughter to the airport for a flight to Philadelphia, first leg of their journey to the Women’s March. Then, I went home and got back into...
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In Grief, Joan Didion’s Move From Fiction to Memoir
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that Joan Didion made a mistake. Not in publishing South and West: From a Notebook—although more on that in a little bit—but in the pair of books that precede it: The...
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Fire, Fury, and America’s Failure to Learn From the Past
If you want to know why reading matters, here, perhaps, is a reminder of a kind. Last Wednesday morning, 24 hours after the Donald Trump twice invoked the image of fire and fury in regard to North...
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David Ulin on the Broken Politics of Rage
Let’s pretend, for the sake of conversation, that I’m more rational than I am. Let’s pretend that, during the Women’s March in Los Angeles two months ago, I didn’t get into it with a small group of...
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The Beats’ Holy Grail: The Letter That Inspired On the Road
Read Neal Cassady’s a never-before-published excerpt from the infamous “Joan Anderson Letter” at Alta Magazine. The audience at the Beat Museum in San Francisco’s North Beach was small, and it fit a...
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On the Excavation of My Desk
There is a photograph, taken in 2017, of my desk as it looked until recently: monitor, laptop, stacks of papers, various derelict technologies, magazines, books. It resembles a forest—or better yet a...
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On the Countercultural Influence of Peanuts
Here’s where it begins for me: a four-panel strip, Lucy and Linus, simplest narrative in the universe. As the sequence starts, we see Lucy skipping rope and, like an older sister, giving Linus a hard...
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Did This Iconic 1962 Short Film Show Us Our Dark Future?
This past summer, I stumbled across a link on social media to Chris Marker’s 1962 science fiction film La Jetée. For those who don’t know it, Marker’s miniature masterpiece—its running time is 28...
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We’re All Just Extras Here: Wandering the Back Streets of Old Hollywood
I had forgotten about the churches. Or maybe I had only imagined that I ever knew. Hollywood, city of churches. Wasn’t there a line about this somewhere? An internet search didn’t show me much, but...
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