David Ulin

YouTube video by Bruce Springsteen Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Audio)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWKS...

Vigil

“Comfort, for all else is futility.”

4columns.org/ulin-david-l...

Disconcerting? That’s my alma mater, speaking the hard truths.

Among my biggest peeves: the pressure to identify a reference in a piece as “writer” or “critic” or some other signifier rather than simply to identify them by name.

LAPD wants nearly $100M to police the Olympics. Who's going to pay for it? City Hall is already in dispute over the department's current budget. Now, LAPD wants new vehicles and equipment for 2028.

Another week, another $100 million that a broke city will magically conjure up for a megaevent that's not supposed to cost taxpayers a dime

No cover yet, but here's the title page. Coming September 22. Very excited about this one.

LA's council passed this motion which will request that LA28 present how, exactly, the organizing committee is working with federal law enforcement including "guardrails the City can enact to ensure that the City's most vulnerable communities are protected."

Unfortunately, it's just that, a request

Actually.

Patriot.

YouTube video by Wolfgang's Grateful Dead Grateful Dead - Cassidy - 10/31/1980 - Radio City Music Hall

Fare thee well now
Let your life proceed by its own design
Nothing to tell now
Let the words be yours, I'm done with mine

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZOi...

A 35 year old letter to the editor, written by a very ballsy 15 year old, about the Rodney King verdict.

Remembering today that having your heart broken is a necessary step on the path to becoming fully human. Whichever heartbreak is your first, it’s probably critical that a state break your heart so that you can develop a political imagination. If this is your first, I’m sorry and also welcome.

Lonesome and a long way from home.

Renee Nicole Good

If you have time to doom scroll, you have time to read books!

Special shoutout to David L. Ulin, Erin Aubry Kaplan, Susan Straight and Susan Brenneman for contributing.

How is this even possible?

YouTube video by beat68 In Spite of All The Danger - The Quarrymen

Happy New Year, everybody.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuuO...

"A writer who knows what he's doing doesn't know very much." ~ Nelson Algren

Memory Book In This Year, John Darnielle (de)mystifies the song.

“Unreleased, unrecorded, performed once or twice a cappella, no instruments at all in its history—the Platonic ideal of a song, for me, so tenuous that it can barely be said to exist; momentary; self-contained.”

www.altaonline.com/books/nonfic...

Her best novel. One of her finest books. The discomfort, the blurriness, the indirection … all the stuff you reference. Just a brilliant piece of work.

Great. But not great enough.

Every November.

Utter brilliance.

Time and Tide In The Pelican Child, Joy Williams offers 12 takes on the weirdness of the world.

"One cannot make up time. One can make up a story or a face or a bed. Ugh. I find it all repellent."

Heads up: You should read David Ulin’s 2 cents’ worth on the penny

And the down side is?

The Penny Is Dead. Its Magic Isn’t. As the coin fades out, David L. Ulin reflects on its invaluable magic.

Belief, however, is an inside job. This, too, is a lesson I have learned. What really happened that July 4? Then and now, I believe a penny saved my life.

It’s fantastic. He reads a mashup of the final pages of On the Road as Steve Allen chords and riffs underneath.

I prefer “accessible.”

Didn’t he create the time line for that edition? “They endured.”