Jason Whited

My god, how historians will excoriate this period.

It's colon cancer in a box! And now on sale!

DEAR AUTHORS: I just want to reiterate, a female character is NOT strong or independent just because she's angry and/or petulant all the time.

Sometimes I think I could live off grid then I watch a survivalist on YouTube and realize I’m made for hot showers and memory foam everything.

Good god. What kind of "stoners" is this guy hanging out with?

Turns out there's a proper verb for the Irish goodbye.

It's more than interesting. It's a masterwork. Look it up.

Rereading Mira Corpora by the inimitable Jeff Jackson. First-person POV with a vengeance. No current author in America crafts first-person POV better.

Correction, it's all the time. This is the proper response to fascism all the time.

I'd bet my retirement savings that Johnson has bodies in his crawl space.

Considering I catch a lot of AI use by students accidentally citing they use AI or leaving jarring tell-tale signs in the text, I think it is suicidal that universities are teaching any sort of "proper use".

I hate to use the old example but I do not want a doctor who was too lazy to read and edit.

Same, for many things.
I also sometimes still use a paper list if I'm walking into a store (if I have a short list; if I have a longer list, I'll put it on Alexa or in a notes app).

Great observation.
I no longer use paper/notebook planners either.
I wonder what other older daily mechanisms have been replaced in our digital world?
Newspapers, for one, I guess. I haven't bought a physical newspaper in ten years.
What else? This is a great story idea, Shonna.

Why did you attend the war criminal Dick Cheney's funeral?

Why did you attend that war criminal Dick Cheney's funeral today?

I feel as if we're still ratcheting up that first steep hill of a roller coaster, and we're about to plunge into god knows what. Hold on.

To paraphrase and to dare update the inimitable Anne Carson, I offer the following:
Why are we full of rage?
Because we are full of grief.
Why are we full of grief?
Because we are full of love and longing for what might have been.

YouTube video by RoxyMusicVEVO Roxy Music - More Than This

If we're out and I've had more than three drinks and this song comes on?
Take me home right now.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOnd...

I miss the way I looked at the world before I knew too much about it.

“If you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts, they will turn on you. Or drag you down with their immense sadness at being abandoned.”
– Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave

A handmade sign advertising a garage sale is misspelled as groj sale.

That's correct, Dr. Cole, which is why a number of us punched out years ago.
I can't tell you how exhausting it was to fight continuously with small-minded bosses, for years, who had little interest in covering the news.

Such a brutish, violent, and vulgar culture.
We won't make it unless we evolve.

This is the Republican Horst Wessel moment and it will be just as bad.

The death of alt-weeklies didn’t just kill a publishing model; it gutted the last public square where curiosity had the right of way. The corporate dailies sanitized the world until it smelled like hotel disinfectant, and the internet finished the job by selling off the bones to Craigslist and Google. What we lost wasn’t just longform stories about drag queens, roller rinks, and shady bail bondsmen — we lost the habit of lingering, of sitting with the mess of reality until it revealed something worth knowing. Now, every damn thing is a “take.” Condensed. Opinionized. Algorithm-flattened until all that’s left is rage bait and a comment section war over scraps. Fascism thrives in that emptiness because it offers certainty where there should be questions, discipline where there should be curiosity. Alt-weeklies were graffiti against the blank wall of capital’s sterilized “redevelopment” projects. They taught people to ask: Who benefits? Who gets erased? And what’s hiding in plain sight? That isn’t nostalgia, it’s strategy. If you want to fight authoritarianism, you need more than slogans. You need the peculiar, meandering, hyper-specific stories about the oddball texture of life - the very stuff the right wants to scrub out with power-wash morality. The long form of lingering wasn’t a luxury. It was democracy in print.

A commenter on my essay on the age of alt-weeklies left this comment from "This Woman Votes," which states my premise so much more powerfully than I could--in the fight against fascism, the urgency of stories that linger--that I added it to the post. slowcivilwar.substack.com/p/the-longfo...

They've done this for many years, across a range of domains. It deflects blame from those who would wield power to rob others of theirs. Classic NYT.