Welcome to Hell World

Every day I learn of a new horror of the American healthcare system

This piece was published in my book Lockdown in Hell World. It’s March and it’s sunny and quiet in my old neighborhood. Too quiet except for the birds. It feels like there’s a blizzard outside that you can’t see. Toward the end of February which is

The pain became a corrosive substance

Even people like this

It becomes hard to see the difference

A pernicious myth

They don't even have the decency to look people in the eye

A lack of coverage

A refusal to participate

Say Nothing and a history of hunger strikes

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As transgender as I have been my whole life

Patrick Kuklinski returns to write about the looming threat trans people face under the incoming Trump administration. They previously wrote about the “Don’t Say Climate Change” bill in Florida and one of the many recent assaults on the rights and dignity of trans people there. It smelled like deathYou

The best 40ish songs of 2024

Music is good

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She may as well be talking about the whole world

I really like today's essay and I think you will too! Corey Atad writes about the 1995 David Fincher film Se7en, the fraught decision to have children or not in times like these, and whether the world is still worth fighting for. "It’s said that Fincher

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It’s hard to see a way forward

An expression of the value in the striving

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Mutilated to set an example

She had died for something

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This was about more than fuel

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What they do to us

Fargo, The Curse, and the 2024 election

Punishment on top of punishment

All trying their best

Image captured October 2019

This story appears in my book A Creature Wanting Form. It was a fall day when the map car drove down our old street because the tree in the little park that you loved to post pictures of every year is there in its full striking orange on the way

Our final reward

In the waiting room

No one learning anything

It falls apart we all got work to do

1,341 years imprisoned for crimes they did not commit

Today Andrew Quemere of The Mass Dump – a great newsletter for people concerned about criminal justice and government transparency in Massachusetts – reports on a wrongfully convicted man who spent over 25 years in prison after a notoriously corrupt Boston cop helped put him there, and efforts to change the laws

Adding Insult to Wrongful Incarceration

Massachusetts limits compensation for victims of wrongful convictions to $1 million. Advocates want to change that—but some lawmakers are seeking a compromise that would put more people behind bars.

Night of the living Pixies

The Night the Zombies Came

These are our choices

What did we do to deserve this?

We deserve it

Shooting and crying

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The time it takes to buy it

Rax King on the film Anora

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You who have already been burned

Murder being so much quicker and easier than medicine

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Down here in the everyday

If you give up looking

It makes a sound like a snake when it falls

Every day for the past year I have spent my waking hours in an aghast sort of stupor. Thinking: no one is arriving to stop this? Surprised anew. Still no one? Not even after this? Or this? Or this? And then I resign myself to that grim fact and wake