Welcome to Hell World

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

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Soil to bury our dead

I was on the treadmill when all of the TVs at Planet Fitness switched to coverage of Iran's strike on Israel. I'd never seen them do that kind of thing before. Even the ones that usually show commercials for Planet Fitness while you're at

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If Gaza is the new Vietnam then this is just the start

Similarities exist between 2024 and 1968, but our current moment is more akin to Vietnam pre-1965 — before the US really got involved.

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The scope of the destruction

Lurching somehow even further right

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Freed from the shackles of sense or expectation

Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis

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Presumably they find time to pray

No end in sight

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The voices of children can be heard from under the rubble

The eventual truth  We were going to have to put Jodie Foster down. Out of her misery they said. Send her up to the very same farm my parents conjured for me the last time this scenario played out when I was a child.   She hadn’t been hungry much

Laws that turn bodies into prisons

Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America.

Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s Quest to Defend Pop Punk

People are discovering Dale Earnhardt Jr. is a big pop punk and emo head again this week after he tweeted out his playlist so I thought it would be fun to go back and read this interview I did with him for Noisey back in 2018. https://t.co/znGNao6gQt

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Your death will serve as its own justification

I have six new shorts and poems up at Flaming Hydra this week. Unforeseen DifficultiesFiction by Luke O’Neil The guilt He was in the garage jigsaw-puzzling the architecture of the bones. After some doing he looked upon his works and thought well that’s spooky. Nothing crazy but still.

Half the Story

Massachusetts passed historic police certification reform. But even with the POST Commission, the public can’t see which cops have been part of the “officer shuffle.”

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We live in danger times

Down below we have a lovely career-spanning essay on the music of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings and a review of their latest album Woodland. You'll need to be a paid subscriber to read it. You can also go directly to it here. Thank you for supporting this

She made me a country music fan

The music of Gillian Welch

When the chariot arrives you'd best enjoy the ride

The music of TV on the Radio

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Nothing more than a racist land grab

"A guy you used to hang out with and liked but weren't close to and haven't talked to in years and then is dead out of nowhere on Facebook" is one of those things I haven't gotten used to despite it happening

They might do something about it.

The breathless madness of fear

We believe in one another

The best of Oasis