You Didn’t Hear This from Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip (Kelsey McKinney, Grand Central, 2025)

    Spend enough time in the library stacks and you’ll begin to absorb the organizing principles of the Dewey Decimal System. Reading a history book means you’ll be in the 900s. You like books about musicians or movies or video games? Check the 700s. Maybe you’re enough of a savant that you don’t need the catalog at all and can use the system without a reference. I’m not quite there yet, but I was also kind of surprised to see that Kelsey McKinney’s text bore the number 296.3 in my local library. The 200s? What the hell kind of book is in that section? A good one, certainly, even though this is a section I’ve apparently not read from much.

    All I know about 200s is from what I read in Judith Flanders’ A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order. In a footnote, she gives a more-than-adequate criticism of Dewey as a person and as the creator of a system. “While all systems are inevitably biased, making more space for some elements and overlooking others, Dewey’s was particularly so, and has proved troublesome in the modern world. Being based on Baconian hierarchies, it is predisposed to an Anglo-centric worldview. More, it is almost laughably Christian-centric: religion, allocated the 200s in Dewey’s system, sees 200-289 devoted to Christianity, while all of Islam is contained in just 297. Women, meanwhile, are patronizingly categorized alongside etiquette. (Dewey himself had chronic woman trouble, or, rather, women had chronic trouble with Dewey: he was forced to resign from the American Library Association after no fewer than four women complained that he had assaulted them in a single ten-day period in 1905. He was, in addition, a notable anti-Semite and racist, even for those notably anti-Semitic and racist times, also being requested to stand down from his position as librarian for New York State owing to his endorsement of clubs that operated on Christian-whites-only policies.)” (p. 217). That is one hell of a footnote! It is prompting me to think about checking out a number of books and to leave open many browser tabs for months.

    What’s relevant about Flanders’ footnote with regard to McKinney’s book is that my local-ish library (and maybe yours, too) has classified it in the 200s, which means it is considered a text about Religion. According to the Dewey Decimal System, 296 is reserved for texts on Judaism. More specifically, the number 296.3 is a subsection titled “Theology, ethics, views of social issues.” What the fuck? Like, what the actual fuck? Does this library branch think that only practitioners of Judaism have an ability to or an interest in gossip? Or that gossiping is the sole purview of members of the Jewish faith? Flanders’ commentary makes it plain that Dewey was antisemitic. Guess that goes for a few librarians using his system in 2025, too.

    For what it’s worth, every other branch in the library consortium where I got this book has it classified as 302.24, which is Social Sciences > Social Interaction > Communication. That is a lot more reasonable.

    All that misclassification aside, this book is excellent. I was late to listen to Normal Gossip, but I have grown to love it. It has survived without McKinney, which proves that it is strong as a concept. People like knowing “anonymized morsels of gossip” about people they’ll never meet. This book is a worthy companion to the podcast in that it reviews some of the literature on the topic of gossip and features relevant autobiographical details from McKinney that help to explain her history with gossip. There are also the tiniest little amuse-bouches of gossip at the beginning of each section just to make the whole book that much more fun. I say this all with the caveat that I do not know McKinney. As she explains in a section on parasocial relationships, “Researchers have found that listening with headphones is a superconductor for creating a feeling of emotional connection, because it sounds like the person’s voice is inside your head” (p. 114). I think the truth of that comment rings even more loudly when the podcast is about gossip. It’s like you’re listening to two of your friends or coworkers tell you about something that you all share. I’m sure in a few decades I will misremember something like the Bunco cheating story as an event that happened to someone in my life, or their friend, all because I listened to it on the way to and from work one week.

    A benefit of listening to Normal Gossip so much is that it has helped me process social interactions better. Typically during an episode, McKinney pauses and asks the guest “So, whose side are you on?” at a pivotal point. This was a good check for me because it let me see whether I was “getting it” in terms of the social rules or norms that were being violated or contested. I’m self-aware enough to know that social interactions are not my strong suit (and now I have a psych eval to prove it, lol), so it was helpful to have a chance to practice thinking about other people’s perspectives while listening along to a gossip story each week. McKinney comes back to this topic in the book, writing, “We are teaching our peer group how we want to behave and how we want them to behave” when we are dealing with gossip (p. 51). The idea is that the stories we choose to tell about other people are revelatory of what we find to be important or valuable. If something goes unremarked upon, it’s not even worth noticing, let alone talking about. You can learn a lot just by hearing what other people find distasteful or rude or funny. Gossip is key part of participating in a society because it teaches you about norms and behaviors that might otherwise go unstated. It’s kind of like an ad-hoc instruction manual for how to live.

    In my 20s, I engaged in plenty of behaviors that seemed like good enough ideas at the time. One of them is that I thought it was an interesting topic of conversation to declare I wasn’t going to read fiction ever again because—are you ready?—it’s fake. That was my argument. I held forth on it at parties and other gatherings, not realizing how alienating I was being at the time. I would ask people to recommend me a novel to read because I was only going to read five more of them. I was engaging in “debate me, bro” conversational patterns without even realizing it. I sure hope some of my friends talked about me behind my back about this phase because I know it must have been excruciating. I was an English major, for crying out loud.

    At the time, I was too emotionally stunted to realize that the emotions I was feeling in response to fiction were proof of my humanity. McKinney knows this is a line of criticism that gossip-haters will maintain; they’ll focus on the capital-T Truth of the matter and want to know every fact about a situation before passing judgment. The world isn’t so clean. As she says about gossip and its relation to fiction, “Many people balk when forced to acknowledge that fiction can make them feel something even if it is not real” (p. 96). That’s just it. I was unwilling to accept that a “fake” story could make me feel real emotions. I thought I was weak or easily manipulated instead of recognizing that I was a human and that those emotions were normal. If you’d asked me at the time, I’m sure I would have thought gossip was beneath me and a waste of time. I would have probably hit you with the Eleanor Roosevelt quote that McKinney cites early on about how “small minds discuss people” (p. 4) and felt confident that I had put you in your place. I’m wiser now that I recognize the power (and fun!) involved in gossip, and I have McKinney and everyone else involved in Normal Gossip to thank for that.

    In each episode of the show, McKinney (and now Rachelle Hampton) asks about the guest’s relationship to gossip. The range of responses across the episodes reveals the utility of gossip beyond mere self improvement. It’s not idle chatter that helps us pass time. It can serve a vital role about keeping in check those who have broken social conventions or engaged in maladaptive behaviors. These whisper networks benefit from anonymity, because to put a face and a name and an address with certain gossip could be dangerous for the one sharing it. Dominant perspectives on sex, money, and power may not withstand anonymous gossip. “When we talk about sex and money, what we are actually talking about is power and who wields it. Anonymity gives people without power an opportunity to grab a little bit as their own” (p. 83). The cloak of anonymity is not fabricated of cowardice. There are reasons to use care when sharing information about powerful people. No one willingly gives up power, but the embarrassment or shame that gossip engenders might help make it hard for the powerful to save face if a critical mass of people keep spreading it publicly. Do your part: keep talking about weird dudes.

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Neo Cab (Chance Agency / Fellow Traveler, 2019)

    Maybe you’re like me in that you don’t enjoy the feeling of being marketed to. You don’t like feeling that you have been targeted by an ad campaign or that your behavior is susceptible to suggestion so easily. Or maybe that’s just my hang-up.

    You want to feel that you are an individual with discernment and refined tastes. Your interests cannot be cataloged into a spreadsheet and compared with existing data to create a profile of your behavior. You are unpredictable and that makes you interesting, and human. You have a personality. You are not a number, you are a free person!

    I hear you. Let me also tell you that I had a marketing situation that worked on me a few weeks back. See, I’d played both Citizen Sleeper games this year and last year, so I got myself on the publisher’s mailing list. Among the updates and announcements, I’d sometimes see info on other games they’d published. One of them was Neo Cab, which was coming to iOS for free. The promo blurb intrigued me enough that I decided to spend actual money on it for my Switch, not realizing it wasn’t a new game at all.

    A few breezy hours of gameplay later, I was glad I made the purchase. Neo Cab is a visual novel where you play the role of the only human cab driver in Los Ojos, a fictional city that sure seems like it’s in California. As Lina, you drive only at night, which adds to the isolating atmosphere. (The alternately propulsive and chill soundtrack by OBFUSC was good enough that I bought it on Bandcamp shortly after finishing the game; it also helps set the mood of driving a cab through a big, empty city at night.) The only person she knows in the city is her old friend, Savy, who has agreed to let you move in with her. Gameplay occurs through conversations with your passengers, most of whom are surprised to learn that you are a human being. Each night, you are responsible for taking a few passengers around the city and keeping them occupied while in the car. Just like a gig worker in real life, you have to worry about your car’s fuel level, your passengers’ ratings of your driving, and your emotions’ impact on your ability to make conversation. Each of these elements plays a role in the type of passenger you can pick up and how far you can go to get them. You also need to find a spot to stay each night to rest and recharge. As the nights go on, you realize that the friend you had planned to move in with is a bit cagey. Even after she’s in your cab for a quick ride, you still feel that she’s hiding something and that she may even be in serious trouble.

    In a simpler world, you could just connect with her again and rest at her place for the night before figuring out how to make the next steps in your move to the big city. That wouldn’t be much of a game, though, so the factor motivating your action as Lina is trying to solve a mystery of what is happening with Savy when she disappears suddenly one night. Now, the conversations you’ve had with passengers aren’t just in service of getting a better rating and more pay. Each person who rides with you has information that might be useful in helping locate Savy. You’ll also learn about the troubles and issues your passengers are facing, some of whom would despise each other if they ever met. You might even get so wrapped up in their needs that the idea of finding or helping Savy seems less interesting. The game will eventually push you toward a resolution, but you can play it out in a variety of ways.

    The combination of autosaves and manual saves makes it possible to retry certain parts of the story in order to get a desired outcome. I got worried a few days into the game when I was low on money, far from charging stations, and unable to pick up passengers who only ride with drivers with high ratings. I was sure I’d get stuck and have to re-load a save from a few rides before. In a very clever twist, I had to use Lina’s phone to train an in-game AI program by solving puzzles and answering questions. I eventually got so annoyed at it that I was able to force quit the program by repeatedly giving it wrong answers. Still got paid, though. This was a really interesting way to emphasize the human hands behind all of the automation in the game (and in real life). Regarding artificial intelligence, it’s humans all the way down. Having to engaged in microwork to train AI to get a pittance that can be used to charge an electric car that is used for the gig economy is a dystopian level of labor exploitation. All of these exact conditions may not exist for a single person at the moment, but each part of the process is currently happening somewhere on the planet. By having players engage with microwork in this way, Neo Cab presents a critique of artificial intelligence and automation while reminding players of the importance of human labor and interpersonal skills.

    To be fair, that critique is apparent early in the game. Picking up your first passenger yields a conversation that results in Lina commenting on Capra, the company that operates the fleet of autonomous cabs. She calls the cabs “soulless capsules of glass and plastic” then realizes “but hey, those things don’t need health insurance.” Too true. Companies will do anything to keep from having to pay workers a living wage. I enjoyed this anti-tech messaging throughout the game as much as I did trying to solve the mystery of where Savy went and what was going on with the gang of bike punks. (There are bike punks.) Turns out it was a good thing for me to be susceptible to marketing after all. Well, at least, the kind of marketing that results from an independent publisher asking me to opt in to a mailing list about games similar to ones I’ve already been enjoying. I’m human, which means I’m a little predictable, despite my desire to be seen as unique and interesting.

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The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (Robin Wall Kimmerer, Scribner, 2024)

    Sure do wish more people were talking about this book instead of the one focused solely on abundance that came out recently. Said differently: it’s the reciprocity, stupid! The existence of abundance is meaningless without reciprocity as a means of dealing with it. Kimmerer writes that “recognizing ‘enoughness’ is a radical act in an economy that is always encouraging us to consume more” (p. 27). This “enoughness” exists not just in terms of food, but also wealth and security. She helpfully calls those who hoard the excess Darren, after Darren Woods, who has been the CEO of ExxonMobil since 2017. One hopes that this name becomes genericized as shorthand for insatiably capitalistic white dudes.

    The serviceberry is one of the models Kimmerer uses to explain how reciprocity operates. As a member of Potawatomi Nation, one of the Anishinaabe peoples of the Great Lakes region, she shares that the etymologies of gift and berry in Potawatomi are remarkably similar (pp. 19-20). So the berries are a gift from Earth to us, and they can be a gift from one person to another. She compares two exchanges that might result in her receiving berries. In one case, she can go to the market and buy them. She exchanges money for goods and that’s the end of the relationship. In another case, she goes to the field and picks the berries herself, then shares them with a neighbor or friend. The relationship doesn’t end there, as her friend might have a great recipe for berry pies that she can share with Kimmerer (or others). They can also have a conversation later on about the quality of the berries they shared or the deliciousness of the pie. Kimmerer contrasts this exchange with the hypothetical discussion of berry pie or jam recipes with the clerk at the store a week after completing the financial transaction. Although it wouldn’t be the most unusual thing to discuss, the clerk has a different relationship to the berries because money and labor are involved. What reciprocity means in this kind of relationship is unclear. A system that alienates workers from their labor also alienates the workers from each other.

    Instead of reviewing ambitious technosolutions that support her position on the importance of reciprocity as a means of distributing abundance, Kimmerer looks to nature as a model for how we can get along better with each other and the world. An instructive story comes from an anthropologist seeking to understand how one member of a hunter-gatherer community dealt with excess meat from a recent kill. Given that such a great deal of food might be hard to come by again, the researcher is shocked that the hunter doesn’t save any for later. Instead of scarcity, the hunter turns to community and hosts a feast for the neighbors. The researcher still can’t help it and asks wouldn’t it be better to store the extra meat in a freezer or in salt for a later date. “I store the meat in the belly of my brother” is the bewildered reply (p. 56). Why, even when there is scarcity, should we keep our gains from everyone else? Sharing them means we will be likely to receive shared goods in the future. Seems so simple.

    There’s not a grand proposal for how this gift economy might replace our mixed economy, but it does help us think about different ways of being. I appreciated imagining along with her the idea of an “Empathetic Mutualist Human” as a response to Adam Smith’s “Rational Economic Man” (p.73). There is plenty to critique about traditional economic models, and this reframing of one of the basic tenets of economics is a strong start. She continues this critique by explaining how a focus on scarcity (instead of abundance) means that the “rational economic man” wants to hoard wealth, food, security and opportunity. In a time of crisis, the hoarders “would not save themselves from the fate of extinction if their partners did not share in that abundance. Hoarding won’t save us either. It won’t even save Darren. All flourishing is mutual” (p. 111).  Although we might be conditioned to think that hoarding abundance will protect us, the abundance is useless if we cannot share it with others. The implicit critique here is that there is no one to help you make use of or partake in the abundance. Because “all flourishing is mutual,” we need to give in order to grow. There’s no way to have accumulated abundance without having taken it in the first place. It’s not just a moral act to share; it is vital for our survival as a species.

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TAYLOR SWIFT The Life of a Showgirl (Republic Records, 2025)

    Now that New Music Tuesday is New Music Friday, I need to discuss Friday Night Parts with you. These are parts of songs that hook into the brain and take on a disproportionate level of importance. They are Friday Night Parts because they exist to be anticipated all week and savored during a focused listening session on a Friday Night after a long week of work. No matter what happens, the music will be there for you. Specifically, these parts of these songs will be there. You can hold them in memory, sure, but nothing beats the real thing. One such Friday Night Part is the line “feel the deadly cold freeze you from inside” on SLAYER’s “At Dawn They Sleep.” Specifically, it’s the effect on Tom Araya’s vocals when he sings “freeze you from inside.” It’s sick. His voice sounds like it’s being frozen in the middle of the line. There’s no other such vocal treatment on the album, which makes it stand out even more. It’s not a detail that requires repeated listens to elicit—it’s right there in your face the first time you hear it. There are many cool parts in the rest of that song, but the key element of a Friday Night Part is that it is brief and not necessarily the “best” part of a song. It’s just a part that stands out for a possibly inarticulable reason. Mine may not be yours.

    Other Friday Night Parts of note include the final chorus to KELLY CLARKSON’s “Since U Been Gone,” specifically the descending vocalization on “want.” There’s many things happening at this part in the song. Fight to focus on this part and you will be rewarded with happiness. In a similar fashion, there’s a drum roll at the end of The RONETTES’ “Be My Baby” that seems like a throwaway moment but is actually really cool. When someone from the Wrecking Crew does a quick tom fill (at ~2:16), you’d better listen up. Finally, there is a funny Friday Night Part in ROXY MUSIC’s “Re-Make/Re-Model” where each instrument gets a chance to do a little improv measure. It’s a few silly noises right in a row, as if to introduce the band members via sonic signature, and it’s the kind of moment you look forward to hearing all week. Then you hear it and you can go on with living.

    What do Friday Night Parts have to do with the new TAYLOR SWIFT album? Well, when the music industry decides to move album releases to Fridays, it is signaling that Friday is a great day for listening to music. You are off work or done with school and have the night or weekend to focus fully on your passions and interests. The industry is telling you to identify Friday Night Parts by releasing music on Fridays. It’s as simple as that. When I was at work on Friday, a few colleagues asked if I’d heard any of “The Life of a Showgirl.” Of course I hadn’t. I was waiting for Friday night! Sheesh.

    The wait was not worth it. I even had the house to myself. I sprawled on the couch as the compact disc played on my home stereo. There’s a little drum fill at the start of “The Life of Ophelia” that got me excited. I was certain this was a winking nod to a variety of Friday Night Parts still to come. They never arrived. “Opalite” is the standout track, but that’s not saying much. The album was meant to be a no-frills affair compared to its predecessor. More fun, more straightforward, not overwrought. Only one of those things is true: a 42-minute pop album is quite straightforward. It fits easily on to one side of a 90-minute cassette, leaving you free to dub another album for your friend on the b-side. That sounds anachronistic because it is. Releasing an album on a major label in 2025 is anachronistic, too. I lean into it. For the fourth time since 2022, I bought the “new” TAYLOR SWIFT CD on my lunch break and picked up a Pumpkin Spice Latte along with it. (Well once it was just a flat white but I digress.)

    As luck would have it, there’s another long-running country music solo artist who just released an album. Too bad AMANDA SHIRES’ “Nobody’s Girl” is too long to fit on the other side of that tape. It would deserve the a-side, anyway. Swift and Shires don’t need a forced comparison to establish their value; their records can stand on their own. That lesson came through to me in 1996 in the letters section of Hit Parader. A subscriber’s letter dismissed METALLICA’s “Load" by writing, “The new PANTERA is heavier than the new METALLICA” and the editor replied, “Yes, and the new INTERNAL BLEEDING is heavier than the new SOUNDGARDEN. So what?” The point of these temporal comparisons is just to stoke argument, not to validly claim that one album is better than another. Even if “Nobody’s Girl” hadn’t just come out, “The Life of a Showgirl” would still be mid.

    Maybe I’m being too harsh in saying that. I know that I’m usually underwhelmed by new LADY GAGA (my modern pop North Star) singles at first. More often than not, they grow on me and I end up changing my opinion on them. I’ve listened to “The Life of a Showgirl” three times but I don’t think it will grow on me at all. The instrumentation is dull and the lyrics are trite. “You’re just now noticing this about TAYLOR SWIFT, Rob? Really?” Well, yeah. I was underwhelmed by “The Tortured Poets Department,” which I chalked up to being an attempt at some kind if literary sensibility or credibility. It feels silly of me to have thought a shorter, more accessible album would have led to a sea change in her approach. Quite the opposite! An album this brief needs to have powerful tracks and deadly hooks to pull in the listener. There’s hardly a memorable element to be found on these 12 songs. There’s not a lot of depth of sound or thought here. The timbre of the synths and keys, not to mention the bass and guitars, is thin as compared to something like “1989” or “Red.”

    The lyrics are appalling. To claim the mantle of “English teacher” in a wedding announcement and then write these words is a little much. (Rhyming kitty with pretty with witty with city with legitly… come on now!) It dawned on me while listening to this album that Swift is still stuck in the same references she was making in high school. A lot has changed in the 18 years since she was a teenager; kids today are more easily in touch with a variety of musical and cultural traditions from around the globe. Swift has the acumen of an A student in an exurban school district who excels at multiple-choice tests but cannot generate an interesting thought when faced with an open-ended writing prompt. She has mastered writing to the test but stumbles into original thinking only by accident. Why else would Shakespeare’s Ophelia and Hollywood’s Elizabeth Taylor appear in the first two songs? These are hardly the most interesting or obscure references. They fit comfortably in the milieu of a suburban high school. Same goes for the ham-handed similes… “like a toy chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse.” I’d wager Swift is also carrying around a set of Barron’s SAT Flashcards, given her use of protégé, discretion, exoneration, and kismet.

    It’s not clear what she has to say with this album. What is the point of “Father Figure” or “Eldest Daughter”? (Is everybody “so punk on the Internet,” and why does that matter?) We get that she’s bragging about her fiancé on “Wood” and “Wi$h Li$t” and “Honey.” Good for her but it doesn’t even sound like an interesting relationship. I think it was on Twitter because I can’t find it now, but Tressie McMillan Cottom once advanced the argument that Swift is different from BEYONCÉ and ADELE because she is not a wife or a mom but she is past the age of 30. McMillan Cottom maintained that that combination of factors breaks people’s brains. Swift is engaged now. Maybe there’s something to settling down that has made her less interesting as an artist. The picture she paints in “Wi$h Li$t” sounds a lot like suburban midwestern anonymity. It could also be a version of Erich Fromm’s “égoïsme à deux” (a concept that I learned about in my suburban high school, lol) that she’s describing in that song. If so, a further inward retreat may reveal that the corners of her character have been rounded off and nothing else interesting remains.

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Al Llorens (1952-2025)

    The last email many teachers in Illinois may have received from Illinois Education Association President Al Llorens arrived on Monday, September 15th. The subject line read “Exercise caution on social media.” In it, he referred to “an aggressive effort underway - nationwide and in Illinois - to target individual educators based on their speech. This targeting has included calls for discipline or termination, and even violent threats to school campuses. We are aware of protests being planned at some school board meetings, schools and district administrative offices.” It is understandable, but also somehow beyond belief that this email existed. It’s a sign of just how frayed the social fabric is that a public union’s leader needs to urge restraint on protected speech from members of that union. That fabric tore a little bit more on Friday afternoon with the news that Al Llorens had died on Thursday in Springfield.

    Rest in Peace, Al.

    Just about a year ago, I met Al for the first time. In the middle of September 2024, IEA emailed its members to announce that it had “partnered with a group called Operation Swing State to help connect our members with Harris/Walz election efforts in Wisconsin and Michigan. On Friday, the IEA Board of Directors voted to concur with the NEA’s decision to recommend Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for president and vice president in the upcoming election. As you probably know, most believe the decision on who succeeds President Joe Biden in the oval office will come down to seven swing states – Wisconsin and Michigan are two of the seven. If you’d like to help in the effort, IEA and Operation Swing State will be providing buses to bring volunteers to Wisconsin and Michigan to knock on the doors of fellow likely voters and encourage them to vote for the Harris/Walz ticket.” A few weeks later, I was with teachers and IEA leaders, including Al, on a bus to Kalamazoo, Michigan. Local organizers re-routed us to Battle Creek due to a large number of volunteers in and around Kalamazoo (a.k.a. Kamalazoo) that day. We got our assignment and spent the afternoon canvassing a residential area in twos and threes. When we’d finished, the group enlisted my long arms for a group photo before boarding the bus for the trip back to Illinois. Al and I bracket the group, who were all worn from walking for a few hours on an unseasonably warm October day. By the time we were back in Matteson, Al had taken the time to thank each of us on the bus for our time, effort, and energy that day. Only after getting back to my car did I realize that the card he’d given me showed that his title was “IEA President.” It felt cool and special to have it, even if I’d never need to use it.

    I spent the next few weekends on buses or in cars with like-minded folks knocking on doors in Wisconsin and Michigan. It broke my fucking heart when Harris and Walz lost.

    Coincidentally, there was an effort underway to fix public pensions in Illinois and IEA was once again chartering buses from all over the state for a rally in Springfield during a special session about the pension reform. Al was one of the first people I saw when I got off the bus. He recognized me immediately from canvassing efforts in Michigan and welcomed me to Springfield for the rally. I realize it had only been a few weeks and that I was one of the tallest people on the bus each time. Still, it felt good to be remembered and seen.

    As with the presidential election, the pension reform effort fell short of expectations. Al continued to send encouraging emails and to remind educators of the stakes of the reform. In all cases, it was clear that educators have a voice as part of a collective bargaining unit and that we should be unafraid to use it. His final email is not an indictment of his judgment or a cowardly change of heart. It is a reflection of how much the United States has changed in the past 12 months. I can think of no better way to honor his memory than to use your voice to speak back against the creeping and creepy fascism we are facing in this country. If you’re not already protected by a labor union, what can you do to organize one near you?

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The Payback (Kashana Cauley, Atria Books, 2025)

    The conventional wisdom of graduate school has it that a doctoral candidate’s dissertation needs to do one of two things to be considered successful in its field. It can either pose a thought-provoking question or it can use a unique methodology to approach an issue. There’s minimal chance it will do both. Kashana Cauley’s The Payback is a novel that also does two different things very well. It has a thoughtful premise and it is also well-written and really, really funny. This combination means that it is worth celebrating at length.

    The premise sold me on the book immediately. What if a group of Black women in the middle of their careers still had endless amounts of student loan debt to pay back? What if they wanted to get payback on the predatory lenders instead? And, in doing so, what if they were able to eliminate student loan debt from all borrowers? You’d celebrate them as heroes if this were real life. Sadly, the United States is hellbent on making former college students as miserable as possible through these loans. Even when Biden could have fully canceled them, he didn’t. Trump has threatened to reinstate them, which is pure lunacy. We turn to fiction to live out the fantasies we can’t have in real life. It feels really good to read this book about three Black women willing to brave the waters with the federal student-loan sharks.

    Maybe people living outside the U.S. won’t be able to relate to the idea of seeking vengeance on federal payment processors. Going to college for free means they can’t enjoy this book as deeply as I did. Their loss, I guess. Even so, there are plenty of ways that faceless organizations across the globe prevent people from living their lives because of bureaucratic stiff-arming. So there are likely ways it is relevant to a wider audience.

    For those fortunate enough to not live with some kind of crippling debt, there are still plenty of cool parts in this book. Let’s think about the characters for a minute. Our narrator, Jada, had a glamorous past in costume design for a Hollywood studio. An event known for most of the book as only “the incident” changed her fortune and she now works in a clothing store in a tony mall near Los Angeles. Her two co-workers and eventual heist-mates are Audrey and Lanae. Like Jada, Audrey flamed out of a promising career under difficult circumstances. Lanae fronts a punk band known as The DONNER PARTY. Maybe it’s clear to you now that none of them have what you could call a comfortable standard of living, and that’s before you consider the turquoise-epauletted Debt Police who are there to make sure women like Jada, Lanae, and Audrey do not take advantage of their university educations. You’ll have to read the book to learn more about those fucks…

    What’s fun about this group of colleagues turned something like friends is how Jada mercilessly rips on Audrey. Or, I should say, Cauley has her savage Audrey’s character throughout the early pages of the book. Audrey, in Jada’s telling, “never made hand gestures when she talked” (p. 51) and, when done ringing up customers at the register, “flip[s] back to her default dull self as neatly as a window blind snapping shut” (p. 72). There are plenty of other great descriptive phrases like those that give you the indication that Audrey suffers from the terminal affliction of being born without a personality. (I can relate.) Also clever are the explanations behind the movies and shows Jada used to work on in her earlier career—Appeal and Ride or Die being two highlights whose set-ups I won’t spoil. Each one had me dropping the book to the floor in laughter.

    So you’ve got the intriguing premise from the start and plenty of interesting descriptions to carry you through the moments between the action. That’s good enough right there for me to recommend it and I haven’t even mentioned the way Cauley works in pop culture references such as PETER GABRIEL’s “Melt,” a few characters at a party who are “a pack of Lisa Bonets of different heights and weights but with the same telltale long, curly wig” (p. 47), and a  reference to eating zucchini that would be “as smooth as a SADE album” (p. 121). Oh, that’s right. Jada takes on a job eating food on camera for the sake of the internet after her retail career ends. I don’t want to do any research into the descriptions of this type of money making, but Cauley again does an excellent job of making Jada’s eating episodes seem believably, uh, stimulating.

    There are plenty more examples of enjoyable wordplay and exciting plot twists in the rest of the book, so I’ll just leave you with one moment that wasn’t just “good” in a literary sense, but made me rethink how I contextualize what I consume. Most of the first part of the book takes place in the mall where Jada et al. work. On her way into the clothing shop, Jada reflects on how “People say a good restaurant has terroir, and so does a mall. Its cinnamon rolls don’t taste the same in an airport, or at home. They taste right in the mall” (p. 60). Damn. Damn right, they do! A partygoer in college once remarked similarly that “Combos taste better when you’re rolling.” He meant in the car sense, not the inebriation sense, but the truth of the fact remains. Cauley makes a strong case here for the importance of context and all its tangibles and intangibles that make something as pleasant as a cinnamon roll taste just right only in a mall. As I’ve said repeatedly, this kind of close analysis and clear description of our shared reality is evidence of excellent writing. Enjoy The Payback for Cauley’s word choice and for the unique and thrilling ways that its characters engage in the most worthwhile heist possible.

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Response to Chicago Tribune's Charlie Kirk Editorial

September 11, 2025 at 9:42 PM

Dear Chicago Tribune Editorial Board:

    The editorial regarding Charlie Kirk’s legacy paints too rosy a picture of a man whose main goal in life was relentless antagonism of undergraduates and their professors. His horrific murder was inexcusable. The issue with the editorial is that it frames his contribution to the cultural conversation as “debate.” This is a charitable interpretation of his campus visits.

    There is no form of debate where keeping a running watchlist of allegedly left-wing professors would be an appropriate strategy. To claim that a discredited, racist conspiracy “is not a theory, it’s a reality” demonstrates an intellectual incuriosity that has nothing to do with finding a reasonable answer through discussion. Likewise, believing that the United States is “a Christian state” is a woefully uninformed position.

    These are just a few of Kirk’s beliefs. They are intentionally inflammatory. They do not stand up to scrutiny. Notably, the Tribune’s editorial does not directly quote nor hyperlink to any of the many public appearances where Kirk used these words. The use of paraphrase throughout the editorial elides the harm of Kirk’s words, as well as their consequences for minoritized populations.

    Truly, that harm is the true legacy of Kirk. He thought a better argument was the result of snappy one-liners and a firm grasp of what he considered to be facts. Those strategies may win a debate and convince listeners that the speaker is correct for having won. The truth, let alone the most reasonable answer, remains elusive in such a setting. Kirk excelled not at debate or argumentation, but in disputational talk. His words were loud; his ideas, quiet. 

My best,

Tall Rob (Yes, I used my real name and address in the actual letter; I know the rules!) 

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DEVO (Chris Smith, Library Films / VICE Studios, 2024)

    I lived in central Ohio for 15 years, so I should probably have a stronger take on DEVO than “I like them and they are cool.” Alas, I never took the deep dive into being a DEVOtee (that’s what their fans call themselves, right?). This documentary had me thinking I had the wrong idea the whole time and should have probably picked up their albums while flipping through the bins at Used Kids Records. Those radio station promo copies of AGNOSTIC FRONT’s “Cause for Alarm” and LEEWAY’s “Born to Expire” from WKCO for $2.50 apiece were more my speed at age 19, so “Q: Are We Not Men?” and “Duty Now for the Future” didn’t warrant a second look. Too bad for past me.

    In my time in Ohio, I picked up a stray fact about DEVO here and there through breathing in the atmosphere. Their mascot is Booji Boy instead of Boogie Boy because they ran out of g in the font they were using. There’s a release called “Hardcore DEVO, Vol. 1” that has “the stuff you’ll like” if HC punk is more your speed. They did an Obama 2008 campaign event in Akron and made a version of his O logo wearing the flowerpot hat. I replied to each of these nuggets of information with a disaffected “oh, cool” and moved on with my life. Who cares what that one-hit wonder band did? So much for me being open-minded about music.

    Even though I wrote them off as a novelty band for “Whip It,” at least I didn’t think that song was some kind of celebration of a certain kind of old-fashioned roughneck masculinity. That’s the apparent takeaway many people had from that song’s video on MTV. The “you’ve got the wrong idea” refrain comes up a lot during the documentary. (Just last month the Memories feature on my computer’s Photos app soundtracked a nice montage of my kid’s earliest years to “Beautiful World,” which is such a dreadful misreading of that song that I had to laugh.) They position themselves as, if not intellectuals or nerds, then people who know more than the average folks. Making a brand (or a band!) out of the idea of being “the smartest guys in the room” is dangerous territory. Worse still, positioning yourselves as the ones who decry the de-evolution of humanity means that you must have something special about yourself that makes you able to make that pronouncement, especially when you have a song titled “Mongoloid.” "Trust me, dude. We are the chosen ones and everyone else knows nothing..." (Or something like that.) The inherent disdain that comes along with thinking you’re so clever and above the fray of the general public’s tastes can result in a variety of outcomes. Thankfully, the members of DEVO are oddballs at heart and they channeled that disdain into a creative pursuit. The story of Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale meeting through mutual friends at Kent State bears this out. They were just weird guys that found each other moving in the same elliptical social orbits; they were not trying to start a band or “make it” or do anything like that.

    The fact that they were university educated is just one part of what made them outliers in the music scene at the time. They leaned into their braininess, but their weirdness seems to have had a stronger pull on their collective vision of social critique. What I’m trying to say is that if they were any good at being public intellectuals, then they would have become pundits (ugh) or authors of general interest subject area books or even professors. As one of my professors further down I-71 once said, “if academics could write, then they’d have been novelists.” Just the same, it seems from this documentary that the members of DEVO did not have the constitution for punditry or other forms of public intellectualism. That’s a good thing, mind you! We’d rather have the music.

    It’s clear they knew how to handle the limelight, if only from the many television appearances that are part of the documentary. They know how to play the media game. They’re media literate not because they are keeping up with the news (they were) but because they knew what was expected of bands on programs like American Bandstand or whatever. Dick Clark saying “Oh, now I know what kind of interview this is going to be” when they gave him an oblique response to a canned question is a perfect example of that. They were aware of their weirdness but it didn’t come off as a shtick; they are just how they are. They wanted you to feel as uncomfortable as they did about the whole spectacle.

    One thing I really appreciated about the documentary was the lack of typical talking head features throughout its runtime. Yes, band members and managers and people in the DEVO universe do appear with their name and credit at the bottom of the screen. But, there are no critics, journalists, fans, or contemporaries in the mix. I’d imagine there is no shortage of people who fall into those categories who could talk about DEVO for days. Instead, what you get is just the people central to the project. Others’ views, such as those of Dick Clark, are present in archival format as part of an existing broadcast or media moment. Just as they did during their career, they presented themselves in this documentary fully on their own terms. Oh, and the early live footage is beyond belief. There are people who saw DEVO at a bar after their shift at Goodyear or Firestone in 1976. They likely wanted to hear someone covering “More Than a Feeling” or “Afternoon Delight” and instead they got “Jocko Homo” and “Mongoloid” played by the guys who were dedicated and desperate about spreading the message of de-evolution regardless of what anyone else wanted to hear.

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So It Started There: From Punk to PULP (Nick Banks, Omnibus Press, 2024)

    It’ll make the reading of this text harder once the links rot, but it’s a nice touch to have QR codes in the text. The first one is a video that shows author Banks explaining how to engage with that extra-textual feature using a smart device. If you aren’t able to get that far or figure out what those weird squares mean at the start of each chapter, then you might persist in your confusion. Those reading this book years after YouTube disappears will simply be out of luck. We all know that a general, if not fanatic, interest in PULP as a band will outlast all forms of social media.

    I hardly think I’m unique in finding the QR codes nifty. When I’m reading a book that constantly references other works in making its argument or shaping its narrative, I struggle to keep my attention on the text itself. I’m mentally cataloging pages I want to revisit as I finish each chapter, then deciding whether to look up the materials the author referenced. I’m also driven to continue reading (in most cases) because I decided to read the book for a reason and still want to keep going.

    I’ve settled on dog-earing pages as I go, and then returning to the book hours or days or weeks later to check on those pages. I have stopped reading with a pen in hand because I get so wrapped up in my own annotations (to say nothing of the desire to investigate the topics the author mentions) that I lose steam with making progress through the book. When I revisit the text, I usually remember why I marked certain pages, but if I don’t, I just chalk it up to past me’s over-exuberance and leave it at that. If that page was truly worth remembering or revisiting, its power would stand out on a second view, right? I hope…

    You can probably tell from my meandering introduction to this review that this book is full of the kinds of references that pull me away from the text. So, the QR codes help, but they are not sufficient to satisfy my curiosity. There is plenty to be curious about in Banks’ life story. He starts with his grandparents’ generation on both sides to establish his working class roots. He also has a famous football playing uncle that I had not known of before reading this book or listening to PULP in the first place. The uncle shows up periodically in PULP history when managers, club owners, bookers, etc., ask if Nick is any relation to keeper Gordon Banks. Nick’s lack of football smarts is a gift to us because he became a solid drummer and an engaging writer instead.

    Banks spends a few chapters on family history and his childhood before getting on to his passion for music and participation in the Sheffield scene of the ‘70s and ‘80s. We might know him for PULP, but he spends around 100 pages of this 400-page book on his life before joining the best band Britpop had to offer. It’s great to have this context because it makes their eventual success as a group that much sweeter. (The same goes for Jarvis Cocker’s and Mark Webber’s recent books about their contributions to PULP.) As the subtitle indicates, Banks’ journey starts with punk. He was part of the scene and not just the scenery, too, which makes the stories more interesting than the usual “I heard about this band through friends / siblings / neighbors and bought the record and went to shows, etc.” story. Those pathways into an underground scene are individually important (I mean, I know I feel that way about my story) but can quickly become genericized in a book like this one because they fit a template. Banks has enough personality as a writer and a drummer to make the tales of punk and goth bands he was part of as interesting as anything that happened when he was on Island Records’ payroll. I really hope he shares the FATAL NOISE demo at some point. A six-song demo recorded in August 1981 by guys who had just finished their O-level exams and that sounds “a bit like it was recorded with a thick sock over all the microphones” is a no-brainer for me (p. 67). Release the session!

    A few years on, Banks tries his sticks with a few other bands, but doesn’t cut the mustard. He recounts seeing the “PULP want drummer” ad in a local cafe around 1986 and feeling like his life had been leading to that moment. As with Webber, Banks was a fan before he joined the band. Banks couldn’t have known the heights he’d reach with PULP within the decade; he just wanted to join the cool local band he liked. In recounting a few rehearsal misfires with two other Sheffield bands, he concludes “I always wonder how my life would have diverged from its eventual path had either of those opportunities come off. Narrow margins.” (p. 112). Feels like a “Something Changed” situation, years before Cocker wrote that song. I’ll add that Banks’ use of a phrase such as “narrow margins” at the end of the paragraph is a writing tic that shows up throughout the text. It’s charming and makes me think of how BUZZCOCKS got their name. (This is your hint to start a band named NARROW MARGINS.)

    In a bit of corroborating evidence, Banks tells a story about Cocker and the rest of the band moving into the same place. He explains that Cocker showed up with their buddy’s transit van full of “trash — sorry, my mistake — carefully curated curios and antiques” on move in day (p. 135). After about 20 minutes, another car pulled up and Cocker hopped in for a driving lesson, leaving Banks to move most of Cocker’s belongings into the building. I’m sorry but this is the kind of hilarious and avoidant behavior that seems exactly on brand with the version of Cocker I hold in mind from reading Good Pop, Bad Pop. The fact that this moment probably isn’t even a memory for Cocker is what makes it all the more absurd. When recounting Cocker’s assessment of him as a drummer, Banks reveals that there’s a chance Cocker had never even heard him play before, but knew they’d get on as bandmates, so he was allowed to join (p. 115). Essentially, you had to be willing to put up with Cocker’s nonsense to be part of PULP and it appears that Banks had the requisite patience, if not the drumming chops, to make the grade.

    That patience is an asset for a drummer in a band focused on visual presentation and pop hooks that might pull attention away from the beat. Thankfully, Banks is perceptive and is not as sought after as Cocker, so he is able to observe various humorous happenings throughout the band’s career and relay them in a way that makes him feel like the cool friend you have in a big band. Notably, his invisibility as a performer indirectly led him to the relationship that would become a marriage. He and friends had seen two women crushing it at a pub quiz game and started chatting them up. The group moved on to another pub and the conversations continued. Banks and Sarah (the pub quiz game champ) get to talking about what they were listening to while getting ready for the night. (I’m pleased to know Banks also thinks “Hatful of Hollow” is a better representation of early SMITHS material than their first album.) Anyway, Sarah tells him she was listening to “a song about some bloke hiding in a wardrobe while spying on others shagging” (p. 217). Banks replies that he wrote that song, which is true, but of course sounds completely insane to the person he’s attempting to court. Things work out and they appear to still be married, thirty years on. Imagine someone telling you they had listened to “Babies” earlier while you’re flirting with them and having the relationship work because you wrote the riff that became that song.

    For me, the most powerful anecdote concerns the recording of “Common People.” (I’m basic, I know.) Banks relates how they’d road-tested the song and knew its features forward and backward, but it was a challenge to get right in the studio. The issue is that playing to a click track with a consistent tempo is a problem when you have a song that starts out at a certain speed and gets faster as it goes. He explains how they tried troubleshooting it by playing at the opening tempo throughout, the closing tempo throughout, and an average of the tempos throughout. Nothing worked, so they had to have their drum programmer make a click track that “increased in tempo every few bars” to match the way PULP played the song live (p. 251). I’d never sat with a stopwatch and metronome to clock the song’s beat, but the story of this recording session matches my experience of the song. In 2011, Mrs. Tall Rob and I saw one of PULP’s reunion gigs at the O2 Academy in Brixton. When they played “Common People” and the lead-in to the last chorus hit, I thought I was going to die. The drum beats, synth stabs, and light flashes were among the most overpowering I’ve felt at a gig, and we were in the balcony. We should all be so glad that they were able to capture a shred of that power in the studio. There’s not a QR code in the world that can capture that embodied rush of live music propelled by a hard-hitting drummer. There’s no substitute for the real thing. At least we have the records and the books and the memories to keep us sharp.

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Badges without Borders: How Global Insurgency Transformed American Policing (Stuart Schrader, University of California Press, 2019)

    There’s an evergreen relevance to books about the nature of policing in the United States and its history in racist vigilante violence. When I bought Schrader’s book in late 2019, I was thinking it would be an insightful read on the history of policing in this country with a particular focus on the beginning of Black Lives Matter as a social movement. That’s not quite what this book addresses. Still, Schrader tells an informative story through his research into connections between the professionalization of U.S. policing that came about as a result of military occupations overseas. Given the recent deployments of National Guard members in U.S. cities, Schrader's is a useful text that can help make sense of how this situation came to be.

    Because I am an asshole, I emailed Schrader about his book after I read it in the summer of 2020 to say I am also a former punk zine editor who has a Ph.D. Who cares? I thought it would be cool to tell him I thought of AGENT ORANGE (DEN) and NEGATIVE APPROACH after reading the intro paragraph to his book’s conclusion. (It mentions The Exorcist stairs.) Not only that—I also told him he had misspelled counterinsurgency on one page. I’m really helpful, you see. He graciously (and within a day!) replied that getting people to listen to those two bands was the precise reason he wrote the book—tongue firmly in cheek, I am sure. Like I said, I am great at making friends.

    Overall, Schrader's text discusses the racist roots of U.S. policing; how law enforcement became professionalized overseas; how law enforcement became professionalized and enmeshed domestically; how everyday experiences complicated police reform efforts overseas; how policing lessons from overseas came back to the U.S. in the form of “tear gas,” riot control, and SWAT teams; how counterinsurgent policing informed “broken windows” policing in the U.S.; and how the overseas counterinsurgent reformers came back to the U.S. to continue implementing counterinsurgent police practices on the streets of this country. 

    On the “fun fact” side of things, I learned that 911 did not exist as an emergency response number until 1968, five years after a similar service debuted in Venezuela. If you want a more succinct idea of the book’s thesis than the above road map paragraph, here you go: “Training, technologies, and tactics for emergency situations grew from overseas counterinsurgency and became integrated into everyday policing in the United States, recalibrating racialized social control” (p. 23). What does that mean? Could he put it to you any simpler? How’s this? “Keystone Kops could not catch Communists” (p. 14). That’s about it, really. And don’t get it twisted—police have always been militarized. No system works.

(This review originally appeared in a slightly different version in issue #2 of the zine Anxiety's False Promise, published in February 2023.)

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It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley (Amy Berg, Topic Studios / Disarming Films, 2025)

    Once again, I find myself reflecting on the nature of background knowledge and its interaction with a text. If you have none, then you are not going to get much of anything out of your reading. Background knowledge lacker is a description that matches me in the case of JEFF BUCKLEY. I’ve only listened to “Grace” once and that was well over a decade ago. It didn’t click for me, so I left it and the awful ending to his life behind. When Mrs. Tall Rob learned about It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, she suggested that we see it. She’s a fan, or enough of one, to have wanted to see it before it left the Siskel Film Center.

    There’s plenty that went in one eye and out the other as I watched, though I was surprised by the richness of our post-view discussion. Through the documentary, various of the talking heads and friends mentioned how Buckley didn’t quite fit in with some of the prevailing musical trends of the first part of the 1990s. That matched my understanding, so I asked Mrs. Tall Rob about her recollections of that time and she said she remembered hearing some of his songs on her local alternative station. If the same was true of mine, I don’t have that memory.

    Either way, Buckley’s music still stands on its own when contrasted with grunge detritus, industrial-lite, folk-ish pop, post-post-post-post-punk, or whatever else huddled under the umbrella of the alternative nation. (“Alternative to what?” my brother used to needle me.) That term ranges widely enough to encapsulate BAD BRAINS and MORRISSEY, two Buckley influences that came up in passing a few times during the film. Citing MORRISSEY as an influence and not having utterly maudlin or sassy, punny lyrics must mean his influence on Buckley was purely vocal. That tracks, as the higher end of Buckley’s apparently four-octave range recalls MORRISSEY’s falsetto at times. My musical training is limited at best, so the rapturous naming of that vocal range doesn’t really do much for me. I can’t imagine liking or disliking a singer because of a numerical value attached to some part of their performance ability. It’s harder to identify BAD BRAINS’ influence on Buckley’s music or vocals or lyrics. There’s nothing in the music on “Grace” that’s evocative of the band that invented the mosh part while also being capable of blistering speeds. Only after a quick internet search revealing a live-on-the-radio cover of “I Against I” did Buckley’s respect for BAD BRAINS make sense. Again, people who have never moshed typically praise BAD BRAINS for their tightness; they could play that hyper-speed trashy punk and the rhythmically oriented reggae songs with the same panache. They were punks who were as proficient at their instruments as any jazz musician. The tightness itself isn’t enough of a selling point for me—it’s all about their power. I’m left with the impression that Buckley likely appreciated their tightness and musicianship instead of their power or politics.

    The DIY nature and community spirit of early career BAD BRAINS is also something that doesn’t seem to have resonated with Buckley. This disconnect probably has something to do with his dad being famous enough in his own right to have given something of a launch pad for Buckley’s career when he was getting started, even though his dad had been long dead. What I mean by this is that his career trajectory was improbable then and seems impossible today. He went from being a busboy or server at a cafe who occasionally takes the open mic and drew enough of a crowd to get major label A&R goons to appear. What’s so strange about it to me is that his ascent from food service to major label contract pathway is that it happened after the indie rock boom of the 1980s. Like, read Our Band Could Be Your Life and try to make sense of the way his career went. The film makes it seem as though there wasn’t a “scene” per se that he came from or any kind of touring circuit or underground label or college radio support. Those elements were crucial to bands that would have made it on to alternative radio in the United States when Buckley’s career peaked. He was as close to an overnight success as one could be at the time.

    I’m reflecting on this seemingly sudden change of fortune for Buckley because it took a toll on him as well. The need to produce an album from nearly nothing (and without wanting to rest on the comfort of cover songs) on demand really is a tall order. All that pressure, plus the need to step out of his father’s shadow really seemed to plague him. As Julianne Escobedo Shepherd wrote about the film for Hearing Things, his closeness to his mom and many other women in his life made him distinct from many other male musicians who came to popular attention in similar ways. The film’s argument, like that of Escobedo Shepherd’s, is that his connection to femininity made him unique in a world of rock stars. Even the other guys in his band were aware of it. Their parts in the film do not give the sense of "guys being dudes" that other rock stories would have (i.e., practice space bonding, alcohol or drug fueled raging, misogynistic groupie abuse, onstage antics, etc.). Well, that is, aside from Buckley’s abiding love for LED ZEPPELIN. He’s a total sicko for them, which is usually the kind of credential that turns me off. But, Ben Harper’s story of Buckley climbing the scaffolding to get a unique look at the PAGE & PLANT set at Glastonbury 1995 proves that his devotion to their music was unparalleled.

    That monastic devotion to a sound, the sound, provides a through line for the film. The power of music to touch and change lives was central to Buckley’s existence. Even if his music hasn’t yet affected me as much as it has others, I still recognize that it is a burst of unadulterated humanity expressed through frequency and amplification.

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Trans History: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (Alex L. Combs & Andrew Eakett, Candlewick Press, 2025)

    For folks who have learned about trans and nonbinary identities in the last 10-15 years of pop culture representation, this graphic text history of people who identify as trans will be a welcome addition to their reading lists. The library that I got it from had it classified as Young Adult, but don’t let that choice sway you. Though young adolescents may be its intended audience, it is full of information that readers of all ages need to know. I say that with plenty of hedging. What I might find new or useful might be old hat or misinformation to you. That’s the funny thing about background knowledge. A writer (and illustrator) have to assume it when creating a text, but everyone’s experiences (both lived and read) vary. It probably reveals more about me than the text when I say that I found it full of new information and names that represent trans and nonbinary identities throughout history.

    If nothing else, this text provides a firm rebuttal to the idea that transgender and nonbinary identities are a modern, western convention. It would be nice if bigots who are misinformed or uninformed of this history were required to read and discuss this book as part of their education. I couch that statement as a hypothetical not only because I know such people would never willingly read the book but also because simply exposing people to information does not automatically result in a change in their perspectives. Still, this book's utility in discussing its topics is so high that I am sure it will be subject to a book ban from those very bigots who are scared of their own shadows.

    As the subtitle indicates, the text addresses a variety of cultures and eras where people who lived outside the conventional gender binary have left their mark in the historical record. The authors begin with a helpful preface that reminds the reader that the “ancient history” section (and even some of the more recent sections) feature stories of people who might not recognize modern terms and identities discussed later in the book. Some of those names include Elagabalus, Antonio de Erauso, We’wha, and Lucy Hicks Anderson. Even so, the authors are correct to position the telling of these stories as a challenge to white, cishet histories that take up a great deal of space, especially in the United States.

    A really cool aspect of the book is the inclusion of primary sources and content experts in the eras and people in each chapter. When I pick up a book like this one, I assume it will be full of information that might be easily searchable online (if I were so motivated — and if search engines were as good as they were 5-10 years ago!). That is, I cynically think well, I could probably just read a couple of Wikipedia entries and get the same info that’s in this book. I’m glad to be wrong here. I, of course, would not have been informed enough to accurately search for 90 percent of the names mentioned in the book, and some of the experts quoted here have given their words directly to the authors. So, these quotes exist nowhere else. Simply searching the internet won’t get you the same reading experience that’s presented here, and that’s before you consider the value of the images that accompany the text. The choice to have shades of pink, purple, lavender makes it clear that this book foregrounds people with trans and nonbinary identities. There’s plenty of black and white to offset the richness of the other colors used; suffice to say that this book is a pleasure to look at.

    The book’s final section really pushed it over the edge from being merely interesting to being essential. Combs is the primary author, and he leads off this section by acknowledging his positionality as a co-creator of the text. Instead of leaving the “Present Moment” chapter up to himself as the sole interpretive source, he calls in a dozen other folks to tell their own stories or stories important to them. It’s no mere afterthought. He explains how “As I talked with and learned from them, I made new choices about what shape the entire book was going to take” (p. 258). It’s not like he invited an old friend onstage to cover a song that friend’s band used to sing just to give a compliment or credit. The welcoming of those friends onstage (if we’re keeping with the gig metaphor) caused a recalibration of the entire show to that point and necessitated wholesale revision of the setlist for next time. Combs’ extensive comments in each contributor’s section of the Acknowledgments prove that he took their input seriously throughout the project. There are references to sensitivity readers and other collaborators as well. Eakett’s part of the “Present Moment” section provides further evidence of the inherently collaborative nature of this work. He recounts some of the processes involved in supporting Combs with the text and remarks “At some point, we stopped calling it his book… and started calling it our book” (p. 334, emphasis in original). There are two names on the cover of the book, but that is a limitation of publication. There are dozens of collaborators, researchers, activists, artists, and authors—not to mention names from times before who are the focus of the text—that made this book possible. Do your part by reading it and sharing it with someone who could stand to learn from that example of community-inspired historical narrative.

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Hardcore California: A History of Punk and New Wave (Peter Belsito & Bob Davis, Last Gasp of San Francisco, 1983)

    It’s a shame that this book isn’t widely available. It’s essentially a scene report from Los Angeles and San Francisco in the late ‘70s to the early ‘80s. The best part is that there are few authorial voices involved. I love punk oral histories that are written in retrospect (Please Kill Me, We Got the Neutron Bomb, NYHC: New York Hardcore 1980-1990, etc.), but there’s something to be said for having a document that captures the thoughts, feelings, and viewpoints of people from the scene at the time it was happening. Short of reading issues of Slash, Search and Destroy, Flipside, or Ripper, you’re not going to get this kind of info anywhere else. I deliberately did not list punk Bible Maximum Rocknroll because that zine started at the tail end of the events covered in this book. In fact, it is striking to see it referenced as a radio show that “Tim Yohannon, Jeff Bale, Jello Biafra, Ruth Schwartz, and Ray Farrell” (p. 96) started as a way to get underground music and hardcore punk on the radio. That is the story, at least according to author and editor Peter Belsito’s write-up of the SF scene circa 1979. Contributors Craig Lee and Shreader (then only 16!) give their complementary perspectives on the LA scene in the first half of the book. With the analysis limited to these three voices (as well as a brief intro by Jonathan Formula and a Preface by Belsito and Bob Davis), you are getting an authentic take on what the scene was like at the time. Not a perfect image, not the final word, but a genuine reflection of what it meant to be in California and to participate in transition from punk to hardcore punk, art punk, post-punk, rockabilly, new wave, and more. This is an indispensable document.

    What makes this contemporary account so fascinating is the double-edged sword of hindsight. On one side of the blade, it is wild to read in 2025 about the explosion of hardcore in 1981-1982 as some kind of death knell for the punk scene writ large. It’s humbling to think that just a few years, even months, after some of these bands had formed that the scene was dying or over or stale or on its way out. For many, that was the case. The violence, the popularity (in relative terms), the changing sound were all factors that participants could point to for proof that things had changed and it was time to move on. On the other side of the blade, you have many of these bands still going today in some form or another (e.g., BLACK FLAG, DEAD KENNEDYS, X, CIRCLE JERKS, The GO-GO’s). There are also plenty of bands that stopped in the timeframe of this book that are deeply influential to this day (e.g. GERMS, The MIDDLE CLASS, SCREAMERS, The BAGS, etc.). The reason it’s interesting to read about these bands in an account from that time is there is no consideration given to their legacy or their impact. They are just another band in the endless list of those around at the time. For instance, this is likely one of the only places you can read hickish as a description for DESCENDENTS. Both Lee and Shreader use that term to discuss the version of that band that had yet to record “Milo Goes to College.” You’ll also see a full-page spread of a crowd doing “The Huntington Beach Shuffle,” which is the beginning of moshing (as distinct from pogoing) as we know it. The fact that the location name is spelled out instead of being an initialism and that it’s the “shuffle” instead of the “strut” dates this book to a particular point in time. Anyone who has read about the history of Washington D.C.’s punk scene knows that its members took this style of dancing back with them to the east coast and told everyone it was “the HB strut.” Little moments like these capture the changes in language that occurred because of the changes in the scene. Noticing those details is part of the fun of reading something written for posterity but without the benefit of hindsight.

    As interesting and informative as the words are, the photos are even more incredible. You’ve got some Glen E. Friedman and Ed Colver shots you’ve probably seen before (and do need to see again) along with others that for all I know are exclusive to this book. I hadn’t heard of f-stop Fitzgerald before opening this book; he has possibly the best punk photographer name I’ve ever heard. Some of the band photos are cool and all, but there are just as many pictures of punks who achieved enough notoriety to be worthy of photographing. Those images, along with flyers and album art, make this a great resource for learning about punk visual aesthetics. (Either Fucked Up and Photocopied or Radio Silence would be good places to look for additional info on visual manifestations of punk.) The bittersweet part of looking at the photos is knowing there were at least twice as many that didn’t make the final cut for the book. I love that they put a BAD POSTURE photo on the cover. You can hardly tell it’s them unless you know that their singer was seven feet tall. I didn’t know that until I read this book and their name suddenly makes a lot more sense. “Get Tough” is an all-timer.

    Anyway, I’m rambling, so I will wrap this up with a rhetorical question that comes to mind every time I read a book like this one or hold an excellently done punk or HC reissue in my hands. Frank Hanney of FOURTEEN OR FIGHT asked it on “Aggressive Collector” from their demo and first record in 2002. He wondered “wouldn’t the scene today be infinitely better if angry kids from Bogotá to Wichita had access to the music and collective history of the disillusioned kids that came before them?” Yeah they would. And, as Frank laments on that song, eBay (and now Discogs) puts crucial documents like records, tapes, zines, books, and flyers beyond the reach of anyone but collectors who are willing to pay top dollar for these cultural artifacts. If not for the Chicago Public Library’s closed reserves, I never would have been so lucky to have been able to access this book and its incredible historical perspectives.

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Paper Airplane, Vol. 1 (edited by Nick Norlen, Paper Airplane Publishing, 2025)

    Any time I try to get the attention of a group of kids by hand-whistling, I’m surprised by how well it works. I can make a shrill enough sound to interrupt their brain waves. Once they pay attention again, they ask “How do you do that?” and I think about how I just learned it from friends or classmates when I was growing up. It’s as second-nature to me as learning how to play tag, make a fortune teller, draw the MASH grid, or look for all the letters of the alphabet (in sequence) on signs and license plates while on a road trip. I don’t have specific memories of the first time I engaged with those activities—they are simply a part of my childhood and the lore of the playground or campground.

    If for some reason I couldn’t have figured out how to hand-whistle through being socialized into it by my peers, I would have learned about it in the Klutz, Inc. book Kids Shenanigans eventually. A glance at that book’s table of contents reminds me of the time-killing activities and tricks that I had either already learned or had yet to put into practice as a youth. I still never got the hang of snapping someone’s belt loops… Regardless, Nick Norlen, the editor behind Paper Airplane has achieved a similar sense of wonder and learning by bringing together a group of authors, artists, puzzlers, and researchers who share a wide variety of highly engaging articles, activities, and assignments for the first volume of what I hope is a long-running concern. The table of contents of Paper Airplane made me think about how we learn those childhood and young adolescent tricks and games in the absence of formal schooling on them. In a Bluesky post, contributor Kory Stamper positioned Paper Airplane as being kind of like Highlights magazine, but for adults. This first volume succeeded in drawing me in for a quick read with the promise of a deeper perusal still to come.

    You can read all about the magazine online, so I will spare you from a dry run-down of its contents. (Purchase it here.) It is designed to be read on a tablet or laptop or desktop screen (i.e., not a phone) and it honestly deserves a print edition. I thought about going to the local library to print a one-off version of it for myself, but stopped when I realized its page count is not divisible by four, so it would not come out as an even number of signatures. I bet Norlen did that on purpose just to foil folks like me from making bootlegs. For real, though, the pages look great on my screen and some of the incredibly detailed images would lose something if run through a laser or inkjet printing process. The problem with a PDF is that it’s not going to show signs of wear and tear over the years as proof of my repeated readings of the text. It’s always going to be as pristine as the day I downloaded it. At least I can print out some of the puzzle pages to solve with pen or pencil if I’m so inclined.

    OK, so I will highlight some particulars just because I think the contributors deserve to hear specific praise. The question that kicks off the first feature is “What's the most memorable thing you've ever cut from a piece of your writing?” and is full of interesting, brief excerpts that would have been on the cutting-room floor or been subject to the file-drawer problem if not for Paper Airplane. Kory Stamper’s “The Shape of Color” is an excerpt from her upcoming book, True Color: The Strange and Spectacular History of Defining Color–from Azure to Zinc Pink and looks to be as engrossing as her first one, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. Another excerpt appears in the form of Phenomena: An Infographic Guide to Almost Everything by Camille Juneau and The Shelf Studio. It makes me think of technical engineering blueprints for parts of the natural world (and some from the human-made one). So that’s two books I’ve already added to my reading list for next year. The wordplay section by editor Norlen is a fun twist on the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game and Dave Shay’s "Venmo Nanofiction" recalls 1932’s Vanity Fair piece, “Ordeal by Cheque” by Wuther Crue. I haven’t mentioned the puzzles, artwork, photos, or comics, either. There are even black-and-white reproducible pages for some of the artwork if you want to color them in yourself! Just know that there is not a single dull moment in the 74 full-color pages of Paper Airplane, Vol. 1. Here’s to many more volumes in the future!

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Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Liz Pelly, One Signal Publishers / Atria, 2025)

    This book is excellent at helping to explain how music became content and how we became discontent with that transition. Liz Pelly has roots in DIY music booking / promotion (a thankless task if there ever was one) and brings that lens to the immense corporate flattening that streaming music represents. It’s Spotify that specifically catches her attention in this analysis, which makes her critique unique to that platform; however, you will likely recognize in its specifics some aspects that apply in general to Apple Music or Amazon Music. I was a bit weary of reading another book about streaming music, given that I’d read Nick Seaver’s Computing Taste not too long ago and the texts seemed similar at first blush. They’re less similar than they are complementary, so I’d recommend reading both.

    It’s deeply clarifying to understand that Spotify began not as a music concern, but as a way to get ads in front of eyeballs. Ads are annoying, and they are the reason the platform exists. It’s not because Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon were diehard music lovers. As Pelly writes, “that’s what music was to Spotify in its early days: a traffic source for its advertising product” (p. 13). Ek and Lorentzon were part of Sweden’s software and media piracy scene, so they had familiarity with file-sharing of different kinds of media. It’s almost incidental to their story that Spotify features music. I had a different idea when I first used the service in 2012 or so. I knew of iTunes and Amazon Music, which were existing companies that pivoted to include music. Pandora and Rhapsody, among other “radio” based options weren’t interesting to me because I wanted more control over what I was listening to. With Spotify, I thought I’d found it, and in so doing, found a way to enjoy music digitally that didn’t involve MediaFire / YouSendIt / MegaUpload links or cryptic blog posts. (The days of Napster, Audiogalaxy, and Kazaa being long gone.) Little did I know that the original source for much of the earliest songs on the platform was via piracy itself, as proven by the presence of music by a band of Rasmus Fleischer’s. His band’s music had only ever been distributed via PirateBay, though it ended up on Spotify (p. 15). With a beginning like that, it’s no surprise that Spotify would later be so uncompromising in its mistreatment of the artists that use its platform.

    Pelly argues early in the book that the Spotify employees in charge of creating and maintaining playlists are a large part of what made the foregrounding of ad revenue over music listening so successful. Essentially, the listening preferences of individuals, when taken en masse, reveal something about what is popular on the platform. If you’re like me, you think that these data would be useful in learning what kind of music is popular to whom and where. Pelly notes that the number of streams a song has are not the same thing as a firm assent for the song above any other. She clarifies that “streams are, in fact, not votes. Especially not when the streams are most earned by music just inoffensive enough to not get shut off” (p. 33). So it’s not the gripping hook of a song you can’t stop playing on repeat that is the measure of success for Spotify. It’s the idea that you will have the app running in the background to give some texture to your day as you go about living your life. (This “lean-back” listening [ch.3] is contrasted elsewhere in the text with “lean-in” listening, which is something I didn’t know I had been doing forever.) For a user who just taps on a colorful tile for a playlist and then lets the algorithm do its work, the gravest sin is to skip a song on a playlist. This action gives the playlist editors information about what doesn’t engage users on a certain list. They want there to be no reason to engage with the app again once you’ve opened it for the day. Pelly explains how this process turns music listening on its head by relating how “Over time, though, the quest for a frictionless user experience resulted in a deluge of frictionless music: an ease of use that, in turn, facilitated easy listening” (p. 40). Music that is just worthy enough to keep on in the background, but isn’t worth investigating or “leaning into” for additional engagement. It’s a painting on your wall that’s there just because you had a blank space and not because you liked how it looked. I do see the benefit of listening to certain artists or albums as I read or write, but the idea of doing some kind of set-it-and-forget-it maneuver with music just seems icky to me. I deserve better; the artists deserve better.

    The more I read the book, the more the inability of Spotify’s executives to actually enjoy music became clearer and clearer. When art is flattened to the metadata that describe it, that’s what happens. A song file has descriptors such as length, volume, pitch, tempo, timbre, rhythm, and melody, among other factors. These are elements that computers can (more or less) identify accurately for the purpose of adding to a playlist by throwing together similar sounding songs. There are times, though, when the songs that go together make no sense or are jarring. Pelly shares the example of ANOHNI’s track “Why Am I Alive Now?” being on a “Chill Vibes” playlist (p. 54). Turns out the unchill, depressing mood of the song escaped the algorithm’s and playlisters’ detection. Rather than stopping there, Pelly uses this instance to interview ANOHNI about the importance of putting music in context without an algorithm. For her, it’s true that “Sometimes a record only needed to be listened to five times in order for a profound transaction to have taken place” (p. 54). So, the “lean-back” listening of many Spotify listeners, which involves just keeping music on as part of the ambience, results in a clear disconnection between the artist and their craft. There’s no real transaction happening except for the the financial one.

    The importance of context isn’t limited to artists thinking their songs have been misappropriated either. Pelly interviewed a Spotify engineer, who had similar thoughts to ANOHNI’s about the high power of an album having no correlation to an equally high number of listening sessions. He tells her how “records that I would consider really life-changing…  in terms of listening time, wouldn’t even show up in my top 100… There is a lot of music that listeners find important but it’s not what you want to listen to all day” (p. 101). There are definitely records that can be exhausting to get through, not because of their low quality. They are an experience and it is necessary to give your full attention to them. You might feel drained or enlightened after hearing them; either way, you might not rush to play them again. These comments about the importance of the context of listening to a certain record or song reminded me of an email exchange I had with a friend I’d traded music zines with over the years. He wanted to write about a band from the city where I lived at the time, so I excitedly sent him multiple MP3s of their music, figuring that would be the easiest way for someone in the U.S. to share music with someone in Australia in 2009. I was a little surprised at his response, which read “I won't download that stuff as I don’t have the time to listen to them attentively at the moment. I only really want to listen to music when I can pay it attention, and not in between school and home or while I'm stuffing packages. I'm finding more and more that my brain is adjusting to music and not listening to it, just *accepting* it. This bothers me.”

    If it’s not the physical environment of listening to music that matters, then maybe the social aspect of sharing music is what makes it click. Anyone lucky enough to have received a mixtape from a friend, acquaintance, or sibling knows the power of music as an influence. That power is integral to its format. Pelly notes the distinction between mixtape intimacy and corporate surveillance (pp. 29-30) in a way that recalls Marc Masters’ argument in High Bias. The playlist that Spotify generates for you based on your own listening preferences is not going to push your tastes or challenge you the way a mixtape might. Even Spotify’s “Discover” feature is less about finding new sounds as it is getting to the core of what you already like. As Pelly puts it, there are more important aspects of music than engagement: the product was becoming blatantly less about connecting users to the world of music, and more about treating your own taste as a world of its own to be studied and sorted, packaged and sold (p. 99). This reversal of what discovery should mean recalls Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which argues that “free” online services have not the user, but the user’s behavior as their product. In other words, it is worth a lot of money to corporations to predict what you are likely to do in the future. If they can get you to keep navel-gazing in your playlist of choice, they’ve won. You are trapped in their algorithm.

    Coincidentally, a podcast I was listening to around the time I was reading the book featured drummer Nick Jett of TERROR (more importantly, he is the guy who recorded the first two KNIFE FIGHT records) The episode included a discussion of streaming and how it influenced his band’s song choices for their setlist. He mentioned how TERROR started playing a certain song because “it’s like number five on our Spotify or something like that.” The host agrees and says he thinks more bands should “play the songs people are clearly listening to” by consulting streaming info. Jett understands that, but also thinks it’s “crazy” that some bands write their setlists based on their Spotify plays. It would have never occurred to me for a band to cater to their audience that much. What a perverse incentive to consider.

    The social element of music is also present in the fact that other humans are making the tunes. Well, there’s some AI-generated music out there, but Spotify’s structure has also ushered in “ghost artists,” who exist to mimic certain sounds. Imagine session musicians hired to write songs that are pastiches or replicas of music in a specific genre. Regarding these artists, one of Pelly’s sources explained how “there was a problematic racial dimension to the unfairness of the program, when stock music tracks started commonly being used in playlists historically dominated by artists of color” (pp. 66-67). So, there’s a racially gentrifying homogenization to the recommendations of the algorithms. There’s no need to pay licensing fees for actual music made by real people who are racial minorities when you can get a white dude in Sweden or the U.S. to sound like them and pay the royalties that way. It’s a rip off, such a rip off.

    That’s the overall message here. Streaming services, especially Spotify, are a rip-off all around. Aside from all the issues I’ve discussed already, Spotify continues to pay its artists penny-fractions for their thousands of streams, even as it increased its monthly fee for its premium service in late 2023. That fact, and Ek’s support of AI for military purposes via investment in German company Helsing, was enough for me to drop Spotify at the end of that year. I’m not going to pretend Apple Music is better. I am glad to support artists that make their music available on Bandcamp and I still occasionally browse the bins at Reckless Records when I’m in the city. You should find a way to more directly support the artists and labels you enjoy, especially as genre meanings get blurred on streaming services to the point that the bright line between independent and major labels is fading. Pelly shares the words of “an independent label owner” who indicated that Spotify’s “All New Indie” playlist is missing the guitar-forward music that is typically associated with the phrase indie rock. They claim “now it’s just this watered down pop sound that has taken over” (p. 182). What better time to recommend you listen to The INMATES' “You’re Not a Part of Us”?

Watered down pop — WE DON’T NEED YOU!

Corporate shit rock — WE DON’T NEED YOU!

Trendy fashion plates — WE DON’T NEED YOU!

Bandwagon fakes — WE DON’T NEED YOU!

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