by Akim Reinhardt
I was born before language. Only waterfalls and wind and tumbling rocks.
Nothing needed to be said if you only knew how to listen.
I still remember my grandparents phone number. 828-3973. They, on the other side of the Bronx, had the same area code as us, as the whole city: 212. No need to add it. Seven digits were plenty.
Placing my finger in our rotary phone’s circular template led to a swirling dance when dialing their number. Long, short, long short, long, long, short. Our own number was a marathon for whoever dared to spin it. 2 sixes, 3 sevens, an eight, and a nine.
My grandmother was the talkative one. A natural polyglot who got spit out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and eventually into the Lower Eastside before she married my grandfather and he took her up to the South Bronx. Hungarian from her family, Yiddish from being a European Jew, Romanian from the post-WWI schools, and English in the new country. She was completely fluent in her fourth language, with some slight quirks. “Do you have what to drink?”
My grandfather never spoke another word of Polish after he and his family got chased out, and just in time. Despite coming over as a teen, his English was forever deeply accented and a little broken. Yiddish was his main language, and as a result, my mother’s first. She learned English on the playground. I loved my grandfather deeply, but talking to him on the phone was awkward. He would ask rote questions, mostly the same ones each time. I would offer quiet, curt responses. We were much better in person, where he taught me how to play chess and read the stock page.
My best friend during elementary school lived in the next building. Our phone time was minimal. Why bother when we could just meet in the playground, or one of us could hop over to the other’s apartment on a bad weather day. You home? Okay, I’m coming over.
By high school, some of my friends were a little further flung, a neighborhood away. But by then we were building our masculinities. Our fathers and popular culture made it clear that yakking on the phone was for girls. Don’t be a chatty Cathy. Or a yenta, in my grandparents’ lingo. Read more »
For about 450 years, the western European colonial powers shit all over the world in spectacular fashion. Genocide across the Americas and the trans-Atlantic slave trade were the main drivers during the first phase. By the mid-19th century, European colonialism was approaching its bloody apogee with more genocide in Australia, the carving up of much of Asia, and eventually the scramble for Africa.
The Republican Party has forever faced a serious statistical obstacle: There are always more Democrats. Never once since the GOP was founded in 1854 have there been more registered Republicans than Democrats in the United States. Democrats are always more numerous. So how can Republicans win?
The only time I met Rex Reed, I was about seven years old. I went with my dad to Reed’s apartment in The Dakota on Central Park West so he could offer an estimate on painting the place. My father ran a very small general contracting business called Ken’s Home Improvements. Typical jobs involved him and one or two other workers. His theory on acquiring customers was to work for rich people since they had money; economies of scale were anathema to his soul. Reed qualified. A film and cultural critic for the New York Times, GQ, and Vogue, he’d been a judge for both the Berlin and Venice International Film Festivals by the time my little feet traipsed across his hardwood floors in the famous 19th century building with custom apartments and famous residents such as John and Yoko, and 
I was 12 years old when I walked down a street in my Bronx neighborhood and saw the poster in the window of Cappie’s. Cappie’s was a certain kind of corner store common in 20th century New York. It sold newspapers and magazines, candy and soda, lotto tickets, cigarettes, and various tchotchkes aimed at kids and teens. Cheap toys, baseball cards, posters, etc. Most of their posters were pinups of the era’s sex pots such as this or that Charlie’s Angels in various states of near nudity. But this poster featured a cartoon mouse, a clear copyright infringement on Walt Disney’s famed vermin. The caption read: Hey, Iran! The mouse held an American flag in one hand. The other flipped the bird.
A thought has been nagging at me lately. Are most shitty people not very bright?
Art is dangerous. It’s time people remembered that and recognized the fullness of it. For if art is to remain important or even relevant in the current moment, then it’s long past time artists stopped flashing dull claws and pretending they had what it takes to slice through ignorance. We need them swallow their feel-good clichés and to begin sharpening their blades. We need dangerous art, and we cannot afford much more art that its creators believe is dangerous when it is not.
Last spring, American documentary film maker Ken Burns gave a commencement address at Brandeis University in Boston. Burns is a talented speaker, adept at spinning uplifting yarns, and 
Are you savvy?
Some people use religion to get their life together. Good for them. I’m all for it. Although I myself am an atheist, I don’t think it much matters how someone gets their life together so long as they do.
Historians have spilled much ink analyzing and interpreting all of the U.S. presidential elections, dating back to George Washington’s first go in 1788. But a handful of contests get more attention than others. Some elections, besides being important for all the usual reasons, also provide insights into their eras’ zeitgeist, and proved to be tremendously influential far beyond the four years they were intended to frame.
There are only four U.S. states where white people are 
The turn of the 21st century saw a burst of atheistic declarations and critiques in the United States and Great Britain, led by a small group of celebrity atheists including Philosopher Daniel Dennett, Biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist Christopher Hitchens. I have always found this New Atheism, as the movement is often called, to be a mixed bag. It was long overdue, and many good (if obvious) points were made. However, there was also a fair bit of navel-gazing and even stupidity. And among some of the celebrity leaders, I believe, there was also a profound misunderstanding of religion, how it functions, and even its basic purposes.
Two spaces after a period, not one. If a topic sentence leading to a paragraph can get a whole new line and an indentation, then other new sentences can get an extra space. Don’t smush sentences together like puppies in a cardboard box at a WalMart parking lot. Let them breathe. Show them some affection. Teach them to shit outside.
The barbarians have won.
A little over a year ago I published 
What do we know about vampires?