by Akim Reinhardt
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.
This was the year 1980, and the Iran hostage crisis was chugging along. Soon, America’s most watched and trusted newsman, Walter Cronkite of CBS, was signing off his nightly broadcast with an addition. Instead of just “And that’s the way it was,” followed by the day’s date, he was now adding: “And that’s the way it was [that day’s date], the [X] day of captivity for American hostages in Iran.” The last time he signed off this way, on January 20, 1981. It was the 444th day.
That running tally, the images of blindfolded hostages, and other near-constant media discussions were a relentless source of U.S. shame and impotence. The saga dragged on and on. The American citizenry, much more homogeneous then than it is now (ca. 80% white, 12% black, and >90% native-born), was united in its outrage and frustration. Nearly everyone in the United States hated Iran, or at least specifically, the Iranian revolutionaries holding American hostages. And that mass hatred was made easy by mass ignorance.
We all heard, over and over, that the fundamentalist Muslim revolutionaries who’d captured the U.S. embassy and kidnapped some of its staff had overthrown the Shah of Iran. Politicians and the media kept telling us that the Shah had been a friend of the United States. But what hardly any Americans knew was that the Shah had been in power only because back in 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had directed the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6, to foment a coup against Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. Read more »
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?
I teach at a large, public university in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. For about a decade now, the upper administration has had a habit of sending “comforting” emails whenever there’s a major school shooting. Of course there are far too many school shootings in America to send a note for each one, so I suppose the administration tries to keep it “relevant,” for lack of a better word. These heartfelt missives arrive in my Inbox once or twice a year, typically after some lunatic shoots up a college campus. So far as I can tell, they go to everyone. To every faculty member, staff member, and student on campus. To 25,000 people or more.
I am sitting on the couch of our discontent. The Robot Overlords™ are circling. Shall we fight them, as would a sassy little girl and her aging, unshaven action star caretaker in the Hollywood rendition of our feel good dystopian future? Shall we clamp our hands over our ears, shut our eyes, and yell “Nah! Nah! Nah! Nah! Nah!”? Shall we bow down and let the late stage digital revolution wash over us, quietly and obediently resigning ourselves to all that comes next, whether or not includes us?
You don’t have to fuck me. Or give me any money. You don’t have to shave your head or adopt a peculiar diet or wear an ugly smock or come live in my compound among fellow cult members. You don’t even have to believe in anything.