When the offer came down several weeks ago to return to one of my most beloved venues on Earth, Saint Vitus Bar, to play live music for the first time since December 2020, I said yes without a second thought. I was vaccinated, which at the time meant walking into…

In a turn every bit as nostalgic as the rebirth of blue hair and Doc Martens as Gen Z aesthetic, the other day Salon posted a “New Atheists Are Terrible” article. Back in the mid aughts, one could always depend on Salon for these. As your browser was loaded down…

Response to Glenn Danzig’s recent comments that punk as he knew it couldn’t have happened today because of woke cancellation has been simultaneously expected and absurd. Expected because any chance for middle aged punks to prove they’re not aging by commenting “old man yells at cloud” or “get off my…

“Trump and the modern GOP don’t have policies, it’s just improvisation, shitposting and culture war grievance.” This line became so popular over the course of Trump’s term it became an article of faith amongst the commentariat. To deviate from it became a kind of heresy. …

Reading Twitter is a nightmare every single day. Plenty of people would agree, but perhaps not for the reason I would give. What I find almost panic-inducing is the manner in which smart, serious people continue engaging as if real people are airing real feelings about real issues. …

Try the following experiment: think of a value that you consider important. It’s a moral virtue, therefore it’s a political good. Now imagine someone online has accused someone else online of violating that virtue. A large group of people has responded publicly to this violation, in a way that corresponds…

There is a counterintuitively important political dimension to the preoccupation with triviality. When energy and resources, like the now lucrative and valuable resource of attention, are devoted to the inconsequential, the net effect on outcomes is not trivial. So is it or is it not OK to smash a guitar…

If it isn’t obvious by now, my accounting of counterculture throughout these posts treads very close to the mainstream. The reason for this is that my goal is to track trends as they rose from the higher and more visible echelons of the underground into the mainstream. …

With the emergence of the social web and the newsfeed in around 2006/7 and the election of Barack Obama, there was a widespread sense amongst both conservatives and liberals that progressive values on the march. Progressives bragged about it, conservatives stewed. I recall a new triumphalism around the 2012 election…