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A clipping of the fight advertisement that ran in the Muncie Evening Post, September 2 1931. As part of the process of researching and writing my book about the Klan-fighting editor George Dale, I've been penning short character studies and historical sketches most every morning. It's been a nice way to get into form—like training for a fight—and a way to work through ideas on tone and voice and practice integrating heaps of often-dry research into a readable narrative. Here's a piece from the…
My well-worn copy of The Westing Game. Foundational Texts is a monthly essay series that looks at some of the culture that shaped me and how it still resonates today. Read all the installments: January: Jenny Holzer | February: The Goonies | March: The Channel 5 News Team | April: The Cave of Time | May: The Westing Game "The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east." And so begins The Westing Game, a children's mystery written in 1978 by Ellen Raskin,…
Arsenal's stadium in the rain. (pic CC 2.0 by Paul Hudson.) It had all come apart. It was supposed to be easy for Arsenal, the 140-year-old British football club from North London. They'd been on top of the Premier League for months now, a final christening in a years-long attempt to reach the top and win the league trophy for the first time in over two decades. Three years in a row they had come in second, beaten and bullied largely by Manchester City, a club who had dominated the league in…
Behind the scenes on the photo shoot for our Season 2 art. This weekend, thousands of people marched across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama to protest the rapid-fire eradication of black congressional districts across the South following the Supreme Court's latest salvo against the Voting Rights Act. The Pettus bridge is the site of Bloody Sunday where, in March 1965, marchers for voting rights, led by the late, great John Lewis, were savagely beaten by cops and racist goons as they…
I am embarrassed at the state of these g's but the only way to get better is to try. Back when this site was new, I wrote a post called "On Trying," an attempt at capturing my belief that trying is everything. Back then, we were a few years past the awful height of the pandemic, the election that ushered in Trump 2 was still in the future, and things hadn't fallen apart as completely as they have now. While I felt fairly battered from the previous few years, saying that I was trying felt like…
It takes just two pages before you're forced to make a choice in the Cave of Time. Foundational Texts is a monthly essay series for 2026 looking at some of the culture that shaped me and how it still resonates today. Read all the installments: January: Jenny Holzer | February: The Goonies | March: The Channel 5 News Team | April: The Cave of Time What if you could change everything? That was question posed to me when I picked up The Cave of Time, the first installment in the groundbreaking…
The speech referenced below really begins at 28:25, and this should play at that point but you know how technology goes. It's never lost on me the miracle that is the library. I've been spending quite a bit of time in them lately (more than usual, that is), as I've been getting deeper and deeper into research for my book. Every time I go into one I'm amazed all over again that the space is free and open and that I can access everything without credentialing or gatekeeping. At a time where…
With Donald Trump going to war against the Pope, I thought I'd revisit a time when Catholics fought the Klan.
The third installment in the monthly Foundational Texts series looks at the iconic 1980s Channel 5 News Team, and the things they taught me when I was young and now that I am old.
I came to Muncie, Indiana this week for this moment: March 24th, the night that George Dale's life changed forever. Even 104 years later, the reverberations of history stay close.
The second installment in the monthly Foundational Texts series looks at the message I took from The Goonies when I was ten and is still just as relevant today.
