There is no mistaking those paw prints. They’re from a bear—no doubt about it. Tom and his patrol partner, Kersti, often spot the animal on the monitor during their night shifts. From their command center in Piusa, in southern Estonia...
& this is what we mean when we say body count. first, a swaddling. then, betwixt damp & ordinary gums hangs a mess hall. we offer a martyr to the blowtorch’s bright kelvin spit and call it supper. an autopsy worth its salt.
Melon Floyd was born out in the Salts, 1881, in the border country between Winnemucca and Susanville—before they recorded Black voices on acetate, before his knife-throwing contest with Charlie Long, before “Laughing Man Blues.” His father...
In the Sonoran Desert, my brother hands me a revolver. In place of tenderness he tells me to kill a woodpecker. It’s injured, on its back like a sunbather thrashing in a gravel bed.
For more than fifty years, I have been studying and writing about political repression and higher education, with a special emphasis on McCarthyism, long considered by historians to be the most serious assault on academic freedom since the...
My dream of being a professional writer, which I’d been pursuing in earnest since I was a teenager, had objectively come true. This wasn’t misery, not really. This was happiness, hiding. Nevertheless, the nagging dissatisfaction I felt made...
