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Print or Perish: Why the Left Needs to Resurrect Alt-Weeklies to Rebuild Its Base
After ten years running a digital alt-news site in Western Massachusetts, I came to a hard truth: we’re not reaching the working class through podcasts, Substacks, or social media. This essay blends personal narrative with political strategy to argue that the American left needs to resurrect a forgotten tool of organizing and solidarity—the local print […]
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Fame vs Celebrity
Orientation Questions about fame and celebrity What does it mean to be famous? Does being famous go all the way back to hunter-gatherers or does it have an origin later in history? What does it mean to be a celebrity? Is it common in all societies or do celebrities emerge at a certain point in […]
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Climate Collapse: The Grim Silence Of Our Leaders
None of us has previously witnessed a barrage of extreme weather events of the kind that has been devastating lives across the globe this summer. Canadian wildfires the size of Austria, a Hawaiian town incinerated by a hurricane-fuelled firestorm, a Greek island devastated by three years of rainfall in a single day, a Libyan town […]
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My Love Affair with Print Newspapers
It all began with baseball. I was growing up in the 1940s in Rochester, N.Y., a farm team for the St. Louis Cardinals. I couldn’t get enough of them in the first newspaper I ever read, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. The instant it came I grabbed the sports pages, flopped myself down on the […]
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Killing the Story: Bakhmut, Nick Cohen, Kakhovka, Nord Stream, and Piers Morgan
The late writer, broadcaster and wit Clive James formulated what he called the ‘Barry Manilow Law’: ‘Everyone you know thinks Barry Manilow is absolutely terrible. But everyone you don’t know thinks he’s great.’ (James, cited Martin Amis, Inside Story, Vintage, 2020, e-book, p.74) A Media Lens version of this might read: ‘Everyone you know thinks […]
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Souls for Sale
In a society built on lies, the search for truth is a game. Consider the debate surrounding alleged ‘threats’ to the BBC’s ‘independence’, even as the BBC itself reports of its outgoing chairman: ‘As for Mr Sharp’s departure, I understand conversations between the BBC and the government have been had in recent days. You’d expect […]
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