Articles

 “Sublime Madness”: Anarchists, Psychiatric Survivors, Emma Goldman & Harriet Tubman   When the state becomes chillingly evil—enacting a Fugitive Slave Act to criminalize those helping to free slaves, or financing prisons and wars for the benefit of sociopathic profiteers—and when dissent is impotent and defiance is required, we need the sublimely mad. For his 2013 piece […]

The Cincinnati Bengals, no longer simply a local frustration, are now a national laughingstock. Bengals rulers are blatantly inept, making decisions so obviously wrong that young children can predict negative consequences. The Bengals disaster would not have surprised the great American revolutionary Thomas Paine, who had contempt for “hereditary succession.” In Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” which […]

For most of us—excepting possibly Mussolini, Trump, and other bully boasters—the word authoritarian is a pejorative. In contrast, many of us want to define ourselves and our heroes as anti-authoritarians, and this has resulted in some curious definitions of that term. The American Heritage Dictionary defines authoritarianism as “characterized by or favoring absolute obedience to […]

What variable is associated with a 12 times greater likelihood of a suicide attempt—and also doubles the likelihood of cancer, heart disease, or stroke? In the late 1990s, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study revealed a stunningly powerful relationship between childhood trauma and later adult emotional difficulties and physical health problems. Two decades after the […]

While not as well-known as “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Perfect Day,” and not one of the classics he wrote for the Velvet Underground (such as “Heroin” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror”), Lou Reed’s “Kill Your Sons,” about his electroconvulsive “therapy” (ECT) as a 17-year-old, gives voice to an event that majorly radicalized him […]