Dangerous Animals

One day in September last year, John Kartsounis was gazing down from a plane window at Cape Cod, the sandy peninsula that juts from the state of Massachusetts into the North Atlantic in the shape of a clenched arm. It was a clear day, and he thought he could make out the public beach where […]

Jarett Kobek – Only Americans Burn in Hell

An immortal faery queen from a magical gynocratic island arrives in Los Angeles to track down her missing daughter. This is actually the entire plot of a novel entitled Only Americans Burn in Hell. Of course, as in Jarett Kobek’s previous book, I Hate the Internet, the fictional element is a foil, with most of the pages […]

Down the Road from Charlottesville

As a young boy, he would go into the woods to hunt squirrels and rabbits with pellet guns. He would fish in a river right next to the family home. His father wasn’t an especially passionate hunter, but they would go together once a year, in deer season. “I grew up in nature,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted my own kids to grow up with acreage around them.” […]

The Dead Pimp, and Other Lessons

Dennis Hof was no run-of-the-mill pimp. He had starred in Cathouse, an HBO reality series set in one of his brothels, and authored a memoir, The Art of the Pimp. He was also the subject of rape allegations by multiple former employees. But Chuck Muth had realised the obvious: that, in the age of Trump, rape allegations against a famous TV pimp could be dismissed […]

Trump Rides West

On September 6th last year, President Donald Trump kicked off the autumn campaign season with a rally in Billings, Montana. He’d campaigned throughout the spring, and almost non-stop over the summer as well – indeed, he’d never really stopped campaigning since his own election victory – but now the primaries were over and the country was […]

From the Campaign Trail in Montana

“Are you here for the Jon event?” a young volunteer asked me as I arrived. The Jon event was taking place at lunchtime in late October, in a mid-sized function room on the campus of Montana State University, in the city of Bozeman. MSU was founded as an agricultural college by federal land grant in […]

The Torturer

CO-WRITTEN WITH JULIANO FIORI People say that this guy isn’t a concrete threat, said “Raíssa Leal, a 25-year-old student, as she left another event and headed home to her favela community in Jacarepaguá. “But his supporters are.” Indianara Siqueira, a veteran transgender rights activist attending a recent protest, reeled off a list of incidents she’d […]