A couple times an hour, a tiny swatch of a Pieter Bruegel the Elder painting flashes across my Twitter feed, courtesy of an automated account called @Bruegelbot. Bruegel’s paintings—and here we’ll just refer to him as “Bruegel,” setting aside the other painters with the same surname—are notoriously busy, packed with tiny figures going about their […]
Read More A Face in the CrowdEven if you don’t know Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s name, you’ve likely heard him speak. In January of last year, you probably saw a viral video on social media of Bregman speaking truth to power in front of some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. […]
Read More The “subversive” idea that breaks economics: What if people are largely decent?In the late 1970s and very early 1980s, Capitol Hill was one of the few neighborhoods in the country where LGBTQ+ people could largely live out of the closet. To the young people moving to Seattle from more regressive parts of the country, the area around Broadway — with its openly queer arts organizations and […]
Read More Bailey/Coy’s Legacy: Why We Need LGBTQ+ Literary SpacesI’m old enough to remember that, when Democrats were passing the Affordable Care Act through Congress, Republicans argued that they were tampering with the greatest healthcare system in the world. The argument I saw most often in comment threads and on cable news, if I recall correctly, went that a free market healthcare system made […]
Read More The Free Market Doesn’t Care if You Live or DieWhen unemployment numbers exceeded expectations last Friday, the Trump administration wasted no time in rolling out the metaphorical mission accomplished banner. President Trump himself declared the addition of two million jobs to be “the greatest comeback in American history.” While it is undeniably good news that two million Americans went back to work in April, […]
Read More We can’t keep slashing state budgets.Early this week, conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh visited popular progressive radio show The Breakfast Club to discuss the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis. “I don’t buy into the notion of white privilege,” Limbaugh said. After a second of stunned silence, Breakfast Club co-host Charlamagne tha God told Limbaugh […]
Read More On Rush Limbaugh, white privilege, and coronavirusThere’s no feeling quite like the stomach-clenching dread that hits when you hear a Nobel laureate in economics label the coronavirus recession as “a textbook example of showing that markets don’t work.” The concept of markets — defined simply as the system that allows buyers and sellers to interact — is a cornerstone of mainstream […]
Read More A Nobel Prize-winning economist says coronavirus shows ‘that markets don’t work’Bookish people, the stereotype goes, are introverts who prefer to stay home. So you’d think the recent social distancing measures would be a bibliophile’s dream: An excuse to read alone for weeks on end. That’s not the case for Queen Anne Book Company bookseller Tegan Tigani, who has been working from home since March 25. During a […]
Read More How Seattle book workers have adapted to coronavirus shutdownsAbout a year ago, AHOY Comics published the first issue of my first-ever comic book miniseries, PLANET OF THE NERDS. AHOY Editor-in-Chief “Torrid” Tom Peyer’s decades of experience saved me from a boatload of first-timer mistakes, but I also learned a few lessons over the course of writing NERDS that I’d like to share with you. […]
Read More Three Important Tips for Writing Comics, as Written by Someone Who Has No Right to Give Advice on Writing ComicsIn a special episode of the podcast Pitchfork Economics, I interviewed author and popular progressive talk radio host Thom Hartmann about his book The Hidden History of the War on Voting: Who Stole Your Vote and How to Get It Back. I’m not super-confident in my podcasting capabilities, so interviewing a professional radio guy felt […]
Read More Inside the Secret War on Voting with Thom Hartmann
