Yoko Ono's "Painting to Hammer a Nail," on display at the MCA Chicago's "Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind". One of those nails is mine. _My contract runs out with 2025 today—a terrible year after a string of bad ones—and so I requested an exit interview with HR. Here's the full transcript of our interview._ Thank you for your time with 2025 this year. We have a series of questions to better understand your experience with our year and your motivations for leaving. To begin, what was the primary factor influencing your decision to conclude this period of work? I've spent some time over the last week reflecting back on this year, and the word I keep coming back to is "unrelenting." It has been an unrelenting year from start to finish. Unrelenting at a global level, unrelenting at a national level, unrelenting at a local level, and unrelenting at a personal level. Every single time I thought there would be a break, some new level of hell would rise up. So, under those unrelenting working conditions, it was clear that this year and I were not going to be collaborating effectively in the long term. It seemed like time to leave a long time ago, to be honest, however I had to see through the end of the contract which, thankfully, is today. My only regret is that it wasn't sooner. Overall, how closely did your experience of this year align with your expectations at the outset? Great question, because I felt like I came into this year with my eyes open and my expectations _low_. Donald Trump was going to become president for the second time so there was no part of me that expected this year to be an easy one. And yet it defied even my own low expectations. Where to start? Probably with the surprise death of my mother, suddenly on a Sunday morning in June. We had a relationship that could charitably be described as "complicated," and let me tell you that nothing about a sudden death uncomplicates _anything_. Pile the exhausting work of clearing out her house on top of that and, well, it was a lot. Meanwhile, the health of our dog was on a rapid decline, my wife was struggling with a cancer scare, and we were moving our eldest kid into an apartment 2000 miles from home. And that was all in like a two month window. It was a lot. _A lot_ a lot. And that's not to mention the unrelenting assault on rights, on institutions, on schools, on _all of us_ by the government itself, which was sort of a high-pitched alarm ringing out through the whole year until it came home, literally, with ICE and Border Patrol's assault on Chicago this fall. There was no part of my expectations for the year that ended with running down the side of a road relentlessly blowing a whistle as an SUV full of masked goons ran a red light to get away. Maybe it was lack of imagination, but I sure didn't envision _that_. I'm sorry to hear all that. To change the subject to perhaps a more positive aspect of our year, which projects, initiatives, or efforts did you find most meaningful or satisfying? I think probably the main thing that kept me even slightly sane this year was the writing I did here. As I mentioned a few days ago, I set out a goal of 36 posts this year, originally planned for three a month. As things spiraled out of control this summer, that felt like a completely impossible goal. But goals are good, because they force you to try and meet them, so once I got my feet back under me a little, I forced myself to try and meet it. And, as of this post, I did. It meant writing five times a month for a few months, but that discipline helped my brain a lot. I'm not sure how I would have made it through the ICE attacks this fall without being able to turn to this space and write it all down. Beyond this site, there were two projects that were really satisfying and a lot of fun: * Santa Dan's Sticker Stocking, which I created for Says Who podcast as a way of working through some of the Says Who Sticker Club overstock, was just a joyful project to work on at a time when a little joy was a welcome thing. Buying weird little toys in bulk, stuffing cheap mesh stockings, even creating a sticker topper and hand-stapling it to 100 stockings was a total blast. * And assembling, typesetting, and (just yesterday) ordering the printing of a little perfect-bound zine compiling my favorite writing from this year was a really nice way of revisiting pieces that I'd written and flex some old typesetting muscles I haven't used in a really long time. If you haven't yet preordered They Can't Take Us All, go for it. It's $12 now and will be $15 when it ships in a few weeks. What achievements from this year do you view as your most significant? I'm still pretty stunned that I've got a book deal with the legendary radical publisher Haymarket Books to write about newspaperman George Dale's unrelenting war against the Ku Klux Klan in Muncie, Indiana in the 1920s. But what's more amazing about it is the way it all unfolded: Sometime last year, I was approached by Chicago's great Andrew Huff to do a reading in early January at a series he runs called 20x2, where twenty people give two minute talks on a topic of their choice. Last year I'd set a goal for myself to say yes to more things like that (not at all my default setting), so I agreed and then immediately forgot about it. Flash forward to a week or two before the date and I was stressing about what to talk about. I'd been reading George Dale's papers ever since election day, and so I thought I'd give a brief talk about him. Of course, I put myself _through it_ in prepping for the talk, but despite a lot of self-doubt, I went up and gave the talk. It went over really huge, including a couple other readers coming up and telling me that it should be a book. Instead, I adapted it into a blog post that came out about a month later and _that_ also went over huge, like significantly huger than anything I'd written here before, and at that point I approached my pal Sarah Weinman for advice on an agent. She connected me with David Patterson who had great thoughts on how to turn the blog post into a book proposal and then he went out and turned it into a deal. That the latter part, the actually-getting-a-deal part, unfolded at pretty much the apex of every shitty thing happening in my life this summer made it feel a little less special, but the reality is that it's a huge achievement and getting a book deal is something I've hoped for for years. That it came from a short talk and a blog post and all happened in about six months from start to finish is really stunning. Now I have to actually write it, which _yikes_ , but also, _wow_. I can not understate how much this wouldn't have happened had I not made a goal for myself last year to say yes to more things. Once again: _goals are good_. Additionally, I would be remiss to not mention Rebel Spirit winning both a Webby Award and a Signal Award this year. I'm hard-wired to declare awards as meaningless but man it felt good to see Akilah's and my work get the recognition it, frankly, deserves. What systems, routines, or outside influences, such as books, films, music, or other media, contributed positively to your work? I went and saw people and had experiences out in the world more this year than any since everything shut down in 2020 and that was wonderfully restorative and something that I'm going to attempt to double down on in 2026. I went to a movie in the movie theater for the first time in ages and sure it was just _The Minecraft Movie_ with my 10-year-old but I left so excited about people _in_ places that I sort of babbled on about it to anyone that would listen for weeks. People in places! It's an amazing cure for creeping fascism, even if everyone's just yelling "_chicken jockey!_ " at the same time. But, thankfully, _The Minecraft Movie_ was not the most resonant piece of culture I engaged with this year. I've already written about Annalee Newitz's excellent book Automatic Noodle, about community and robots and cooking, but I haven't stopped thinking about it all year. I also already wrote about Caitlin Angelica's sad and haunting album "Now I Know," a meditation on grief that I definitely needed this year. I did not write about, but was blown away by Alex Espinoza's thick book Sons of El Ray, a multigenerational saga about lucha libre wrestling, the immigrant experience, and living with secrets—it's a masterpiece. (The two books mentioned here are affiliate links.) On the subject of masterpieces, the newest installment of Mario Kart, Mario Kart World, is right up there—I have played it for hours with my kids this holiday break. I watched and then immediately rewatched The Studio, a love letter to Hollywood created at a moment when Hollywood is collapsing. The pace that Seth Rogan _runs_ through every scene is incredible. Equally incredible is Wake Up Dead Man, by Rian Johnson largely because of the performance of Josh O'Connor, who anchors the movie with a quiet depth that was stunning. But the two pieces of culture that I saw and have stuck with me the most this year were both in-person exhibits (like I said, people _in_ places, what a concept!): The first was "Music of the Mind" the incredible Yoko Ono retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The exhibit, which spans the entirety of the MCA's top floor, is filled with opportunities to interact with the art and become a part of the pieces on display. From leaving notes stuck to a wall outside the start of the show, to piecing together broken plates, to hammering a nail in a canvas, and adding messages scrawled in blue paint to the final room in the show, I've never seen a museum retrospective that makes _you_ so central to it. It's truly stunning. And since interaction and playfulness is so much a part of Yoko's work it doesn't feel like a gimmick but instead a necessary element to understand her remarkable career. Also, yes to giving someone their flowers before they've passed on. I hope she knows how much people love the show. The _other_ exhibit I saw this year was about as far apart from the Yoko one as I can imagine: "Let there be GWAR" the career-spanning retrospective of the shock-punk band GWAR, held at LA's Beyond The Streets gallery. More than their music, I was always amazed at the elaborate costumes and sets they built for their shows, all of which were done on DIY budgets. The gallery had dozens of their enormous foam-rubber costumes on display as well as lots of concept art, full stage sets, and videos like the one I think about a lot with the guy who mixes together hundreds of gallons of fake blood before every show. Seeing the schlock of GWAR given a loving gallery treatment was a reminder that there is a lot of incredible art in the underground that doesn't get the loving respect it deserves. Well that doesn't sound all that bad. Oh, sorry if you misinterpreted finding some light in an endless darkness as "not that bad." Let me be clear: your year fucking sucked. Noted. At what point did you begin to feel that a change in years was necessary, and what contributed to that conclusion? Probably when I was running down McCormick Boulevard in Evanston, frantically blowing a whistle while an SUV full of masked bastards in tactical gear was driving recklessly trying to shake the line of honking cars behind them. That was definitely the "You know what?? I'm fucking _done_ with this shit" moment. But there were _so many_ moments leading up to it. The unrelenting nature of this year made it so you could probably pick any day in any week and point to something and say _yes, that_. It was a year I hope to never repeat, I hope none of us ever have to, and I desperately hope for something better in 2026. Despite every counterfactual, for some reason, I cling to the idea that that is possible. I have to. We have to. It has to be, right? 2026 is out of our purview. To conclude, are there additional reflections about your experience with this year that would be helpful to document here? Yes. There was one thing about this year, despite its unrelenting awfulness, that is worth calling out: _community was everything_. As the government turned against us, as jobs were lost (oh yeah, that happened to me this year too), as thugs spread out across our neighborhoods snatching people, community was all we had. And community stepped up. As much of a nightmare as ICE and Border Patrol's occupation of Chicago was, seeing them thwarted at every turn by neighbors with whistles and car horns, seeing the organizing happening in ad-hoc Signal chats, seeing regular people— _you and me_ —stepping into the path of danger, running toward trouble, and trying in any way we all could to keep our neighbors safe was remarkable. I have lived in my small, falling-apart house for quite a while and I've never felt closer to my neighbors than after the assaults this fall. People who I've never talked with before would come up, ask for a whistle, and explain what they were doing to help. Parents would coordinate patrols around schools, every day, and turn up in real numbers. When SNAP benefits were about to run out, people donated food in a volume that was truly mind-boggling. Seeing community come alive and work together to protect each other, despite the unrelenting nature of 2025, was truly inspiring and I believe is going to be the key to not just _surviving_ 2026, not just making it through, but to reclaim what is ours and to make the year truly better. Like I said, despite every counterfactual, I cling to hope. We are all we have. Maybe we are all we need. Thank you for your candid responses, this concludes our questions for you. Thank you for your service in 2025, please leave your ID at the front desk. You can leave. Fucking finally. Goodbye 2025, I hope to never see you again.

Even as he wrote a Christmas song, I can't imagine that Shane MacGowan believed he was writing a _Christmas Song_ , something that you'd hear on one of those radio stations that starts playing holiday music 24/7 in November or in the background of one of a dozen interchangeable Hallmark holiday rom-coms. And yet, inexplicably, "Fairytale of New York," his ballad about a couple in a heated drunken argument in an NYPD jail cell on Christmas Eve, somehow did. You've heard it dozens of times as you've done your holiday shopping this year, nearly as inescapable as Mariah Carey. I still remember the first time I heard it, smashed right up against the screamer "Bottle of Smoke," about betting on a longshot horse that wins, the fourth song on an album that up until then had not let up even for a second, and suddenly there's this lush, wistful duet. Shane's rough cigarette-scarred voice contrasted against Kirsty MacColl's perfect vocals is a magical pairing (that both Shane and Kristy are dead now makes listening to the original a little too haunting for me now). I had the Pogues' _If I Should Fall From Grace With God_ on cassette and when the song ended I remember rewinding and re-listening immediately. It's a beautiful song, about hope and love and the fleetingness of both, and the instrumentation captures the shimmer and wonder of the season perfectly. And at the end of this year—this long awful brutal year—I want more than anything to say to you this line from the song: _I can see a better time_ _When all our dreams come true_ We've all been through so much this year and I have to hang on to the belief that 2026, like the song says, is for me and you. So, on this Christmas Eve, take a moment to watch this performance of Glen Hansard and Lisa O'Neill performing "Fairytale of New York," at Shane MacGowan's funeral in 2023. It's a beautiful take on the song—sad and joyous all at once, as funerals can be—and when people start dancing in the pews at the end I've never not started to tear up.

I write most of these posts out, roughly, by hand. It's all part of Doing The Work. There's something about the winter solstice that always lends itself to reflection for me. It is dark and cold and the fleeting light mirrors the rapid dwindling of days at the end of the year. There hasn't been much light in this whole long, grinding year, that is for certain, but today, before the sun sets on this shortest day, I wanted to reflect not on the terrible bits (though there have been a lot) but instead on the one thing that has sustained me through them: Doing The Work. For me, this year, The Work has largely been writing. I've written more words this year than I've written perhaps in any year before now. I wrote them for myself and for you, not for an ever-shrinking freelance check. I did it by setting a goal of writing 36 posts this calendar year, a number I'll hit exactly despite some of the tragedies and travel of the year meaning that I barely posted in June and August. It was an arbitrary goal, one that nobody was enforcing but myself. But, especially as things fell apart, it sustained me in a way that was a good reminder that The Work matters. This year The Work saved me. It's not the first time The Work has done that for me and certainly won't be the last. And so I guess I feel I owe The Work something, a defense, in a year that over and over we've heard about how new tools—offered by men richer than they have any right to be—can save us from The Work. But here's the thing: There's no shortcuts, not really, to Doing The Work. There's no shortcuts to how it can save your life. The Work is _everything_. For me, the discipline and rigor of writing regularly brought structure to a year that fell deeply off the rails for many, many reasons. These men are out here insisting that the rigor and discipline isn't worth it, I am here to say: _It is_. It is not easy. It is messy and frustrating (so frustrating) and it feels like it can take forever and half the time all you want to do (all _I_ want to do) is quit, but here's the thing: All the mess and frustration and the tangents and mistakes and learning and everything else that goes into _actually_ making a thing from nothing adds up to something that you miss with a prompt. It adds up to The Work. That work, in all its chaos and messiness, is The Work. And that work will sustain you. It might not make you rich (it sure hasn't for me) but it fills you. And this year, I needed that more than anything. Next year too, most likely, as we suffer through the continued indignities of an authoritarian regime. The Work will be there, ready. So as the days get longer, as the sun ascends just a little bit more, as 2025 rolls into 2026, Do The Work. Do it the hard way, the long way, the slow way. There _is_ no other way. I'll be there toiling alongside you, getting frustrated, wanting to quit, and pushing through, all of us, each and every one Doing The Work the only way that it can be done, together. 📖📖📖 Speaking of Doing The Work, I'm doing something different this year. I'm compiling my favorite pieces that I've written in 2025 into a little perfect-bound zine called _They Can't Take Us All_ , and I'd love if you preordered it. The act of Doing The Work in this space has been so liberating to me, but digital writing is ephemeral and I think that capturing some of these pieces in a form that feels permanent is nice. So I did it and I'd love if you grabbed a copy. It'll ship in January, and will be a limited run, signed and numbered, so reserve your copy now to ensure you get it. Thanks!

Unraveled Press and LA Taco, the inaugural winners of the Snooping Newsies. Back in 2022, Magic: The Gathering, the endless card game that usually features wizards and dragons battling in high-fantasy settings, released a new set of cards called "Streets of New Capenna," which was set in a new world in the game's multiverse that was essentially 1920s America, with five demonic crime families battling for control of the city of New Capenna. All the cards had a beautiful art-deco approach to their illustrations, and the nod to the gritty mob battles of the 20s was a nice change of pace to the usual flavor of the game. But among all the devil-mobsters, bird bootleggers and rhino thugs was a journalist, dead set on exposing the corruption of New Capenna in the form of the card Snooping Newsie. The card was designed to reflect the work of muckraking journalism: it got stronger the more cards it exposed and, if it really did the work, it brought new life to the player. Snooping Newsie was a little too finicky to be particularly useful in actual gameplay, but I was immediately hooked: I mean come on, _it was a journalist in Magic: The Gathering!_ I never forgot that card. This year has been hard—perhaps the understatement of the year, I know—but one thing that has stood out to me throughout this endless struggle of a year has been the importance of small-scale, truly independent journalism to stand up for communities and to expose the abuses and corruption of the powerful. Nowhere has this work been more critical than in covering the raids of our communities by ICE and the US Border Patrol, where tiny news organizations with no budget and barely any staff have been a critical lifeline to understand the scale and impact of these attacks on our neighbors, our family, and our friends. This year, as I was turning to tiny news orgs to find out what was happening down the street from me, I remembered that Magic: The Gathering card again, that Snooping Newsie and her dogged pursuit to expose the ills on the streets in order to bring new life to her community. It felt exactly like what was happening right now. And so today I am thrilled to announce the inaugural recipients of the Snooping Newsie Award for Excellence in Independent Journalism. The award—which is for community-focused, independently-owned newsrooms with a staff of less than ten—is in recognition of the fearless work, commitment, and effort that goes into producing vital reporting for your community, on no budget, with no net. The winners of this award should likely come as no surprise to those who have been reading my writing this year as I've called out their exemplary work before: ## Unraveled Press Based here in Chicago, Unraveled Press is a newsroom of just two people, Steve Held and Raven Geary. Raven and Steve not only got shot and arrested in their coverage of ICE's occupation of our region this fall, but were out on the streets or at the Broadview detention facility almost every day working tirelessly to expose the brutality of the federal agents and to speak up for the peope and communities that they attacked. Unraveled was also part of coalition of news organizations that filed suit against the federal government for violating their First-Amendment rights in deliberately targeting journalists during the occupation. Even as the fed attacks have slowed, Unraveled has continued to do vital work, exposing corruption in the Chicago Police Department just this week. ## LA Taco Based in Los Angeles, LA Taco was founded in 2006 to cover the street food scene in LA. This summer, when federal agents started snatching food vendors off the streets of Los Angeles, the tiny staff of LA Taco realized that their reporting beat had to immediately and dramatically change. They rose to the challenge, offering some of the best street-level coverage of the assault on Los Angeles. This culminated in creating their excellent Daily Memo, a brief-but-complete roundup of all the reports of ICE attacks across the huge LA region every day. The Memo, hosted by producer Memo Torres, is in my opinion the gold standard in how to do this kind of wide-angle coverage on a shoestring budget and every day I wish it was being copied by small news orgs in every community targeted by ICE. Doing this work, in this way, is nearly impossible. I know because I've lived it. To do it under the conditions that the Unraveled and LA Tacos teams did this year, when the entire weight of the federal government is threatening to come down on you, is a miracle. And, because it's done on no budget, because it's done without institutional backing, because it's done with a point-of-view and a middle finger raised, it will be overlooked by the traditional awarding bodies. That's where the Snooping Newsies come in. This is a small act of recognition that this work matters, that this work is important, and that these newsrooms deserve an award just as much as the big orgs, if not more. Unraveled and LA Taco will each get a plaque and a copy of the foil-edition Snooping Newsie card in an acrylic case. I'd love to include a cash award, but, well, _*stares in broke*_. So here's my ask of you: What if we all gave them that cash award? What if you donated to Unraveled and gave to LA Taco today? If each of us tossed even $10 their way, that would make a huge impact on their bottom line at the end of the year. A community-funded award for community-first journalism. That sounds right. Please give a little something. Mostly, please give a shit. Folks like Unraveled and LA Taco are doing this because _journalism is a calling_ , and when done right it builds and strengthens the communities that it is a part of. The only way organizations this small survive is by you caring. Supporting with money—sure of course absolutely 100% yes, that—but also supporting by sharing their reporting and uplifting their work. Everything depends on voices like Unraveled Press and LA Taco, now more than ever.

Last week I wrote a gift guide for a bunch of artists, writers, and Chicago people that I'm a fan of. Today, let's talk about _me_. If there's one constant for the last 30 years of my life, it's that I love making merch. Between my own little webstore, the Says Who Merch Store and the Rebel Spirit Spirit Ship, I've made a lot of great merch for you. Here's some highlights that you might want to put on your list or grab for someone else: Let's kick things off festive, with perhaps the best piece of merch I've ever made: Santa Dan's Sticker Stocking. This little mesh stocking is filled with 10 random stickers produced over the last four years for the Says Who Sticker Club, plus a little cute food squish, a Ring Pop, some Bazooka gum (with the comics), an ICE whistle, and a monkey with a parachute. Inspired by Mike Montiero's Sock of Shit, this is a fun Christmas gift to maybe you or someone else. However: it's going to sell out very quickly. Last weekend I did a surprise drop and they sold out in an hour. This weekend's drop is the last chance for this! Sorry folks, these are now sold out. But, don't worry: if you want stickers, sign up for the Says Who Sticker Club, available to our "Chamber of Commerce" $10 Patreon supporters, and you get a sticker in the mail every month! While we're talking about Says Who, I am currently wearing this OH NO hoodie, which was just released on the Says Who Merch Store and which pretty much captures this current moment in time, set in enormous, all-caps Cooper Black, the greatest of typefaces. It's also super soft. Speaking of capturing this moment in time, you can also get a hat with me and Maureen, Muppet-style, hanging out in a trash can. You know, if that's your thing. Over the last year plus, I wrote a 13-essay series looking back at the entire run of Punk Planet, and to commemorate that, I rereleased a classic Punk Planet T-shirt. Literally built from scraps from our office copier, it's a classic design now available again. And, did you know the Punk Planet book, We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet the Collected Interviews is still in print? Over two decades and still going strong. So many of these interviews are still super vital, plus it looks great on a bookshelf. While you're grabbing things for your bookshelf, pick up We Are Civic Media, a book I helped edit that came out this year. It's a collection of two dozen essays written by people that have charted their own trajectory in life, built outside the mainstream, and fought like hell the whole time. It's a super inspiring collection that I'm so happy to have played a hand in creating. Plus, it's gorgeous. Akilah Hughes (who has an essay in We Are Civic Media) and I are gearing up for the second season of Rebel Spirit (more on that in '26), but in the meantime, you can get the iconic BISCUITS sweatshirt to cheer on your favorite team, or food. Your choice. What goes well with a a biscuit? How about a Rebel Spirit Butter T? My classic TRYING patch is ready to ship your way and makes a great stocking stuffer. If you're not a patch person, you can always grab a TRYING sticker sheet. Or, if you're both, get the bundle and save a little. Finally, this one won't be for under the tree, but I'm trying something new this year: A small printed collection of my favorite blog posts from 2025. I think we should be leaning into physical objects right now for a whole bunch of reasons, and so I'm curating some of my favorite blog posts from this year into a small, perfect-bound collection called They Can't Take Us All. You can sit back during the cold winter months and read essays about fighting the Klan, about AI slop, about Chicago's pushback against ICE, and more. I'm really proud of the writing I've done this year and am excited to try this little experiment. NOTE: THIS IS A PREORDER, hence why you can't get it under your tree, and will ship in late January. By preordering though, you help me to know how many of these to print and also you'll save $3.

Look, we live under the crushing boot of capitalism and all that, I get it. But also, it's the time of year where we try and find things for our friends and family that might bring them a little joy, a worthy cause if ever there was one, always, but especially this year. So I've assembled a little gift guide of stuff I like a lot, largely from independent artists and makers, with an emphasis (but not exclusively) on things that are handmade and small-run. No stinkers in the bunch, these are all rad, no bad. ## Stuff from Pals _There's nothing more joyful than getting to hype your pals' incredible work._ Chicago letterpress printer Jen Farrell has built a career on stunning letterpress creations hand-printed on century-old printing presses. One of her truly unique specialties is building urban landscapes from metal type, and she did a beautiful tribute to Chicago's pushback against ICE this fall featuring a quote from Chicago's legendary Studs Terkel. Jen also made a print from something I wrote on this blog earlier this year, which was super cool to be involved with. My pals Nick and Nadine print under the name Sonnenzimmer, and their playful, inventive, and gorgeous prints evolved from gigposter to works of arts over many years. Their incredible, self-published tome, Per Diem: Graphics in Time by Sonnenzimmer, which is over 1000 pages long, collects 16 years of their work. It's a work of art unto itself, but also a remarkable collection of ideas, of moving in new directions, and of two people's creative collaboration over a decade and a half. I spent many late-night hours at the _Punk Planet_ office working on the magazine while Dan Grzeca was printing things in the other room. And I spent plenty of time drinking coffee with him in the early morning hours after. And so of course I love his new This Caffeine Kills Fascists shirt, which is also a fundraiser for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. But so much of Dan's stuff is incredible, including this beautiful Cooper's Hawk print. I shared office space with Jay Ryan at The Bird Machine for years, and I continue to be in awe of his work. Everything he does is joyful in a way that is so uniquely him, and his color palatte is always stunning too. Anything he does is worth picking up, but I'm especially in love with this portrait of 12 wooly mammoths. You can see more of Jay's mammoths at Chicago's Field Museum's After the Age of Dinosaurs exhibit. My pal Eve Ewing bought a bookstore earlier this year and this fall, when shit was getting rocky in town and we were all out on the street protecting each other, designed this wonderful totebag featuring a red winged blackbird in full attack mode. I love it so much. Plus, a percentage goes toward Organized Communities Against Deportations. Annalee Newitz is both a pal and one of my favorite authors, and their latest is the cozy little novella Automatic Noodle (that's an affiliate link), about a group of robots who open a noodle shop in San Francisco and build a community among themselves and their human customers. Looking for a nice read about the post-apocalyptic future where basically nothing bad happens? Yes you are. My longtime podcast collaborator Maureen Johnson, put out an absolutely stunning and really fun book, You Are the Detective, the Creeping Hand Murder (that's an affiliate link), where you get this beautiful little book that's a collection of letters, pictures, interviews, and more to help you solve a locked-room murder from the turn of the century. It's a ton of fun, really beautiful, and kind of shockingly inexpensive. A legit great gift for almost anyone. ## Chicago things _Chicago has been through a lot these last few months, and here are a few things to celebrate our great city._ The Chicago Transit Authority gift shop goes so much harder than it needs to. It's hard to pick out one thing, but I think this 60s-era logo beanie could be your new winter look. It's a Chicago Hot Dog Flag, what more explanation do you need? Chicago has many iconic buildings but I've always loved the pink towers of the former Edgewater Beach Hotel (now condos), and I was so happy that scrappy third-tier US soccer team Edgewater Castle FC put it on a totebag. And speaking of Edgewater Castle, you can buy season tickets for only $60. Games are super fun. Go Rooks! Chicago journalist, historian, and photographer Robert Lorzel created a breathtaking look inside the long-abandoned Uptown Theater in his book The Uptown: Chicago’s Endangered Movie Palace. When I first saw some images from this book I was stunned at what good shape the theater was still in. It's so fun traveling back in time with Robert and his co-author James Pierce. Speaking of beautiful books,The Golden Era of Sign Design: The Rediscovered Sketches of Beverly Sign Co is a beautiful tribute to a classic Chicago hand-painted sign studio compiled and written by a current Chicago hand-painted sign studio. Filled with breathtaking sketches from the mid-20th century and assembled with real love and care, this is a gorgeous book you'll look at a lot. ## Other Awesome Things _There are so many great things, here are a few more._ Speaking of books on signage, Bryan Yonki's 380 page love-letter to the hand painted signs of Los Angeles, "Hand-Painted in LA: Some Los Angeles Signs" is just an absolute gorgeous collection. Whenever I walk around LA I feel like half the time I'm just jaw-hanging-down agog at the various storefronts and their painted signs. Yonki's book really captures the beauty of them. My family and I spent a really great week recently playing the wonderful Ministry of Lost Things game. It's less a board game than a series of puzzles to solve together, but the premise—you're helping lost items reunite with their owner—is really wonderful and the presentation, which plays out through opening envelopes filled with little artifacts like letters and calendars, and maps, is so satisfying. One of the things that truly helped define who I was when I was still an impressionable youth was the artist Jenny Holzer, whose "Truisms" series (think: ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE) changed everything for me. When I discovered that one-woman-print-shop Bread and Water Print Shop does a monthly design dedicated to Holzer's work, I was so happy. You can even subscribe to get a Holzer shirt every month, if you have enough drawer space. Rose, who prints everything herself, has a ton of really cool shirts, including this awesome Royal Tenenbaums/Royal Trux mashup. On the topic of rad shirt printers, this Garfield "I may be self employed but I can still hate my boss" T from High Desert Debris makes me laugh out loud every time I see it. It looks like they're almost out but they have a few sizes left. But also all their shirts are pretty rad. And speaking of being self employed, Chicago chainstitcher Vitchcraft makes one of my favorite patches of all time, "Self Employed: Tough Little Bitches." I have one on my favorite pair of coveralls. Jenna also has a ton of really cool things available at her shop, including custom-chainstitched items. OK, finally, I'm _definitely_ not telling you to spend $65 on a stamp (someone bought this for me because _I_ would never spend $65 on a stamp). But honestly this Japanese modular one-month stamp that you break apart and put back together to create a month-accurate stamp is actually really wonderful. It's transformed my setup for the frontmatter in my monthly journals, and is really unique and fun to snap together every month. That said: It's a $65 stamp, so obviously YMMV.

My current whistle supply, bagged and bulk. For the last few months, the sound of whistles has become a regular occurrence in Chicago. They act as an instant alert system that ICE is on the streets, as a call to action to neighbors to come out, and as a rapid warning for those that need to take cover. Parents, whistles around their necks, have stood outside of schools on patrol. Businesses across the city and suburbs have bowls of whistles available. The zine produced by the Pilsen Arts & Community House, "Form a Crowd, Stay Loud," has become iconic, and "Whistlemania" events held everywhere from bars to libraries have brought hundreds of people together to fold zines and pack whistle kit bags that have put tens of thousands of whistles on the streets. The whistle has been an effective weapon against the occupation of Chicago. Effective enough that Greg Bovino and his band of Border Patrol thugs left our city last week. They moved their attack to Charlotte, North Carolina, where they were immediately greeted with the sounds of whistles. Now reports have them moving to Louisiana. Where they'll go after that is anyone's guess. Which is why it's time to whistle up wherever you are. Inspired by Chicago indie publisher Marc Fisher, I started buying and distributing whistles sometime in September. Originally I ordered around 100 to put into our Little Free Library and to send to some friends that ran stores in Chicago. Over the weeks that followed I ended up getting a few thousand whistles out to folks, constantly buying whistles from any place that had some in stock at a decent price. In the spirit of getting whistles out to people, I thought I'd share some notes and resources on whistles so you can start stocking up wherever you are. **Please note:** _this is from my own personal experience and is nowhere near definitive._ # Buying Whistles I bought whistles from anywhere that had them in stock and available for as cheap as possible. That meant a lot of random sellers on Amazon, which I usually try and avoid, but also some of the Chinese direct-to-consumer sites like Shein and Ali Express (which were cheapest by a lot but also wildly unpredictable in terms of arrival time). I feel shitty about it, but they were the easiest places to get hundreds of whistles quickly for not much money. Any port in a storm. I do know folks who ordered from domestic party supply and carnival supply places, though the whistles were of pretty cheap quality. But again: any port in a storm. Stock comes and goes very quickly and prices vary wildly. I found it was easiest to do a search for "bulk whistles" and see what comes up. My goal was to try and find whatever whistle I could, with an attached lanyard, for as cheap as possible, in quantity, that would arrive with some level of predictability. That combination of needs usually meant paying around 30 cents a whistle. Occasionally I found deals as low as about 10 cents, and sometimes I went as high as 50 if stock was low, delivery was fast, and attacks were active. I did get a few deals that were cheaper than that, but the whistle quality reflected it for sure. My personal favorite whistles are these orange alert whistles that I think are designed to clip onto a life jacket. I've bought so many variations of this design. _A note on availability_ : You could see Amazon's stock drop rapidly when Chicago really started to move on whistles and I shudder to think what happens when a place the size of New York starts ordering en mass. Do not expect that the same deal will exist the next time you look. For instance, I bought this batch of 100 whistles for $14.99 a few weeks ago. Now it's $28.99 (still a good deal). In between it didn't exist at all. _A note on whistle color:_ First, let me just say that _any whistle is better than no whistle_. But I personally really like bright whistles with a bright lanyard, so that you can easily identify folks that are also out on the street. This was especially helpful for school patrols, but really at any point being able to see someone from a distance and know they were also out there was a relief and a help. _A note on bulk buying_ : If this was all happening before the tariffs, it would have likely been very easy to bulk buy an extraordinary number of whistles from China. However, tariffs make things far more complicated than I had time to sort out, so I never tried it. # 3D Printing Whistles As consistent whistle stock became hard to come by, a lot of people in Chicago started 3D printing whistles. Like, an incredible number of whistles. I've heard of one group that printed 60,000 whistles alone. Even a small printer can print a batch of a couple dozen whistles in a few hours and my understanding is that the per-piece cost is measured in pennies. Honestly, with the price of decent printers as low as a few hundred dollars, I might be investing in this method in the future. I certainly spent much more than that on whistles. There are a lot of whistle designs available for printing online. Chicago whistle printer Lauren, who goes by bibliogrrl online, has put up a collection of _tested_ whistle shape files on Makerworld. Her go-to is the quick-to-print Tiny Emergency Whistle and has produced thousands on a $200 Bambu Lab A1 mini. Of course, 3D printing produces only the whistle itself. If you want the whistle with a lanyard, obviously that's a manual process after the printing. Folks have been tying yarn onto whistles, using old lanyards from conferences, or letting people sort out their own methods. Again: _any port in a storm_. Also, if you have never 3D printed anything, know that it is not instant (runs can take hours) and it is not foolproof. While the current state of 3D printing is better now than it ever has been, it's not perfect. # Whistle Instructions It seems like a whistle should be enough, but bagging up a whistle with a little instruction book has proven to be super effective. The instructions for whistles are very very simple: * If you see ice in the area, blow short bursts on the whistle. * If they're actively snatching someone, long blows. The purpose is not to stop the action, but to warn people that ICE is in the area and to bring out your neighbors as witnesses and to amplify the sound as a warning to others. It also annoys the Feds, a nice bonus. These instructions were codified in a one-sheet, eight-page zine made by Chicago's Pilsen Arts & Community House that has become the visual symbol of the movement. That zine has been translated into tons of languages, shortened into cards and flyers and pretty much any other method you can think of. And while an eight page zine for two sentences of instructions might be overkill, folding the zine has been a great organizing tactic. Bringing people together to fold zines and assemble whistle kits has brought so many people together at a moment when _bringing people together_ is crucial. That said, for my own use I created a little business-card sized instruction card with the Pilsen Arts instructions on one side and the ICIRR phone number to call if you spot ICE in Illinois on the other. I just printed them through a cheap biz card printer. The Pilsen Arts & Community House folks encourage remixing, so do what you need to do to get the information out. Say it with me now: any port in a storm. # Distribution The best tip I can give you for distribution is _talk to people_. Talk to friends, see who needs 'em and who knows people that need 'em. Talk to your neighbors. Talk to store owners you might be friendly with. Stock your neighborhoods' Little Free Libraries. If you're a church, temple, or mosque person, talk to folks there. I started putting whistles in my own Little Free Library and getting them to friends that had shops in the city. By the end, I was dropping whistles at assembly events and shipping to friends and family who could hand them off to their circles. We handed out whistles to school patrolers in our neighborhood. I even had neighbors ring my bell and leave with handfuls of whistles for their church groups or community gatherings. I can't speak to organizing a whistle event directly, but the ones I've helped stock were held at bars and libraries and never had less than a few dozen people show up on extremely short notice, usually just a flyer shared on social or on a Signal chat. # Additional resources The aforementioned Pilsen Arts & Community House has become a clearinghouse for whistle graphics, zines, and so much more. They even have folders on their Google Drive for other states and cities now. They could use your support. I'm in awe of the work Emily Hilleren has done in whistle organizing in Chicago. She's personally responsible for getting thousands of whistles out onto the streets _every week_. She's collected an amazing list of resources, holds whistle assembly events regularly, and is also fundraising to cover some of her considerable costs. And it's worth another plug for the Good Whistles 3D printing resource compiled by Lauren on Makerworld. There are so many shape files there and it's nice that she went to the effort of curating a tested list. I'm sure there are things I've forgotten here, but this is as complete a brain dump as I can muster. Go, whistle up, keep yourself safe and keep each other safe. We're all we've got.

I've been thinking a lot about a video I saw recently of the late, great Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick, who died last month. In the clip, Tony waxes philosophic about what makes Chicago unique and what makes those of us that call it home special. And while he's got a lot to say about it in the short clip (including an amazing line about how people that want to be rich "use Preparation H for lip gloss"), the part that has been stuck in my head for the last few days is when he says that Chicago is a boxer: _They don't have the best skills, they don't have the best snap on their jab. But you get to the twelfth round, and you look across the ring and that guy's still there._ As word came out this week that Greg Bovino—the ringleader of the attack on this region that's been underway since September—would likely be departing Chicago along with 250 of his goons shortly, I thought about that boxer Tony talked about: Bovino looked across the ring, after two months of relentless assault, and _we were still there_. Whistles blowing, cars honking, everyone scared and nobody scared, lined up, ready to go another round. Everyone I know is exhausted from the last two months. Exhausted from rushing out on the ding of a Signal notification, exhausted from standing in front of schools keeping watch, exhausted from confronting heavily armed masked agents in tactical gear with nothing more than a whistle around your neck. Exhausted—so exhausted—from being witness to neighbors, friends, and family going missing. Over 3000 people, according to the goons' own count. One was too many. Everyone I know is exhausted. Everyone I know is ready to go another round. One of my favorite pieces of writing is the short story "The Pugilist at Rest" by Thom Jones, who grew up in Aurora, Illinois before becoming a writer in Seattle. The story is incredible, a tour-de-force of voice and language, a pedal-down race through the narrator's experience as a Marine in Vietnam. But, within this tale there's an aside—it's where the story gets its title—about the ancient Greek boxer Theogenes. It's an aside that I thought about when I watched Tony Fitzpatrick talk about that boxer: _The sort of boxing Theogenes practices was not like modern-day boxing with those kindergarten Queensberry Rules. The two contestants were not permitted the freedom of a ring. Instead, they were strapped to flat stones, facing each other nose-to-nose. When the signal was given, they would begin hammering each other with fists encased in heavy leather thongs. It was a fight to the death. Fourteen hundred and twenty-five times Theogenes was strapped to the stone and fourteen hundred and twenty-five times he emerged a victor._ Maybe Bovino is leaving. Maybe, as has also been reported, he'll be back in the spring when the snow has melted and the temperatures return to something resembling reasonable (it takes a special sort to survive the winters here, he'd never cut it). And maybe, if the reporting is accurate, when he comes back he'll be bringing a thousand men with him, four times more than the number he brought this time. But here's the thing: Chicago has been strapped to the stone so many times, long before this guy and his goons came along. Chicago has thick scars and bloody hands. Fourteen hundred and twenty-five times—to borrow from Jones—we have taken our blows, spit out a tooth, and turned to square up again. The winter is long. We just had our first measurable snow this week, four or five inches where I'm at, more further south. That snow has already melted—mid-November is too early for "real" winter to set in—but it served as a reminder to all of us of what's coming. The winter is long. We'll spend it getting ready. Chicago is a boxer. We rest, and we wipe the blood from our one good eye and we stand, yet again. There's always another round. 🤜🎁🤛 Today is my birthday. If Bovino really leaves, that's the best gift I can ask for. But knowing that he'll be back (and like when he left LA, they won't _all_ go away), here's my birthday request to you: The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant & Refugee Rights has been the backbone of Chicago's response to this assault. From running the hotline you call when you see ICE, to holding rapid response and know-your-rights trainings multiple times a week, to offering legal aide to the families of those who've been snatched, the work they do every day is critical. They've been doing it long before this two-month nightmare began and will be doing it long after it's passed. For my birthday I would love if you threw a little money ICIRR's way. Thank you.

_This was originally written for and performed at theNovember 4th edition of Tuesday Funk, the long-running reading series in Chicago's Andersonville neighborhood. It's been lightly updated here._ I spent Halloween chasing ghosts. Not kids in costumes, or jumpscares in a haunted house. I spent Halloween, much of it anyway, chasing ghosts of a different kind: careening from one ICE spotting to another. We were always just a little late. They'd disappeared by the time my wife and I would pull up, a crowd left in their wake, angry and heartbroken. Dozens of people in the streets pointing at nothing, at ghosts, wondering what to do—what to do practically, right now, but also what to do with the welling anger inside them. Inside us. For now we'd tamp it down and check our phones. There was already another sighting, blocks away, so we jumped back in our car, and head out. Sometimes it feels like a little parade—a Halloween parade today—of cars chasing down another ghost. We're too late again. This time there's an empty truck, a landscaping crew, disappeared. In the truck, the keys are still in the ignition. They may have gotten snatched, but nobody knows for sure. They may be hiding. When I was little, kids in the neighborhood would play Ghosts in the Graveyard. It was a combination of tag and hide-and-seek. One person would be the ghost, and run and hide. Everyone else would run around trying to find them. If you spotted them, you yelled _" GHOSTS IN THE GRAVEYARD!!"_ as loud as you could, and ran back to base. If you got tagged before you made it back, you became a ghost as well. You played that way, one person getting picked off, then two, then four, an exponential set of disappearances, until there was no one left. I still remember what it was like, to be running around on a warm summer night, the fireflies thick, and realizing that the shouts and laughter of the other kids playing had dwindled to near nothing, as the recognition set in that you were alone. The last one that wasn't a ghost. It's not long before there's another sighting, across town this time, no way we'd make it there in time. The Feds are coordinating across multiple teams of jump-out-boys, hitting spots across town nearly simultaneously. The reports in the spotter's chat get tangled: they're going east and west simultaneously; they're _here_ , then they're _there_ in a blink. Hauntings crisscrossing the town. Hours of this, back and forth, sightings, a chase, and then gone again. _Poof_. I'm not supposed to be doing this. None of us are. I'm supposed to be chasing ghosts of a different kind. I'm supposed to be writing a book about a guy, George Dale, who lived a hundred years ago. George was a newspaperman in Muncie, Indiana in the 1920s who chased ghosts of his own: the white sheets of the the Ku Klux Klan. Back in the '20s the Klan had emerged as a political force across the country. The Immigration Act of 1924—which introduced racist limits on immigration numbers and created the very US Border Patrol that's now running wild in our streets—was authored by the Klan. But they were especially powerful in Indiana, where the Klan controlled the governor's mansion and two-thirds of the statehouse by the mid-20s. And in Muncie, where George Dale published his newspaper the _Post-Democrat_ , the Klan controlled the mayor, the city council, the cops, and the local courts. We know this, because George published their names in his paper. And because he published their names in the paper, he paid dearly for it. The corrupt connection of cops and judges meant that George was in and out of jail constantly, for years, on charges that were mostly trumped-up or frame jobs. When he'd decry the corruption that was haunting him in his newspaper, he'd get hauled in on libel charges. When he'd protest _those_ charges in his pages, he'd get called up for contempt. He was in and out of jail so much that it was said that other folks locked up would applaud when he'd return. Once on a cool spring night when he was walking home with his son, George Jr, two carloads of jump-out-boys in masks leapt out at them. They drew a gun on George, who moved without thinking—some say he never thought—and wrestled the gun from his gut where it was pressed. The gun went off and someone went down. It wasn't George. The masked bastards retreated back to their cars, dragging their wounded man. Nobody knows what happened to him. There's no record of a hospital visit for a gunshot wound that night. He just disappeared. _Poof_. George maintained he shot him dead. It wasn't the only time George was in danger. His house was shot at and firebombed. George was beaten in the streets multiple times. Members of the Klan's women's auxiliary were given the orders to spit on him on sight. And then there was the repeated threat of spending months on one of Indiana's notorious penal farms, made doubly dangerous for George because he'd exposed corruption on those very farms in his newspaper. He could have made it stop, so easily. He could have stopped writing, could have stopped exposing the Klan and the corruption and the way those two things were so closely interwoven as to essentially be the same. But he never did. Even as it destroyed his life—even as he was driven into destitution from the fines and legal fees, even as he lost his house—he continued to stand up. He continued to speak out. He never stopped fighting. When George Dale died in 1936, he was at his typewriter. He'd just started writing an editorial. The whole day was spent running from one sighting to another. A long chase west felt productive, by every account we were on course to intercept them, but they just never emerged where we thought. They'd made a turn at some point, the reports lagged, and then they were gone. _Poof_. After that, we headed home. Our young son was about to get out of school—a school ringed by parents standing like sentries. It was Halloween and, like every parent, we wanted to try and protect our child from the evil spirits of the world for as long as we could. At least for another night. We moved Halloween outside during the start of the pandemic, you probably did too. You remember Halloween 2020 and 2021, with candy chutes and folding tables with take-two bowls. All of us doing what we could to balance a sense of normalcy with living in a world that was haunted by the sense that it never would be again. I wonder sometimes if what I'm chasing isn't just the masked bastards snatching our neighbors, but the ghosts of the life we lead before all this. Before the agents showed up, before the helicopters, before the tear gas, before the kidnappings. Before this latest Trump election, certainly, but before the first one too. So much has been lost. So many ghosts. Back in those pandemic Halloweens, I started sitting out with a fire going, saying hi to parents and complimenting kids on their costumes as they went by. I've been doing it ever since and so on this day, after our kid was home safely and out trick-or-treating in the Garfield costume we'd made together, I arranged my little fire pit and chairs and was so exhausted, so bone tired from the day and from the stress and from the sound of the helicopters that never stop and from the last few weeks of living like this (this assault only started in Chicago in September, if you can wrap your head around that) and from the fact that nobody should be living like this and from—despite that fact—the _years and years_ of living like this, and I lit some firestart and I watched it all burn.

I've been deep in newspaper archives from Indiana in the 1920s doing research for my book _I HATE THOSE MASKED BASTARDS!_ Right now, a lot of my writing process involves clipping newspaper articles and filing them away in a piece of bespoke software I've written to help me create an annotated timeline which I'll use to start crafting chapters, so I've been copy/pasting a lot of old news articles. _A lot._ While I've been digging around in these old newspapers, I've been drawn to all the advertisements. In addition to being _beautiful_ , each one is an amazing little capture of life a hundred years ago (you could buy a new car for about $600 and there were a surprising number of uses for laxatives). In fact, I've been drawn enough to these old ads that I created a _second_ piece of bespoke software just to collect them (OK, yes: writing bespoke software is apparently my procrastination method). With Halloween tomorrow, I thought I'd share some of the ads I've collected from newspapers across Indiana to give you a glimpse of what Halloween was like in 1925. A hundred years ago, everything was cheap, there was a lot of "nose putty" involved, pumpkin pie was a Halloween thing, and the _cuts_ (think clip art from 100 years ago) illustrating many of the ads were incredible. Plus, Chicago's best typeface, Cooper Black, makes a few appearances. Of course, this is America and so racism is also always close at hand: "Mexican" and "Chinaman" costumes are cheerily advertised and burnt cork, for blackface, is on sale for 50 cents. Scratch under any surface in this country—even the ones with seemingly immaculate spooky vibes—and there it is. A hundred years ago and right now are not that far apart in that way. Anyway, everything is very hard right now, so travel back in time with me for a few minutes and take in the Halloween vibes—the good and the bad—of 1925. Evansville Journal, October 26, 1925 Richmond Item, October 7, 1925 Evansville Courier Press, October 18, 1925 Huntington Herald, October 21, 1925 Indianapolis Star, October 23, 1925 Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegram, October 26, 1925 Muncie Morning Star, October 25, 1925 The Fairmount News, October 15, 1925 Huntington Press, October 18, 1925 Indianapolis News, October 5, 1925 Evansville Courier Press, October 25, 1925 Huntingburg Independent, October 23, 1925 Indianapolis Times, October 1, 1925 Richmond Item, October 1, 1925 Muncie Morning Star, October 23, 1925 Muncie Morning Star, October 9, 1925 Indianapolis Star, October 25, 1925 Evansville Courier Press, October 3, 1925 The Cambridge City Tribune, October 15, 1925 Muncie Evening Press, October 23, 1925 Huntington Herald, October 21, 1925 Richmond Item, October 25, 1925 Evansville Courier Press, October 23, 1925 Anderson Daily Bulletin, October 6, 1925 Indianapolis News, October 23, 1925 The Hammond Times, October 8, 1925 Indianapolis News, October 3, 1925 Marion Leader-Tribune, October 25, 1925 Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegram, October 26, 1925 Indianapolis News, October 26, 1925 Indianapolis News, October 23, 1925 Evansville Journal, October 21, 1925 Huntington Herald, October 21, 1925 Evansville Courier Press, October 25, 1925 Jennings County News, October 15, 1925 The Columbus Evening Republican, October 9, 1925 The Columbus Evening Republican, October 23, 1925 The Hammond Times, October 23, 1925

The Stamp King in all its glory. The first thing you should know about The Stamp King, the last stamp dealer in the city of Chicago, is that it is exactly what you imagine it would be: chaotic and jumbled, a space navigable by exactly one person, the Stamp King himself. I was bringing my dad's stamp collection to its last resting place. I never thought of him as an avid stamp collector, more someone who traveled a fair amount and collected trinkets along the way. But, in the process of cleaning out my parents house following the death of my mother last month, I found a bankers box filled with stamp books, with stamps clipped from mail, and with loose stamps in various envelopes marked with countries he had visited. It wasn't a collection that I needed to hang onto, so I looked up places that might be able to value it and, hopefully, buy it. Stamp collecting used to be a thing. Based on the lack of stamp stores that came back in my search, it's not much of a thing anymore. But there was one, The Stamp King, way out west on Higgins Road in a nearly-not-the-city corner of Chicago. Further research said it was the last stamp collector store in the city proper. The second thing you should know about The Stamp King is that you should probably call first. There's not a lot of street-level traffic to the store and when I got there on an absurdly hot day in mid-July, it did not look open. The lights were off, a security gate was pulled across the storefront window. A small sign was taped to the door instructing you to knock on the adjoining storefront, because he was using the computer there. I knocked. Eventually the Stamp King opened the original door, confused. "Did you call?" was his first question. I had not called. I had a collection of stamps I'd like him to look at, I said, gesturing to the bankers box I was carrying, and he sighed and invited me in. The place was chaos. Bankers boxes just like mine stacked in wobbly piles to the ceiling. Banks of filing cabinets stood behind a counter that was so covered in piles of dusty stamp books and shoeboxes that you couldn't see it. Unexpectedly at the front of the store sat rubbermaid tubs full of African violets, growing in the diffused light of the dirty storefront window. It was perfect. The Stamp King himself was also perfect. He sported a white mustache waxed into curls and a mostly-bald head, short along the sides like my dad used to wear it. He was kind without ever being particularly friendly, approaching this transaction with a generous series of sighs. He did not need to buy another stamp for the rest of his life. And yet you knew he would from the very start. He cleared a space on the counter, shifting pile after pile, and explained that he was planning on leaving early today, after he was done with his "computer stuff." I said I could come back a better day and he sighed and motioned to put the box in the newly-cleared space. He asked a little about the history of the collection and then started looking at it, breezing through books in fast-forward, opening every few envelopes, carefully tweezering stamps to get a closer look. A couple books you could tell were sort of interesting to him, until his tweezer-led inspection revealed that the stamps were "hinged," a heretofor unknown term to me, but apparently not the way stamps should be kept. Who knew? The Stamp King knew. He was through it all in 10 minutes, probably less. Most of the time was him sighing and me wandering around the store. It really was all boxes. The adjoining storefront where he'd been doing his computer work was also all boxes. Floor to ceiling. In a fire the place would go up in a millisecond. Affixed to the filing cabinets were stickers and clippings. "The only difference between this place and the Titanic: The Titanic had a band." The Stamp King laid it all out for me: two books were interesting, but all the stamps were stuck in wrong. He'd do $10 for those. Another book was $2. A couple envelopes were $5. Piles of stamps that had been lovingly de-adhered from envelopes were garbage. All this, he said gesturing to stamps collected from a lifetime of travels, are "fun but worthless." Eventually he delivered the total with another sigh: $25. It was a pity $25, I know, fished from his wallet. The Stamp King needs another box of stamps like Lake Michigan needs a glass of water. But I think probably everyone that comes through is like me now, someone with a box of someone else's stamps, a box that would end up in the garbage if The Stamp King didn't step up. So the Stamp King steps up. Stepping up is his life's work now. He's probably pushing 80, saving the thing he loves well beyond the point of sensibility. The piles are huge and threaten to engulf him and maybe me if today happens to be the day. I said $25 sounded good, and would he take the leftovers too. He sighed. Of course he would. Today there's another banker's box touching the ceiling of the Stamp King, that one was my dad's. Ever since I left that box behind, I've been thinking about the things each of us has piled in unsteady stacks, stacked all the way up to the ceiling of our own lives. We all accumulate a life the way the Stamp King accumulates stamps: sometimes with a thought-out plan, sometimes in the hopes of making a buck, but most of the time because you step up. The boxes stack up whatever way. Living is hard. That's not a revelation, just an acknowledgement. But we live it as best we can. We fill our boxes and we stack them up. Not every box is filled with good memories. Most of them, if we're lucky, I think fall into the best category the Stamp King offered: fun, but worthless. Fun, but worthless. Not everything has to make a profit, despite the grind mindset that's forced on us. Not everything has to have meaning beyond being joyful to you, _now_. Maybe it's some stamps, put in an envelope and kept in a box. A box that now sits among hundreds at The Stamp King. Maybe it's something else. Whatever it is, I hope it's fun but worthless to you and that you fill your boxes with it, every day, until they tower over you. And I hope you take a moment to look at those fun but worthless towers of your life and you sigh the content, exasperated sigh of the Stamp King. A sigh that says it's all a little bit mad and more than a little tiring and even so you know you would not do it any differently because someone has to step up and save the things that are fun, but worthless. As I left, I smiled at the Stamp King and said, "The good news is now you have some stamps to sell." He laughed a little and sighed a lot.

1 Hulk Hogan stands at the lecturn of the Republican National Convention, the summer of 2024. Donald Trump had been shot at a week earlier, he wears an oversized square bandage on his ear. Trump stands in the audience, applauding and pointing every time Hogan says that Trump is “my hero,” which he says a lot. Hogan’s got the audience right where he wants them, cheering and chanting as he runs through a script that paints him at his 1980s best, despite the fact that he can’t stand up straight anymore, his walk reduced to a shuffle. It’s all “dude” and “brother” and “real Americans.” He references the Macho Man Randy Savage and Andre the Giant. He’s wearing a sportcoat over a T-shirt with a picture of himself on it. At the climax of the speech, the sportcoat comes off, he take ahold of the neck of the T and he rips it clean in two, revealing a Trump/Vance shirt underneath. One year later, almost to the day, Hulk Hogan was dead. 2 Hulk Hogan stands next to his lawyer, dressed in all black with a black bandana covering the ample bald spot on his head. It’s March 18, 2016 and they’re on the steps of the Pinellas County Courthouse in Florida. Hogan doesn’t speak at all, squinting in the sunlight. Moments before, he was awarded $115 million in a lawsuit he’d filed against Gawker, the hard-charging news and gossip website, over their publication of a sex tape featuring Hogan and his best friend’s wife. Soon, that number would swell to $140 million, an amount that would send Gawker into bankruptcy. Ten days later, it was revealed that the lawsuit was funded by Peter Thiel, a then mostly-unknown startup billionaire who had been on a secret vendetta against Gawker ever since they wrote a story in 2007 that outed him as gay. Thiel spent $10 million on the lawsuit. He told the New York Times “it’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence.” Thiel has since spent millions on conservative causes and candidates. He spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He did not rip off his shirt. 3 Everything is silver and black, the distinctive hue of an infrared camera. Hulk Hogan sits on the edge of a canopy bed. Blurry in the bed is the wife of his then-best friend. It’s 2006, Hogan is getting divorced. His friend, a Tampa radio shock jock who goes by the name Bubba the Love Sponge, invites him to sleep with his wife. He doesn’t know that Bubba is taping him. He does more talking than anything else. He rants about his daughter Brooke dating a black man. It’s shockingly ugly, filled with the n-word. Over and over again. “I guess we’re all a little racist,” he says in the midst of it. They have sex. Six years later, the tape leaks. Gawker publishes a two-minute excerpt. Everything is silver and black. 4 Trash rains down on the wrestling ring. Hulk Hogan stands in the center, arms up, hands clasped with Kevin Nash on one side and Scott Hall on the other. It’s the culmination of a storyline that has been building for months. Hall and Nash, known as “The Outsiders,” had recently left the World Wrestling Federation to join their biggest rivals, World Championship Wrestling and had been running roughshod over the WCW roster. For weeks they’d been teasing that they’d be joined by a “third man,” at WCW’s July 1996 pay-per-view, Bash at the Beach. That third man turned out to be Hogan, who ran out as if he was saving his former best friend Macho Man Randy Savage before doing his signature Atomic Leg Drop on Savage and clasping hands with Hall and Nash. They became known as the New World Order. Wrestling was never the same after that point. 5 Hulk Hogan sits in the witness stand, dressed in a dark suit. It’s July 1994 and he’s quietly answering questions from federal prosecutor Sean O'Shea. Hogan is a witness in the government’s case against Vince McMahon, the owner of the WWF, for illegally providing steroids to his wrestlers. Hogan used to tell kids to say their prayers and take their vitamins and today he revealed that for 14 years he had been injecting himself with steroids. He picked them up at the WWF headquarters “along with my paycheck, fan mail or whatever.” The government's case seems solid. Hogan is the star attraction. Except. He testifies that he was never told by Vince to take steroids. McMahon is found not guilty. 30 years later, Vince’s wife Linda would become the US Secretary of Education. 6 93,000 people. It’s the largest crowd anyone had ever wrestled in front of. Wrestlemania III, Hulk Hogan vs Andre the Giant. March 29, 1987. The audience is huge and it is electric and here for this match. When Hogan is announced, the crowd explodes in unison. He struts down the aisle to “Real American,” his theme music. “I am a real American / Fight for the rights of every man / I am a real American / Fight for what’s right, fight for your life.” He points to the crowd, raises his hand to his ear. He climbs in the ring and reaches for his yellow Hulkamania T, grabs with both hands and rips. The bell rings. Slowly he approaches Andre the Giant who stands stoically in the center of the ring. They stand chest to chest, Hogan looking up at Andre who towers above him. They stare at each other. They stare forward into history. They stare info infamy, forever.

Attempting to break out of the the malaise of a difficult summer, my family and I drove out to Brookfield, Illinois to visit the Galloping Ghost Arcade, a sprawling, ramshackle collection of buildings that take up one entire side of a city block and house the largest video game arcade in the world. Walking in is overwhelming, it's dark and warm and humid; the beeps and boops of the vintage arcade game collection drowned out slightly by the hum of industrial fans placed in corners. The windows to the outside world are either tinted or obscured and most of the lighting comes from the games themselves. The games. Room after room of games pressed right up against each other in aisles barely wide enough to squeeze past someone as they try their best against Donkey Kong or Pac Man. It's a labyrinth of games that seems to continue forever. We were discovering new rooms filled with games up until our last moments at the arcade. There's a box on the counter asking for donations to expand even further. At this point there are well over 800 games, according to their website, with machines regularly swapped in and out. You pay a flat $25 to play all day, every game rigged to play for free at the push of a button. Don't expect high-tech Dave & Busters-style games at the Galloping Ghost. The vast majority are from the golden age of arcades, the 1980s. As it should be, extra attention is given to the games born in Chicago from Bally, Midway, and Williams, as well as smaller outfits like Rock-Ola. The city used to be the center of the arcade universe, and it was fun to be able to walk past (and play) dozens of Chicago's forgotten classics. After a while though, I became captivated not by the games themselves but by the incredible art on the cabinets and specifically the marquee, the sign set above the screen, tempting a kid from 1983 to spend their hard-earned quarters. The marquee back then had to do a lot of work, because the games themselves were all low resolution and blocky affairs. The marquee had to sell the _idea_ of the game, the excitement around the concept and the story because the on-screen graphics alone weren't going to do it. So you made sure that your marquees did the job, filling it with exquisite hand-lettered logos, art borrowed from the pages of fantasy novels, sci-fi, and comics, and vivid color palettes that would shine out into the dark arcade. These vintage marquees, to me, are such a beautiful vernacular artform that perfectly capture the moment where our lives were transitioning from the physical to the digital. So, during this long, hot summer, enjoy a gallery of video game marquees I took while walking around the Galloping Ghost.

No matter what happens in the coming weeks, we are Chicago. We rose from the ashes. We never quit. We are the lake in the morning, the sun rising over the water, its reflection drawing a line straight to our shores. We are the Haymarket Martyrs, the Pullman strikers, always demanding better than what we've got. We are the words of Sandburg and Algren and Brooks and Wright. We are the 90s Bulls, making the impossible possible. We are the dipped Italian Beef. Messy, sure, but incredible. We are the humidity in the summer, the frostbitten cheeks in the winter. We are smoke-kissed rib tips. We are elotes on the street. We are pierogis in a pot. We are Curtis singing _Hush now child._ We are the Soul Train dance line, the National Barn Dance, the Warehouse on a hot summer night. We are the beach in the last days of summer, drawing every moment out. We are the downtown canyons, wind-whipped in the winter, how do you make it through? We make it through. We are celery salt and tomatoes and onion, sport peppers and a dill pickle and relish so green you swear it's not real. We are the dreams of millions. We are imperfect, but we are perfect. We are forever. We are everything. We are Chicago. There will never be more of them than there are of us.

There's a record by garage rock legend Holly Golightly that has been my go-to for decades now: _The Good Things_. It's a short record (on vinyl it's only a 10"), but every song on it is amazing. It was Holly Golightly's first solo record, having made a name for herself as one of The Headcoatees, known for their driving, '60s girl-groupesque, lo-fi rock songs. _The Good Things_ was a very different record: slow and sad, a beautiful kind of melancholy. Which, honestly, is about as good a thing as you can ask for right now, a time that is so markedly sad. So here are a few _good things_ that I wanted to share with you. ## Automatic Noodle Automatic Noodle is a wonderful, slim book written by Annalee Newitz about robots that run a noodle restaurant in a post-dystopian San Francisco. But what it's _really_ about is about realizing your dreams with a found family, about building real things that matter to real people, and about the importance of community. It's a very nice read right now, if you'd like something where basically just good things happen. Which I desperately do. (The link to the book is an affiliate link where I get a little cut of the sale.) ## Coyote I will always ride-or-die with alt weeklies, the locally-focused indie culture newspapers like the _Chicago Reader_ , the _The Stranger_ , and the _Village Voice_ , and so it's thrilling to see the launch of the Coyote, a _new_ alt weekly for the Bay Area. Started by a bunch of kickass writers, I'm really excited to see where it goes from here. Lord knows we need more independent media right now, I hope that they're successful and that success spawns more in their image. ## Caitlin Angelica I've been listening to the haunting, warbling voice of Caitlin Angelica lately. Her tremendously sad, tremendously beautiful album "Now I Know," was born from the tragic death of her partner in 2023. She has bundled all of the hurt and shock and pain of it into a record about grief and perseverance and it's not an easy listen per se but it's one that I really need right now. (There's also a great interview with Caitlin in the latest edition of the excellent see/saw punk newsletter.) ## World Tramdriver Championships OK, this is one of my favorite things that happens once a year: This weekend 25 teams of tramdrivers competed to see which one would be crowned the best in the world. Yes, really. Previously focused just on European public transportation, this year included teams from Brazil, China, Australia and the US to turn what had been the European Tramdriver Championships into the World Tramdriver Championships. Feast your eyes on the six hour live stream to watch drivers compete in disciplines like driving-backwards-without-spilling-water, not-hitting-a-cardboard-cutout-of-two-people-dancing-as-you-drive-by-it, and of course, tram bowling. It's just pure joy. Look, times are hard right now. Take the good things where you can find them.

One of my favorite stories from Chicago's recent history is the invisible flood that happened in 1992 that forced the shutdown of downtown Chicago for days. Repair work was happening on the Kinzie Street bridge, one of many that span the Chicago River. They were replacing nearly hundred-year-old pilings with updated ones that were driven deep into the ground beneath the river. Unbeknownst to anyone, one of the pilings was too close to an forgotten coal delivery tunnel that had been dug in 1906. Slowly, the clay soil between the piling and the tunnel eroded away and a small leak began to form. As things do, that small leak became a bigger one, and that bigger one became a problem when, suddenly, janitors and maintenance managers across the Loop discovered deep water in the basements and sub-basements of their buildings. Some buildings reported nearly forty feet of water. The colossal Merchandise Mart found fish swimming in their sub-basements! At first, nobody knew where it was coming from. The city turned off water mains, assuming there was a leak somewhere in their system. But eventually they figured out it was the old coal tunnels, which had long-forgotten openings in most of the buildings across downtown and to which there was never any formal map (many of them had actually been dug illegally). By the time they discovered it, the hole in the tunnel was 20 feet wide. You could see water swirling on the surface of the river like it was being flushed down a toilet. And yet, on the streets, everything was dry. My friends and I took the L downtown while it was happening. We walked the nearly-abandoned streets and marveled at the invisible disaster raging underneath our feet. There's a different type of invisible disaster unfolding across Chicago now. ICE and Border Patrol agents have been terrorizing immigrant communities across the massive geographic expanse that is the greater Chicago area. Instead of focusing on the city proper (though certainly they've been there as well), they seem to be concentrating on border suburbs, especially on the southwest side, though they've ranged as far north as Waukegan and as far south as Joliet, two cities 75 miles apart from each other. The raids are often pre-dawn and lightning-fast, agents gone within minutes, though that's not always the pattern. A traffic stop by ICE in the light of day in northwest suburban Franklin Park left a dad, who had just dropped his kids off at school, dead two weeks ago. The speed and unpredictability of the ICE roundups make hearing about them difficult. News organizations can't be everywhere all at once, not to mention most of the orgs in Chicago are in a defensive crouch from years of layoffs and budget cuts. As a result, there's _much_ less visibility on this unfolding tragedy than there should be. While some days get lots of coverage, focused largely around the ICE detention facility in the suburb of Broadview where daily protests have been held for weeks, other days this disaster is nearly invisible unless you know where to look. There is amazing coverage happening, don't get me wrong, but you have to work to seek it out. For me, my go-tos are largely on Twitter alternative Bluesky: * Unraveled Press is the load-bearing element to much of the up-to-the minute coverage of what's happening around Chicago. They're at the Broadview facility most days, and doing an admirable job of spreading disparate social media videos and reports of ICE raids from elsewhere across the region. That it's fallen on a _tiny_ two-person outlet is pretty much everything you need to know about what makes this disaster invisible. It's also a reason to send them some money. I sent $50, and I'll be sending more once I've got it. * Shawn Mulcahy, the news editor of the _Chicago Reader_ has also been at Broadview regularly and has been a must-follow on Bluesky for me. I wish the _Reader_ was actually highlighting his work on their site more regularly, but they're going through it right now, so ¯\_(ツ)_ /¯. * Organizer and author Kelly Hayes has also done a remarkable job of supplying to-the-minute information and photos from Broadview. There are two news organizations that I also think are doing standout work: * Block Club Chicago, a local news startup that has been running laps around the incumbent _Tribune_ and _Sun Times_ for years now, has been doing good work covering raids and giving a wide-angle look at what's happening. * The TRiiBE is a growing, Black-owned news org that has been punching above their weight for a while now and has been doing good nearly-daily updates. Other area news outlets, including stalwarts like the _Tribune_ and _Sun-Times_ , have been doing their best, but the coverage is often locked behind paywalls and gets buried under other stories quickly. But among all the Chicago news orgs, even the ones doing good work, the urgency of the situation isn't captured in the approach. What's unfolding every day—neighbors snatched off the streets, protesters teargassed and shot with pepper balls—should be treated like a disaster: pull down the paywalls and subscription pop-ups, make the coverage accessible to all comers. Get people up-to-speed on what's happening every day in a way that is comprehensive and accessible. In a way that makes the invisible visible. To me, the gold standard for this comes from an unexpected source: The (formerly) food-focused website _LA Taco_ , who found themselves in the position of doing the best reporting when ICE swept through Los Angeles and disproportionately targeted the same street food vendors that _LA Taco_ had covered for years. They realized that, like it or not, they were best situated to cover this unfolding disaster. What the folks at _LA Taco_ , not the _LA Times_ , figured out was that while it was impossible to have on-the-ground reporting from sweeps happening across a metro area as colossal as LA, we live in a time where most everything is documented and uploaded to social media in near-real time. They took to compiling these social media videos and reports into a vertical video Daily Memo that simply runs down where ICE has conducted raids that day across the vast LA area. The _LA Taco_ Daily Memo is required viewing now for folks in LA that want to keep up with what's happening there. They make their Daily Memo available as a video and as a written update on their website. I wish they provided them in Spanish as well, but they are a very small shop with limited resources. The Daily Memo is one of those ideas that's so obvious now that someone's doing it that I wonder why it hasn't been the standard all along. So, in the hopes that obvious ideas can be grabbed and run with easily, here's a few thoughts from me on how to flesh _LA Taco_ 's Daily Memo idea out even more. If you're a news org in Chicago or anywhere else looking to do this, feel free to borrow, expand, and—most importantly— _build_. * Have someone whose dedicated beat through the duration of this disaster is to monitor social for reports/video/etc of ICE activities. _Verify those reports,_ then put them in a spreadsheet. (Bonus points, make that spreadsheet open and available to all.) * Use that spreadsheet to build out a whole host of Daily Memo-style roundups: * Like _LA Taco_ , create vertical videos that you can put on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, as well as share on Bluesky, Twitter (ugh), and elsewhere. * Make text-based roundups that are available on your website at a consistent location and with findable, predictable titles and tags. Daily Memos, for instance, always lead with, what else, "Daily Memo:" in their headline. That makes finding them really fast and easy. * Use that text-based roundup to ground an ICE-specific mailing list that sends those daily updates directly to your readers. You can use that same mailing list for breaking alerts _when necessary_. Don't try and clog it up with other coverage. Stick to what's most important to the folks that subscribed. Respect their inbox. * You've got each incident in small, atomized, texted-sized chunks, so push _those_ to Bluesky, Twitter (ugh), and the others too. You could even push to phones via text if you have the infrastructure for it. * Create a short audio roundup that you can push out to podcasting apps for people to listen to on their commutes or whenever. Again, we're talking quick hits here. * Please, do this in English and Spanish if at all possible. * This part is important: Dedicate a place on your website that _won't_ get blown away by all the other news of the day that collects all of this and that is easily accessible from your home page, so that people can find your work immediately and accessibly. Make the URL simple: /ice or something else memorable. * If your CMS is so inflexible that you can't do that (and trust me, I've worked with some of them and they definitely _are_ that inflexible), build out a quick-and-dirty secondary site that you can host at a subdomain like ice.yoursite.com. This is a list of every possible permutation I can think of. I know it's a lot! Pick and choose. Some orgs are already doing some of this, and that's great, push to do more. Not all of it is a heavy lift—even just creating clear headlines will go a long way. All of it is important. Does this take people? Yes. Does it take time? Also yes. If a freak earthquake hit Chicago, you would find the people and time to cover it. If those old tunnels opened up again and the Loop flooded, you'd find the people and time to cover it. This is a disaster that has claimed hundreds of victims so far. Cover it like it should be covered. Make the invisible visible.

It was a beautiful, warm day in Chicago today. The kind of early October day that you want to be out in because you know the number of them we have left is dwindling. And so today, people were out. There were plenty of people out on the corner of Armitage and Central Park in Chicago, grabbing lunch, doing some shopping, just hanging around the way you do when it's nice in the early fall. All of that descended into chaos instantaneously, when an ICE agent—or some other masked motherfucker—after being momentarily blocked by a scooter, decides to uncork a can of teargas and casually toss it out of the window of his unmarked SUV. It makes a spiraling decent, and then it hits. Within seconds, everyone—who moments before had been going about their day—is scrambling, coughing, and screaming. It takes almost no time until the entire street is engulfed in toxic fog. The whole scene unfolds in a 43 second video posted to Reddit. > ICE incident at Rico Fresh > byu/DREWBICE inLoganSquare For those familiar with Chicago, there's no real reason you'd remember the corner of Armitage and Central Park, a mostly-residential section of Logan Square. For those unfamiliar, this is a city street not unlike the one you may live on, and certainly like one you've frequented many times in your life. It is unremarkable in every possible way: A check cashing place, a hot dog joint, a vacant storefront or two. The video was shot from the parking lot of Rico Fresh, a big Mexican grocery store that's the main draw for the corner. Just out of frame—and I mean _just_ out of frame, maybe 50 feet away—is Funston Elementary, which was in session at the time. Next to the school, just around the corner, is a playground. There are always kids there. There are _always_ kids there. I used to live a mile or two away from here. I'm pretty sure I have been on this very corner, and have certainly been on corners just like it a million times. It is the most ordinary place. Until, suddenly, in a blink, today it wasn't. This is how we live now: our ordinary places become something else, in an instant, subject to the whims of some bastard out to inflict cruelty or having a bad day or just following orders or a combination of it all. There have been horrific examples across the entire Chicago area for weeks now, of agents just like these jumping out on workers and families. A family of four were snatched while playing in the fountain at Millennium Park on Sunday. Just a couple days ago, an enormous action that included _camouflaged bastards dropping down from helicopters_ unfolded pre-dawn in a run-down apartment building in South Shore, children carried out by agents, zip-tied, and loaded into the back of a box truck. Hundreds of people have been snatched and disappeared in the weeks since the feds have descended on Chicago. You feel the tension everywhere, every day. Earlier this week I was sitting after a long day and realized I could hear a helicopter making big looping circles overhead. My initial thought was was it was a school shooter, since there are three schools within a few blocks of me. Then I thought it was a Department of Homeland Security copter, which have taken to buzzing the beach near me. I hate that these are the immediate two thoughts that come to mind, but this is our lives now. But. But watch the video from Armitage and Central Park again. You'll notice something, even as the fog drifts across the screen and the guy shooting the video starts retching: _Nobody is cowed by this._ Even as the gas thickens, people are screaming obscenities at the agents in the car. The moped directly in front of them, despite having received what must have been a facefull of gas, refuses to move. And then there's the shrill chorus of whistles that begin to ring out near the end, audible evidence of the successful grassroots campaign to distribute ICE warning whistles in neighborhoods across Chicago. There are, of course, no police to be seen. And despite the strong words of Governor Pritzker, who just last month told people to "be loud for America," he sent state troopers to hassle protestors at the Broadview detention facility today. When I first watched this video, I was seething. So angry the way I feel so often now. An _unhelpful_ level of angry. Angry because of the impunity with which these masked bastards operate. But also angry because we've been left to fend for ourselves. But. But that's how it's always been, when change has to happen. There's nobody to do it but us. This is how we live now: _it's just us._ And the good news is that even among the fog, even choking back tears and bile, we're strong and we're resilient and there are so many more of us than there are of them.

In February, I wrote a blog post, "What Felt Impossible Became Possible," about George Dale a newspaper editor and publisher based in Muncie, Indiana in the 1920s who used his paper, his wit, and his inability to stand down from a fight to do battle against the Ku Klux Klan. I'd done a fair amount of spelunking through Dale's archives in the months that followed the election of Donald Trump in 2024 and I thought that his story of perseverance would resonate with folks. It did. A lot of people read it. Like, _a lot_ a lot, which took me surprise on day one and was truly mind-blowing weeks later when it was still going strong. And it got me thinking: Maybe there's a bigger story here, the story of someone who refused to back down against fascism even when the odds were stacked massively against him and the only one that believed he could do it was himself. And maybe there's something resonant about _how_ he won, with words and with truth and with a wit sharpened like a razor poised to cut through the entire power structure aligned against him. And so a friend connected me with a book agent, who had already read the blog post—because at that point, like I said, _a lot of people had_ —and he thought the same thing that I had: There was a bigger story here. And so I'm absolutely beyond belief excited to tell you that that bigger story will get to be told in _I HATE THOSE MASKED BASTARDS! Terror, Truth, and the Editor Who Took on the Klan_ , a new book by me coming sometime in the future (I still gotta write the thing) from the powerhouse radical indie press Haymarket Books. _Really!_ There's even one of those Publisher's Marketplace things! I'm thrilled and I'm terrified. While I've done books before, I've never done something like this: researching events from a hundred years ago and trying to weave them into a coherent story that not only talks about yesterday but is relevant to today. It feels like I'm embarking on some kind of uncharted endeavor, like I'm heading into the frozen arctic without a map. Anyway. Of course, it's not lost on me, and I hope it's not lost on you, that there's a new crop of masked bastards running around the very streets that we live on right now. And it feels, at least for me, like the odds of overcoming them are insurmountable. That's where I think the story of George Dale (and others like him) comes in, because in learning about history we learn that the struggles of a hundred years ago offer lessons for the struggles of today. It's part of why our current crop of fascists are so hellbent on erasing history. And why we can't let them. You will be hearing about this _a lot_ in the coming months, including how _you_ can help make it happen. But for today, here's to history, to uncharted endeavors, and to beating back the masked bastards once again. Let's fucking go.

In 2016—you remember back then, it was nearly a decade ago if you can believe it—I made a proposition to Maureen Johnson, an author of YA books who I was friendly with online the way you were friendly with people online a decade ago. _What if we did a podcast,_ I wrote, _about the end of this crazy election cycle?_ It was the Donald Trump/Hillary Clinton race and, over the course of the summer, Maureen had been sending me DMs looking for reassurance that things weren't as tenuous as they seemed. She knew I knew folks involved in the election on both the journalism and political sides, and could I tell her _anything_ that I was hearing to help her cope with the increasing anxiety of that race. After a few back and forths, I finally made the proposition: _Let's do this as a podcast._ It will help us to talk it through, and maybe it will help other people too. But, I added, you're busy and I'm busy and this can't take over either of our lives, so let's keep it to just eight episodes—the final eight weeks of the election—and then that will be it. Besides, I said, it's not like Trump's going to win or anything. You know what happened next. Those eight episodes, which we called _Says Who_ after a quote from Trump bagman Michael Cohen, ended with an election night livestream too painful to link to here, and then it was over. That is until Maureen posed a question a few exhausting days later: _Are we really going to stop?_ We'd committed to eight episodes because our lives were busy but those episodes had helped, and they helped not just us but thousands of people who'd listened, and what's to come is going to be hard and maybe continuing is something we should do? Besides, she added, he's probably not going to stay in office for long. You know what happened that time too. This is a long way of saying that this week _Says Who_, the eight-episode podcast we launched in the leadup to the 2016 election, released its 400th episode. Yes, we overshot the mark by nearly 5000% and no, I don't regret it. In the immortal words of Elvis Costello, it was a brilliant mistake. Over the course of the 400 episodes we've released (don't misinterpret this as an ending, we're still going), the show has transformed. It's still about trying to understand current events and politics, sure, but more than that it's about Maureen and I trying to understand how to exist through it all, how to build lives when things are crumbling around you, and how to help others survive the cascading traumas of our time. But, you know, also funny. For Maureen and I, we built a thing to help us muddle through a specific period of time that then became a whole _era_. And, in the process, we connected with people who found our muddling helpful and, in return, helped us to continue. Because, despite outlasting most podcasts, _Says Who_ never got picked up by a network, never got a penny of advertising dollars, instead it has been entirely listener supported. Maybe some of those listeners are you. Thank you. When times are hard—and they were then and they sure as shit are now—one of the best things you can do is build things with your friends. Build things that can help people get through it, even if that just means _you_. Because it almost always isn't just you. Put your things out in the world, let them help the people they can help. You never know where it might lead. Here's to 400 episodes of _Says Who_, one of the best mistakes I've ever made.

_Originally from notes written Tuesday, October 21 2025_ What I need you to understand is that it was relentless. Sightings miles apart at the same time, reports, misreports, they were at a Home Depot, a mall, the post office, six different intersections. Car makes and models rapid-fire. A Kia, a Ford, a Silverado, an Audi (an Audi??), a dizzying number of license plates. Too much to keep straight, so you look at every car and you wonder. There's noise, so much noise, but there's also signal and the signal was that they were _here_ that they were _everywhere_. Smash and grab jobs happening across the city nearly simultaneously. But the things being stolen aren't jewels, they're lives. Off streets, from yards. One roofer plucked off a ladder. A landscaper thrown to the ground, tackled by a half-dozen men in camo with weapons. Sixteen people on this day. Sixteen people disappeared, from just the northern side of the city and suburbs. More across the entire city. What I need you to understand is that nobody is letting them go quietly. The Feds' every movement is announced by a chorus of whistles, by a parade of cars honking in their wake, neighbors rushing outside to yell to film to witness these kidnappings that are unfolding in front of us. Neighbors running _towards_ trouble. What I need you to know is we are organized. What I need you to know is that you need to get organized. What I need you to know is they are coming. What I need you to know is you can stop them. They come not for the "worst of the worst," as they so repeatedly claim, because that would mean they would be coming for themselves. They are coming for people just trying to get by. Landscapers, roofers, tamale women, Lyft drivers waiting in a lot at Ohare, the people standing outside a Home Depot hoping that today might be better than yesterday. A report rang out that a child was hiding, and people converged. Whistles around necks, a half-dozen in moments. One heard whistles when dropping her own child off at school. Another rode up on a bike. Everyone unsure of what to do except to do what any parent would do: ensure a child is safe. The child was safe. This is how it works: We protect each other, period. These are our neighbors, our friends, our family. We do the things we have to do to ensure that as many of us can make it to tomorrow as possible. Not everyone does. I need you to understand that we tried. For some, living far away from Chicago, this may sound overwrought. I need you to understand that it's not. This is every day here. Every day, in any part of the city. As I write this, the onslaught is happening across Lincoln Park, one of the richest parts of Chicago, while yesterday it was in Little Village a working class Mexican neighborhood on the West Side. You never know when it's going to happen. You only know that it is going to happen. Life is lived on the edge now. I need you to understand that we'll still be here when it's over. I need you to understand that, eventually, it will be over. It will be over because we are here. I need you to understand they can't take us all. * * * ## A couple places to give your time and your money ## ICIRR Pretty much everything involving witnessing ICE and alerting neighborhoods is running through the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) Family Support Network and Hotline. * If you spot ICE (in and around Chicago) you can call the ICIRR FSN hotline at 855-435-7693. If you're in the greater Chicago area, put that number in your phone. * You can get alerts from the ICIRR's Eyes on Ice text network by signing up here. (note: this is Chicago-area specific) * ICIRR also runs Know Your Rights trainings regularly, which are open to anyone. If this seems like a very long list of things, it is. And I am positive they could use your donation ## Whistles/Pilsen Arts & Community House A huge amount of organizing is going on around the distribution of whistle kits, the amazingly effective on-the-ground street-level alert system for neighborhoods. * While the actual instructions for what to do with a whistle are very simple (short bursts if you see ICE, long blows if they're actively detaining someone), the Pilsen Arts & Community House has created a little zine that has become the iconic symbol of the rapid response effort. * There are "Whistlemania" and whistle assembly events happening across the Chicago area pretty much all the time. * If you are in a city that Trump has been threatening, the best time to start buying whistles was yesterday and the next best time is right now. They're getting harder to come by because so many people are ordering them. * People are also 3d-printing whistles, if that's your thing. As with ICIRR, the Pilsen Arts & Community House could very much use your money.

The Stamp King in all its glory. The first thing you should know about The Stamp King, the last stamp dealer in the city of Chicago, is that it is exactly what you imagine it would be: chaotic and jumbled, a space navigable by exactly one person, the Stamp King himself. I was bringing my dad's stamp collection to its last resting place. I never thought of him as an avid stamp collector, more someone who traveled a fair amount and collected trinkets along the way. But, in the process of cleaning out my parents house following the death of my mother last month, I found a bankers box filled with stamp books, with stamps clipped from mail, and with loose stamps in various envelopes marked with countries he had visited. It wasn't a collection that I needed to hang onto, so I looked up places that might be able to value it and, hopefully, buy it. Stamp collecting used to be a thing. Based on the lack of stamp stores that came back in my search, it's not much of a thing anymore. But there was one, The Stamp King, way out west on Higgins Road in a nearly-not-the-city corner of Chicago. Further research said it was the last stamp collector store in the city proper. The second thing you should know about The Stamp King is that you should probably call first. There's not a lot of street-level traffic to the store and when I got there on an absurdly hot day in mid-July, it did not look open. The lights were off, a security gate was pulled across the storefront window. A small sign was taped to the door instructing you to knock on the adjoining storefront, because he was using the computer there. I knocked. Eventually the Stamp King opened the original door, confused. "Did you call?" was his first question. I had not called. I had a collection of stamps I'd like him to look at, I said, gesturing to the bankers box I was carrying, and he sighed and invited me in. The place was chaos. Bankers boxes just like mine stacked in wobbly piles to the ceiling. Banks of filing cabinets stood behind a counter that was so covered in piles of dusty stamp books and shoeboxes that you couldn't see it. Unexpectedly at the front of the store sat rubbermaid tubs full of African violets, growing in the diffused light of the dirty storefront window. It was perfect. The Stamp King himself was also perfect. He sported a white mustache waxed into curls and a mostly-bald head, short along the sides like my dad used to wear it. He was kind without ever being particularly friendly, approaching this transaction with a generous series of sighs. He did not need to buy another stamp for the rest of his life. And yet you knew he would from the very start. He cleared a space on the counter, shifting pile after pile, and explained that he was planning on leaving early today, after he was done with his "computer stuff." I said I could come back a better day and he sighed and motioned to put the box in the newly-cleared space. He asked a little about the history of the collection and then started looking at it, breezing through books in fast-forward, opening every few envelopes, carefully tweezering stamps to get a closer look. A couple books you could tell were sort of interesting to him, until his tweezer-led inspection revealed that the stamps were "hinged," a heretofor unknown term to me, but apparently not the way stamps should be kept. Who knew? The Stamp King knew. He was through it all in 10 minutes, probably less. Most of the time was him sighing and me wandering around the store. It really was all boxes. The adjoining storefront where he'd been doing his computer work was also all boxes. Floor to ceiling. In a fire the place would go up in a millisecond. Affixed to the filing cabinets were stickers and clippings. "The only difference between this place and the Titanic: The Titanic had a band." The Stamp King laid it all out for me: two books were interesting, but all the stamps were stuck in wrong. He'd do $10 for those. Another book was $2. A couple envelopes were $5. Piles of stamps that had been lovingly de-adhered from envelopes were garbage. All this, he said gesturing to stamps collected from a lifetime of travels, are "fun but worthless." Eventually he delivered the total with another sigh: $25. It was a pity $25, I know, fished from his wallet. The Stamp King needs another box of stamps like Lake Michigan needs a glass of water. But I think probably everyone that comes through is like me now, someone with a box of someone else's stamps, a box that would end up in the garbage if The Stamp King didn't step up. So the Stamp King steps up. Stepping up is his life's work now. He's probably pushing 80, saving the thing he loves well beyond the point of sensibility. The piles are huge and threaten to engulf him and maybe me if today happens to be the day. I said $25 sounded good, and would he take the leftovers too. He sighed. Of course he would. Today there's another banker's box touching the ceiling of the Stamp King, that one was my dad's. Ever since I left that box behind, I've been thinking about the things each of us has piled in unsteady stacks, stacked all the way up to the ceiling of our own lives. We all accumulate a life the way the Stamp King accumulates stamps: sometimes with a thought-out plan, sometimes in the hopes of making a buck, but most of the time because you step up. The boxes stack up whatever way. Living is hard. That's not a revelation, just an acknowledgement. But we live it as best we can. We fill our boxes and we stack them up. Not every box is filled with good memories. Most of them, if we're lucky, I think fall into the best category the Stamp King offered: fun, but worthless. Fun, but worthless. Not everything has to make a profit, despite the grind mindset that's forced on us. Not everything has to have meaning beyond being joyful to you, _now_. Maybe it's some stamps, put in an envelope and kept in a box. A box that now sits among hundreds at The Stamp King. Maybe it's something else. Whatever it is, I hope it's fun but worthless to you and that you fill your boxes with it, every day, until they tower over you. And I hope you take a moment to look at those fun but worthless towers of your life and you sigh the content, exasperated sigh of the Stamp King. A sigh that says it's all a little bit mad and more than a little tiring and even so you know you would not do it any differently because someone has to step up and save the things that are fun, but worthless. As I left, I smiled at the Stamp King and said, "The good news is now you have some stamps to sell." He laughed a little and sighed a lot.

Sometimes you need to step out for a second, to take yourself out of the here and now and go somewhere else. With everything so _waves hands in all directions_ right now, here are three places I'm going, if only for a moment. # Skating Across America Earlier this summer, pro skater Demarcus James embarked on a journey from Oakland to New York on his skateboard. It's been incredible watching him kick-push-coast his way up the Sierra Nevada mountains and down into the desert of Nevada. Averaging around 40 miles a day, it's slow, hot, and more than a little dangerous. But the daily videos he puts together and posts to Instagram are truly inspiring and beautiful and showcase the things that are still pretty incredible about this country as seen from atop a board. (He's raising money on Gofundme for his travels, toss a couple bucks his way if you can.) > View this post on Instagram # Bezawada Arts I follow a huge number of signpainters on Instagram, but Bezawada Arts is unique. An auto shop based in India, who post regularly to Instagram, they paint trucks and busses with some of the steadiest hands I've ever seen. South Asian truck art is worth a whole post of its own sometime, but watching these masters of the craft freestyle perfect gothic lettering on the bumper of a truck is some of the most relaxing moments I get in a day. > View this post on Instagram # Cornell Feederwatch I've been watching birdfeeder cams since the pandemic, and the one I've come back to the most is the one at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York. A lot of the time it's just bird feeders swinging in a gentile breeze, sometimes it's more of an ASMR thing with the far-away sounds of bird calls, and other times, yes, it's buzzing with activity as birds swarm the feeders. Either way, it's worth a visit to YouTube just to be taken away from everything for a while.

Attempting to break out of the the malaise of a difficult summer, my family and I drove out to Brookfield, Illinois to visit the Galloping Ghost Arcade, a sprawling, ramshackle collection of buildings that take up one entire side of a city block and house the largest video game arcade in the world. Walking in is overwhelming, it's dark and warm and humid; the beeps and boops of the vintage arcade game collection drowned out slightly by the hum of industrial fans placed in corners. The windows to the outside world are either tinted or obscured and most of the lighting comes from the games themselves. The games. Room after room of games pressed right up against each other in aisles barely wide enough to squeeze past someone as they try their best against Donkey Kong or Pac Man. It's a labyrinth of games that seems to continue forever. We were discovering new rooms filled with games up until our last moments at the arcade. There's a box on the counter asking for donations to expand even further. At this point there are well over 800 games, according to their website, with machines regularly swapped in and out. You pay a flat $25 to play all day, every game rigged to play for free at the push of a button. Don't expect high-tech Dave & Busters-style games at the Galloping Ghost. The vast majority are from the golden age of arcades, the 1980s. As it should be, extra attention is given to the games born in Chicago from Bally, Midway, and Williams, as well as smaller outfits like Rock-Ola. The city used to be the center of the arcade universe, and it was fun to be able to walk past (and play) dozens of Chicago's forgotten classics. After a while though, I became captivated not by the games themselves but by the incredible art on the cabinets and specifically the marquee, the sign set above the screen, tempting a kid from 1983 to spend their hard-earned quarters. The marquee back then had to do a lot of work, because the games themselves were all low resolution and blocky affairs. The marquee had to sell the _idea_ of the game, the excitement around the concept and the story because the on-screen graphics alone weren't going to do it. So you made sure that your marquees did the job, filling it with exquisite hand-lettered logos, art borrowed from the pages of fantasy novels, sci-fi, and comics, and vivid color palettes that would shine out into the dark arcade. These vintage marquees, to me, are such a beautiful vernacular artform that perfectly capture the moment where our lives were transitioning from the physical to the digital. So, during this long, hot summer, enjoy a gallery of video game marquees I took while walking around the Galloping Ghost.

1 Hulk Hogan stands at the lecturn of the Republican National Convention, the summer of 2024. Donald Trump had been shot at a week earlier, he wears an oversized square bandage on his ear. Trump stands in the audience, applauding and pointing every time Hogan says that Trump is “my hero,” which he says a lot. Hogan’s got the audience right where he wants them, cheering and chanting as he runs through a script that paints him at his 1980s best, despite the fact that he can’t stand up straight anymore, his walk reduced to a shuffle. It’s all “dude” and “brother” and “real Americans.” He references the Macho Man Randy Savage and Andre the Giant. He’s wearing a sportcoat over a T-shirt with a picture of himself on it. At the climax of the speech, the sportcoat comes off, he take ahold of the neck of the T and he rips it clean in two, revealing a Trump/Vance shirt underneath. One year later, almost to the day, Hulk Hogan was dead. 2 Hulk Hogan stands next to his lawyer, dressed in all black with a black bandana covering the ample bald spot on his head. It’s March 18, 2016 and they’re on the steps of the Pinellas County Courthouse in Florida. Hogan doesn’t speak at all, squinting in the sunlight. Moments before, he was awarded $115 million in a lawsuit he’d filed against Gawker, the hard-charging news and gossip website, over their publication of a sex tape featuring Hogan and his best friend’s wife. Soon, that number would swell to $140 million, an amount that would send Gawker into bankruptcy. Ten days later, it was revealed that the lawsuit was funded by Peter Thiel, a then mostly-unknown startup billionaire who had been on a secret vendetta against Gawker ever since they wrote a story in 2007 that outed him as gay. Thiel spent $10 million on the lawsuit. He told the New York Times “it’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence.” Thiel has since spent millions on conservative causes and candidates. He spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He did not rip off his shirt. 3 Everything is silver and black, the distinctive hue of an infrared camera. Hulk Hogan sits on the edge of a canopy bed. Blurry in the bed is the wife of his then-best friend. It’s 2006, Hogan is getting divorced. His friend, a Tampa radio shock jock who goes by the name Bubba the Love Sponge, invites him to sleep with his wife. He doesn’t know that Bubba is taping him. He does more talking than anything else. He rants about his daughter Brooke dating a black man. It’s shockingly ugly, filled with the n-word. Over and over again. “I guess we’re all a little racist,” he says in the midst of it. They have sex. Six years later, the tape leaks. Gawker publishes a two-minute excerpt. Everything is silver and black. 4 Trash rains down on the wrestling ring. Hulk Hogan stands in the center, arms up, hands clasped with Kevin Nash on one side and Scott Hall on the other. It’s the culmination of a storyline that has been building for months. Hall and Nash, known as “The Outsiders,” had recently left the World Wrestling Federation to join their biggest rivals, World Championship Wrestling and had been running roughshod over the WCW roster. For weeks they’d been teasing that they’d be joined by a “third man,” at WCW’s July 1996 pay-per-view, Bash at the Beach. That third man turned out to be Hogan, who ran out as if he was saving his former best friend Macho Man Randy Savage before doing his signature Atomic Leg Drop on Savage and clasping hands with Hall and Nash. They became known as the New World Order. Wrestling was never the same after that point. 5 Hulk Hogan sits in the witness stand, dressed in a dark suit. It’s July 1994 and he’s quietly answering questions from federal prosecutor Sean O'Shea. Hogan is a witness in the government’s case against Vince McMahon, the owner of the WWF, for illegally providing steroids to his wrestlers. Hogan used to tell kids to say their prayers and take their vitamins and today he revealed that for 14 years he had been injecting himself with steroids. He picked them up at the WWF headquarters “along with my paycheck, fan mail or whatever.” The government's case seems solid. Hogan is the star attraction. Except. He testifies that he was never told by Vince to take steroids. McMahon is found not guilty. 30 years later, Vince’s wife Linda would become the US Secretary of Education. 6 93,000 people. It’s the largest crowd anyone had ever wrestled in front of. Wrestlemania III, Hulk Hogan vs Andre the Giant. March 29, 1987. The audience is huge and it is electric and here for this match. When Hogan is announced, the crowd explodes in unison. He struts down the aisle to “Real American,” his theme music. “I am a real American / Fight for the rights of every man / I am a real American / Fight for what’s right, fight for your life.” He points to the crowd, raises his hand to his ear. He climbs in the ring and reaches for his yellow Hulkamania T, grabs with both hands and rips. The bell rings. Slowly he approaches Andre the Giant who stands stoically in the center of the ring. They stand chest to chest, Hogan looking up at Andre who towers above him. They stare at each other. They stare forward into history. They stare info infamy, forever.

No matter what happens in the coming weeks, we are Chicago. We rose from the ashes. We never quit. We are the lake in the morning, the sun rising over the water, its reflection drawing a line straight to our shores. We are the Haymarket Martyrs, the Pullman strikers, always demanding better than what we've got. We are the words of Sandburg and Algren and Brooks and Wright. We are the 90s Bulls, making the impossible possible. We are the dipped Italian Beef. Messy, sure, but incredible. We are the humidity in the summer, the frostbitten cheeks in the winter. We are smoke-kissed rib tips. We are elotes on the street. We are pierogis in a pot. We are Curtis singing _Hush now child._ We are the Soul Train dance line, the National Barn Dance, the Warehouse on a hot summer night. We are the beach in the last days of summer, drawing every moment out. We are the downtown canyons, wind-whipped in the winter, how do you make it through? We make it through. We are celery salt and tomatoes and onion, sport peppers and a dill pickle and relish so green you swear it's not real. We are the dreams of millions. We are imperfect, but we are perfect. We are forever. We are everything. We are Chicago. There will never be more of them than there are of us.