Express
My Years With Guns
By Williams ColeThe gun “issue” is woven with the strands of American history. It is also made from politics, culture, identity, passion, power, and, of course, fear.
Cul-de-Sac In Context
By Christian ParentiIn the winter of 1998, Garrett Scott was living in Oakland, working as a waiter and slowly putting together his first film about an unemployed plumber who stole a tank and rampaged across San Diego.
Inside Cul de Sac
By Ian OldsI met Garrett through an early “manuscript” of Cul-de-Sac he left on our kitchen table. It was 1999 and I was floundering in San Francisco.
The splendid asylum of impersonating Kris Kringle
By Joshua MohrAn excerpt from Mohr’s third novel, Damascus, due out this fall from Two Dollar Radio.
A Buenos Aires Memory
By Steven RossIn the summer of 2006, I was planning a trip to Buenos Aires and Brazil. I sort of knew this then, but I certainly see this now: my life was quite adrift, not in a tragic or irrevocable sense, but enough to annoy me.
Kraków Here and There
By Alan LockwoodA pulsing taste of culture in the Krakow mode unfolds in early April, when the Unsound Festival arrives again.
A Night in the Foxwoods
By Karl GreenbergFoxwoods Resort, submerged as it is in the misty, ancient, and somewhat decrepit woods of northern Connecticut is a weird juxtaposition of H.P. Lovecraft and Las Vegas. One expects to see “Yog Sothoth Got Divorced Here, So Can You!” on bumper stickers.
Cyber Wars 2.0
By David RosenIf you are reading this review from the Rail’s website, you should pick up a copy of Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion. Once you get past the author’s straw-man bashing of those he dubs “cyber-utopians” and the foreign-policy establishment’s Manichean antinomies of “democracy” and “authoritarian” countries, you can learn much about how the “dark side” of the Internet works.
In Dubious Battle
By Allen WilcoxLet us not mince words: if there is one element of Republican governance that truly does trickle down, it is its pernicious incompetence.
Addicted to Polymers
By James ArnettMy review copy of Susan Freinkel’s forthcoming Plastic: A Toxic Love Story featured a blurb in the biography declaring that Freinkel’s previous effort, American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree, was “a perfect book.”
Amongst the Ruins
By Michael TerryPaul Clemens’s new book, Punching Out: One Year In a Closing Auto Plant, is a personal, upfront look at the desertion of the Motor City, and the effect that the automobile industry’s outsourcing has had on the city and the people on whose backs its wealth was created.
Still Looking For a Cure
By Christopher MichelIt’s pleasant to think that we’re long past the time when illness was attributed to divine retribution. Nowadays, we understand that most disease has an external cause.
BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN: ROBIN HESSMAN in Conversation with Williams Cole
As a rebellious and idealistic teenager in the mid-1980s I was obsessed with figuring out why the USSR was called the “Evil Empire” since it was also a place that—I was told through other channels—guaranteed food, health care and education for everyone.
