Today’s headline at WIRED is a reminder of “Billboard Proposal #2,” which was posted seven months ago. And now that Elon Musk’s chainsaw has evolved, this is not so much an I-told-you-so as confirmation of his so-far inescapable assault. Let us also not forget “Billboard Proposal #1.”
Stoppard Never Got the Nobel Prize for Literature
Which is remarkable, except that neither did many writers of the highest esteem. Was he considered for it? You’d certainly think so, given his record of achievement.
A Straightup Thanksgiving — It’s a Tradition
Our Thanksgiving team of William S. Burroughs and Norman O. Mustill has been a happy pairing since 2012. It still is. So here they are again, sweetened by Heathcote Williams’s words in a narration-cum-montage by Alan Cox. It’s all so delish.
Fragments of an Unfinished Revolution
After watching all six episodes of ‘The American Revolution,’ Ken Burns’s new, much-heralded documentary, I had mixed feelings.
This Is An Emergency
Who will answer the call?
Baudelaire’s Head Floats into Gauguin’s Portrait
Cut-ups do strange things.
Memory Speaks
‘Oh baby, it’s too late now!’
The Influence of Cut-Ups on the Art of the Collage
Here are two collages. One is from a blogpost, “Visions at Midnight,” posted on May 27, 2025, and the other is an illustration, similarly styled, which appeared in The New York Times on Oct. 13, 2025. And Süddeutche Zeitung joined the game on Oct. 18-19, 2025.
Yelling His Fool Head Off
He was up early. He would not say under the cover of darkness,
because he had nothing to hide. He had something to bury. — William ‘Cody’ Maher
PARTISANS
A Graphic History of Anti-Fascist Resistance
Just in over the transom: An eye-catching collection of wartime tales of armed resistance to fascism edited by the comics writer and activist Raymond Tyler and the radical historian Paul Buhle. It’s a great teaching tool for students and for anyone else who could use a gripping introduction to the subject.
When the grim reaper comes to dinner . . .
. . . he hovers there like bad breath.
Hollywood Goes Up Against the Trump Regime
Jane Fonda and other Hollywood stars are modeling their battle against the Trump regime’s “campaign to silence critics” on the Committee for the First Amendment, which was initially formed during the “Red Scare” of the 1940s. Here’s what happened the first time around.
Charlie Kirk Would Not Appreciate This
In case you haven’t seen it, this is Trump in excelsis thank you very much.
The Vanity and Narcissism of an ‘Irreplaceable’ Leader
The comparison to the 47th American president is overworked but necessary. Here’s an excerpt from “Hitler’s People” by the British historian Richard J. Evans.
Charles Plymell
Sunday Service of Sun and Clouds
There was a time when Charles Plymell claimed that Bob Dylan stole his Nobel Prize. Charley was full of blustering anger in those days, calling his old friend Allen Ginsberg a phony, his publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti a two-bit miser, and Jack Kerouac a Mama’s boy whose ‘On the Road’ he never read. In more recent years, though he still claims not to have read Kerouac, Charley has apologized for his deprecation of Ginsberg and dedicated his latest book, ‘Over the Stage of Kansas,’ to Ferlinghetti. Because it would make poetic sense, I would like to date his change of heart, not only metaphorically but literally, to the time he had a heart attack and wrote this majestic, never-published poem.
Upon the Death of Charlie Kirk
The Most Truthful Statement I’ve Read About Him
“The media wants you to believe he was some saint of free speech, cut down in his prime. They’re already sanding down the edges, turning a man who spent his career spewing bile into a martyr. But here’s the truth: Kirk wasn’t about dialogue, he was about domination. He wasn’t about protecting liberty, he was laying the rhetorical groundwork for fascism.” — Samuel Thompson
One-Strike Poems
Malcolm Ritchie’s Mountain on Top of a Mountain
Here is a magnificent book of short poems so rich in images, so clear and yet mysterious, so generous in feeling that, to steal a thought from a Donald Hall essay about Dylan Thomas, “form and shape and honey-in-the-mouth make small monuments of English literature.”

















