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From the Magazine

Blood and Pancakes
January 2013
Issue No. 11
We are speaking of the over-the-counter Illuminati, my friends; the purveyors of smokers and spaghetti dinners and all things in between. Recite their names three times quickly—Rotary! Kiwanis! Lions Club!—and you risk invoking a suburban bugaboo. Eek! Look there! Do you ...

The Gaudy and Damned
Just off Highway 126 in Ventura County, California lies the town of Piru. Tucked among the orange groves and foothills of the Santa Clara valley, it is a strikingly well-preserved small town, the kind of place urban theorists dream about and on which towns like Disney’s ...

Triangulation Nation
January 2013
Issue No. 11
Back to Normalcy II: The Theory Upper-middle-class life still has its comforts, to be sure. If anything, the suburban piles are getting bigger, the SUVs more imperious, the hotel employees more servile, and the frequent-flier perks more lavish. But turn on the TV and revolution ...

Internment Camp
January 2013
Issue No. 9
For a very brief period not too long ago I was the “chief of research” at a glossy yet rugged men’s lifestyle magazine. An industry darling, this “practical guide to the sensory thrills and psychological rewards of an active physical life” (as its 1995 National ...

Cram Your Spam
For more than three years in the mid-1980s, grassroots union activists and their supporters waged a remarkable campaign against the George A. Hormel Company of Austin, Minnesota. The high point of the struggle was a 10-month strike by Local P-9 of the United Food and ...

Zoned Bohemian
January 2013
Issue No. 10
Behind these pretty, pricey streets of West Town lingers a neighborhood of dim ghosts: The grimy filigree of the Milwaukee Avenue firetraps, the cornices dated to the nineteenth century, the snaking alleys of oxblood cobbles, and the smoothworn, narrow railway tracks that ...

Remainder Table: Pamela Moore Plus Forty
One afternoon toward the end of 1982 I happened across a trade paperback called The Catalog of Cool, compiled by a veteran music-industry publicist named Gene Sculatti. The book consisted of articles and blurbs by Sculatti and his cronies, among whom were some names—Ronn ...

Cordon Sanitaire
January 2013
Issue No. 10
Amps for Christ: The Secret of the Almost Straight Line 7″ EP (Westside Audio Laboratories) Barnes was the man behind Man is the Bastard’s gruesome and gigantic howl (they almost made me give up meat; no, I’m MORE cynical than you are). Here the pain comes back as love. ...

See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Accumulate Me
January 2013
Issue No. 10
Despite five years of solid economic growth, ten years of impressive corporate profits, and fifteen years of a stock market so bullish that finance pundits are talking of a “new paradigm,” some Americans still worry about money. No, not those petty worries about not ...

You’re Either On the Bus…
Every morning at 5:30 a.m. the buses roll into the ghetto. They stop to pick up their cargo of dark-skinned workers, then turn around and drive out to the region just beyond the city limits—the place where anyone can find work. Once in the industrial districts of the ...

Boom Crash Opera
“From every corner of the earth where the unfettered industrial system was grinding out the raw materials for wealth, crushing men’s bones, parching their blood, following them in a perpetual orgy of chicane and debauchery, came the onrushing flood of pennies pilfered from ...