Category: Recommended

Encountering Crumb today feels like being in a staring match with an artist who’s still almost daring the culture to eject him. “The average people out there,” he tells me, “what they know of my work … either they love it because they are degenerates themselves or they hate it because they stand with the forces of political correctness.” His iconography includes every taboo imaginable: not only incest and racism but also sexual assault, castration, self-mutilation and murder.

“Second to your cell phone, the thing you actually touch the most every day is probably your keyboard.” Why shouldn’t it be perfect?

I first heard about the video from a colleague and friend at my university as we waited in line to pick up our kids after school in late September 2021. One of her students was in the video, and it had gone viral, she said. She’d posted something in support of that student, but then she also started getting attacked. Another professor at our university, Arizona State, would later call the attackers “vultures,” the kind of people who feed off moments of everyday life that morph into spectacle after an article or tweet or video goes viral. But at the time, I didn’t have that analogy. My friend told me she was scared, and I said I was sorry. By that point, she had already taken down her post.

Frank told me that, after building an audience of covid skeptics with his revisionist statistics, he was invited by several politicians to examine their 2020 election results. “I noticed a pattern,” Frank said. “And the pattern enables me to go into any state and look at one county. And, once I’ve looked at one county, I can predict all of the other counties to preposterous accuracy.”

But when the delegation tried to visit the storage room, the filing said, one of the lawyers “explicitly prohibited” officials from opening or looking into any of the other boxes there. That, the filing said, stopped them from confirming that no materials with classification markings had been left behind.

The tone is college admissions essay. Typical sentence: “In an environment of maximum pressure, I learned to ignore the noise and distractions and instead to push for results that would improve lives.”

One day, Ricky was annoyed because I hadn’t changed a broken string on the guitar. I said, “You should play it like that.” He scoffed it off. But the next time I went to his house, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, playing and laughing. He said, “I’ve just written the most stupid guitar riff you’ve ever heard.” And it was the “Rock Lobster” riff, played on five strings in an open tuning.

General Milley’s frustration with the president peaked on June 1, 2020, when Black Lives Matter protesters filled Lafayette Square, near the White House. Mr. Trump demanded to send in the military to clear the protesters, but General Milley and other top aides refused. In response, Mr. Trump shouted, “You are all losers!” according to the excerpt. “Turning to Milley, Trump said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?’” the authors write.

The San Francisco skate crew GX1000 is a loosely organized gang of misfit skateboarders who are bound together mostly by a shared appetite for positive vibes, high speeds, and copious amounts of Northern California’s famous high-potency marijuana. Some of the crew, whose online video releases have made them a sensation, are pro skaters. Others are amateurs. All of them are unflinchingly confident and freakishly physically gifted.

“You have to wonder if people are thinking very deeply about what they’re doing. Do they realize what the alternatives are to a functioning democracy?”

Singh is the creator of hate5six, an extensive video library of punk and hardcore shows, mostly from cities across the Northeast. Singh is bafflingly prolific, often uploading videos from different cities in a twenty-four-hour period. In a subculture that thrives on spontaneity and obscurity, his collection stands out as a lovingly curated record, one that elevates shabby local bands to filmic heroes. Hardcore fans often report on social media their sightings of him at shows, as if he were a U.F.O. “It seems like he’s just always been there,” said Daniel Fang, who drums for the Baltimore punk band Turnstile and has spent many hours “drenched in sweat” with Singh at hardcore festivals. “It’s the stuff of Shaolin-monk movies, both in terms of physical endurance and a tenacious adherence to principle.”

The movement to reinstate President Trump has gone far beyond him — and now threatens the future of American elections.