Forgotten Cartoons from All Fifty States
Alabama — Southern Man – Hippie genius Neil Young is on a mission to assist the State of Alabama in becoming less racist. Instead of being welcomed with open arms, the helpful musician is scorned by Governor George Wallace and by the rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, who write a scorching hot anthem telling Young to shove it, and identify a new species called “Southern Man” who doesn’t want Neil Young around anyhow. However, it is the Canadian hippie who is fated to enjoy the last laugh: After George Wallace is crippled from the waist down by an assassin’s bullet and Skynyrd band members Ronnie Van Zant and Steve Gaines are killed in a plane crash, Neil Young is the last guy left standing, and he and Southern Man become best friends.
Alaska — Arctic Jerry – Aging polar bear comedians sit on an iceberg and make jokes about nothing, in the …
Draw Me
This story is excerpted from the novel What Came West by Josh Weil, available from Random House on June 2, 2026.
My parents chose her for a maid because she was a mute. Hoping that without a voice she might be half the presence of anyone else. Even less if she avoided me, as they surely instructed her to. By then they had long since become accustomed to my inability to withstand proximity to others.
Tantrums, they’d called them when I was young. Fits that would come over me, caused by something simple as a scent: bread rising on an afternoon of baking with my mother, and my father barging in reeking of his veterinary work, lighting a pipe. Or I …
Furious George
The Borg Is No Match For This Naughty Monkey
Often renowned for their intelligent use of tools, one marauding Capuchin fancied himself a Luddite
Chaotic scenes of pursuit and capture were faked by AI.
With rising apprehensions about the grip of technocracy tightening upon our creaturely society, it was only a matter of time before defenders of the natural order launched a primal assault on the machines. But which targets would be struck first, and who would mount the early attacks? Would data centers be bombed by eco-terrorists? Would corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley be raided by cadres of unshaven anarchists? In the looming war of carbon-based life forms on our silicon would-be masters, such violent possibilities abounded — until this year, in January, when at last the fated battle was joined in a most unlikely spot and by a most unlikely rebel.
Dateline Morristown, Tennessee, a sleepy Appalachian town of 30,000 people — and one courageous Capuchin monkey determined to exact vengeance on the Borg. “Furious George,” as this nameless simian vandal seems destined to be called by future …
