David Samuels

You can smell what’s coming. It isn’t good, what they’re cooking up. It’s been almost a decade now, so we already know the drill: Keep quiet, do what you’re told, don’t think wrong thoughts, and make yourself as small as possible, in the hopes of maybe becoming invisible. This is plainly no recipe … Continue Reading

Great artists talk directly to God. Sometimes, more often than not, they do it only once. Maybe a handful of times, at best. Why God chooses some people to talk to and not others is a mystery that other artists love to savor and ponder and get jealous about, which is a solid reason to prefer the … Continue Reading

The Greyhound bus ride from New York to Memphis takes 24 hours, so you may as well do something pretty with your time, like getting drunk before noon off a liter of J&B or tagging the initials "Nc" on the window or checking your blood pressure at the drugstore next to a transfer station. Or you … Continue Reading

Picking glitter off the carpet of the Ace Hotel in Seattle in the dog days of August is the reward I get for leaving home and venturing into the great beyond. Every year, at around this time, I descend from my farmstead in order to report on what remains of the America I once loved, and still have … Continue Reading

There was once a boy who fell to earth.  He was delicate and small, his hair was blond, his face was smudged, and he was born nowhere — but he had an unusual talent for writing songs that remind listeners of the Beatles, with lyrics that were a strange combination of puns and jokes and pure misery. … Continue Reading

Bobby Kennedy Jr. is the first environmental activist with a legitimate shot at winning a major-party nomination for President. He has made preserving and cleaning up the environment his life’s work, rescuing the Hudson River from polluters and turning it into the centerpiece of the country’s … Continue Reading

The legendary American con man Titanic Thompson once said that “In every bet there’s a fool and thief.” Thompson’s refusal to be a fool, the role for which he had seemingly been destined from birth, helped make him one of America’s greatest heroes of the 1920s, the age when the American hero was … Continue Reading