Reports from May Day 2012 from Kansas City to Athens.

Former Los Angeles Times book critic Susan Salter Reynolds and writer and editor Willie Osterweil talk about what it means to be a working writer in a precarious economy and how it has changed the nature of written culture and book reviewing.

To ask the question of whether an LRAD is designed to hurt people or designed to communicate across long distances with people is to mystify its central design function: it is a technology whose purpose is to FORCE you to listen and obey, and one which is less interested in the difference than you’d think.

she probably told Gilgamesh he’d get fat off all those loaves of bread, probably sucker punched Jesus, replaced Roland’s horn with a protophonograph that split his temples from sheer sonic distress, told Vlad the Impaler that his methods were obsolescent, flooded Paris a few times for a laugh

If the New York Times can get away with describing a trans woman as “25 and curvaceous” in the first line of the piece covering her death, that means it only stopped describing all women in those terms because they “had” to.