Alex Pagliuca

The first month of 2026 has been the beginning of a catastrophic rending for many in the United States. Many are experiencing a sense of rupture beyond any in their lifetimes or they could have imagined. There are many ways this is a progression, the logical advancement of conditions in the too long

I was raised in a home that venerated Martin Luther King Jr. When my mother remarried in my seventh year, she married a man who as a social worker, and who had earnestly dedicated his life to making the idea of The Beloved Community Dr. King spoke and wrote about a reality. He was, at the time, a me

It seems the fears about martial law are not taking the full picture into account. The fuller picture, considering what was normalized long before Trump even began his political career. The things many people are afraid of the administration doing or being able to do, by instituting martial law, hav

I have more experience with hopelessness than I'd like to admit, but this also means I have a whole lot of experience with combatting it. I thought some of that might be useful right now.

I had an interesting experience Tuesday morning. I sat, having my coffee, scrolling social media (something I keep saying I'm going to stop starting my day with), and I came across a combination of posts that I felt captured or described something. For whatever reason, the algorithm decided to serve

As I was writing the latest piece, it occurred to me there was a way to talk a little bit about the experiences of being neurodivergent, the stigmas and the benefits, as it relates directly to what the piece is about, but that didn't belong in the piece I was writing.

NPR recently reposted a piece from May that accompanied a segment of All Things Considered. It’s a piece in what has become a genre in our news. It concerns people refusing to date outside of their personal political affinities. For a number of years now, we’ve been seeing these pieces with some reg

Quick public service announcement on something you're going to be seeing a lot more of in news and from the mouths of people with fecal matter between their ears.

I think what sticks in my craw about the “political violence is unacceptable” declarations is that it’s basically just a defense of a mythological history that never happened. Political violence, and most especially what we now consider right wing political violence, has always been acceptable. Ther

Horror is the art of fear, the uncomfortable and the taboo. This is to say it's the storytelling genre we use to explore those things. This can mean very specific, individual fears. It can also mean collective fears. It also means exploring ideas, themes and topics that sit at the nexus of that rela

When we speak about the arts, most especially the popular arts (movies, books, music, television), one of the things I get tripped on is a consistent drive to hem them in. “This is art,” and “That is not art.” The most common version of this is to speak about art made with the perceived intent of be

"It’s all a mess. The one out there. The one in here. The one that’s coming. Why is everyone so ready to think the worst is over?” - Susie Bannion (as played by Dakota Johnson) It’s chilling to consider this line today, originally delivered to theaters in 2018 by Dakota Johnson, as Susie Bannion, in

I have been avoiding writing about politics and social issues directly. This is too important to ignore. The Supreme Court just issued a new ruling related to protest. Everyone who believes their right to avoid inconvenience, while at the same time arguing democracy is a messy, slow process, and peo

Kind of can’t really explain the degree of dread and fury it inspires to have watched the far right use campus free speech as a Trojan Horse for spreading hate for years, to now see people start saying, “Campus free speech has gone too far,” because far right fuckwits are very into suppressing speec

Are you familiar with KOSA, the bill currently moving through Congress with bipartisan support? If not, follow the links below, get familiar. 22 Democrats Sponsor a Bill That Could Censor Abortion Info From the Internet Congress Amended KOSA, But It's Still A Censorship Bill Despite wide support, th

Ryan Walters, the head of public education in Oklahoma, is showing us the future of right wing politics and governance. This is what happens when fascists gather power. There are a lot of otherwise well meaning people who just write this stuff off and say, “Well, that’s what happens when you live in

Fear. Anger. Two of the most common and destructive human emotional and psychological responses. They're deeply interconnected, and one of the few real truisms is how often anger is the veil for fear, especially but certainly not only for men. Market Street, on August 12 in Charlottesville in 2012,

I've written a general review for Babylon. After seeing it again, I'm struck by how little of the commentary in the film about repression via conservative social norms has been left out of discussion surrounding it. Part of the response to the film belies the unconscious conservatism in much of the

For a decade or more, among our political commentators, pundits, media personalities, operatives of both parties and no shortage of self identified leftists, there has been a dismissive tenor toward what are often called "culture wars" and/or "identity politics." The dismissiveness is founded in the

The circumstances of my life couldn't be more different today than they were in the mid 2010's. Given this, it seems strange to be looking at events in the news, and feeling as if we are once again, back in 2015 - 2016, some six or seven years on, it's as if nothing has happened. In too many places

I've tried to write this piece a number of times. I've tried different angles, different "ways in," different ways to get at saying what I need to say. When it comes to most things, if I'm having this much trouble finding the right way to go about framing what I want to say, I just let it go for a l

No, this isn't a piece about one of the most perfect, aurally lustrous baby making songs of the turn of the century, though I am now listening to D'Angelo's classic album, Voodoo, because it's a comfort record for me and the title of this piece did bring the song to mind. "Untitled (How Does It Feel

Ya know... They made it illegal to give people water while they were crossing the desert a while back. Now it's illegal to give water to people standing in lines to participate in democracy, because they've made the lines so long, people need food and water to stand in them. Tomorrow they'll be talk

Back in the halcyon days of the late nineties and early 2000's, after 9/11, but before the economic crash, there was a sentiment among many of us then young things that there was a promise of some coming digital utopia. This isn't to say I believed the existence of the internet was going to bring ab

It's finally here. Tomorrow, some things will be different. At the very least, we won't be bombarded with political ads, we'll stop having pundits in every single news outlet trying to interpret polls, and so on. Chances are good we'll have some idea who our next president is going to be, come this

Thank the Lord, I was finally able to get to the club yesterday. Saved by Renewal Remembrance Day, yet again. I’ve spent the last three days dealing with Johnson, going through affiliates leads on our local bomber and getting ready for the live Reconciliation. The tedium of it all is just draining.

Because of Big Tech's decision to start cracking down on Q Anon, the crowd of liberals and moderates who believe the answer to Nazis, white supremacists and their fascistic kin spreading their propaganda is "more speech" are making their arguments about rational discourse being the only way to turn

Lauren Southern is a grifter. That's the short version of the story about Lauren Southern. The long version is, for a short time, she was operating a successful grift as the American media and culture was trying it's best not to admit that the "alt-right" wasn't some new splinter movement of youth c

We are confronted again with the vile reality created by the fantasies which have been at the core of the nation since before it was even a nation. In the streets of our cities, the phrase Black Lives Matter rings out each night, and stares at passers by from signs and graffiti each day. The need fo

Photo by Alec Favale on Unsplash I'm behind on a long piece I'm working on related to COVID-19, our national readiness for a pandemic, and the half century fight which has created the state of affairs which amounts to unreadiness. A few standard life distractions have come along over this past week

I remember when a number of journalists and government transparency activists said that Obama’s zealous prosecution of whistle blowers was setting a terrible precedent, and dangerous to the concept of press freedoms. The whole of the Democratic Party responded that whistleblowers should be prosecute

I've been trying to write this entry for a week or so now. It's hard to even know where to start. Disloyal Jews? Rounding up the mentally ill until "we know what's going on"? The Epstein connections and scandal? The continued refusal to specifically address the wanton violence committed by the adher

Have been limiting the intake of current events news pretty significantly lately, in defense of my own mental health. Just heard a report on William Barr saying there will be investigations into the agencies that investigated the Trump campaign, along with the usual panel discussion following the ba

I’ve talked about a general strike a pretty fair amount in the last few years. It’s generally not seen as practical by most people. Part of the idea behind it is the ability to decide who gets to instill some level of order. Trump’s shutdown is in many ways no different from a strike. His idea to in

I was 50 or 75 feet away when James Alex Fields drove his car into that crowd, and killed Heather Heyer. I heard the bodies bouncing off the car before I saw anything, then the crash of his vehicle pushed two cars sitting in front of it at a stop sign into the crowd in the intersection, and then as

We are not exceptional. The myth of American Exceptionalism has to go. It's existed as the basis of a xenophobic and racist foreign policy for decades, replacing naked white supremacy. Meritocracy, itself an offshoot of American Exceptionalism, kept them alive domestically. Today, American Exception