Here are the ones I’ve watched so far. All are new to me, but most aren’t new.

Pabrik Gula (aka Sugar Mill)—I like watching horror movies from other countries because a)it makes me feel like part of a worldwide community of weirdos and b) they tend to have different tropes and obsessions than American horror movies. This movie, about a bunch of friends from a town in rural Java (I’m not familiar with Indonesia, so maybe that’s the only kind of Java?) who sign up for seasonal work at a sugar mill that turns out to be haunted, is pretty good for most of the movie but ultimately fell short for me. The ghosts are creepy, there’s a lot of suspense, and (mild spoiler) the character who is dumb, fat, and horny (and also darker skinned than anyone else—I also don’t know if colorism is a thing in Indonesia, but based on this movie I suspect it is) not only isn’t the first to die—he doesn’t die at all! There’s a lot of stuff about dispelling demons in an Islamic context which is interesting to me because it’s all very different than how it’s portrayed in a Christian context. But unfortunately from my perspective, the movie isn’t concerned with the morality of the factory owners who ran a place where a lot of people died (hence the ghosts), but rather with the sexual morality of the workers. So like a pretty decent horror movie that kind of turns into a Davey and Goliath episode at the end, if Davey and Goliath talked about adultery. (I dunno—maybe they did. I couldn’t stand that show.)

Halloween III: Season of the Witch—Current conventional wisdom is that this movie is good, actually, and just never got a fair shake from a public that was expecting another Michael Meyers story. I’m sorry to report this is not true. I mean, look, it’s goofy and therefore kind of charming if you find goofy 80’s horror charming, but it’s not actually good. There’s just way too much going on: the human-passing killbots are like, not even central to the plot, just to give you an idea of how busy this movie is. The rest is science fiction witchcraft plus a non-credible age-inappropriate relationship and a heaping dose of misogyny. (Because our alcoholic hero’s stupid ex just wants to complain about what a shit father he is instead of listening to his insane story about killer masks!). Watchable, but VERY far from essential.

The Blade Cuts Deeper—You know what I appreciate? When someone makes a subgenre movie without constantly winking at us about how familiar they are with the conventions of said subgenre. In this case, we’ve got a modern giallo set in the world of reality television. It differs from classic giallo in that it’s not dubbed and everyone can act, but otherwise it’s just a straightforward giallo movie. It seems to be trying to satirize true crime TV in a way that never totally hits, but still, it’s suspenseful and gory and has a cool surprise ending. And best of all, the filmmakers appear to have decided to just make a giallo instead of a giallo ABOUT giallo. So the movie is about what it’s about rather than being about the cleverness of the filmmakers. This was my favorite of the 4.

Solvent—I remain a sucker for found footage because it strips away one layer of artifice and makes it easier for me to suspend disbelief. And the description of this one made it sound like it was fully a “cursed object” movie, which is right up my alley, but that’s really not what it is. Let me say the first 20 minutes or so are really really good. And after that it kind of goes off the rails, ultimately resolving into what’s primarily a body horror movie, which is my least favorite subgenre. So I guess if you like body horror, you might like this one, though it is self-consciously artsy and the POV character is, judging only by his voice, the worst actor in the movie. Oh yeah, also? There’s a big moment at the end that features sub-Sharknado level CGI. Seriously, it looks like absolute garbage and is unintentionally comical. I can’t believe they saw this shot and went, “yeah, that’s good.” Okay. Spoilers! Turn back now or forever have a mediocre horror movie spoiled!

So, like, the central conceit of this movie is essentially incomprehensible. The nazi guy found a way to liquefy himself and saved bottles of his pee because reasons, and now he lives as a puddle of goo in a hole in the ground with a pipe in it because reasons, and then our protagonist gets possessed and obsessive and starts spewing black goo from every orifice. Oh yeah, and inexplicably feeding the nazi puddle of goo with his own pee. I have never seen a movie so obsessed with urine. I’m not here to kink shame, but I guess I just don’t find pee as interesting as the filmmakers do. Fair play for the dick horror, though—I feel like women are often the targets of body horror, and slasher horror, and, okay a lot of kinds of horror, so I guess it was time for us to see a penis leaking black goo.

The protagonist apparently committed war crimes in Bosnia, but the movie really stops short of exploring the connection between his war crimes and the nazi puddle of goo’s war crimes, ultimately insisting that the protagonist is better because he exposes a lot of present-day nazis. Oh yeah, it also equates criticism of the Israeli government—or indeed, any sympathy at all with the Palestinian people—with Nazism, which I’m sure Netanyahu appreciated, but I didn’t.

Let’s start with who. As is so often the case in “ed reform” circles, it’s difficult to untangle. MassLive says the ad was placed by MassPotential, “a K-12 nonprofit” and “a new coalition in the nonprofit” called Next Chapter Boston.

At the helm of MassPotential is Mary Tamer, who once ran for city council and mailed out an “accidentally” racist flyer before getting whupped by Kendra Lara Hicks in the general election. When I went to vote for Hicks in that election, I had to run a gauntlet of Tamer supporters who, if I may judge a book by its cover, were off-duty cops, and were illegally lining both sides of the entrance to the school where I voted saying, “Mary Tamer. Mary Tamer,” to everyone who walked in.

Okay, one of my issues with Tamer at the time is that she had a history of anti-public school activism, having worked at the Mass Charter Public School Association and School Facts Boston. After losing her city council race, she became executive director of Education Reform Now. She’s not the first person who couldn’t cut it in real education work and followed the money into the ed reform grift, but she’s one of them.

Okay, so what about this latest organization Tamer is heading up? MassLive told me it was a nonprofit, so I looked them up on the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s website, and guess what? MassPotential doesn’t legally exist! Kind of like School Facts Boston! If you go to try to donate to MassPotential (please don’t), you can find that it is “a fiscally sponsored project of Goodnation Foundation.” As near as I can tell, New York-based Goodnation Foundation provides this service to organizations that don’t want to go through the process of applying for 501c(3) status.

But the ed reform movement has extremely deep pockets and could surely spare the roughly two thousand bucks it takes to incorporate a nonprofit. But of course the fact that these organizations don’t have any official legal status also means they’re not subject to any of the transparency requirements that govern nonprofits incorporated in Massachusetts.

So: how much money is Mary Tamer making for her role in this project? We don’t know! How much money does the “organization” have? We don’t know, though Tamer asserts they dropped $1.5 million on the anti-BPS ad. Whose $1.5 million was that? We don’t know! Then add that Next Chapter Boston, who apparently paid for the ads, is nested within MassPotential which is nested within Goodnation foundation. (We see Tamer’s fellow School Facts Boston alum Vernée Wilkinson is on this gravy train too. Get that bag, I guess).

Next Chapter Boston of course asserts that it consists of “parents, neighbors and Bostonians,” which, since there are two employees, is technically true but of course deceptive, since this is yet another ed reform astroturf organization. Nested inside another ed reform astroturf organization. Nested inside a nonprofit that provides logistics.

You want to know something funny? On the “What We Believe” section of Next Chapter Boston’s website, one of the three core values they list is “transparency.” LOL!

So why are the ed reform grifters turning up the heat on Boston Public Schools now? Well, as I’ve written before, (here, here, and here) Boston’s charter schools are in serious trouble. City on a Hill and Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy have both closed down, and here in October 2026, 8 months after the lottery for the supposedly scarce and in-high-demand charter school seats, Academy of the Pacific Rim, Roxbury Prep, Boston Prep, and Neighborhood House charter schools are all still looking for students across multiple grade levels.

The whole “let parents vote with their feet” thing espoused by charter school founders has really come back to bite them. Parents are providing accountability that the Commonwealth fails to provide and avoiding schools with long hours, draconian discipline, and a well-deserved reputation for not adhering to special education laws, and charter schools are suffering.

I find it interesting that they’re no longer even trying to put forward a pro-charter case. They’re attacking BPS because they’ve failed to make a case with parents that charter schools should continue to exist. The worse the outlook for Boston’s charter schools, the nastier the failing ed reform movement is bound to get. Strap in!

As I always do at this time of year, I’m thinking a lot about horror movies, and so I’ve decided to assemble a non-comprehensive list of horror movies I consider canonical.

What I mean by this is that these are the movies that everyone making horror has seen and that all other horror movies are therefore inspired by or reacting to in some way. Please note this is not a “best of” list. Nor do I intend it to be the end of anyone’s horror movie viewing. I see it more as a gateway drug. Once you’re acquainted with Argento, for example, you’ll probably want to check out Fulci and Bava. Or once you’ve seen Nosferatu, you might want to check out Vampyr and Haxan. Though Haxan sucks and is way too long. But you get the point. Ready? Here we go!

Three notable exclusions:

1. I haven’t included any Hammer movies, on the theory that the style and aesthetic have been incredibly influential, but not really any individual movie. Dracula A.D. 1972 is my favorite, but really any of the Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing Dracula movies will do.

2. Same with Vincent Price’s oeuvre. I’d recommend Masque of the Red Death as a representative of the Poe “adaptations,” (i.e., movies with the same title as Poe stories) and The Abominable Dr. Phibes as representative of the 70’s, and Comedy of Terrors for comedy, but while Price is a horror icon, I don’t think any of his individual movies qualify as canonical.

3. Jason’s not in the first Friday the 13th, so it’s obviously not that one. So, like, one of the other ones, I guess. They’re mostly the same until he goes to space or fights Freddy.

Content warning: yeah, it’s horror, but in addition to violence and death, you may encounter misogyny, racism, and homophobia in a lot of these movies. I’m not excusing them or making a judgment about whether those elements ruin the movie, as your mileage will vary on that stuff.

Nosferatu (1922)

Dracula (1931)

Frankenstein (1931)

Freaks (1932)

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Cat People (1942)

Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)—Horror comedy starts here. Watch and marvel at how many movies and Scooby-Doo episodes were influenced by this movie.

Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Plan 9 From Outer Space (1957)—an objectively terrible movie, and therefore the spiritual ancestor of all the bad DIY horror movies we know and love.

Psycho (1960)

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

The Birds (1963)

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)—Please pirate this or buy it used on physical media if you want to watch. It was directed by a child rapist who is unfortunately still alive and will financially benefit from any legitimate purchase of his work. Great movie, tho.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

The Night Stalker (1972)

The Exorcist (1973)—I don’t believe in Satan and therefore never found this movie as scary as everybody else did, and I find the head spinning and the puking comical. Nevertheless—can’t deny that it’s hugely influential.

The Wicker Man (1973)

Black Christmas (1974)—Fun fact: Elvis loved this movie and watched it at Christmastime every year from the time it came out till his death! So three times. But still!

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Deep Red, aka Profondo Rosso (1975)

Trilogy of Terror (1975)—really just the doll segment with Karen Black, but that’s iconic enough to merit inclusion.

Carrie (1976)

The Hills Have Eyes (1977)

Suspiria (1977)

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Halloween (1978)—I’ve said this before, but in my opinion this is a perfect movie. Not one wasted frame.

Alien (1979)

Phantasm (1979)—kinda weird, but people love it for some reason. I’m not one of them, but I have to admit it’s not like everything else.

Cannibal Holocaust (1980)—filmmakers were literally arrested and held until they could prove that the gore gags weren’t real. There is significant animal cruelty in this movie, but it’s one of the sharpest, nastiest indictments of colonialism I’ve ever seen.

The Shining (1980)—I don’t think Jack Nicolson can actually act. He does the same thing in every movie. Including this one. Still there’s some good suspense and iconic visuals.

An American Werewolf in London (1981)—Okay, I actually hate this movie, and I believe The Howling, released the same year, is a much better werewolf movie. But this is the one people remember.

The Evil Dead (1981)

Poltergeist (1982)

The Thing (1982)

Children of the Corn (1984)

Gremlins (1984)

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)—Only two of the sequels are worth watching, imo: 3: the Dream Warriors and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.

Fright Night (1985)

Re-Animator (1985)

The Fly (1986)

Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn (1987)—Probably my favorite movie. Like a 3 Stooges movie but with only one stooge and some demons that swallow people’s souls.

Hellraiser (1987)—The whole movie looks murky and sounds like shit and I can’t say I fully understand it even after 2 viewings, but, again, iconic visuals.

The Lost Boys (1987)

Near Dark (1987)

Child’s Play (1988)

Tremors (1990)

Troll 2 (1990)—see Plan 9 From Outer Space, above. Just a wonderfully terrible movie.

Candyman (1992)

Scream (1996)

The Blair Witch Project (1999)—not the first found footage movie, but certainly the most influential.

Scooby-Doo and the Witch’s Ghost (1999)—the best Scooby-Doo movie. Plays with the formula in delightful fashion, has numerous quotable lines, and introduces fan favorites The Hex Girls.

Well, I’m so glad you asked! Here are some things I would put forward if I were running for Governor.

We are in a climate emergency but our response hasn’t been urgent or bold. When climate disaster strikes, we’ll need to spend a lot of money to fix things, so let’s fix some things on the front end instead! I actually don’t think this should count as bold leadership as much as “the bare minimum required of competent leadership.”

• First and foremost: close Hanscom Field. It is unconscionable in a climate emergency that we operate an airport for private jets at public expense. If rich people want a private airport, let them build, staff, and maintain it. And then tax it at an incredibly high rate.
• Make all public transportation free in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Electrify the commuter rail. And run rail links from Worcester to Springfield. It’s absurd that the third biggest city in the Commonwealth is the only one of the 23 most populous cities inaccessible by rail. Ideally this line could stop in Amherst as well. Once again, it’s absurd that the flagship campus of the UMASS system is inaccessible by rail.
• This should do a lot to get unnecessary cars off the road in Massachusetts, but we can do more. Tolls should be put on 93 and 95 as well as on the Mass Pike. (I’d like to have special transponders for folks with mobilty or other physical challenges who have to drive that allow them to pay reduced tolls or no tolls at all.)
• Solar panels on every building owned by the Commonwealth. And on non-park property owned by the commonwealth as well. There’s a big solar array at the Framingham service area on the pike Westbound: where are the rest of them?
• Massive subsidies to get homeowners and other property owners off fossil fuels. Nobody should be burning oil to heat their home in 2026, and people using gas need to get off it. But we can’t leave this to individuals. The heat pump programs in effect are a start but are still out of reach for a lot of people. And why no solar subsidies?
• Masshealth for all. I’ve lost confidence that we will ever be able to get the federal government to provide health insurance for all citizens, but Massachusetts can and should be a model for how that can work. I’m not suggesting we abolish private insurance right away—let people who want private insurance pay for it. But we have a moral responsibility to offer no-cost health insurance to everyone in the Commonwealth.
• Proper ventilation for all public schools, K-University, in the Commonwealth. Keep everyone healthier and thereby improve attendance for both teachers and students and thereby have everybody get more out of school. I am actually dumbfounded that nobody is proposing this easy, common sense win for education.
• Raise the minimum wage to $30/hr.
• Baby box like they do in Scotland. Free period products like they do in Scotland. Free childcare like they do in Scotland. Hell, basically just look at Scotland and do as much of the stuff they’re doing as possible.

“Okay,” the liberals who don’t actually want this stuff will say. “But how are you going to pay for it?”

Well, first of all, this is a canard. Ten years ago, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the City of Boston combined to offer General Electric Corporation 275 million dollars in public money to entice them to move to Boston, which, by the way, they never did. People like Deval Patrick were working to try to get hundreds of millions of dollars tax money funnelled to the IOC when Boston was bidding for the Olympics. The point is that when government wants to do something, it finds the money, and “we can’t afford it” is just a dishonest way of saying, “that is not something we want to do.”

But sure, I’ll play—we can institute a progressive income tax instead of the current flat tax. Single-payer health coverage will also save a lot of money—even just looking at the Commonwealth, it now employs people to adminster Mass Health and people to administer private insurance policies for Commonwealth employees. Getting cars off the road will mean fewer accidents, which will generate cost savings from a reduced need for first responders, tow trucks, and cleaning crews. It will also improve air quality, which will help people stay healthy and lead to less sick time, fewer hospital stays, etc.

Big ol’ tax on second and third homes. People who own vacation homes and empty tax-dodge condos in luxury high rises can afford to kick in some more for the public good.

Tolls and congestion pricing will add revenue, as would repealing the law that requires construction sites to have a police detail, a law that Massachusetts cops say is absolutely essential to public safety but exists almost nowhere else.

I’m not a public policy scholar. But I know these things are doable because they’ve been done elsewhere. And if any of these policies look like an unachievable dream, that’s an indictment of the United States, not of government policies that actually benefit ordinary people.

I’m writing with an urgent concern for the upcoming winter. As I write this, the average price of heating oil among the companies I’ve checked is between $5.50 and $5.75 per gallon. This is about $1.50 more per gallon than I’ve ever seen before.

I’m aware that the price hikes are tied to the war in Iran, which is not a local issue. What is a local issue, though, is that these prices will almost certainly result in deaths this winter.

That may sound hyperbolic, but I don’t believe it is. Many people in old homes, especially those on fixed incomes, cannot come up with an extra $300 every time they have to refill their oil tank. I’m afraid that people will either freeze in their homes or die when space heaters start fires or perhaps from carbon monoxide poisoning from trying to start a fire in a long-disused and possibly-unsafe fireplace.

As I said, I know nobody at the local level is to blame for this situation. But we now find ourselves in a situation where our neighbors are at risk of dying this winter, and I believe we have a responsibility to prevent that outcome.

I don’t have a specific policy recommendation, but I would really like to see our elected officials talking about this and making plans before this entirely foreseeable emergency unfolds. I’m certainly hoping for a mild winter, but we need to be doing more.

Thanks for your attention to this critically important matter.

The internet and the world are long on gloom and doom and extremely short on practical suggestions for how to resist the doom they’re so gloomy about.

I’ve been listening to the audiobook of The Nerd Reich by Gil Duran. It explains how big tech embraced fascism and the “philosophical” roots of a lot of what these guys are trying to do. (I put “philosophical” in quotes because most of it is Peter Thiel read a book in college. But there’s some nazi stuff and of course Ayn Rand thrown in to boot.) It’s a fascinating, depressing read, and it has changed the way I view our current moment.

We have a fascist state in large part because big tech wants us to have a fascist state. Actually they want us to have no state at all. They want a dictatorship of the tech elite with the goal of destroying all nations and having us all be serfs in their little tech enclaves. This is actually some of the less unhinged stuff they believe. They also believe that they are literally creating a vengeful AI God that will punish those who tried to slow its progress and also free the elect from death. I’m not kidding. They believe this.

Big tech has, through the magic of having a lot of money, effectively captured the United States government. But make no mistake—this is a global project. These guys (yep, pretty much all guys) are quite open about their disdain for democracy and their rage at not being summarily put in charge of the entire world because they are so smart and awesome. If you want the details, I encourage you to read Duran’s book or just do some searches about TESCREAL, The Network State, Accelerationism, Rationalists, and The Sovereign Individual.

So I think we in the US need to reframe how we look at our current problem. Yes, it is partly a Republican vs. Democrat problem, but it’s more broadly a Big Tech vs. Humanity problem. They’ve used their wealth to fund fascism, and they won’t stop actively working to subvert and destroy democracy no matter who is in office.

Which makes all of us collaborators. It’s tough to come to terms with this because we haven’t been physically invaded. But the interesting thing about technology is that it allows you to capture a population without firing a shot. So we are actively aiding our enemies by giving them our time, our money, our attention, and our respect.

Well, okay, the respect has pretty much evaporated—most people view Elon Musk as a dangerous clown who doesn’t know he’s an idiot, and if people have heard of Peter Thiel, they probably think of him as the guy who’s gone around the bend making speeches about the Antichrist.

But everything else? We are all in bed with our enemies. And so I’d like to give us all (Because I am extremely far from perfect in this or any other area) some pointers on how to stop collaborating with the people who want to destroy us. It’s not easy because they’ve pandered to our desire for connection and convenience, and so giving some of this stuff up is going to mess with both. But trust an old guy—it’s all doable.

I’m not going to get into anything that requires a lot of tech knowledge because if you’re the kind of person who feels confident putting Graphene OS on your phone or whatever, you already know about this stuff and don’t need me to tell you. I’m pitching this at most of us who look at our phones and computers the way we look at cars: we know how to operate the thing but have no idea what goes on under the hood.

Tips

1. Roll your own storage. I’ve written before about the joy of having Network Attached Storage in your home, but if that’s intimidating, let me encourage you to buy an external hard drive. You can get a 4 terabyte external hard drive on newegg.com for under 200 bucks. That’s ample storage for all your documents, contacts, photos, and music. It might get tight if you do a lot of video editing or music production, I guess. But—no more Dropbox, no more iCloud, no more giving your data to Big Tech to train AI with.

2. Buy a planner. I got this one in green with my name printed on the cover for 30 bucks. Think about all the information about your life that your calendar contains. Don’t just give that to the Big Tech ghouls to monetize. Keep it for yourself. “But it’s not searchable!” Actually it is. You can search it by flipping through pages. I read this in the breathless review of the new Siri that ran in the New York Times’ Wirecutter: “Siri AI was able to recall the exact dates I went on trips to Las Vegas this year, identifying that I went twice.” Or you could page through your calendar and look at where you wrote VEGAS in big letters. I bet it wouldn’t be that hard and you might also be reminded of something else cool that you did or experienced along the way!

3. Get off corporate social media. I know this is a tough one because for some folks, social media is a lifeline because they live in communities that are hostile to their identites and values. If that’s you, or even if you just like social media for fun, please check out this page and video about the fediverse. Tl;dr—you can have social media without being a Big Tech collaborator.

But also? I’d like to encourage us all (very much including me!) to consider whether the connections we make on social media are coming at the expense of real world connections. Like, are you not actually joining in-person book groups with real humans because Goodreads scratches that itch for you? In the last few years of my mom’s life, she spent a lot of time on Facebook, staying connected with her extended family but also having a lot of pointless fights about politics. I can’t help wondering if she could have gotten a healthier sense of connection by just going to the same coffee shop every morning.

Actually this is a life hack: showing up in the same place at the same time regularly is a great way to connect with actual humans. This happens to me at the park walking my dog, and it used to happen to me in coffee shops and libraries when I was writing full time. Just show up somewhere and eventually you’ll wind up talking to the other people who also show up there.

My advice on getting off corporate social media is to go one service at a time. Start with Facebook and see how it feels to not have that taking up space in your life. Then maybe move on to Instagram. Or Youtube. Or Goodreads. Leave the service you like most for last so that you can look back on your earlier experiences leaving a social media platform to bolster your confidence that you can do it.

“But I like social media!” See fediverse, above, but also: do you? Like, do you really? Or does it give you a quick high followed by a nasty comedown? Do you really think it’s healthy for you to stalk your exes? Do you actually need to know every time someone from your high school has a child or a colonosocopy?

“But I need social media to promote my art/small business!” No you don’t. What you need is a website and a mailing list. I’ll write more about this soon.

1. Don’t use AI. I know some people are forced to use it at work. If you’re one of them, I encourage you to figure out some malicious compliance. (Actually given all the stories I’m seeing about CEOs freaking out about their employees burning through expensive AI tokens that they were told to burn through when they were cheap, I think malicious compliance is pretty widespread in this area already.)

But at home? Don’t use the AI that comes baked into your phone, your word processor, your almost everything these days. Download Libre Office, an AI-free office suite that is free and actually works better than what you’re probably using. if you’re making a flyer for your event, don’t use AI. If you’re writing literally anything anywhere that you expect a human to read, don’t use AI. Just don’t. It is bad for the environment in general and especially for the low-income communties forced to host data centers. Sure, your flyer isn’t going to make or break Open AI, but it does make you a collaborator with the anti-human agenda. Also? It makes you look like an asshole. Sorry. People will actively avoid your event if you advertise it with AI. I would sooner go to something whose flyer was hastily scrawled with a Sharpie than one whose flyer was made with AI.

Seriously. It’s bad politically, it’s bad environmentally, and, despite what they want us to believe, it’s far from inevitable. If you are recycling but still using AI? I think you’d be better off setting your single-use plastics and cardboard boxes on fire in the street and quitting AI. Burning the planet down in order to save five minutes is a really shitty thing to do to your children and grandchildren. (or those of your friends and loved ones) Stop it.

BTW, one way to cut AI use is to stop using Google search (which sucks now anyway) and use Duckduckgo. Go to the duckduckgo settings and click on AI features and select “off” “no” and “never” to every setting you find.

Also you can get in touch with people using AI and say, “hey, I’m not coming to your event because of your horrible AI flyer,” or “Not buying your album because of the AI cover,” or whatever.

1. Buy dumb whenever possible. Anything “smart”—fridge, nightlight, air conditioner, space heater, whatever—is collecting data on you and those around you and also making you dependent on the internet which makes you dependent on big tech. And boy howdy is this true of cars too. Buy the car with the fewest “smart” features you can find because the cameras on your car make you a free rolling surveillance drone in service of Big Tech, but also they’re fundamentally trying to make you rent the car instead of own it. If you have to pay for subscriptions to make things work, don’t buy. Keep your old car. Fix it up.

Conclusion

The biggest enemies of democracy and freedom in the world right now are American tech companies. Disengage with them as much as possible. Unsubscribe to their services. Don’t use their “free” products. Starve them of your money, your data, and your attention however you can.

I know this is difficult. It’s difficult for me.

But come on. We grew up watching movies like Terminator and The Matrix and Star Wars and believed that we’d be the ones hiding out and striking blows against an evil empire. This comes with a certain level of inconvenience.

The bad news is that the evil empire is here, and it’s in your pocket. The good news is, you can fight it without having to do violence or sleep outdoors. Or spend time in a gross, damp cave or whatever that was that the people in the Matrix lived in.

Get resisting.

I like noir fiction a lot, and it’s a tough sell. This one’s only been rejected once, but I don’t really see a lot of hope for it in the short fiction markets for crime and mystery.

Content warnings: violence, drugs, mention of sexual assault.

I’d like to be able to say I started dealing because my family needed money and there were no other options. Something noble.

The truth, though, is that I wanted to get invited to parties. I mean, it is certainly true that we, my mom and I, had way less money than the families of any of my classmates at Cincinnati Prep, but it’s not like I was hungry or we were about to be homeless or anything.

But if you’re a broke kid who takes the Metro bus to Cincinnati Prep and lives in Western Hills, you don’t get invited to parties in Hyde Park, Amberley, or Indian Hill.

Unless you’ve got weed to sell. Instant popularity!

I then branched out into adderall, because my high-achieving peers requested it.

I stayed away from the hard stuff, though. Because I get my product from Alex down the street, and they have guns and security cameras and all that shit because they sell coke and fentanyl. I’m sixteen. I don’t want that kind of hassle.

Actually, even the hassle of selling weed and adderall had become too much. I did a fair amount of dealing in the school parking lot, and the administration had started to get uncomfortable because parents were complaining that their kids were buying weed at school.

They called me in for a chat. I don’t know if other people got called in or if this was a special privilege for people from the wrong side of the tracks. (Not a metaphor. Literal train tracks run through the center of the city just west of downtown. Cincinnati is a little on-the-nose).

Our Dean of Students was a white guy named James Browne who used to boast about how he dropped out of Cornell to follow the Dead (which I guess is some stoner band and not, like, ghosts he was tracking or something) in the 80’s before straightening up and getting a degree from the University of Cincinnati. He sat me down in his office.

“Look, nobody knows better than me how much kids like to smoke weed. I was a kid once.”

I didn’t respond.

“But, you know, there are some parents here who are pretty uptight about the old ganj. And as much as I’d like to tell ‘em to smoke a bowl and relax, I can’t, because they pay my salary. So look, you do whatever you want off of school property. But I can’t have you dealing on campus.”

You don’t have to talk to cops, but silence isn’t really an option with Deans of Students. “I really don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Seriously, though. Search my bag. Search my locker. I don’t sell drugs, I don’t do drugs, and I don’t have any drugs on campus.” That was two lies and a truth. I didn’t do drugs. And the drugs on campus were in the “gear tunnel” of Abby Johnstone’s Rivian pickup truck because nobody is ever going to suspect the top-of-the-class student, basketball star, and student council president of holding drugs.  Or doing drugs. But you really can’t do all those things at a high level without chemical assistance. At least Abby couldn’t. I sold her Adderrall at cost as a thank you for the use of her high-tech stash locker.

Dean of Students James Browne said, “well. I’m sorry to be a narc, but I’m gonna have to take you up on that.” Nothing but books, pencils, notebooks and some pretzels in my bag and my locker. “You tried the honey mustard ones?” James Browne asked as he held up a bag of plain pretzels.

“Just here for the salt and the carbs,” I said.

“Respect, man, respect,” James Browne said.

The cameras went up in the parking lot the next day. There’s a couple million dollars’ worth of automotive hardware in that parking lot, so I was kinda surprised it took the administration that long to put it under surveillance.

Like I said, I didn’t need the money, not really, and I definitely didn’t need the hassle, so I put out the word that I was having a going out of business sale at Lily Brightling’s party on Saturday night. Dealing had gotten me the level of social acceptance and coolness I wanted, though, it has to be said, it hadn’t brought me any real friends, because I never knew who was being nice to me because they liked me and who was being nice to me because they liked drugs. Now I could just get some shitty food service job or something and focus on my grades, and I suppose find out who my real friends were. Unlike most of my peers, I actually had to do well because I didn’t have a dad who owned a company and could hire me if I majored in frat parties at a third-tier college.  As far as I knew. Mom had always been tightlipped on the subject of my father.

I did a brisk business at Lily’s party. I usually sold to my rich classmates at 150% markup from my cost, so dropping that down to 100% seemed like a bargain to them but was still a pretty nice payday for me.

And then everything went sideways.

Nick Last Name Redacted because if you’re from Cincinnati, you know it, came up to me and said, “Can you get me a key?”

This was the second time I’d spoken to Nick, who was a year ahead of me, since I started at Cincinnati Prep. The first time was when he tried to make me eat his jockstrap in the locker room after gym class when I was in 9th grade and literally a foot shorter and probably 50 pounds lighter than him. Classy guy.

So I decided to give him some shit. “Like a house key? A car key? What kind of key are you after?”

“A kilogram. Of cocaine.”

“Sorry, man, I don’t move that kind of weight.” First thing I did when I started dealing was to study and memorize Ohio’s drug laws. A kilo gets you the Major Drug Offender designation and a mandatory eleven-year prison sentence. I wouldn’t risk that for myself, let alone for this asshole. “I can ask my person.”

“Your person? Why not just say guy?”

“Because they’re not a guy.”

“Chick, then.”

“Look, Nick, it’s been a real joy talking to you, but I’m not getting you a kilo of cocaine, and I don’t want to be the person who introduces my person to a guy who is gonna disrespect them. Because trust me when I say that would be bad for everyone involved. Okay? So give it a rest.”

“Thought you might say that,” Nick said. “So check this out.”

He pulled out his phone and showed me a video of me pulling what was pretty clearly several bags of weed and a bag of pills out of the gear tunnel of Abby Johnstone’s Rivian. Fucking douche. “Can’t really see Abby getting into Stanford after this. Can you?”

“Abby’s not involved,” I said.

“Can’t unlock that tunnel without the key fob,” Nick said, smiling.

“I stole it,” I said.

“Bro. Do you even know how cars work these days? Of course not, because you’re too fucking broke to have one. If you lose your fob they reprogram the car so the old fob doesn’t work. You’re obviously in this together. And, anyway, all I have to do is show this to Browne and you’re done at Cincinnati Prep. Back to the West Side where you belong. And that stuck-up bitch is gonna have to find a safety school.”

My brain was racing. Nick was an idiot, but not so much of an idiot that he didn’t have backups of the video. So I couldn’t ever make sure the video was destroyed and couldn’t come back to haunt me.  I really did not want to get into the coke dealing business. I especially didn’t want to get into the coke dealing business because I’d been outsmarted by this asshole.

But it didn’t seem like I had a choice. I wasn’t going to get him a kilo, though.

“I’ll get you an eight ball. Then if you like the product, I’ll send you to my person. I can’t afford the kind of lawyer that could get me out of “caught with a kilo of coke” trouble.”

“Fine,” he said. “Ault Park. Tomorrow at 10. On the roof of the pavilion.”

I cannot stress enough what a dumb place this is to execute a drug buy. In a park after dark, so you’re legally trespassing just by being there, and on the roof of a structure so that literally anyone driving by, say, in a patrol car, can see you. Oh yeah, and if you’re on the roof of the structure, one cop on either staircase and you’re trapped. The pavilion is literally surrounded by woods that can’t be seen from the road and would be much better places for illicit meetups. But I wasn’t the one driving this train.

So I found myself on top of the pavilion at Ault Park at 10PM the next night. The park was closed, but there weren’t any gates or anything. My bike was locked to a lamppost outside of the park. The stairstep fountain in front of the pavilion was still lit up and the water was still moving, and from the top of the pavilion I could at least see when lights were coming up the street. Which they did kind of frequently. I ducked down every time I saw them coming, but eventually this got tedious, so I just sat down on the concrete floor and waited. Ten minutes later, I saw Nick.

I stood up. “You got it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Three hundred bucks and it’s all yours.”

He made a show of reaching into his pocket, then pulled his hand out, empty. “No money till I see the product,” he said.

“That’s not how this works,” I said. “And anyway, I don’t have anything on me. It’s in the park, and after you pay me, I’ll tell you where it is. It’s not like I’m gonna rip you off—you know how to find me pretty easily.”

“I don’t give a shit how it usually works,” Nick said. “I’ve got the video, I make the rules.”

I really didn’t like this. Selling to potheads and honor students was always a joy. Selling to bullies who want to be coked-up bullies turned out to be much more complicated. But he did have a point about the video.

“Fine,” I said. “It’s behind the plaque of Joseph Ault.”

“What the…where exactly the fuck is that?”

I pointed. “Downstairs. There’s a plaque on a big rock. What you want is behind the rock. Now, about my 300 dollars.”

Nick walked to the front of the pavilion and called down to someone, “behind the rock with the plaque on it!” I joined him at the front of the structure and saw Shane Becker head over to the rock. He came back a minute later with the baggie in his hand. “Got it!” he said.

“Okay, now about my 300 bucks,” I said.

“I’m getting the friends and family discount,” Nick said and punched me in the stomach. Hard. While I was doubled over, he punched me in the face, and I went down. He gave me a couple of kicks in the ribs while I was down, I guess just for fun, and then walked away. I heard the roar of his Porsche’s engine as he and Shane went off with three hundred bucks’ worth of coke. Well, it cost me one fifty, but still. The fucker drove a Porsche. He could afford to pay me.

Eventually I got up off the ground and started walking out of the park back to my bike. I guessed, given what I knew about Nick, I should have been glad that he didn’t want to humiliate me in some weird sexual way. Maybe that was just for the locker room.

I stopped paying attention to my surroundings, maybe because I was trying to think my way out of this. If he tried to get a kilo out of Alex, he wouldn’t dare try this shit, but, on the other hand, he didn’t want an intro to Alex. He wanted me to take all the risk. In fact, he would definitely make me mule the kilo to him and then not pay me.

I was still trying to think about how to get out of this when I saw flashing blue lights. A cop car pulled up next to me. I stopped walking, and I soon had a flashlight shining in my eyes. “Park’s closed,” the cop said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m leaving.”

“What the hell happened to you?” he said. My face was bruised and a little swollen.

Normally I wouldn’t talk to cops, but I didn’t think this guy was trying to bust my balls on a trespassing charge. “She told me her boyfriend was out of town. He came back early,” I said.

The cop laughed. “You wanna file a report?” he said.

“No sir I do not. I want to go home and get an ice pack and ponder my life choices,” I said.

“Hey, speaking of life choices, you got any drugs on you?”

Ugggh. I didn’t, but I was in the park illegally, which might have been probable cause for a search. And if I asserted my right to refuse a search, I would definitely get a trespassing ticket, which I’m sure would not be a big deal, but I was already out a hundred and twenty-five bucks for the night.

“I do not,” I said. “I’m happy to empty my pockets, though.”

I was hoping this would at least allow me to avoid having the cop’s hands on me. I pulled my wallet out of my right pocket and opened it up to reveal no wad of cash, no baggies of drugs. I turned the pocket inside out. I pulled my keys out of my left pocket along with a wrapped condom. “Guess I won’t be needing this tonight,” I said.

“Can you pass that wallet over here?” the cop said.

“I can, but don’t take my library card. I’ve got holds to pick up.” I smiled. I couldn’t tell if the joke landed because I still couldn’t see the dude’s face. He looked at my state identification card.

“You’re a long way from home,” he says.

“Tell me about it. Came all the way over here for some pussy and got the shit beaten out of me instead. It hasn’t been a good night.” This wasn’t the kind of thing I would say in real life. But I figured this would go better for me if I spoke the cop’s language.

The cop shined the light in my face again. Then he handed me my wallet.

“Alright. Stay out of the park after closing time.”

“Sir, I can promise you I will,” I said.

I got home exhausted from the long bike ride and the beatdown, but I barely got any sleep because I was absorbing the reality that I was going to have to change schools. Because my choices for playing along with Nick included buying a kilo from Alex and then having Nick steal it from me or buying a kilo from Alex and getting arrested with it and going to jail for eleven years. The cost of a kilo would pretty much wipe out my savings, and I couldn’t see Nick giving up his leverage over me pretty much ever. In fact, he’d probably send the video to James Browne just out of spite as soon as he graduated. So the best thing I could do is to just cut my losses. It wasn’t the end of the world. I didn’t really fit in at Cincinnati Prep, but I was comfortable there. People knew me. I knew how the social stuff worked. And I could get really good grades without anyone wanting to kick my ass. They just wanted to kick my ass so they could steal drugs from me, apparently.

But with the possible exception of Abby, nobody would miss me, and I’m not completely sure that she would miss me more than the Adderall. I would miss her, though. She had been nice to me when I was a new kid from the wrong kind of neighborhood in a school where everyone else had known each other since they were five.

Speaking of Abby, I was going to have to talk to her and reveal my idiocy and the fact that there was probably going to be blowback from this that hit her. Which I felt bad about. She didn’t have to do me a favor, and now she was going to have to suffer for it.

The next day at school I found Abby before lunch. “Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?” I said.

“I know, I know, going out of business. I’ll survive,” she said.

“Yeah, it’s…it’s kind of worse news than that.” I told her about the video and about Nick blackmailing me to procure coke and how he wanted a kilo and I wasn’t gonna do that which meant I was going to get kicked out of school and we’d have to find a way to pretend I used her truck without her consent so it didn’t mess up her Stanford application.

“I dunno if I can like clone your key or something. I can probably say I stole it out of your bag while you were at basketball prac—”

“Wait,” she said. “Stop talking. A video? That’s what he has?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure it’s real?”

“I mean, it’s me doing a thing I have done, but I can’t really say if it’s legit. I mean, I assume Nick is too dumb to put a fake video together.”

“Yeah, but Shane isn’t. That piece of shit has made deepfake porn of half the girls in the senior class.”

I didn’t know what to say about this, except that selling recreational drugs suddenly seemed like a way less shameful activity than I thought it was.

“Jesus. That’s…”

“Yeah. It sure is. Look. I can get Liz Wallace to make like six deepfake videos of you setting the school on fire, shooting JFK, whatever. We’ll send ‘em all to Browne, and Nick’s ironclad blackmail video loses all its power.”

I shook my head, smiling. “Damn. I knew you were smart, but not this kind of smart.”

“Oh, I’m not done. We’ve gotta figure out a way to get him back for beating you up and stealing from you.”

“Well, I’ll think about that one,” I said, but I had no plans to.

I liked Abby. But people who grew up with money just couldn’t have any idea how unfair the world is. When someone as connected as Nick Last Name Redacted decides they want to screw you, you just get screwed. That’s how it works. Everybody on my street knew this. And probably nobody on Abby’s did.

When I was walking to the bus stop after school, Abby pulled up in her electric truck and said, “get in. I’ll drive you home.”

“Aw, Abby, I can’t let you do that. It’s so far, and—”

“Nothing in Cincinnati is more than 20 minutes from anything else,” she said. “Besides, we need to talk.”

I hopped in the truck. First time I’d seen the inside. “So I had an idea,” she said.

“About what?” I asked.

She looked at me like I was stupid. I guess I was. “About making Nick pay for what he did.”

I sighed. “Guys like Nick don’t pay for what they do.”

“Well, just because he hasn’t doesn’t mean he can’t. And I know how to do it.” She told me her plan. It was ridiculous.

But twenty-two minutes later (yeah, I timed it, and frankly I was relieved to find that Abby was wrong about something) she pulled up in front of my house, which I’m embarrassed about. I know I should be all working class proud, like my mom actually has a house despite being a hotel housekeeper, but it was a small house and looked shitty on the outside (and, frankly, the inside), and I guess I had spent enough time at Cincinnati Prep to feel ashamed about not living in a mansion in Indian Hill.

We walked down to the end of the cul-de-sac where there was a house hidden behind overgrown bushes and under overgrown trees. Alex’s place. You probably wouldn’t know there was a house here unless you knew there was a house here.

I rang the bell and smiled at the camera.

“Who the fuck is that?” a voice said.

“She’s with me. She’s cool,” I said. I knew this was not a thing I should have been doing. Showing up unannounced with Abby in tow.

“She’d better be,” the voice said. The door clicked, and we entered.

Inside the door, we took an immediate left into the living room. Alex was there playing video games on a six-foot TV. Jorge was on the weight bench in the corner pressing a lot of metal. I didn’t stop to count the plates, but it had to be more than his body weight. And Jorge was a big guy. Dennis was spotting, which was kind of a joke because I severely doubted he could keep that much weight off Jorge’s neck. Dennis was the speed and ferocity and Jorge was the strength, and they were why you did not fuck with Alex or their supply. Well, them and the guns they carried, but as far as I knew, they’d never used them.

The room smelled like sweat and weed. “Okay, talk,” Alex said, not looking away from the TV. “First, explain this person’s presence.”

“This is Abby who kindly provided me with a secure stash for my product,” I said.

“A pleasure,” Abby said, turning on her ‘charm the parents and admissions counselors’ smile which did absolutely nothing in this environment.

“So what do you want?” Alex said. “You told me you were retired. But lemme guess. You got a taste of that coke money and you want some more.”

“Um. Not exactly. If you were to look at my face, and I’m not suggesting you should, but I’m just saying if, you’d see that I’m bruised and swollen because the fuck I sold the 8 ball to beat the shit out of me and stole the coke.”

Alex paused the game and looked over at me with what could have been genuine tenderness. “Ah, shit. I’m sorry, kid.”

This was the most human emotion I’d ever seen from Alex, and I figured this meant we could call this visit a win and just leave even though we hadn’t actually asked for anything.

“So look,” Abby said in a bright, perky voice. “The guy who did this is a real piece of shit—bully, rapist—you know the type.”

Alex raised their eyebrows. “I do indeed,” they said.

“So I was thinking maybe you should—” I cringed. One does not tell Alex what they should do, but it was too late, Abby was plowing straight ahead, and I had to give it to her—she was not intimidated by this unfamiliar situation or the terrifying people in the room with us. “punish this attack on your supply chain, because it certainly doesn’t look good if people find out they can steal from you.”

Alex stared at Abby for a long, long time. Then they smiled, and I nearly wet my pants with relief. “I don’t want to make any assumptions about your gender identity, but I can tell from here that you have a pair of brass balls. Either that or you’re just a rich kid who’s never been told no before. In either case, I respect it. But I have to point out to you that I was not robbed. I was paid in advance, so I’m not out any money or product.  And you two go to school with high profile people. And, as you can imagine, my livelihood depends on keeping a low profile. What’s this kid’s name?”

Abby told them, and they laughed out loud. “Oh hell no!” they said. “That family owns this town. I am not touching this. Sorry, kids, but you are out of luck.”

If Abby was flustered, she didn’t show it. “Do any of your employees work on a freelance basis?” She asked. I saw Jorge and Dennis perk up.

Alex didn’t even look at them. “They do not. Everybody in this neighborhood knows who they work for. They get caught on camera beating the shit out of the coked-up Prince of Cincinnati, it will eventually come back to me. And I will be out of business. So, no. We can’t help. I really am sorry. You,” he addressed this to Abby, “going to Harvard, or what?”

“Well, I’m still a junior, but Stanford.”

“And then law school, right?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Well, if you decide to go into criminal defense law, I will happily put you on retainer. I don’t think a single prosecutor in Hamilton County would be a match for you.”

Abby glowed, and this praise made her lose a step for the first time. “I..uh, I appreciate that. I wonder if you would approve of your staff giving us a referral to a specialist who might be interested in the kind of work I’m proposing.”

Alex raised their eyebrows again. “That’s up to them. Guys?”

“Yeah,” Dennis said. “We know a couple guys. But we’re gonna need a finder’s fee.”

“If you hadn’t asked, I would have offered one,” Abby said.

I had essentially been standing there like a big dumb asshole for the entire conversation, though in fact I was a little dumb asshole. I was so stunned to find Abby Johnstone fitting in better at Alex’s house than I did that I lost my usual cool. The plan had been to come in here and ask Alex to handle it, and when Alex said no, I figured we were done, but Abby clearly wasn’t going to be done.

An hour later and two blocks away, Abby had come to terms with two guys whose names we did not know. “Look, uh,” I said, “I can pay half of the—”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Abby said. “I have the money, you don’t, so let me do this.”

“Okay,” I said. “But w—” I was going to ask why. But then I remembered Abby called Nick a rapist. Which was not surprising information in the least, but she hadn’t said it like it was speculation. Maybe it was her. Maybe it was one of her friends. Maybe both. In any case, it wasn’t my business to pry into. She’d tell me if she wanted to. “We need to get you a burner phone,” I said.

It was only a few days later that Nick cornered me in the hall after school. “I’m ready for my key,” he said.

“I’m glad you enjoyed the product. But I’m afraid this time I’m going to need some money up front,” I said. “I’m happy to cut you a deal, but free just isn’t sustainable for me.”

He held up his phone. “I’ve got the email to Browne in my drafts folder,” he said. “Video attached.”

I held up my hands. “Okay, okay, but can we at least meet in the woods this time? I got stopped by the cops last time.”

“Fine,” he said. “10:30 Friday night.”

“Great,” I said. “There’s a trailhead about half a football field to the left of the pavilion. I’ll be there with the product.”

I told Abby when the meetup was, and she, Abby Johnstone, the girl with the 4.3 GPA because of the honors sections bump, pulled out her burner phone and texted the muscle she’d hired. “I’m excited,” she said. “Are you excited?”

“No,” I said. “I’m fucking terrified.”

“You’re not the one who should be scared,” she said. “And I want to be there.”

I sighed. “Abby. Between me and Jorge and Dennis’s buddies, you are the person with the most to lose. If something goes wrong, you do not want to be anywhere near this. You know I would never give up your part in this, but if something goes wrong—”

“I’m willing to take that chance,” she said. “I want to see him suffer.”

Nick and Shane showed up only ten minutes late. I was standing in a streetlight beam that was shining through the trees.

“Okay, where is it?” Nick said.

“Let him have it,” I said, and two big guys materialized out of the trees and started raining punches on Nick and Shane. They were unprepared and probably less practiced at this kind of violence than the guys we’d hired, and they were screaming and cowering, and pretty soon they were on the ground, both bloody messes. Abby stepped out of the trees, looked down at Nick, and spat.

“Fu’n bi,” Nick managed to spit out, along with some blood.

“Say it again and I’ll have all your teeth knocked down your throat. Go ahead. Say it.”

Nick was silent. And that’s when the blue lights came on.

Our guys vanished as quickly as they’d appeared. Abby looked at me.

“Do what I say and don’t ask questions. Rip my shirt open.” I actually found Abby more intimidating than the muscle we hired, so I did what she said, ripping the button-down blouse from the collar, popping buttons.

“Skirt,” she said. “Pull it down.” I yanked it. Hard. It tore a little bit as it passed her hips. She reached down, grabbed some dirt, and rubbed it on her face and in her hair. “Hide, idiot!” she said, and I did.

The cops came down the path seconds later, and Abby was crying. “Oh thank God,” she said.

“What seems to be the trouble here?” they said.

“I was…he said let’s go for a walk in the park, but then his friend was here, and he assaulted me when I said no, and these guys pulled him off me—” She looked around, “I guess they’re gone,” she dissolved into tears.

They called for ambulances. I stayed in the woods listening, and peeking out when I could.

They took Nick and Shane away and gave Abby the card of a social worker and told her she could go to the hospital if she wanted, but she said no. By now there were about twenty cops on the scene, and one of them, a young Black woman, came up to Abby.

“I’m gonna be straight with you, okay?” She said. “You can press charges, but that boy’s father owns half of Cincinnati. His lawyers will take you apart, call you a slut, blame you for everything. The way I look at it, he got the shit beaten out of him tonight, and that’s gonna have to be justice for you. What do you think?”

“I think you’re right,” Abby said.

“All right,” she said. “So we’re not gonna have you make a statement. We’re just going to pretend you weren’t here at all. Too bad a rich boy decided to take a walk in the dark. You okay to drive home?”

“I can call my friend,” she said. “He lives nearby.”

“Okay,” the cop said. Abby took out her real phone and called me.

Ten minutes later, I walked out of the woods. Abby was by herself. All the cops were gone, just happy they didn’t have to deal with arresting a Last Name Redacted in the park.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” She said.

“How do you feel,” I asked.

“Honestly? I feel great,” she said, smiling.

I couldn’t actually say the same. The beating Nick had given me was nothing compared to the one he’d just received. Nick was a piece of shit, but it was sickening to watch him beaten bloody. And Abby’s quick thinking and acting skills were amazing, but also a little terrifying.

“I’m glad,” I said. “Sorry about your clothes.”

“I can buy more,” she said. “And anyway, I asked you to do it. That makes it consensual.” She smiled at me.

“Um,” I said. “are you flirting with me?”

“Jesus Christ, you are slow. Why do you think I let you use my truck to store your weed and Adderall?”

“Well, I gave you a price break,” I said, trailing off weakly as the stupidity of my statement caught up to me.

“I drive a fifty-thousand-dollar truck I got for my sixteenth birthday. I just paid those guys a thousand dollars. Do you think I can’t afford full price Adderall?”

“I. Uh.”

She smiled at me.

“Get in the truck,” she said. “I’ll drive.”

First of all, even Bob Kraft, who got Macklemore tossed from the tour, doesn’t actually believe that criticism of the actions of the Israeli government is antisemitic. Kraft is a supporter of Trump. You know, the guy who famously said there were “very fine people on both sides” when incels with tiki torches marched through UVA chanting “Jews Will Not Replace Us!”

Kraft is a very rich guy and doesn’t care about antisemitism because he doesn’t believe it, or anything else, can touch him. But he cares deeply about preserving a status quo that has made him incredibly wealthy.

So what he doesn’t want, and what nobody with power in this country wants, is for the citizens of the United States to start being critical of the way “the good guys” use military power.

It’s probably hard to explain to anyone who didn’t grow up here the degree to which young people in this country are indoctrinated with the idea that the United States of America is not just a country; it is the best, most morally correct country in the world. And if the USA occasionally does things like incinerate entire cities full of civilians, well, that’s just because they were trying to save American and Japanese lives, see! Because if they hadn’t dropped the bomb, they would have had to invade, and so many more people would have died! So incinerating two cities full of civilians was the moral course of action!

They really told us stuff like this. And we really believed it.

And Israel is probably the only other country that we ascribe this level of virtue to. (And let me say this as a GenXer—when I was growing up, Holocaust survivors were alive. I met a couple. If you’re even like 40 years old, the Holocaust probably seems like ancient history to you, but for us it was a thing that happened to our grandparents. And so a lot of folks see any resistance against the actions of the Israeli government as a continuation of the Holocaust’s project of eliminating Jewish people from the face of the earth. I don’t agree with this perception, but I get how you arrive at that point of view. But that point of view is not driving billionaire and government overreaction to people pointing out that maybe the government of Israel should stop doing genocide.)

The position of the United States in the world is, in large part dependent on the implicit threat that the US government will use military force to accomplish its aims. But this threat rests on VERY shaky foundations due to the fact that we have a volunteer military. In other words, you have to convince people that they are signing up for a virtuous project when they join the US military, or else fewer will sign up.

The US establishment was stung by the widespread opposition to the Vietnam War. So much so that they abolished the draft in order to squash said opposition. It worked! As soon as they stopped drafting people, the protests stopped! And while we’ve protested other wars, they haven’t drawn the massive opposition that Vietnam brought because our wars are, by and large, fought by poor people.

But now the establishment is in a pickle. Because they really can’t bring the draft back without massive pushback. And they can’t continue to recruit people to project force across the globe unless they can get them to believe that they are soldiers of righteousness, fighting for truth, justice, and the American way.

So unquestioning support for Israel is where they’ve decided to draw the line. Because it’s not too far a step from realizing that the US is funding a genocide committed by our client state in the Middle East to realizing that maybe US military actions in the world aren’t really about spreading democracy any more than Israel is committing a defensive genocide. Maybe the aims of our military actions are actually venal and ignoble. While some people will still definitely want to sign up to be international bullies, it’s a smaller number than would want to sign up to do something brave and noble.

So this, I believe, it’s what’s behind the wild overreaction to people expressing the idea that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are human beings who deserve to exist. Because the United States is on the side of genocide in this conflict. We are not the good guys here. And the more people who believe this, the shakier American military power becomes.

And speaking of professional wrestling, I saw a piece today about a wrestler who is having a hard time getting booked because they are a domestic abuser. They haven’t been convicted of anything—their former partner has just detailed the abuse, and people have been like, “this person is a piece of shit. I’m not booking them.” Plenty of pieces of shit continue to get booked in pro wrestling, so I’m not suggesting it’s some sort of piece-of-shit-free utopia. But it did strike me that this person has faced more consequences for their actions than most of the people who were friends with Jeffrey Epstein.

Indeed, while a lot of wrestlers who are pieces of shit are still working, most of them have lost their jobs at the promotions that offer the most money.

Sadly, this is not the case for Epstein’s pals. A LOT of them have faced absolutely no professional consequences for their association with him. (Though if you want a grim laugh, check out this post by former MIT researcher Joscha Boch about how very hard it was for him to have his association with Epstein exposed. The poor guy!)

Indeed, for many of these people, if you don’t search their name with Epstein’s, you won’t find any evidence that they ever knew him.

The press has tiptoed around this stuff—I don’t know their reasons, but they are timid about even saying people were associated with Epstein. Perhaps this is because they’re afraid of being accused of libel because of course just associating with Epstein doesn’t mean you broke any laws.

What it does mean, though, is that you’re a piece of shit. The good news about declaring someone a piece of shit is that there’s no legal standard. There’s no burden of proof. You just look at what you know about someone and go, “yeah, fuck that guy. He’s a piece of shit.” No legal proceedings!

We’ve done this before: even before his association with Epstein came out, we all pretty much agreed that Woody Allen was a piece of shit. Indeed, he’s such a piece of shit that his name was one of the least surprising ones to come up in the Epstein files.

Now, look, I don’t have time to comb through the Epstein files looking for everyone who ever met with him. But I did have time to search for Boston and Cambridge and see whose name came up.

There were a lot of familiar names whose association with Epstein has already been written about in the mainstream media and whose Wikipedia pages mention their association: Larry Summers, Joi Ito, Marvin Minsky, etc.

But Epstein met and corresponded with a WHOLE LOT of people in Boston and Cambridge, and most of them haven’t been written about. So let’s take a look, shall we?

There’s old pal Danny Hillis, my former employer, and professional smart guy currently affiliated with The Long Now Foundation and Applied Invention. I’m still the only person writing about his association with Epstein.

Psychologist Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness and still employed by Harvard University.

Geneticist George Church, also still employed at Harvard.

Mathematician and Geneticist Eric Lander, still employed by both MIT and Harvard.

Neuroscientist Ed Boyden, still employed at MIT

Tech Writer Linda Stone

Former MIT Media Lab researcher Caleb Harper, already disgraced for faking research results but not yet disgraced for his association with Epstein.

Tech bro Greg Wyler

Harvard Medical professor Ted Kaptchuk

Statistician Don Rubin, professor emeritus at Harvard.

General tech guy and Wolfram Alpha founder Stephen Wolfram.

I’m not saying these people should necessarily be fired. I’m saying that insofar as they are known for other things, they should also be known for being pieces of shit.

Again, you don’t need any kind of legal proceeding to decide for yourself, as I have, that these people are pieces of shit. Please do!

So shines a good deed in a weary world: seemingly alone out of anyone Epstein reached out to in Boston or Cambridge, Palm and Handspring founder Jeff Hawkins rebuffed Epstein’s efforts to meet up thusly: I will pass. Our research is published. If Jeffrey has read it and wants to discuss it then we can start with an email conversation. Jeff.

You know who else could have cut this wealthy perv off with a cold blooded email just like Jeff Hawkins? Literally every single person on this list.

One is that the photos of Danny Hillis next to some rocks and Danny Hillis posing puckishly on the bed in the Lolita Express plane that were in the first drop of the Epstein files seem to be from 2002. I had thought the relationship between Hillis and Epstein only dated to 2012, but that’s just as far back as the emails go. So since I am, as far as I can tell, the only person in the world writing about this, I wanted to enter it into the record.

Also, someone else pointed out to me that Danny Hillis took his then-teenage daughter to Epstein’s ranch in 2016. (Keeping track at home? That’s 7 years after Epstein became a convicted sex offender! Would you take your daughter on such a visit?) After their visit, Hillis emailed Epstein to say his daughter enjoyed the visit. Epstein replied “she’s always welcome,” which could of course just be a banal pleasantry. Or it could be something more sinister. I wonder how Hillis took it at the time? Epstein then follows up with “Is she a biological daughter?” which I’m sure we can all agree is an extremely normal thing to ask that certainly doesn’t have any weird implications.

I’m not linking to these emails because the DOJ did not redact the name of Hillis’ daughter from them. My feeling is that if she has something she wishes to say about this visit, she will say it, and otherwise she should be left alone.

Those are the updates. Except for this: I tried editing Hillis’ Wikipedia page to reflect his relationship with Epstein. My edits were rejected, and they patiently explained to me that Wikipedia doesn’t use primary sources. They are a tertiary source by design. In other words, it doesn’t go in Wikipedia until a reliable source writes about it.

So Hillis’ Wikipedia remains pristine because nobody but me has written about his association with Epstein, except for this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it mention in a Scientific American article. I did a search for Hillis’ name, and on the third page of results, there’s a page that inaccurately says Hillis appears in only 4 documents in the Epstein files. So even if you do keep clicking “more results,” after searching for Danny Hillis, the info you’ll get is inaccurate.

Here’s my question: what the hell is going on here? I mean, this is clearly not unique to Hillis; he just happens to be the person I’m interested in because I used to work for him.

There are a lot of people whose names are all over the Epstein files. Some have faced consequences for their association, but most haven’t, and this is at least in part because the media seems to be treating this as a story about Jeffrey Epstein rather than a story about the people he associated with. Which is weird because Epstein is dead and a lot of these other people are still with us.

Sure, sure, nobody but Epstein and Maxwell (well, and the President of the United States) have been accused of a crime, but I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: if you’ve built a public profile on being a smart person, the fact that you have a yawning void where your ethics should be out to be part of your public profile. It ought to be part of what people know about you.

But it’s not for Danny Hillis. Unless you are already aware of the association and find one of my blog posts, there’s almost no way to find out about it.

A lot of Epstein’s network was here in Boston. He cultivated relationships with folks affiliated with MIT (Including Danny Hillis) and Harvard in order to give himself a patina of respectability. Why hasn’t the local media done a deep dive into all these people’s association with Epstein?

Why do we have to search through the Epstein files ourselves to find this stuff out? I never would have learned about Danny Hillis’ decades-long association with Epstein if I hadn’t looked at the photos in the first drop. Because nobody’s writing about all the people who were involved, even if, as in the case of Danny Hillis, they are a public figure. (an obscure public figure to most of the general public, but very well known in certain circles.)

Why is the media not holding people’s feet to the fire about their association with a sexual predator and sex trafficker, even if said people weren’t involved in the crimes? Why is no one even asking these people why they hung out with Epstein?

Because journalism is broken and most of our journalists are toadies so thrilled at proximity to power that they don’t want to do anything to mess that up.

Prove me wrong. Please.