People likened Evening Whirl editor Ben Thomas to a Wild West newsman, an X-rated Walter Winchell, a blues lyricist. In later years he was also called an ancestor of gangsta rap. But he considered himself none of these things—in his own eyes he was a crusader against crime, an exposer of wrongdoing, and he had absolute confidence in the righteousness of every word that he wrote. His persona in print was that of a hanging judge; he thought of his paper as a public service. But the man also liked to sell newspapers. At its peak in the 1970s it had newsstand sales of 50,000. Thomas relied not on advertising but on circulation—the popular vote—and at a time when black business success came rarely, people around St. Louis referred to the editor as a “black millionaire.”

READ THE ESSAY »

THE BELIEVER: Do you find that actors like it when you lay down and say, “I’m in the trenches with you, and we’re all working toward the common goal of making this film.” Does that make them feel more comfortable?

DAVID GORDON GREEN: It’s about getting the actors into gear. Sometimes you’ll have great actors who aren’t comfortable with improvising. Which can get pretty frustrating, only because my first instinct is to go freestyle. To just get them up on their feet. But every actor’s coming from a different place and they have their own strengths and weaknesses and your job is to sell them as two people in the same world. Some of them have to have their hands held and some I just let loose entirely.

READ THE INTERVIEW »

THE BELIEVER: You posit that the conservatives use the values issues—abortion, for instance—as a way to get their financial interests in the back door.

THOMAS FRANK: The Republican Party on the national level has been very successful with their economic agenda to roll back taxes, to deregulate and privatize, to do away with the welfare state in many different ways. Their accomplishments have been very impressive. The things that get the votes for them, though, are the social issues, the cultural issues. Now, on those issues they have almost nothing to show for it. All these years of campaigning against Hollywood, for example, and nothing has changed.

That’s interesting because sometimes it seems the Republicans choose cultural issues deliberately because they can’t be resolved, can’t be won, the classic examples being abortion and school prayer. Those require constitutional amendments or a seriously altered Supreme Court in order to win. Some of the people I talked to in Kansas really believe they’re going to live to see the day that Roe v. Wade is overturned. I strongly doubt it.

READ THE INTERVIEW »

The Last Antiwar Poem by Rolf Potts

Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra” seems doomed to be eternally overshadowed by the poet’s celebrated “Howl”. Rolf Potts explains why this lesser-known work — which he calls an elegy for the power of language in an age of competing information — has never been more relevant.

Jamie Lidell interviewed by Baron Von Luxxury

Warp Records’s pasty-white-iest pioneer of future-retro R&B talks about his music, his live performances, and why Brian Eno never burns out.

Dogsbody Does Dublin by Jim Ruland

June 2004: On the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, Dogsbody leader and casual Joycean Jim Ruland is at the nineteenth International James Joyce Symposium in Dublin. Mental inebriation and drunken, tweedy weavings abound in the hallowed university halls and the less-than-hallowed pubs.