Volume III, Issue 4

The morning had been as usual as most any other. I tapped my way down the sidewalk at the appointed hour, and reached the subway platform about ten to six. It was warm down there, but at least there weren’t too many people. Half a dozen, maybe.

As I walked toward my regular pillar to… »

Small businesses are the backbone of our economy and the engine of job creation. – Ronald Reagan

I never met a small businessman yet who didn’t have one finger up his ass and the other on the scales. - Mad Dog Howard

Like many older married men, I’d rather… »

The pigeon trembled as I removed it from my backpack. I held it firmly, feeling its heartbeat and panicked respiration pulse between my fingers. It kept its head tucked between the raised rims of its wings and I wondered for a moment how I was going to get to its neck. I carried it… »

The Surly Bartender has long had a very clear sense of the hereafter. In his mind, Heaven is a bar in which, during his off hours, he can always find a seat, the cigarettes don’t give you cancer, the music is the all roots rock and angry, while the booze flows freely from the… »

“Report at the earliest possible convenience,” says the Embassy website. I should have taken that word, ‘convenience’ a little more seriously. One week and four days after the most gruesome (and rewarding) experience of my life, I’m going to report the birth of my American son, Oliver Sol, to the United States Embassy in… »

Patrick McGrath Muñiz, with the talent of an old master and the raw, intellectual wit of his millennial generation, challenges his viewers to consider the interrelationships between our mass-media driven culture and the longer traditions of the Western… »

The Misfits’ Club

Back in the late 1990s, when I was teaching in Brooklyn, NY, I had a student named Uran Dragon Kolenovic. And, it seemed that the dragon lived inside Uran’s head.

Uran Kolenovic was a 14-year-old immigrant from Kosovo whose mother and father had sent him to America to live with his grandmother when… »