This article is part of a series on the ideas and philosophy of Alan Moore. To read the other articles, click here . Let me tell you a story, and you tell me if it sounds familiar: After several years of gains for the progressive and labor movements, there was a conservative backlash, and the country elected a far-right leader who had links to rejuvenated fascist movements. Naturally, with the leader’s support, the fascists began targeting minorities as the country saw an uptick in hate crimes. ...
Apr 17, 2024•11 min
This is part of an ongoing series on the ideas of Alan Moore. Read the rest of the series here . Also, I took the paywall down from last week’s article, as it makes up the basis of a lot of the philosophical stuff I’m gonna be talking about on here. Read it here . Among adults, magic is a degraded art. Most of us loved magic when we were kids — we saw a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat or guess our card, and, little dummies that we were, we weren’t able to see through the trick and wondered i...
Apr 03, 2024•12 min
In 1968, Kurt Vonnegut quipped, “a sane person to an insane society must appear insane.” A few years earlier, in his acclaimed book, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, the philosopher Michel Foucault argued that what we view as insanity is often a social construction. He was coming at this from a place of deep personal knowledge — Foucault was a homosexual in a time when it was still deeply taboo and treated in many places as a mental illness. From this vantage...
Mar 27, 2024•14 min
This is part of a series on mutual aid . If you are interested in this newsletter but not the mutual aid series (which comes to an end next week), you can unsubscribe from JUST the series here , and still get my other stuff! In 2020, Chelle King moved to her current house in Sacramento, California, and began cooking a lot. “It was just me and my husband and our kids, so we were ending up with tons of food waste because it was really fun to cook it and then nobody would eat the leftovers.” The so...
Feb 21, 2024•13 min
This is part of a running course on mutual aid. You can read the other articles here . Last week we discussed “disaster utopias,” the phenomenon in which, when something really terrible happens, people on the whole respond with kindness, selflessness, and bravery. This phenomenon is well-documented, even though the media in moments of crisis tends to amplify (often exaggerated or entirely false) stories of crime and violence. The phenomenon could also be described as “spontaneous mutual aid,” an...
Feb 07, 2024•11 min
This is part of a running course on mutual aid. You can read the other articles here . If you want to have an honest discussion about mutual aid, you have to be willing to discuss radical political ideologies like anarchism and communism, and you have to look at the history of controversial groups like the Black Panther Party or the Young Lords . Many of the groups that advocate for mutual aid also advocate for the overthrow of capitalism and, by extension, the United States government. This beg...
Jan 24, 2024•15 min
If there was one silver lining to the dumpster-fire pandemic year of 2020, it was the resurgence in the public eye of mutual aid. Mutual aid hadn’t gone anywhere, of course: it is something that the vast majority of humans engage in every day, and its proponents convincingly argue that it is older than the human race itself. Anyone who has lived through a catastrophe of some sort — a terrorist attack, a war, a wildfire, a tornado, an earthquake, a hurricane — is also familiar with the concept, e...
Jan 10, 2024•14 min
Merry Christmas! I’ve got a special one-off article for you today. May your holiday and New Year be full of people you love, fun, and kindness. Last week, thanks to Thomas Klaffke ’s excellent newsletter Creative Destruction, I learned that the Santa Claus myth may have roots in the ritual use of psychedelic mushrooms. The story goes like this: The Sami, a tribe of nomadic reindeer herders that live at the northern edges of Scandinavia, would hunker down in their homes during the cold winter mon...
Dec 25, 2023•7 min
Editor’s Note: All of the books on this list are affiliate linked to Bookshop.org. If you buy through the link, I get a small kickback, which would be a lovely Christmas gift if you’ve been enjoying my work! The fact that I get paid does not influence my choices. 2023 was a hard one for me! I quit a job to start a new writing business in a year where most pundits seemed to agree that writing was over because of AI. I had to manage the ongoing mental health fallout from COVID, I had to try and do...
Dec 20, 2023•12 min
The TikTok algorithm has me figured out, because sometime last year, it started showing me videos by Britt Hartley, an expert in secular spirituality. When I first heard her introduce herself this way, I was intrigued at the phrase, as “secular” and “spirituality” are not words that are normally put together. But Britt’s story is, I think, a fairly common one: much like me, while getting her masters (hers was in theology, mine was in human rights), Britt deconstructed a bit more of her worldview...
Dec 13, 2023•12 min
“If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” -Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil We live in an age of collapse. Most of what’s collapsing is physically, tangibly real: the collapse of global ecosystems and the climate, the slow and steady erosion of democratic norms, the collapse of original storytelling in Hollywood in favor of remakes, reboots, sequels, and prequels of established franchises, etc. But perhaps the most frightening collapse is the slow, wholesale d...
Dec 06, 2023•14 min
If I could have dinner with one fictional character, there is a pretty good chance I’d choose Neil Gaiman’s Morpheus, a.k.a. The Sandman , Lord of the Dreamworld. This is not so much because I’m taken with the fictional universe which he inhabits (though I am), but because as a journalist who is interested in things like dreams and imagination, I am annoyed by my lack of access to the statistic-keeping bureaucracies of our collective unconscious. Specifically, I’d want to ask him: What are the n...
Nov 29, 2023•7 min
I haven’t written a listicle in nearly six years, but I’ll do it for you, dear readers. I came of writing maturity in the clickbait age of the internet, so I’ve learned to loathe the medium, but this is “Revolutions” month at Better Strangers, and we do not seem to be living in particularly revolutionary times. So my “how to” article for the month would be wasted on “How to mount a revolution.” Instead, I want to address a major problem with our current political landscape: political despair. We...
Nov 15, 2023•10 min
Tomorrow, November 11, is Veterans Day in the US. It was not always Veterans Day: November 11th, 1918, was when the first World War came to an end. After that, the day was formally known as Armistice Day, and was honored as such for the next 36 years. In 1954, President Eisenhower changed it from Armistice Day to Veterans Day, so it would honor the Veterans of all wars, rather than just the one. Broadly speaking, this change was accepted, but one prominent author has since spoken out against the...
Nov 10, 2023•6 min
This is “Revolution” month on Better Strangers, but it occurred to me as I was writing articles on the topic that nearly everyone I know with leftist/progressive views works within the current political system rather than outside of it. I know that the ideal society that these people envision is fundamentally different to the one we currently live in, so I decided to ask a few of them: how do you square what are effectively revolutionary beliefs with working within a deeply conservative system? ...
Nov 08, 2023•10 min
Yesterday, across England, Guy Fawkes was burned in effigy, 418 years after he tried to blow up parliament as part of the pro-Catholic Gunpowder Treason. In the 21st century, Fawkes has come to represent something very different from what he did in his life: in his time, Fawkes wanted to restore a Catholic monarch to the throne of England, someone who would answer to the papacy in Rome. He could not have possibly wanted a more centralized government. But in the 1980s, a comic book antihero named...
Nov 06, 2023•12 min
This week on Better Strangers: * For Halloween, we talked about John Carpenter’s 1988 movie They Live! and how it neatly explains some leftist media theory. * For the Wednesday column, we talked about Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline and the strategic and moral arguments behind nonviolence and sabotage. Coming next week: * For Monday’s Book Rex, we’re going to be looking at anarchist revolutions in fiction! Specifically, we’ll be talking about Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, Ursula K. LeGui...
Nov 03, 2023•9 min
In 2020, the renowned Swedish climate activist and Marxist Andreas Malm published a book with a spectacularly provocative title: How to Blow Up a Pipeline. The book serves less as a how-to guide (there are no diagrams for building bombs here) and more as an argument in favor of sabotage as a valid tool in the activist’s toolkit. The pipeline, in Malm’s formulation, is not just a literal pipeline, but the pipeline from new fossil fuel projects like mines, wells, and infrastructure, to future foss...
Nov 01, 2023•10 min
Pro tip: If you want to subliminally embed a subversive idea into America’s collective unconscious, do it while having Roddy Piper and Keith David beat the ever loving shit out of each other for a full 7 minutes. It does not get much more pulpy than John Carpenter’s 1988 movie They Live . The movie is based off a 1963 short story by Ray Nelson called “Eight O’Clock in the Morning,” in which the main character accidentally wakes up “all the way” after a hypnotist’s performance. Now awake, he real...
Oct 30, 2023•12 min
Hey everyone! I wanted to take a minute to welcome you to the new and improved version of Better Strangers. I’ve been on hiatus from writing new articles for about a month as I’ve done some strategic rebranding work to make this into less of a personal blog and more of a focused publication. So: allow me to reintroduce the publication! About Better Strangers TL;DR: Better Strangers is a publication that faces a bleak world with hope, curiosity, and imagination. We are here to help you build a be...
Oct 27, 2023•9 min
Earlier this year, for the first time in my nearly 10 years struggling with depression, I went on antidepressants . It was something I should’ve tried long ago — depression is caused by many things, and there are often many components to treatment (therapy, exercise, cutting back on alcohol, getting fresh air, overthrowing capitalism, etc.) — but in spite of what the Scientologists say, antidepressants have helped a lot of people and have saved a lot of lives. I have not been one of them. The re...
Oct 17, 2023•8 min
This article was originally published on my personal website in slightly different form . Ask the average American when fascism was defeated, and they will tell you 1945. Fascism, they say, died with Hitler and Mussolini. When did America start fighting fascism? December, 1941. Four years and we had the thing licked. This is, of course, nonsense. Fascism continued to not only exist, but to be actively supported by the US government throughout the world as a bulwark against communism after the en...
Oct 12, 2023•14 min
Shirley Jackson is, among most Americans, only remembered for her deeply unsettling, controversial short story “ The Lottery. ” When it was first published in The New Yorker in 1948, it quickly became the most talked about work of fiction ever published in the magazine, with many writing in to complain or cancel their subscriptions. This was in part because “The Lottery” is an amazing short story (the link above is to the full text, now available without paywall on The New Yorker ’s website), bu...
Oct 10, 2023•4 min
As of this writing, Bruce Springsteen is in the middle of a string of arena shows in the New Jersey Meadowlands. This is a big deal in the state: Bruce Springsteen is New Jersey’s most famous son, and here in Monmouth County, nearly everyone has had an encounter or a connection with the man: My former coworker used to live next to the shack in Long Branch where he wrote the Born to Run album, and was on her porch one day when Bob Dylan stopped by the house on a musical pilgrimage. My wife’s uncl...
Oct 03, 2023•6 min
The terrible thing about stigmas is the way in which they linger in the mind long after they are gone. When I was a kid in the conservative Ohio suburbs, tattoos were intensely stigmatized. They were derided as a sort of vandalism of the body, as something that respectable people didn’t get because respectable bosses wouldn’t hire someone with visible tattoos, as youthful mistakes that would inevitably lead to regret. By any reasonable measure, this stigma could not be said to still exist except...
Sep 28, 2023•6 min
A few years back, after my friend realized that I hadn’t seen like, any of the truly great movies of the 1980’s ( Big Trouble in Little China, The Goonies, Better Off Dead, Gremlins 2, etc.) he arranged for a year-long, once-a-month event he called “Matt’s Movie Mondays,” as a way to further my cinematic education. I was a little surprised that I’d seen so little of the era — before I’d gone into journalism school, I’d been a film major, and instead of partying and kissing girls, my entire high ...
Sep 26, 2023•6 min
For my money, Carl Sagan wrote one of the most beautiful speeches to be given in the last century. I am speaking of his famous “Pale Blue Dot” speech, in which he looks at a picture of earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990. Earth, in the photo, is a mere speck of light, a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” It is impossible, looking at it, to feel significant. The Voyager 1 was one of Sagan’s greatest projects: the famed astronomer, with his wife, science communicator Ann Druyan, pl...
Sep 19, 2023•6 min
In her classic gender-bending sci-fi book The Left Hand of Darkness , Ursula K. LeGuin makes a point about how our enemies can end up defining us: “To oppose something is to maintain it… To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.” This idea has been rattling around my brain since 2015, when it felt li...
Sep 07, 2023•7 min
Writer’s note: my specialty is in neither science nor math, so I would ask the reader to be aware that I come at this with a spirit of curiosity rather than as any sort of expert, and thus may very well explain some of this badly. I encourage you to read the source book for a better understanding of what I’m saying here. At the end of Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution , he draws our attention to an arresting fact: most of what we see is, in a sense, a hallucinatio...
Sep 05, 2023•6 min
Our mindset is a huge factor in helping us survive chaotic times. People who have trouble with change just don’t do well in moments of upheaval, whereas people who are flexible and adaptable tend to roll with the punches a little bit better. It’s forgivable that most of us fall into the former camp — our lives have been lived in an era of almost unprecedented stability and material wealth. Major, seismic societal change is barely in living memory, as the so-called “Greatest Generation” that surv...
Sep 05, 2023•6 min
