I don’t talk about it much, but I spent part of my child­hood in the care­less & tacky con­di­tion of the very poor. Small town Col­orado was where I learned what an evic­tion notice is, what food stamps could & couldn’t buy, & what the terms “dry out,” “blackout,” & “bail bond” mean. I also learned, by watch­ing & lis­ten­ing to the adults around me, about grow­ing, buying, sell­ing, & smok­ing mar­i­juana. And I learned how to make myself very small, nearly invis­i­ble, during the seem­ingly random explo­sions of casual vio­lence that I spent much of my time dreading.

But besides the humil­i­a­tion & anx­i­ety, I remem­ber the aes­thet­ics. I remem­ber over­sized t-shirts printed with styl­ized uni­corns & wolves.

Look, I don’t have time to do crit­i­cal jus­tice to Big Boi’s Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty, so I’m just going to say that it’s the best album of the year by far & you need it in your life. And that I hope what­ever morons at Jive passed on the record are tear­ing their eye­lashes out as they read the jubi­lant crit­i­cal responses. (“Too artsy,” they told him. Like Fellini or some­thing! Rule 4080 proved again.)

Chris Wiman and Don Share read and dis­cuss my poem on this month’s Poetry pod­cast. Many thanks to them both!

A little over a month ago, I pub­lished a report that con­clu­sively demon­strated for the first time that the U.S. financed Hugo Banzer’s 1971 coup in Bolivia. That report relied in part on a tran­script of a con­ver­sa­tion that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had on the morn­ing June 11, 1971.

Now it turns out that another con­ver­sa­tion Nixon and Kissinger had during that same meet­ing adds more evi­dence for the long-​held sus­pi­cion that the CIA par­tic­i­pated in the murder of Rene Schnei­der, the Chilean army commander-in-chief.

Here’s the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Jeff Stein report­ing on the new tran­scripts (PDF) released by nixontapes.org: