“THE NEW SATANIC PANIC,” blares the August cover of Harper’s. “Exorcism in the age of TikTok.” What you’ll really find is Sam Kestenbaum’s behind-the-scenes account of working a tent revival in Tennessee—a fascinating read that’s gonzo and empathetic at the same time. Greg Locke learned how to court online outrage as a pastor in the 2010s, but he really hit his stride during the pandemic; now, he and his like-minded “Demon Slayers” hold events of mass exorcism, in which they drive demons from the faithful with one hand and sell merch with the other.
Onstage, the Demon Slayers pit themselves against a limp and sissified American church, deriding mainstream houses of worship as anemic Christian-in-name-alone places of fussy theological debates and snoozy Sunday worship, defeated and decayed, moldy and morose. In contrast, this here is an exhilarating, slap-you-in-the-face, roaringly Spirit-led, experiential thing, animated by that gutsy supernaturalism that has been forgotten for all too long. The miracles: Cancers evaporate. A woman is helped out of her wheelchair and takes several halting steps forward. Pow, pow! Yet the ills these Slayers diagnose and the demons they battle can also feel more modest and familiar, coming less from a distant Apostolic Age than from our present Therapeutic Age. Among more far-flung enemies are the spirits of codependency, ADHD, OCD, IBS, dyslexia, narcissism, procrastination, lactose intolerance. At one point, Locke roars, “Tell that gluten-free demon, Up and out, right now!”
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When Will Smith rose from his seat at the 94th Academy Awards ceremony, walked to the stage, and unleashed a right-hand slap on host Chris Rock, it shocked the watching world—but perhaps it shouldn’t have. The creative arts are no stranger to interpersonal drama. The internet is filled with reports of actors who despise each other. In 1971, authors Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal went at it hammer and tongs live on late-night TV in a showdown that allegedly spilled over into violence. More than 400 years ago, the Italian artist Caravaggio was accused of circulating disparaging poems about his rival, Giovanni Baglione. “Pardon me, painter, if I do not sing your praises,” he wrote after a series of surprisingly profane suggestions about what Baglione’s art could be used for, “because you are unworthy of that chain you wear, and worthy only of painting’s vituperation.”
Yet, none of these spats can match the sheer messiness of those found within the realm of popular music. Before hip-hop brought the concept of “beef” into the mainstream, rock and roll’s aggression and excess resulted in many an unfriendly rivalry; decades earlier, the hard life of the traveling jazz musician led to some heady and memorable fallouts. Whether it’s pop stars, country singers, dancehall artists, or Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s recent multi-song war, feuds hold an irresistible pull for listeners.
These days, of course, things play out not just on record or in mainstream media, but in the 24/7 pressure cooker of social media. In such an environment, where success or failure is stamped in the concrete numbers of record sales, streaming numbers, and concert tickets, it’s easy to see how competition can erupt into conflict. And such conflict can easily spill over into tribalism. (If our tastes define us, then it’s hard not to take an attack on said tastes personally.) In my day, it was Blur versus Oasis, a battle that utterly divided UK Gen Xers in the mid-’90s.
Of course, strife occurs not just between competing artists, but among bandmates as well. External pressure can either bring a group together or split it apart; when the latter occurs, it’s often a bitter divorce. Insecurity, arrogance, misunderstanding: no matter the cause, the stories collected below are more than a chronicle of artistic difference. They’re a mirror held up to human nature itself.
The two biggest bands of the 1960s (and possibly of all time, depending on your criteria) share more than an era-defining rivalry. They also share a lineage. Before Andrew Loog Oldham became the Rolling Stones’ manager—and, depending on your point of view, he either shaped the Stones into a cultural juggernaut or alienated band members with his cutthroat tactics—he did publicity work for The Beatles. The fact that he was fired from that gig by Beatles manager Brian Epstein provides a nifty origin story for the rivalry: for Oldham, creating a band that could outdo the Fab Four was a personal mission of revenge.
That bad blood aside, though, were the two groups themselves really rivals? Individual Beatles and Stones have certainly traded words over the decades, but the issue is far from straightforward, as this in-depth piece makes clear. Journalist John McMillian does an admirable job of drawing the reader into the center of the action, painting a vivid account that explores the complex interrelations between fans, press, and the musicians themselves. Whatever side of the fence you fall on, these are two of the most influential and successful acts of the 20th century, and their combined stories remain absorbing.
Nowhere was the Beatles/Stones debate more fiercely fought than in American underground newspapers, which by 1968 could be found in every pocket of the country, and had a readership that stretched into the millions. “The history of the sixties was written as much in the Berkeley Barb as in the New York Times,” claimed literary critic Morris Dickstein. Freewheeling and accessible to all manner of left-wing writers, these papers generated some of the earliest rock criticism, and provided a nexus for a running conversation among rock enthusiasts nationwide. To recall how youths assayed the Beatles/Stones rivalry is to be reminded that when rock and roll was in its juvenescence, youths interrelated with their music heroes in a way that today seems scarcely fathomable. Amid the gauzy idealism and utopian strivings that characterized the late-1960s youthquake, they believed that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—the biggest rock stars in the world!—should speak to them clearly and directly, about issues of contemporary significance, in a spirit of mutuality, and from a vantage of authenticity. Young fans believed that rock culture was inseparable from the youth culture that they created, shared, and enjoyed. In some fundamental way, they believed themselves to be part of the same community as John and Paul, and Mick and Keith. They believed they were all fighting for the same things.
Throughout his life, jazz icon Miles Davis earned a fearsome reputation for being taciturn at best, and impossible at worst. The same toughness that strained his personal relationships, however, unquestionably served his ambition. The jazz life was a hard one, full of hard touring and the temptations of alcohol, drugs, and general excess. Though Davis couldn’t match the frenetic, fiery playing of his idol, Charlie Parker, he was also too stubborn to quit. Instead, he forged his own path, and a whole new approach to jazz—cool, introspective, and quite beautiful. Yet, he would later abandon even his own oft-emulated sound in a relentless quest for new styles.
As Davis approached the end of his career, Wynton Marsalis was on an upward trajectory. Since the mid-’60s, jazz had been declining, unceremoniously pushed from its podium by rock and roll, then the folk revival, then hip-hop and rap. Marsalis was the savior burdened by critics with reigniting the genre’s flame. Marsalis was on a mission to de-corrupt his beloved artform, stripping away its acquired rock stylings and electronic edges to return to the pure wellspring. Or so the music press would have us believe. As is usual with such cases, nothing is ever so clear cut, and this piece does a first-class job of diving into the truths behind the headlines—particularly an onstage encounter at a jazz festival in 1986.
A startlingly gifted trumpeter from a brilliant New Orleans jazz family, he first came on the scene in the late 1970s and immediately began making a splash, both with his playing—not only of jazz but also the classical trumpet repertoire—and his outspoken critiques of the contemporary jazz scene, most pointedly of his former idol, Miles Davis.
The young trumpeter was highly opinionated and highly quotable, and from the beginning the music press, sniffing a possible feud, gave Marsalis’s venting about Miles—he even critiqued the outlandish outfits Miles had taken to wearing onstage, calling them “dresses”—plenty of column inches. The first time the two met, Miles said, “So here’s the police.”
For three blazing years straddling the 1960s and ’70s, Creedence Clearwater Revival was one of the most commercially successful acts in rock. Formed in California, CCR consisted of brothers Tom and John Fogerty (on guitar and vocals/guitar respectively), bassist Stu Cook, and Doug Clifford on drums. They were still in their mid-teens when they began playing as a unit, fired up by British Invasion bands such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Today, they’re best remembered for their enduring hit single, “Bad Moon Rising,” and for numbering among those who appeared onstage at the legendary Woodstock concert. In their short career the band released an asstonishing 14 consecutive US Top 10 singles and five Top 10 charting albums. Then, in 1972, it ended, with a split so acrimonious that even revisiting it can be painful.
So rancorous was the group’s dissolution that, in 1993, when CCR were justly inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, John Fogerty refused to perform with the band’s two surviving members. Fogerty continued to play CCR songs live, while Cook and Clifford themselves later toured as Creedence Clearwater Revisited. With such tangled tales, it’s often hard to appreciate the viewpoints of all parties, but Hugh Fielder’s balanced retrospective comes as close as possible to unraveling the causes behind CCR’s swift demise. Sibling rivalry, paranoia, swelling egos, and grasping music executives all play a role—but in the end, it comes down to the fact that you can’t escape the unrelenting pressures of the entertainment industry.
Fearing they would be sued, Warners told Fogerty to remove the tracks. Fogerty refused, and indemnified Warners instead. He then found himself facing a $140 million defamation lawsuit from Saul Zaentz. Scarcely had he wriggled out of that by changing the song title to “Vanz Kan’t Dance” than Fantasy sued him, claiming that the album’s first single, “The Old Man Down The Road” (not published by Fantasy), plagiarised an earlier Creedence song, “Run Through The Jungle” (published by Fantasy). Fogerty was being sued for plagiarising himself.
I was in my early 20s in 1994 when Oasis’ debut album, Definitely Maybe, shot to the top of the UK albums chart. This was a time that would come to be viewed as the heyday of Britpop, a sensibility somewhere between pop and rock, with catchy melodies, often whimsical sonic palettes, and sophisticated, yet earthly lyrics. Acts like Super Furry Animals, Kula Shaker, The Lightning Seeds, and Pulp all occupied the scene, but two bands inarguably stood out, with their singles regularly racing each other up the charts: Blur and Oasis.
Fronted by Damon Albarn, London-based Blur displayed a metropolitan sheen and veered toward the poppier side of things, producing hit after earworm hit, with tracks such as “Girls & Boys” and “Country House” burying themselves in the public consciousness. Oasis was Blur’s perfect polar opposite; fronted by brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher and hailing from the industrial city of Manchester, the band employed a grittier sound that matched its provenance. A rivalry between the two bands was nearly inevitable, but was stoked by the media, with large bodies of fans forming into two entrenched groups. In fact, the competition was more about hype, with little to no true enmity between the outfits. Unbeknownst to many, however, a bona fide feud was growing inside Oasis, and would spill out into a fractious and very public affair. Here, Mark Beaumont does a fine job of breaking down the long and complicated history of the fallout between Noel and Liam, breaking things down by era to offer a balancing, nuanced perspective of one of the ugliest feuds in popular music.
Liam’s drunken comments about his ongoing divorce from Kensit turned into a free-for-all of abuse that overstepped the mark. When Liam questioned the legitimacy of Noel’s daughter Anais, Noel jumped on him, raining punches and splitting his brother’s lip. Again, Noel quit the tour; again the band eventually reconciled. But this was one barb that stuck deep – as late as 2005 Noel would tell Qmagazine, “I’ve never forgiven him because he’s never apologised…He’s my brother, but he’s at arm’s length until he apologises for what he’s done.
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There was a time when John Lydon’s credentials as a counterculture anarchist icon seemed unshakeable. A swaggering, unconventional singer with an intense, magnetic presence, Lydon joined punk legends The Sex Pistols while still a teenager, having been spotted in a crowd sporting a handmade “I Hate Pink Floyd” T-shirt. Attitude was everything with punk, and Lydon had plenty. Yet the singer’s credibility has slipped over the decades; it may have begun with his appearance in this surprising ad for Country Life butter, but more seriously, his comments against same-sex marriage, support for Donald Trump, and anti-Muslim sentiment have led many to wonder if Lydon was ever the antiestablishment hero that his early persona suggested.
Of course, that’s putting it simply. Lydon is clearly a complicated character, and Andy Malt’s detailed history of the singer’s war of words with the American band Green Day offers a fascinating insight into the mind of a man who, for better or worse, played a large part in changing the course of music history. It also asks the question: what happens when an old punk finds himself displaced by a new one?
Soon after those happy remarks, however, something snapped. Possibly because Lydon tired of being repeatedly asked what he thought of Green Day, the biggest punk band of the time, while promoting his reunion tour.
In a particularly antagonistic interview with MTV the same year, Lydon was asked what he felt he could “offer a sixteen-year-old Green Day fan that Green Day can’t?” The answer? “A big willie,” said Lydon, who at this point had already called interviewer Toby Amies “queer.”
Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, UK. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.
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In 2007, a gasoline truck crashed on the MacArthur Maze, a high-trafficked tangle of multiple freeways in Oakland. The explosion from the crash melted the overpass. In this compelling story for Popular Mechanics, Mitch Moxley recounts how Clinton “C.C.” Myers, a construction boss known for high-speed emergency bridge repair, took on the challenging job and rebuilt this section of the freeway in only 26 days.
As dawn broke, officials across California were asking, “How the hell are we going to fix this?” The guy they looked to: Will Kempton, the director of Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation. A trim man with graying hair and a matching mustache, Kempton presided over a massive agency notorious for slow, expensive roadworks that snarled traffic around the state.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was Kempton’s big boss. As a young man, Schwarzenegger had worked as a bricklayer between bodybuilding competitions. Now, he saw infrastructure as a way to publicize the government’s capacity to do good. What’s more, Schwarzenegger remembered that the last Republican governor of California, Pete Wilson, had gotten the Santa Monica Freeway, one of the busiest freeways in the world at the time, rebuilt in just 66 days after the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
Schwarzenegger was a ferocious competitor—in bodybuilding, at the box office, even with his in-laws, the Kennedys (“I’m the only Kennedy in elected office,” he liked to brag). He told his staff to call Governor Wilson. “Find out how he did it,” he said. “Then figure out how to do it faster.”
The solution to Schwarzenegger’s request was C.C. Myers. Back in 1994 Caltrans had estimated it would take 12 to 18 months to repair the Santa Monica Freeway, but Governor Wilson, facing a tough reelection, told the agency to get it done in 140 days. Caltrans opened the job to bids, and Myers won.
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Marilyn Monroe is causing a kerfuffle, well, a 26-foot statue of her is. Dan Kois explores the warring factions of Palm Springs, who can’t decide if Seward Johnson’s Forever Marilyn belongs there. A delightful, fun piece, where Kois refuses to stay objective!
A tall, gregarious gadfly who met me wearing a vibrant aloha shirt, Hoban spent his career conducting market research for television networks and then working in Silicon Valley, until his husband made him retire after a heart attack. Now he keeps getting involved in various Palm Springs kerfuffles: a battle over short-term vacation rentals, a fight about the establishment of a community college campus in town. He’s the one, he said, who negotiated the purchase with the Seward Johnson Atelier, which disassembled the 30,000-pound statue, loaded it onto several tractor trailers, and sent it across the country. He’s the one who spent “50 different days walking around this area, looking at every possible spot.” When he decided that Museum Way, with its mountain backdrop, was perfect, he’s the person, he said, who made the case to City Council members one by one.
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What would it be like to watch a baseball game—in London? Imogen West-Knights heads to Stratford, to a stadium in London that’s the home of Premier League football club West Ham, to find out. It’s the Phillies vs. the Mets that day, and over the course of the game, West-Knights observes the “light-hearted bit[s] of cultural exchange” between attendees, and the differences between an American baseball game and, say, a UK soccer (ahem: football) match. She writes a fun, breezy essay for The Dial commenting on the distinct Americanness of the event.
It is nice, I suppose, that you can go for a wander, get drinks or go to the toilet, and not really feel you’re missing much. This is a major cultural contrast, however. Football games are much shorter than baseball games, yes, but even so, you would not catch any self-respecting football fan queuing for any length of time, let alone 45 minutes during the game in order to enter the merchandise tent. But this is what I find several hundred people doing when I leave my seat to go and buy a hot dog. I overhear one woman describing her intention to buy nine T-shirts for her nine grandchildren as she checks the score inside the stadium on her phone.
I decide to postpone the hot dog and instead join the queue for the merch tent, where I meet Caesar, a 43-year-old from the Bronx who’s been living in London for 10 years. This weekend is a complex puzzle of allegiance for him, he tells me. He’s from the Bronx, so he should be a Yankees fan, but his Dad was from Queens via Puerto Rico, so the Mets. He considers himself a Mets fan, but he also supports the Phillies because he went to college in Philadelphia. Yesterday he came in full Mets gear, and he thought about coming in Phillies attire today before remembering that he’d be sitting next to the same people who saw him yesterday, and he didn’t want to be considered some kind of freak. He’s split the difference today by dressing entirely in Puerto Rican baseball player-themed clothes. When we finally get in the tent, I find a Phillies Mets crossover jacket available for $325.
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Cameron Maynard recounts his time as an amateur competitive eater, an attempt to find the emotional fulfillment he sought by eating in bulk for a cheering crowd.
At the time, the “amateur” world of competitive eating—encompassing small holiday events and local restaurant challenges—looked like a way to recapture a sporting life I’d lost, a means of once again reliving the fast-twitch tension of a stolen base, the chest-clattering thunder of a hardwood shuttle run. But food competitions didn’t help wrest back control. If anything, competitive eating became just another way to fold in on myself like a piece of dough, to reframe the consumptive appetites that led to fights, a DWI, and stints of flunking out of college. I was no good to anybody during this episodic decade and a half, but with its trophies and cheering crowds, competitive eating appeared on the horizon like a totem to noble excess, an opportunity to offer up my worst impulses as a virtue-seeking endeavor.
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J.K. Nickell | Texas Monthly | June 10, 2024 | 10,640 words
As we all know, the US housing market is a nightmare. Property prices and interest rates are sky-high, rendering the prospect of buying a home unthinkable for many people. Renters face a dire landscape, too: according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, “affordability conditions are the worst on record.” (I urge you to look at the data in that JCHS link; it’s jaw-dropping.) Policymakers are doing little to remedy the burden of housing costs, even for the most vulnerable, or to protect renters from landlords who—excuse my language—don’t give a crap about the people living under their roofs. But in Dallas, Texas, woe is the landlord who finds themselves on the radar of a local lawyer named Mark Melton. When readers first meet Melton in this superb profile by J.K. Nickell, he’s wearing “a sweat-stained purple Patagonia cap . . . [and] an untucked T-shirt dangled loosely over his jeans.” In my imagination, that T-shirt is emblazoned with the phrase “ENOUGH!” because that, in a word, is Melton’s mantra. Since 2020, Melton has been doing everything in his power to stop unlawful evictions in Dallas County. He’s recruited an army of people to help him—attorneys who literally intercept renters on their way to eviction hearings before justices of the peace, elected public servants who “are not required to have a high school diploma, much less a law degree.” (Seriously?!) These advocates demand that landlords follow the law by, say, providing due notice before kicking someone out of their home. As for lawful evictions, ones based on policies that seem intended to punish people when they fall on hard times, Nickell shows that there’s little reason for hope: renters in Texas shouldn’t expect the law to change soon, if ever. This fact clarifies Melton’s character. He’s a person doing what he can with what he has rather than being daunted by the big picture. It’s not everything, but it’s something—and for the people he helps, it’s a lot. I tore through this story, fueled by admiration for Melton and by rage against Texas’s eviction machine. —SD
Conor Niland | The Guardian | June 27, 2024 | 3,845 words
Wimbledon is a world of Pimms, strawberries, and crisp all-white tennis outfits. It is also a world that revolves around the show courts—Centre Court and No. 1 Court—where the big names play and the crowds fawn. The lower-ranked players battle it out on the courts around the edges of the grounds to a smattering of people: a visual representation of the extreme hierarchies in tennis. Only the top 112 players in the world (plus some wild cards) even make it to Wimbledon. And, as Irish player Conor Niland explains in this stark portrayal, the lower down the ranks you are, the more brutal life in tennis becomes. We often hear about the journeys of the best in the world, but what about those who hover between number 300 and 600, “winning just often enough to keep their dream faintly alive[?]” I appreciate The Guardian running a piece about those who never quite make it into the spotlight—one that shows us how difficult it is if you are talented but not talented enough. Stories rarely told. Niland is certainly not opposed to having a good moan in this essay, but as he reveals poor earnings, exhausting travel, dingy hotels, long waits to play, and never-ending loneliness, you can forgive him. Without people like Niland who fight to climb the rankings, players like Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic would not exist, but it is tough to be a stepping stone for others. This essay will give you a new appreciation for the underdogs who never make it to the top. —CW
Wendell Brock, Paul Kwilecki | The Bitter Southerner | June 26, 2024 | 6,957 words
For The Bitter Southerner, writer Wendell Brock mines photo archives, books, journals, and more to sculpt a satisfying portrait of Paul Kwilecki, an irascible self-taught photographer who had such a deeply emotional response to his hometown that it became the subject for his entire body of work. Brock highlights Kwilecki’s persistence, dedication, and his trust in the process of making art. “The desire and energy to continue year after year come from seeing layer on layer of subject matter peeled back before your eyes, material you didn’t know existed until you penetrated the layer above,” says Kwilecki. “Eventually, you realize the supply is inexhaustible, a lesson in itself, and that how much of it you can exploit depends on your patience and skill.” This piece is much more than a profile of a dedicated photographer, it’s a celebration of art: what it means to make it, and its everlasting influence if you have the courage to keep showing up. I love the slowness of this essay. It meditates, it ruminates. It’s like a slow walk on a beautiful day for no reason other than the joy of the journey. It feels like a fitting tribute to Kwilecki, who captured bits and pieces of Decatur County, Georgia, on film over four decades, giving us an indelible portrait of a place over time. What’s most poignant about this story, and something I will never forget, is that Kwilecki never felt like he fit in, never felt seen. And yet, he spent his entire creative life documenting the people and spaces around him—bearing patient witness. —KS
Ally Jarmanning | WBUR | June 13, 2024 | 3,526 words
We all have our quirky reading obsessions. Mine include poop and eco-friendly death, and—I suppose as an offshoot of the latter—an interest in what might happen to our bodies after we die, intact or not. I debated whether or not to recommend this story, as the thought of trading body parts is unsettling. But ultimately, Ally Jarmanning’s glimpse into this macabre market is fascinating. On Facebook, people openly discuss selling and shipping body parts like they’re items at a garage sale, and if you can believe it, this marketplace is legal—provided that the body part up for grabs is not stolen. That brings us, then, to the case of Cedric Lodge, a man who managed the morgue at Harvard Medical School for nearly 30 years. At some point in his career, he decided to steal body parts from cadavers and sell them to customers. Apparently, no one at Harvard tracked what happened to bodies after medical students had finished their work, and Lodge trafficked body parts for at least four years. As Jarmanning reports, he sold remains to buyers across the US. One collector within this network, Jeremy Pauley, works in the niche field of oddities and has since become the face of a larger criminal investigation. I don’t want to spoil you on all the details, but I’ll say that underneath the grisliness is a thought-provoking piece about property, collecting, and preservation. —CLR
If you’ve seen a Tesla Cybertruck in person, you know that photos can only do it partial (in)justice. It’s massive. It’s massive. It looks exactly like what a seventh-grade boy would draw in his notebook alongside pictures of, like, throwing stars. It looks like it comes with a preinstalled vanity license plate that reads B4D4SS. It looks like a can of energy drink became sentient and watched Starship Troopers without noticing the subtext, then designed a car. Yet, it exists. People own them and drive them down the street, seemingly without shame. Drew Magary is not one of those people. He is also not an automotive journalist. He’s a columnist and a very funny writer who happens to resemble the quintessential Cybertruck owner. And when he rents one, the result is the perfect piece for a hot summer week: short, breezy, and refreshing. “You know how Apple will occasionally confuse the world by doing away with standard features like a headphone jack?” he writes. “OK, well, imagine a car built entirely out of that kind of gimmick.” Magary’s experience with the car is as entertaining as you’d imagine, even when people aren’t giving him the finger simply for driving it. He’s offended by its fighter-pilot steering wheel. He can’t figure out how to turn off the one giant windshield wiper. He nearly crushes himself with the retractable roof. But really, it’s his disdain for Elon Musk and the Cybertruck’s obvious target audience—“the kind of men who use speakerphone on airplanes”—that really animates the proceedings. Writing about people rather than things is where Magary has shined since his Deadspin days, and this piece is no exception. Will it make Cybertruck owners happy? Definitely not. Will it make you happy? Massively. —PR
Audience Award
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In this piece, Luke Winkie asks, “[C]an anyone truly optimize their way back into the good graces of an ex?” The various “get-your-ex-back coaches” on the internet would have you think so. Winkie questions their advice—which boils down to avoiding contact for a while—and asks whether these notoriously expensive “gurus” are taking advantage of people in an emotional state. Another question to consider: should you get back with your ex? —CW
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