Excuses, excuses.

(subliminal advertisement for the moose report. you saw nothing.)

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Hello all you beautiful people.

It’s been awfully quiet around here the last few weeks, and I suppose I have some explaining to do (and apologies to Grandma, who briefly feared this meant I’d suffered some bodily harm). I wasn’t really sure what to do for 9/11, and spent a while debating whether or not to send out a short essay detailing my rather contrarian feelings on the subject; it felt a little ill-advised, and then by the next week, everyone had stopped talking about it completely, and then it seemed out of date and ill-advised. So.

The other major distractor has been one giant project that has consumed just about every spare moment–we’re talking train rides, lunch breaks, and evenings–for the past few weeks: grad school. A year and a half ago, on my way out of college, I could scarcely imagine wanting to spend more time doing research and writing papers. I was ready to get out into the world and earn a paycheck, convinced I’d keep learning and improving my writing on my own. To some degree I think I have, if I may say so; but I’ve also realized the limits of this approach. And over the course of the past year or so, I’ve done some serious soul-searching, and have begun to wonder if I need a slight change of course from the whole journalism world.

After letting all of that churn around a while, it’s led me to decide that I want to pursue a degree in creative writing. Since Mom says I shouldn’t go $50K into debt for a writing degree (what do parents know?), I’m holding out hope to get into a funded program, which, surprise, are absurdly competitive. Which is why I’ve spent the last few weeks obsessing over short story manuscripts instead of sending out letters about people I meet on trains and stuff. So consider this a pledge to get back to newslettering. I’m not sure I’ll keep up a weekly publishing schedule–it was starting to feel like a chore, and seriously how many commuter stories do you want?–but I promise to get back to it, and thanks for sticking around.

Also, if anyone knows anyone on Michigan’s MFA reading committee, drop me a line.

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news & updates.

see above.

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read this.

On the campaign trail with Lincoln Chafee. thanks to Chris for passing this one along.

The SF beach shack that sold for $1.4M

Robert Bales: confessions of America’s most notorious war criminal.

What we really know about Bin Laden’s death.

Extremely Public Relations – tech vs journalists, and what’s left in between (on the continued saga of the Amazon/NYT showdown)

In praise of Melville’s whale chapters – on how yes, Moby-Dick has some brilliant philosophizing tangents on the nature of man and God and such, but it’s also a lot about actual whales.

Farenheit 451 was serialized in Playboy, and other interesting stuff about America’s most famous former-nudie mag.

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listen to this.

“Tick” – Weave

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thanks for reading, and seeya soon

Shut up.

ICYMI: moose dribble is transitioning from a blog into a weekly newsletter called The Moose Report (and it’s really easy to subscribe!). Here’s a copy of Friday’s letter.

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My junior year of college, I enrolled in my first-ever Political Science course. It was similar in most ways to the other humanities classes I’d taken up until then: reading-based, a small group, a few required papers, but mostly in-class discussion. The only problem was that within about the first week, I knew that I had nothing to say.

The course was titled Black Politics, and it was intended to be a survey of the Black community’s political engagement since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. To be honest, I don’t remember much of the reading. What I do remember is being one of the only white people in a room for perhaps the first time in my life. I remember listening as other students talked about their first-hand experience with issues that, until then, had always seemed like abstracts to me (police harassment among them). And I remember being concerned that I would flunk if I never opened my mouth, but feeling like I was getting a lot more out of just shutting up and soaking up what I could.

That all came to mind this past week, in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death and the ensuing protests and unrest in Baltimore. It came to mind especially because of some of vitriol I saw people spewing on their social media accounts. There was the mindless racism that seems to always rear its head in times like these, but then there were also far-removed people offering their hot takes on the situation. Some compared protestors to Neanderthals; many reduced the whole of the African American community to a group of thugs.

The lack of empathy–and more importantly, the apparent lack of effort to even try to understand–was disheartening. And even though I’m a firm believer that people should always be free to speak their minds, what I saw reminded me of the one lesson I remember best from the course in college: sometimes, it’s better to shut up and listen.

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Howdy folks, and welcome to the Moose Report! Glad everybody could join. Sorry to kick this thing off with such a weighty topic, but the way the situation in Baltimore has developed over the past week, it didn’t seem right to ignore it either. Now, on to…

News and Updates

Last weekend, I convinced Bacon Bacon, one of San Francisco’s most popular food trucks, to let me ride along in back for the day, and it turned into my first story for SF Weekly.

Read this:

The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved. Hunter S. Thompson’s classic account of the big race, written under great duress. One of my all-time favorites. Thanks to Josh for making me read it many moons ago.

Nonviolence as Compliance – fairly widely-circulated by now, but if you missed it, a good think piece on the calls for calm in Baltimore

Dumb people tweeted looting pictures that were actually from different countries.

On football and concussions. One of the best sports stories I think I’ve ever read. Like top 3.

Escape or Die. After being held captive by Somali pirates for years, the crew of the M.V. Albedo hatch an insane and desperate plan to escape. Think Shawshank meets Captain Phillips.

A cool interview with Grant Faulkner on art and happiness and stuff.

Look at this:

A very thoughtful protestor goes to town asking Fox News to leave town.

The difference between living in NYC and SF. (the SF ones are hilariously spot-on…)

Before and after the Nepal earthquake.

The Bus Station. An awesome photo story about what happens to people right after they’re released from prison. Shout-out to Kelsi for bringing this one to my attention!

Somebody replaced all the pictures on the NYT homepage with cat gifs.

Listen to this:

“Electricity” by Table Scraps. Punk’s not dead.

Fic Pick:

“Car Crash While Hitchhiking”  This one sat open in my browser for a while, so I can’t even remember how it came to my attention any more. And yes, it was published like 20 years ago, but it’s still good!

aaaand that’s all I got for now. Thanks for your patience as I get the hang of this thing! And in case you were worried, I am planning to branch out into more non-New York corners of the world in the coming weeks (to that end, if you got good stuff, send it my way). Thanks for reading, and see you soon!

-Mike V

Oh by the way, the picture on the subscribe page didn’t turn out like I’d hoped, but here’s what it was supposed to look like:

Teach and Frisk

“I didn’t sign up to be a prison guard. I signed up–I thought–to be an educator.” This is the story of Vitaly, a high school teacher in Culver City, CA, who’s on the brink of losing his job because he refuses to pat down his students each morning. As Leighton Woodhouse points out in this story for The Awl, there is mounting evidence that metal detectors and security searches in schools tend to selectively target specific segments of the population, and their efficacy is questionable. That’s leading to new conversations about race and school safety, with some people believing the current prison-like policies could be gotten rid of. But for Vitaly, it might be too late.

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Photo by Christopher Webb

At the front of the one-classroom schoolhouse in the Mar Vista Gardens housing project in Culver City, California, a handful of high school students and their teacher sit in a circle and participate in small group discussion. Behind them, a dozen or so students who have opted to engage in independent study work silently at their desks. The volume of the class rarely rises above the level of a friendly dinner table conversation.

Yet the man running this class, a forty-two-year-old former public interest lawyer named Vitaly, may be on the brink of being fired. For the last four years, he has refused to conduct mandatory in-class weapons searches of his students—which the district argues keeps classrooms safe—because he believes that the policy is unethical and would destroy everything that makes his classroom successful.

Read on at The Awl.

Meet Stanley (Cup)

Football has the Lombardi trophy, and baseball has that thing with all the flags, but there’s no trophy in sports quite like the Stanley Cup. Molly Brooks illustrates its history in this comic for The Nib, starting all the way back in 1888 when a certain Lord Stanley moved to Canada. One of the most important facts that had previously been lost to history: unlike other trophies, the Stanley Cup does not belong to a league. After the National Hockey League’s infamous lost season, a few rec league players took the NHL to court. The result? Should the NHL have another lock-out or cancelled season, one of North America’s premier sports trophies will be up for grabs.

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See the full story at The Nib.