On Thanksgiving morning supporters of President Trump’s doomed reelection effort descended on the Loop neighborhood of Chicago to raise the battle cry “Stop the Steal!” The “steal” in this tortured locution is the purported Democratic Party theft of the November presidential election, chronicled in a convoluted conspiracy theory that one conservative federal judge recently compared […]
Archives for November 2020
“Remember What My Number Is”: RIP Toots Hibbert
54-46 was Toots Hibbert’s prison number. He sang it out loud on the electrifying track 54-46 That’s My Number (1969), one of a crop of tunes that made Toots and the Maytals a household name on the island of Jamaica and soon thereafter in a lot of other places too. Toots Hibbert, the reggae singer, […]
“The Trial of the Chicago Seven”: A Review
There have been a number of reviews written about Aaron Sorkin’s film The Trial of the Chicago Seven (available on Netflix). The film is a fictional account of the trial of leaders of the anti Vietnam War movement who came to Chicago in 1968 to protest both the Democratic Party’s nomination of “New Deal liberal” […]
Response To John Brown and The Good Lord Bird
Note from the Editors: A few weeks ago, we ran an interview with Marty Brown, a descendant of one of John Brown’s children. We had come across Marty via a letter that she wrote to the New Yorker Magazine. She allowed us to interview her for Hard Crackers. The gist of Marty’s letter and her […]
Drawing Ourselves into the Picture
My mother Leah frequented the Durban Public Library in South Africa at least once a week. As the youngest child, I was often forced to tag along with her. I enjoyed those sessions. I used to haul out the dinosaur books or the big portfolio tomes about the pictorial history of World War One. I […]
2020 Election–Impressions and Reflections
America appears to be divided into three more or less equal parts, at least when it comes to the election results. Thus far, just under 78 million people voted for Biden; about 73 million voted for Trump and around 78 million of eligible voters didn’t vote at all.[1] It’s likely that a good number of […]