Part of living in New York is accepting the brutality of rapid change with a cynical shrug as all you love and depend on vanish to make way for something almost certainly worse. Over the past couple years, I’ve seen this happen to the Metrocard–especially the unlimited Metrocard, which for my nearly two decades living […]
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The Last Bailout
It was Sam’s last day with Bail Out Oklahoma, and he felt both relieved and somber walking down the corridor leading to C7 the final time. Ralph the Roach, the long dead and desiccated unofficial mascot of the jail’s visitation area remained unmolested in his final resting place on the carpet where he’d lain for […]
Hymns and Arias – Rugby in Wales
“Rugby is a wonderful show: dance, opera and, suddenly, the blood of a killing.” Richard Burton – Welsh actor There’s this old gag. Elvis Presley, James Brown and Tom Jones go fishing together in a small boat on the ocean. The craft gets capsized and they are all swallowed up by a gigantic whale. Deep […]
An Evening with Hard Crackers
Several Hard Crackers editors will be at The Word Is Change, a bookstore in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, on Wednesday, March 22 at 7pm. If you’re in the area, please join us for readings from recent print issues and the Hard Crackers blog, followed by an open discussion.
“Together, We Can Create the World We Want to See”: An Interview with ChatGPT
Recently, an editor at Hard Crackers discovered that many students in his classes were having their homework assignments written for them by an artificial intelligence (AI) program called ChatGPT, a piece of software that draws on the collective knowledge of the Internet to engage in conversation with users. Much of this writing demonstrated profound insight […]
What is to Be Hated
There is no hatred more sublime than the kind you share with others. This is true of the worst and best hatreds, but when that hatred lies between the political and the aesthetic, what some people might call “taste,” you really find that hatred is meant to be shared. Everyone hates cancel culture until the […]