In the annals of U.S.-Soviet rivalry in the decades after World War II, the so-called "space race" between the two superpowers was by far...

This short essay was the program note for the world premiere of my play, An Evening with Lola Montez, at the 2019 Capitol Fringe...

1. My friend Dušan Veličković passed away last week. His death hit me hard. We had a deep professional relationship in the 1990s and...

Only recently did I learn that John Spalek - the great scholar of German exiles in the United States (and, in particular, Ernst Toller) -...

A version of this essay appeared in the January 2021 issue of The Ryder. 1. When the COVID-19 outbreak was on the cusp of graduating from...

Sometimes drama can tell a news story better than journalism. That is why I wrote Flamingo. It's a 10-minute monologue about how Florida...

Earlier this fall, I was asked to write a two-hander for possible filming. We didn't end up getting it done. But for the record, here's a...

One of the darkest moments of a dark 20th Century was the sustained success of a agronomist named Trofim Lysenko in darkening the course...

Liner notes for Warner Brothers re-release of Uncle Tupelo’s Anodyne It’s October 1993. The Midwest’s biggest deluge in almost 200 years...

These are the liner notes I wrote for the Rhino reissue of R.E.M.’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi in 2005. After more than a decade of...

These are liner notes published with the Sony Legacy rerelease of Uncle Tupelo's No Depression. WITNESS TO THE REVOLUTION Uncle Tupelo’s...

One of the most popular posts on Balkans via Bohemia was a piece I wrote back in 2009 in response to a Slate piece by Timothy Noah that...

The world knows the town of Dachau because of the horrors of the Nazi death camp there. Created in 1933, Dachau was the first of these...

I didn’t want a dog. There were lots of reasons for that from childhood I won’t get into here. But in 2005, after I got married, I was...

One of the deeper layers of Jiří Kolář (1914-2002): Forms of Visual Poetry, now showing at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts

This entry is the first in a continuing series of appreciations of work I find interesting as a playwright. They are not reviews, though...

The personal essay in Helmsley’s hands becomes an often-understated but relentless self-interrogation, never veering into self-pity or mythm

John Strausbaugh has been a mentor and friend for 30 years now, so it's a delight to report that his new book -- City of Sedition: The...

Back in the autumn of 1995, I was living in St. Louis and working at The Riverfront Times. ​ It was a strange time for me. I was in a...

Today on Vox, playwright Justin Sherin writes about the genesis of his @dick_nixon Twitter account. Read Sherin about it first. Then come...