I do what I lovE, AND that’s not necessarily what I do for money.
I do a bunch of things, and I have done a bunch of things for a long time.
I am a writer and a journalist, though, none of those things pay the bills, you know? The main bill-paying thing is that I help run a fellowship program at a university. But I never think of that as what I do, despite having done things in and around nonprofits and fellowships for a very long time. I do podcasting, but, again, I never totally think of myself as, like, “I’m a podcaster”. I’ve done a podcast for 10 years now, and I produce another podcast that’s won a bunch of awards and shit. I design and sell merch, and, well, it’s… there’s just a lot, man. There’s just a lot.
It’s difficult, I think, because there’s what you do, and then there’s what you do for money, and in this country, those are the same question, usually. But when I think about what I do, I do what I love, and that’s not necessarily what I do for money.
I just put together a little zine of the writing I did that I really liked in 2025. I decided to do a pre-sale of it — one thing I’m bad at is judging how many of a thing should I make. When you have to pay for the thing that you make, it’s like “If I pay too much and they don’t sell, then I’m fucked”. Originally I was going to make a small run, just 150 copies of this thing. Then I was like, “Well, maybe I should make 200, 150 is maybe a little low”. Then I put a pre-sale on, and by the time I had to place the order, I was like, “I think I gotta do 400”. I took the presale off, and now I have 50 left. This weekend, I had to sign and number these little zines, and then pack them. Tomorrow I’ll ship around 360 zines or so.
Another thing that I do right now is that I basically run a whistle factory in the corner of my basement, where I’m running a 3D printer 15 hours a day, printing whistles to send to communities to defend from ICE. There was a moment this weekend where I was sitting at the same little desk that the printer is chugging away on next to me, and I’m signing and numbering zines. I’m building this giant pile of these little books as I go, and I was like, “Man, this fucking rules”. I was so happy right then. I was like, “Well, this is kind of what I do, right?”
This is what I’ve done for a long time, and it felt really great.
I came up in — I would say the Chicago punk scene, but that’s not really true, because this was the punk scene of the late 80s, early 90s, so pre-internet. Chicago’s a big enough place that the scenes were factionalized. It wasn’t just like, “Oh, everyone goes to one place for a show”. I came up in the northern suburban Chicago punk scene, which was distinctly different than the western Chicago suburban punk scene, let alone the north side of the city, or the south side of the city. There was one band in the scene that had a real following, and an actual record out, and it was this band called Billingsgate.
Everyone in that band was in high school. Everyone booking the shows were in high school, and everyone putting out records and zines were in high school. I think I was about 14 at the time, and it was just this revelation — like, wow, these are people my age doing shit that I didn’t think you could do if you were my age.
The most incredible part of it all was that the way you participated in that scene was by contributing to that scene. Sure, you could go and just go to shows, and fucking dance, and that kind of thing, but, most of the time, you actually wanted to do more than that. You wanted to be an active member of that scene, and that meant actually doing things within that scene. So, like, I helped book some shows, and then I started making little zines and giving them out or selling them at shows, and that felt right. I was in a band — we had a couple of 7-inches, but I’m glad I’m not a band guy.
How did I start? It was that. I was just sort of finding myself in that world, and that world was a radically participatory world. I think that’s true everywhere, but I think it’s also uniquely true to Chicago. Chicago is a very working place, and the way you are measured here is less about who you know and less about how you present in the world, and much more about what you’re doing, and that was really true in that scene.
Couldn’t we just make a magazine? How hard could that be?
Flash forward a few years — I was still in a band, and the internet was not totally a thing, but there was an America Online message board about punk, and it was crazy, because there were, like, real people in there talking about punk. It wasn’t just posers — Larry Livermore, who ran Lookout Records, was in that message board. This was a moment in time, this would have been early ’94, so, at that point, Green Day had signed, Nirvana was huge, and there were a lot of questions about what the underground was, in relation to mainstream commercial music. That was a large part of the discussion happening in this message board, which was really the “sellout” argument. Which is such a cute and antiquated notion now, but that was a real thing. A real, real thing.
There was this magazine called Maximum Rocknroll that was a big, big, big punk zine. All newsprint, black and white. You would know people who read it, because their fingers were smudged with black by the time they finished reading it. Maximum Rocknroll was a key element to that entire underground, because if you put out a record, you would send it to them. It would get reviewed. You would get little orders sent to your P.O. box. There was a whole classified section. The ads were a vital feature to it, because they were really cheap, and anyone doing a record label at their kitchen table, or in their bedroom, could probably afford an ad to let you know that the new 7-inch was out. One of the things that came out of this kind of mainstream punk thing was this backlash, and it wasn’t just a backlash against major labels, or that sort of thing. It became a backlash around sound, or around pushing boundaries in directions that didn’t adhere to what punk had been.
Maximum Rocknroll got inundated with records. I now understand the shit that they were in — so many record labels started in that time, and not all of them started because “I love it and I want to contribute to the scene”, there were a fair number of people who were like, “Hey, we can maybe make some money here”. They were inundated with records. They could not possibly keep up with the number of records that they were being sent for review. They instituted a review policy for the first time. But you couldn’t possibly have labeled that review policy in a worse way, which was “We’re only going to review punk records”, which most people sending them thought they were sending!
I remember, very distinctly, there was a DC band called Rain Like the Sound of Trains, who were very chill, and did not sound like what DC punk sounded like before that, and they had their record refused by Maximum Rocknroll. That was also true with a lot of Midwest emo stuff being refused. That was a problem, because if you were a small label, that was your one lifeline to anywhere else. If you were a small band, you needed to get in there. So, I was on this message board. I had a computer, and at one point, I realized everyone on this thing is sitting here with a computer, and we’re all spread out everywhere. Couldn’t we just make a magazine? How hard could that be?
I was 19.
My roommates had gone away, I think, and I don’t remember the circumstances that led me to not being able to get into my apartment, but I couldn’t get into my apartment, which means I couldn’t get onto this message board, and I couldn’t see what was happening. I finally got back in, and there was an entire volunteer staff that had stepped up. I had to be like, “Hey, I kind of want to help with this. Can I also be an editor?” Two and a half months later, the first issue of Punk Planet came out. That’s how I got started — like, I mean, really, 19 years old, having no idea what the fuck we were doing. I was calling other people that made zines. There was a punk collective in Chicago called Underdog, who published black and white on newsprint. So I called them up and was like, “How do you print a magazine? How do you do that?”, and they were like, “Oh, there’s a printer in Astoria, Illinois”. So that’s where we got printed, because that was the one place I called that was like, “here’s where we do this”.
I often describe Punk Planet as a public learning process. Like, we were all figuring it out. None of us had any background in any of the things that needed to be done. And we were also — this was 1994 — we were doing this remote. There was no one else in Chicago doing it. Everyone was everywhere. We literally mailed floppy disks back and forth with files on them. It wasn’t until a few years later that it was like, “Oh, we could send these via email”. I remember — this guy Josh Hooten, who did design work with us, and later became an editor — he was in Boston, and I was in Chicago, and at that point, we were the main design people. We would have to stay up all night to make sure that the files actually uploaded from him to me. If they didn’t, if they failed, I would have to call him up, and I would literally — he would have an answering machine, and I would just go, “wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up” until he finally would hear it and would come groggily to the phone.
“Mentor” is a funny word, coming up in this scene where everyone was your age and doing shit, and some people were a little further along the learning curve than you.
From the jump, Larry Livermore was very supportive of the idea of starting a magazine. I think probably because him and Tim Yohannan from Maximum Rocknroll had a falling out, and he was like, “here’s a way to kind of get back at him”. But Larry was super supportive. And super supportive of me, specifically. He lent — I think it was $800 — at the beginning, because we did not sell enough ads to cover printing. In 1994, if you published, I think it was 54 pages for the first issue, and we printed 4,000 copies, and it cost $800. He lent us that, and then we repaid it with advertising for Lookout. He left his column at Maximum Rocknroll and wrote a column in Punk Planet. I think without that, it would not have flown, because everyone else was just like, “who?”
Larry was super important. Pretty early in doing the magazine, I was still in college. I went to art school, my major was in video art. A year in, I joined the student newspaper. Both the editorial advisor and the design advisor for the paper were really, really helpful. The design advisor, especially, a guy named Michael Miner, was teaching me — like, he explained shit like dot gain to me, where it was like, “Yeah, you need to actually print this lighter than you think, because it’s going to get darker on the paper”, and I’m like, “Oh, that’s why it always looks like shit”.
I think those people early on, but, Larry, especially, were really, really crucial. Mentor is a funny word, coming up in this scene where everyone was your age and doing shit, and some people were a little further along the learning curve than you. You would say to them, like, “How do you do that?”, and then they’d go, “Oh, this is how you do it”. Mentorship was often just peer-to-peer. It was like, “Oh, here’s how I figured out that problem”, and then it’s like, “Oh, cool, that’s awesome!”, and then they’ll be like, “But how are you doing that?”, and it’ll be like, “Oh, well, this is how we’re doing that”.
When I graduated, I got a job at the Chicago Reader, which is an alt weekly in Chicago. I got a job in the production department. That’s a job that I got because of Punk Planet, because that’s where I learned to do design work. The Art Director there was a woman named Sheila Sachs, who was hugely important to me. She was also involved in the Chicago indie rock world, like, she did a bunch of design work for Thrill Jockey, and that kind of thing. We knew a bunch of people in common, and she was a few years older than me. She let me come in and use the high-end printing machines there when I didn’t work.
This was also the perfect job, because it was a full-time job in 3 days. You worked Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Your Monday and your Wednesday were ridiculous days, just forever. I worked out a deal with my boss that I could sleep under my desk if I was idle for a little bit. You were supposed to — if you were idle — go up and file photographs into their filing cabinet, and I was like, “Dude, this is a punishment for being fast. It’s incentivizing me to be worse at my job. How about you let me sleep and just kick me when you’re ready for the next thing?”, and he was like, “Okay, fine”.
But I feel like most of the time, it was really just people you met along the way who knew one thing that you didn’t, and then you’d learn it from them.
The barrier for entry for making a thing now is so negligible in a lot of ways compared to when I got started.
I feel like I used to do stuff that was much bigger, in terms of audience, in terms of who it was connecting with. Now, mostly, I do stuff for a fairly small audience, an incredible group of people, and who are amazingly supportive and enthusiastic about the work that I do. But the scale is just very different, and I think that — like, when I want to be charitable to myself, which is not very often — I think that’s true everywhere. Like, I think the scale is just different. Look at TV ratings in the 1980s, it’s fucking bananas. The worst show on ABC was being watched by 12 million people, and now, Game of Thrones is being watched by 3 million.
As things bifurcate, audiences become smaller. But, all that said, it means that I can just kind of have an idea and be like, “Well, I think there’s probably some folks that’ll support it”.
Making things now is a miracle. Making things in 2026 is mind-blowingly easy. I make shirts for my podcast, for myself. I hold no inventory of shirts. I pay no upfront money. For shirts! They get ordered, I don’t ever have to touch that order. They get filled and shipped. They cost what it would cost if I were to place a huge order to get silkscreened, and try to guess the right distribution of shirt sizes and all of that.
What kind of miraculous world is that?
The zines that I did — there are 54 pages. They’re perfect-bound. They look like a little book. And I made 400 of them. They took two weeks which is amazing. They cost $2.50 with shipping, each. Like, what the fuck? If I wanted to, I could have just had the files there, and they would print one out if somebody ordered one. That’s insane! The barrier for entry for making a thing now is so negligible in a lot of ways compared to when I got started. That really does feel miraculous. It enables small ideas for small audiences in a way that just wasn’t possible before. I mean, like, the original Punk Planet, we printed 4,000, because I think that was probably the smallest number we could print. Now I could make a magazine and print one. That’s fucking wild.
another goal I set for myself was to just say yes to opportunities that present themselves.
Last year, I really committed to writing and publishing my own stuff. I had a good run of doing some freelance stuff, but freelance is bananas now, and it suddenly just dried up. I don’t know why, but it just went away. I don’t think it was something I said, I think it was budget stuff. But I was doing the hustle, and then I was like, “I fucking hate this hustle”. I hate the hustle. Some people are amazing at it, and god bless them, but to me, it was just easier to be like, “You know what, I’m just going to publish this stuff myself. Yeah, I’m not going to get the $150 or whatever that this freelance would have paid, but I can probably make that up in merch, maybe?”
I started up a blog again when Elon Musk bought Twitter, and I left Twitter. And I was like, “I need somewhere that I feel like I actually control, because we’ve gone way too long ceding all of it to someone else”. I needed to have my own spot. I set up a blog and a website, and I stressed myself out trying to publish to it. Not publishing enough, spending a lot of time stressing out about it, I was like, “You know what, I just gotta bite the bullet”, and I set myself a goal, and I was like, “I’ll do 36 of these”.
I’d been reading the papers of this radical publisher in Muncie, Indiana, named George Dale. They became especially useful to my brain after Election Day and Trump’s re-election, because this guy fought the Klan in the 20s. He didn’t just fight the Klan — like, I don’t know that I have ever experienced someone so willing to destroy themselves in a fight, just over and over and over again. As I’ve been doing research, it’s just like, the metaphor to me is just like the boxer that will not fucking stop, even though everyone is like, “Please stop. Like, you are a bloody-ass pulp”, and it’s this guy, George Dale — he just literally never stops, just in a fascinating and unrelenting way.
So I wrote — another goal I set for myself was to just say yes to opportunities that present themselves. With something like readings, I’m often like, “I’m not going to do that”. But I agreed to a very early January reading in Chicago at this long-time reading series called 20×2 which is 2 minutes, 20 people. I was like, “Well, 2 minutes is not bad, I’m not going to beat myself up that bad over 2 minutes”. Cut to an entire week of me being like, “Fuck you, goddamn it!”
But I did a little 2-minute thing about George Dale, and reading stuff in front of live humans is amazing, especially live humans who had been drinking for most of the night. This was a week, I think, before Inauguration Day, maybe two. Afterwards, an internet pal named Mikki Kendall came up to me and said, “So when’s the book coming out?”, and I was like, “What are you talking about?” Then Peter Sagal from Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! , who had also been a reader there, was like, “I want to know more about this guy”, and I was like, “Okay, well, I was thinking about doing a podcast”, and he was like, “Why would you do a podcast? There’s no audio from 100 years ago”, and I was like, “Oh, that’s a good point”. He said, “No, it should be a book”, and both of them saying that in one night made me think, “Well, fuck, maybe this is a book”.
So, then, I rewrote it as a blog post, because I was in the grind of trying to blog 36 times last year, I was like, “Fuck, it’s February, I’m already behind, I gotta write a thing”. I wrote a thing about George. Up to that point, I’d published blog posts and I was like, “This is a good blog post, it got read by 1,500 people”. Two days into that George Dale post, 100,000 people had read it, and I’m like, “Oh, okay, something’s happening”. I reached out to a friend and was like, “Hey, you published non-fiction books — do you have an agent?”, and she was like, “Yeah, I do, I love my agent”. She connected me to the agent, who then was like, “Oh, I had just read that thing this morning, someone had sent it to me, and I thought, I hope this guy’s doing a book”.
It’s funny, because a lot of things that I do, when they don’t look like the normal things I do, I’m the last person to know that I’m doing it. I did this satirical Twitter account about Rahm Emanuel’s run for mayor back in 2010. I wrote it for 6 months anonymously. Four months in, a bunch of people were like, “This is the best book I’ve ever read”, and I’m like, “This isn’t a book!”, and it was, like, finally, somebody said, “God, I hope they make this into a book”, then I was like, “Oh, is this a book?”, and it kind of felt like the same thing. Practically every single person was like, “This is a book”, and I was like, “Well, I guess I don’t know what a book is”.
So, yeah, so now I’m doing a book.
It’s funny, because it’s extremely historical research-heavy, which is not shit that I’ve done before. It’s a lot of words, which is not something I’ve done before. It’s super intimidating, but in a lot of ways, it feels like a familiar space, because it’s yet another situation where it’s a combination of making it up as I go along, and turning to other people to be like, “How the fuck did you do that?” In that way, it feels really nice and comfortable.
I am, at my core, a problem solver, and the beauty of Punk Planet was every day was a problem.
The thing that I’m most proud of is Punk Planet. Like, it was huge and a remarkable thing to have done. It lasted for 13 years. I was a kid when it started. There was never a plan, so every year felt like a miracle. Like, “How are we still doing this?” It had real cultural impact that still percolates today. It started a remarkable number of people on paths and careers that I don’t think they necessarily would have started on without Punk Planet. And so that is — like, that’s everything. Make a thing that has impact, and there are many, many people who can point to and say “That’s where I got my start writing”, or “That’s how I started designing”, or, you know, “I read that thing, and I made a thing like it”. It’s amazing. It will always be amazing.
It also, frankly, is incredibly painful to talk about. Because it is — you know, the end was hard. I mean, I’m fucking 51 years old, I think I was 33 when it ended, and it’s still hard. I actually — one of the first things I did on this blog was to do a series of 13 entries about the magazine, and it was because I have done a very bad job of shepherding the legacy of that magazine, in part because of the pain associated with the end of it. But the thing I’m most proud of is absolutely that.
That said, I remember years and years ago — well, it was in Punk Planet — we did an interview with Ian MacKaye post-Fugazi, when he was in a band called The Evens. I forget what the question was exactly, but it was along the lines of, like, “You’re doing weird shit now. Like, what is that about?” and his answer was basically, like, “I’m not a fucking statue“. I always feel weird, like, that answer — like, what’s the thing you’re most proud of is it this thing that I did when I was 19 years old? What the fuck? I’ve done so many things that are amazing, and that I’m proud of in many different ways.
I would say most recently, I’m proud of the work that I do with Akilah Hughes on Rebel Spirit podcast, where it was me and her and Elizabeth, 3 people, being like, “Let’s create a narrative story of race in America, but funny and approachable”. I’m immensely proud of that work. We are embarking on Season 2, which is going to be even more ambitious in that capacity. I’m just immensely proud of it. That work — like, I’ll put that up any day of the week to Punk Planet. It’s important and really good work. So, I mean, it’s just hard. It’s, like, everything I do, to some degree, I’m proud of. Sitting this weekend, numbering these little zines, and it’s like, “Wow! I wrote all of this”, and then people were like, “I liked it”. They can just go read it. It’s free on the internet, but they were like, “I like it, I would like to have it in my house”. I am super proud of that. So, it’s — yeah. There’s a lot that I’m proud of.
I am, at my core, a problem solver, and the beauty of Punk Planet was every day was a problem. Like, one of my favorite days of Punk Planet was when we moved into our last office space, and they didn’t provide garbage, and I had to learn how to get a dumpster. I fucking loved that shit. Or we ended up partnering with Akashic Books to produce books through Punk Planet. One of them was the first collection of this poster artist, Jay Ryan, who prints under the name The Bird Machine, and Johnny at Akashic was like, “Well, we can do it, but I don’t know how to print color stuff. I think you gotta do it overseas. I don’t understand any of that”. So I was like, “I’m on it”. The most fun moment of that whole process was trying to figure out how overseas shipping works. It was great. I ended up on the Port Authority’s website, and I downloaded a coloring book that was for kids about how ports work, and I was like, “Now I understand!”
I think the most fun I have had recently was a project with a longtime collaborator, the author Joe Meno, who came to me and said, “Hey, I have this idea to write a novel, but it’s not a book — it exists on the internet”. And it’s called Question Mark Ohio, and it’s about this town that’s disappearing. I was like, “That sounds awesome. Let’s do that”. For a year and a half or so, it was a daily thing. The beauty is, he totally pitched me in the way that I pitched Maureen Johnson for my podcast, Says Who, where I was like, “It’s 8 episodes, both of us are busy, don’t worry about it“.
We’re coming up on our 10th year, and we’re at 400-plus episodes. At the time, Joe was like, “It’s cool, we’re both busy, I think we can kind of do an entry every now and then, we can advance the story”, and then very, very quickly it became a daily thing. I ended up making, over the course of a year, I think, 45 different websites, and just this sprawling mess of a thing that was an absolute joy to make. Joe would write a little bit, and I’d be like, “Well, I think it would make more sense like this” and it was like, how do we create these websites that feel real and lived in, but also advance this narrative?
It was so much fun, and nobody gave a shit. In retrospect, I’m like, “Oh, we created a story that, like, if you weren’t in on day one, by day 200, you were not getting in”. But god, it was fun to be in. Like, just so much fun. The best thing is, Joe is — I mean, he’s by no means a Luddite, but he’s not, like, online, like me, so it was all over email. You would just reply to one email, until you would hit the limit of replies, and then you would reply to the next one, I think it was a hundred, before it would start a new thread. It was a true joy. Like, just a true joy. Every single part of that project was fun as hell.
I think Question Mark Ohio is such a beautiful story. It was very much a story about the kind of post-COVID, where nobody wants to face up to the fact that things have changed. It was a meditation on change and grief told in sort of a sci-fi absurd, amazing way. Like, I mean, it really is, again, a project that to me stands up against anything. Man, I liked that. I liked that project a lot.
If I go long enough without making something, that speed bus is going to explode
As part of my day job at the fellowship program, we onboard new fellows every year. Part of that is everyone has to give sort of a little 5-minute talk about themselves. I tend to really make myself feel terrible in the lead-up to doing that. This year, I did that for a while, and then I finally was like, “Fuck it”, and I came up with a metaphor that I actually think really sticks in my head well, which is the movie Speed. Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock. Keanu Reeves is a cop, Sandra Bullock is a passenger on a bus, and the bus is rigged to explode if it goes below a certain speed, and the metaphor is: there’s a speed bus in my brain. If I go long enough without making something, that speed bus is going to explode.
That’s the driving force. Years and years and years ago, I think it was 2012, I was doing the most legit work I’ve ever done. I was the Executive Director of a non-profit that worked at the intersection of journalism and technology called OpenNews. It was a lot of work, and it was an incredible experience, and I was not making a lot of things. I started to feel worse and worse and worse. I finally turned to the woman who was the deputy, and I was like, “I gotta take a couple days off. Like, I don’t feel good, I feel shitty”.
Then I just made some stuff.
This was during the Obama re-election campaign, and David Axelrod had said, “If polling in these 3 swing states or whatever drops below a certain amount, I’ll shave off my mustache”. He had a glorious mustache, so I ended up making a website called, like, “Does Axelrod Have His Mustache Still?”, or something like that. It just hit — I think at the time, the Huffington Post had an open API for polling stuff, and so it hit that. There was a little drawing that I had done of David Axelrod with a mustache, but it had — if polling dropped below a certain amount, the mustache would disappear, and I felt great afterwards. I was like, “Oh, right! Like, I need to be doing this shit”.
I left that job in very capable hands, and I’m very happy about that, because I started that project, it’s still going today. But I just — I was fairly miserable in it by the end. Afterwards, I was talking with a friend, and I was like, “I don’t know what happened, like, you know, it’s doing good work, it’s got this massive budget”, and he was like, “Yeah. But you’re a builder, you’re not a maintainer”, and I was like, “What?”, and he was like, “You enjoy getting the plane off the ground, but you’re not flying that plane”. I was like, “Oh, shit! You’re right!” That was such a helpful thing to recognize, like, maintenance mode is not my strong suit.
Making stuff, to me, is the driving force. I desperately want the world to be better than it is, and so most of what I make is about that. It’s about trying to push us forward toward a future that is better than the shit we’re living in. That’s true all the way back to Punk Planet, that’s true from the just the punk shit that I was doing as a teenager. Like, the world’s gotta be better than this, like, it really does, we gotta fucking live here. We could be doing such a better job at that, and so that’s the other driver for me, how can I help make this better? That’s the motivating factor behind most of what I make. It’s like something like Question Mark Ohio — that was just about, like, how can we talk about the grief that we’re all fucking walking around with? Like, millions of people died during COVID, and we just don’t talk about that. So what’s the story about that, about disappearance and loss, and how you come to terms with that?
It’s not always just like, “Forward!” But that is definitely the driver.
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE 