People, travel, conversation.
I was on my third bourbon when the neon died. The kind of place where the bartender knows your name and your sins — and now it's a goddamn smoothie franchise. Someone has to write about this.
Read the Full Story →A deeply unscientific investigation involving public records and cold coffee.
Nobody warned me about the hat thing. A report from the other side of good manners.
They did it anyway. Now the coffee is $9 and the soul is gone.
It started as a joke assignment. It ended with a restraining order request, three standing ovations, and a genuine understanding of why local government is the most important and most ignored thing in American life.
A road to nowhere. A stadium in the wrong city. An airport expansion that made things worse. This is the story of how America forgot what public works were supposed to do.
"The job of the press is not to comfort the powerful or afflict the comfortable. It's to show up, ask the dumb question, and not leave until someone answers it honestly.
— The Funny Papers Manifesto, Issue No. 1, 2021
Three hundred jobs gone. One zine left. How a grieving town found its voice in a photocopier and a lot of spite.
Spoiler: the money went somewhere. Where exactly is a matter of creative accounting and muffled laughter.
The badge said "Certified Delegate." No one asked who certified me. This was my first mistake.
Part folk art collection, part found objects, part ongoing legal dispute. The board is divided. The building is not.
We filed 47 public records requests across six states. Eighteen came back incomplete. Three were denied without explanation. One arrived in a language no one in our office spoke. This is what we found.
The expert panel. The policy brief. The focus group held in a hotel ballroom forty miles from where anyone actually works. Enough.
The bar. The barbershop. The diner. The church basement. They didn't disappear. They were priced out, zoned out, bought out, and burnt out. We should talk about who did that.
Balance is not neutrality. Context is not bias. And "he said, she said" stopped being journalism sometime around 2003. A note from the editor's desk.