Author: Erik St.Andrew Moe

Somehow I’ve gone all day without hearing any sound bites from last night’s dueling town halls. Biden and Trump appeared on separate networks because Trump rejected the perfectly reasonable precaution of a remote debate amid his treatment for Covid-19. I read a few reports about the evening. They tell me Trump was an embarrassment to…

”One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.” Simone de Beauvoir When I started this series, I wasn’t sure what direction it would take or if I could sustain it for 100 days. With 19 days remaining, I have far…

I’m not usually drawn to the gross-out, macabre elements of Halloween and goth culture (though I wear plenty of black and will dance to The Cure any day of the week). I have been seeing and writing about creepy body horror films during the first half of October (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, The Fly). Horror…

On Sundays, I’ve been writing about one simple trick to end Trump. Early voting is open in many places. I voted this week. I hope that by now everyone within the sound of my keyboard has a plan, knows how they’ll vote, and is putting it in motion. The next step is to make sure…

This afternoon, a 74-year old Covid-19 patient who lives a mile and a half from my home has invited 2,000 guests to mingle on his lawn. There is no indication he will require masks or social distancing at this event. This man had a similar event on September 26, followed by a smaller indoor reception.…

She saidSoap for sore eyes(I need an intermission)If looks could kill(I’d kill your television) —Ned’s Atomic Dustbin I became so addicted to cable news in my first years working in D.C. (see yesterday) that I knew the exact rhythm of commercial breaks and when certain segments and commercial breaks would come on. There was an…

I’m watching Rachel Maddow on MSNBC with the sound off as I wait for the Vice Presidential debate to begin. I dislike cable news. I dislike commercial television. But I splurge and pay for it one month of the year, the month of October because I have a strange sentimental attachment to the World Series…

While writing yesterday about centenarians and attempting to connect the art world of 100 years ago to electoral politics, I began exploring the parallels between Trump’s hospitalization and the medical emergencies of past presidents. News sites resurfaced these stories in recent days: the president who secretly had part of his cancerous jaw removed on a…

On Sundays, I’ve been writing about one simple action you can take to end Trump. With 30 days left, it’s not complicated: vote. D.C. mailed ballots to all registered voters this week. I received mine in the mail on Friday. Your state may be doing the same, or may have opened early voting sites already.…

Some of the most frustrating TV watching I’ve ever endured dominated my experience of the last two days. There was the torturous debate, in which the President of the United States shouted incoherently for ninety minutes over Joe Biden and moderator Chris Wallace, and called for white supremacists to, “stand by.” I wrote on Tuesday…

I am in the middle of reorganizing my place, going through boxes and clutter that I have accumulated since I moved in. As though on cue, one of the things I found yesterday was a sign from the 2008 Democratic National Convention that reads: READY FOR JOE. It was a fun riff on the call-and-response…

PlanYourVote.org is a 2020 visual arts initiative from Vote.org that harnesses the power of art to promote and encourage citizens to exercise their right to vote. —PlanYourVote.org On Sundays I offer one simple thing you can do to end Trump. This one is a bit of a repeat. But with just over a month to…

I think of walking as a kind of call and response. Not only in terms of acknowledging those that you pass… I think of that remark that Ralph Waldo Emerson made in his diary, “the ground is all memoranda, and every object covered over with hints.” So, part of walking is trying to find those…

It isn’t fashionable to call yourself a writer of domestic fiction — you’ll rarely catch male novelists describing their work as such… Domestic fiction, as novelist Sue Miller told me, seems to denote some kind of smallness, a lack of scope or ambition. And yet, those narratives of our most intimate familial relationships are the…

Early in the Trump administration, it irritated me to read that high-level officials felt comfortable have a nice relaxing dinner out in the city I call home: people implementing the “Muslim ban,” militarizing border communities, separating Immigrant children from their parents, discriminating against Black people and trans folks, people enabling carbon profiteers’ while valuable seconds…

Over the weekend, I talked to a Trump supporter. This is someone I’ve met before. I didn’t know he was a Trump supporter until now. We’ve both been regulars on a video social I’ve joined often in the past few months. It came out when he mentioned a date with a political appointee. In Washington…

Today, I’m circling back to Occupy Wall Street. Thursday was the ninth anniversary of its beginning at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. I stopped myself from posting a version of this on Thursday because I wasn’t sure how it fit in to my story, or whether the stories of others were mine to tell. These…

All weekend, as I anticipated in my post late Friday, my neighbors in D.C. — and others who drove great distances— made pilgrimages to lay flowers on the steps of the Supreme Court. Crowds gathered in an outpouring of love and grief for Justice Ginsburg. Trump and Mitch McConnell played their expected parts as well: villains…