From The Post-Star to Self-Published: Four Journalists Talk About Their Books

From The Post-Star to Self-Published: Four Journalists Talk About Their Books

L-R: David Blow, Michael DeMasi, Maury Thomson, and Joseph Cutshall-King

Journalists, writers, authors of books—and those aspiring to be! Ever wonder what it’s like to be a journalist for a daily newspaper? Ever think of self-publishing your own book, but wonder how? Then join us at “From The Post-Star to Self-Published: Four Journalists Talk About Their Books,”a panel discussion on journalism,…

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Lullaby

Keanu Reeves x reader (A/n- he’s coming of as so much of a jerk, but come on, he’s nice, but he’s not oblivious, and no one’s a saint. Also, I’ve been writing this chapter for 3 weeks now and it’s still not that great.) (Chapter Summary- Keanu surprises Y/n. Later, her parents make an unexpected return, and they’ve brought along unexpected guests.)

Chapter1  Chapter2  Chapter3  Chapter4  Chapter5  Chapter6  Chapter7  Chapter8

Warnings- SUMT/NSFW, semi-public sex (sort of)

Chapter 9

After a morning's worth of chairing back to back board meetings, in the absence of her father, Y/n was finally heading back to her office, tablet in hand and designer handbag hung in the crook of her elbow. The pristine white of her fitted skirt suit stood out bright against the dark back and grey décor of the building. Her heels clicked softly on the porcelain tiles, complimenting the tip tap of keys of the secretary’s computer. 

“Miss Warren!” Emily caught her before she entered her office, standing abruptly, clearing her throat, “I mean, Y/n.” Stopping in her tracks, Y/n turned on the thin heel of her shoes, humming in response. Emily swiped up a post-it stuck to the rounded counter, scanning it to make sure she had things right, “You have a meeting in conference room 19, it’s urgent, he’s waiting.”

“He?” Y/n quoted; despite her best efforts, she couldn’t recall having a meeting with anyone slated for that time, “I didn’t.......how long has he been here?” Worry built in her chest, hoping it hadn’t been long.

Emily glanced at the clock, “Since eleven,” she cringed; it was twelve thirty.

“Fuck,” Y/n breath, mumbling a quick thanks and hurrying back towards the elevators. Briefly, Y/n wondered if it was actually her father who had set up a meeting without telling her, though, as she tapped the toe of her shoe on the way down, she decided that it didn’t really matter, because if he found out that she’d kept someone waiting for that long, he’d be livid. 

Sucking in a breath as the doors opened to a hallway two floors down, Y/n all but ran to the conference room labelled ‘19′ in elegant silver numbers on rich mahogany. When she got there, the door was closed and the long window facing the corridor was tinted in an opaque white, signaling that the privacy setting had been enabled. 

Taking a minute to catch her breath, she smoothened her hair and skirt before turning the knob and slowly walking in. Though, just as she did, Y/n realized that she had completely forgotten to ask for her guest’s name. Fortunately, she was just about to find out that she wouldn’t even need to ask, for when she raised her head to greet him, she was left speechless by who sat at the table, chair turned facing the doorway. His hair was attractively wind blown and he sat like he owned the whole damn room, sunglasses discarded on the tinted glass table next to him. A well-fitting leather jacket hugged his biceps and between the worn jeans and the familiar brown boots, Y/n already knew that he wasn’t there for any sort of business meeting.

Grinning and amused at her surprise, Keanu folded his arms, eyes unashamedly roaming her body, biting his lips at how everything seemed tight in the right places; she certainly looked like the makings of a dirty movie. Licking his lips, Keanu leaned further into his seat, crossing one ankle over his knee, “Surprised?” He teased, “I can’t say I wasn’t expecting you to be.”

Y/n scoffed, the reddish tint of her make-up only exaggerating the heat in her cheeks. Still, she tried to play it cool, “I thought you were in New York.”

“Well now I’m here,” Keanu declared, standing, the chair rolling back a little as he approached her. After Y/n set her things down the table, she folded her arms, awaiting a more substantial reason for his visit to Los Angeles and by extension, her workplace. Keanu, however, didn’t wait for an invitation to put his hands on her hips, enjoying that he was still able to tower over her even while she wore heels. “Last night was very......unsatisfying.”

Y/n tilted her head to the side, widening her doe eyes, trying to maintain her most innocent façade, even if she was far from it, “So you came all this way just to fuck little ole me?” She pouted, “I’m flattered, but surely a man like you has women just waiting with their legs open.”

Chuckling, Keanu knew she was right, he could play the coy card all he wanted, but he knew what women thought of him. Some even took his passing kindness as something more, offering things up, and admittedly, there were times when he had taken them readily, a night or perhaps a weekend of fun then cutting them lose, neither party ever minded. Keanu briefly thought back to New York, he had already noticed the little gestures and wanting stares from the younger assistant directors, then their was his own assistant with her ‘aim to please’ attitude and finally, one of his co stars, she was just a couple years younger than him, but he was sure they could have some fun if they wanted to. But none would be as fun as she was. He didn’t want just some woman, he wanted Y/n.

Sliding his hands around to cup her ass, he eased her closer, smiling as she ran her hands up his forearms, “Maybe your right,” he said, low and bending a little to get close to her ear, “But I wanted to feel your tight cunt around my cock.”

Y/n smirked wickedly, arching her brows, “Don’t you have a way with the words?”

“Fuck words,” Keanu offered hastily, just before crashing his lips to hers, squeezing her ass. Between them, she reached for the buckle of his belt and the button and zipper at his pants, her fingers fumbling in the process of undoing them. Y/n moaned into his mouth, complying without protest when Keanu broke their hungry kiss, hurriedly turning her and peppering rough nips and kisses on her neck all while undoing the buttons of her blazer. Shoving off the material, Keanu only retracted to pull off her camisole, tossing it to the floor. 

Y/n reached behind, stretching to tangle her fingers in Keanu’s hair, encouraging him back towards the column of her throat. His hands slid down her body, stopping at the hem of Y/n’s skirt, pushing it up over her waist only to shove her panties down. In one go, he pushed into her and Y/n melted onto the table, “Fuck,” she groaned loudly, gripping the edges until her knuckles went white. The top of her breasts and her stomach welcomed the coolness of the surface and her loose hair fell over her face, skewing her vision of the screen at the front of the room, not that it mattered.

Keanu maintained a firm grip on Y/n’s hip while his other hand travelled up her body, lingering to loosely circle the back of her neck, but eventually reaching her head. Quickening his rough thrusts, he brushed some hair out of Y/n’s face, only to gather a handful of it up in his hand, twirling it in his fist, before tugging, hard enough to make her whimper. “Do you know what you do to me?” Keanu managed through clenched teeth, “I never wanna fuck anyone else, only you.” Pulling out fully, Keanu slammed back into Y/n’s drenched core seconds later, marveling at how the movements pushed her body up onto the furniture. The toes of her shoes were barely reaching the floor by then and Keanu’s grip was the only thing keeping her in place.

The sound of skin slapping skin, coupled with the blood rushing in her ears was enough to nearly drown Keanu’s words, though, even if she could hear him, Y/n could barely think straight, far less piece together any sort of response. Between the way he stretched her with his girth, his throbbing veins brushing against her slick walls, and how far he reached with each rough motion; it hurt, in the best way possible. His hold on a fistful of her hair was tight and occasionally, he’d tug without warning earning him a little yelp of pleasured surprise. 

Y/n’s shallow breath went ragged as the knot in her stomach came loose and she came without warning. Her chest, still pressed to the table, glistened with exertion despite the air conditioning and her legs weakened as heat spilled out of her, dripping onto his thighs and coating Keanu’s cock. 

Keanu groaned as he felt her clench around his member. The way his name left her barely parted lips was the most sinful heaven and having Y/n completely at his mercy was something he missed since they’d parted. She was such a wonderful plaything. 

“Is that all you’ve got?” Keanu taunted, riding out Y/n’s orgasm, only to pull out and flip her wanton body. Her eyes were unfocused and she could still barely string a sentence together. When she didn’t answer, Keanu gathered her into his arms, discarding her onto the table, already edging into her again, “Well?” He pressed, “Is that all you’ve got for me babygirl?”

Y/n whined at the sensation, shuddering when Keanu reached between to add friction to her swollen cilt, “I....”

“Use your words, tell me that you want my cum in your pussy,” Keanu went slower that time, his hips rolling at a more leisured pace.

“I want....” Y/n swore she was seeing stars and she reached clumsily to grab Keanu’s shoulders, only just realizing that he was still dressed, with his pants only down to his knees. “I want you.....” the words dribbled off Y/n’s lips, slow and broken, “I want to feel you cum inside me.”

Keanu grinned wickedly, using his hand on Y/n’s back to press her closer to him, “Good,” he breathed, feeling himself grow closer to his climax, “You feel so good,” he praised sinfully, “I missed your cunt.”

Y/n felt her second orgasm building quickly and her toes curled as she threw her head back. The room seemed to spin, Keanu the only constant and the only thing keeping her from bouncing off the walls, “I missed your cock,” she eventually returned.

Keanu’s drawn on pace eventually quickened and not long after, Y/n was overflowing with pleasure again, her jaw slackening and her walls clenching around Keanu. “Fuck, baby,” he grunted, fingers digging into her hips as his member twitched inside her. 

Y/n’s ragged breaths went shallow, her face falling onto Keanu’s shoulder. In response, Keanu propped his chin on the top of Y/n’s head, his stiff hips still ridding out their highs. 

When it was over, and he pulled out, Keanu dropped back into the chair and Y/n laid back on the width of the table, both trying to catch their breaths. “I can’t believe you flew across the country for sex,” Y/n chuckled breathlessly.

With his hands on the plastic, cushioned armrests, Keanu slouched a bit, his pants still undone and around his knees. Y/n didn’t look much better; with her skirt still bunched up, topless and a bit exerted. “I flew across the country for sex with you,” Keanu corrected pointedly, “You have no idea what you do to me, do you?”

Rolling her eyes, Y/n licked her lips, “I think I’m getting a pretty clear idea.” Sitting up, Y/n winced as she shimmied off the table, going to collect her clothing off the floor, “Can’t say I’m not flattered though,” she grinned, starting with her bra, “Besides, no one can fuck my like you can.”

Standing as he frowed, Keanu pulled his pants up, the front still undone. When he finally stood before her, Y/n looked up at him, eyes holding a teasing glimmer, biting her lip. Keanu let his fingers skim her still bare arms, his movements slow, raising goosebumps on her skin. 

Letting one of his hands linger on her hip, Keanu used the other to capture a lock of Y/n’s hair, curling it around his index finger. His gaze was one of questioning and meant to intimidate her, “You’ve been fucking other people?” His voice was low and husky and Y/n sucked in a breath.

“I......” Y/n trailed off. She didn’t know what it was about Keanu, but the thought of him being possessive like that, even if they weren’t in a relationship, sent heat to the lingering soreness between her legs.

Untangling his hand from Y/n’s hair, Keanu let his hand rest at the bottom of her neck, his stocky fingers just over her pronounced collar bones, the edge of his palm in the hollow of her throat, “Answer me,” he urged, stepping forward so they were chest to chest, well, chest to face.

“Yes,” she admitted, blinking slowly, pupils dilated, “But they couldn’t even come close to you.”

Keanu hummed, a wicked grin pulling at his features, “I’m sure they don’t,” by then, Keanu’s hands were freely roaming Y/n’s body; sliding over her curves, groping her ass, “You know, since you left my room the last time; I haven’t been able to think about another woman the way I think about you. But here you are, fucking other people.”

“A girl's got needs,” Y/n teased cocking an eyebrow, “Pity that they were only just barely satisfied.”

Keanu huffed, jerking her even closer, “Sounds like you need someone to make it up to you.” Already, Keanu’s erection was pressing into her stomach and the throb of arousal in her center reminded Y/n of the growing soreness between her legs.

Licking her lips, Y/n regarded Keanu through her dark, hooded gaze, “Maybe I do.” An informal invitation was all Keanu needed to let his hold on her hip grow firmer as he crashed his lips to hers, pushing her up against the pulled down projector screen. Y/n’s skirt rode up her thighs as Keanu lifted her off the floor and her legs went around his hips. Not too long after, they were once again, clumsily shoving his pants down to around his knees, though, that time, Y/n pushed his leather jacket off too. 

Keanu’s hands slipped up Y/n’s blouse and underneath her bra, groping her breasts and toying with her nipples, eliciting sinful moans and pleading whimpers. “I like it when you beg,” he smirked, letting his tip brush her folds, “Beg for me baby,” Keanu encouraged.

“I want you,” Y/n pleaded breathlessly, her words evaporating as they left her lips, “Please Keanu, I need you to fuck me....”

The tip of Keanu’s tongue trailed Y/n’s neck, all the way up until his mouth was close to her diamond studded ear, “Well since you asked so nicely,” he mused, pushing into her, dragging his teeth over her ear lobe as she groaned at the feeling. 

“God,” the word seemed to bounce off the walls, low and hollow. Y/n’s nails dug into Keanu’s back and he could feel them through his thin t-shirt as he maintained a steady rhythm. Y/n’s warmth cocooned Keanu’s shaft perfectly, being with her like that was the perfect escape.

Y/n’s cheek was pressed to the side of Keanu’s face, his beard rough against her skin, giving her the slightest burn as he moved harshly. She clung to him for dear life, her eyes slipping closed as a consequence of the pleasure. It wasn’t an understatement when she’d told him that there wasn’t another man capable of making her feel the way he did; there was just something about his confidence, they way he could control her without force, wean her body to the highest levels of pleasure with his. Or perhaps it was simply physical, they way Keanu could fill and stretch her so much that it almost hurt, his balls slapping her ass all how his hands sent shocks through her body. Whatever it was, Y/n was certain that there could never be another man like Keanu. 

With the tips of his fingers pressed into the sides of her stomach and Y/n still gipping Keanu’s shoulders; they came together, obscenities mixing to sound messy and hanging in the heat that surrounded them. A final squeak of pleasure escaped her just as Keanu pulled out, collapsing lazily into the chair at the head of the table, pulling Y/n into his lap as he did.

Words weren’t exchanged as they caught their breaths, but there wasn’t really anything to be said anyway. One of Keanu’s arms stayed around Y/n tracing absent, unseen circles into her arm. The other hand lingered on one of her legs, both of which were draped over the arm of the chair. Y/n’s head lolled on Keanu’s shoulder, her gaze blank and forward. 

They stayed like that for an uncounted amount of time, the only thing pulling the two out of their sated state being the anxious shrill of Y/n’s cell, coming from her bag nearby on the table. Not even bothering get up, she reached over Keanu’s shoulder, knocking over the bag and grabbing the phone and swiping to answer without even checking the name or number. 

“Hello?” She nearly yawned, clearly tired from their activates. Letting his hand skim her back, Keanu moved to tangle his hands in her hair, single-handedly massaging her scalp as she spoke. “Okay,” though, Y/n’s frowned suggesting that whatever the matter was; it wasn’t ‘okay’. After another couple minutes worth of her hums of understanding, she finally chalked up, “I’ve been in a meeting all afternoon,” and then, she managed, “No, I’m busy this evening.” Momentarily, Y/n glanced at Keanu, though he couldn’t decipher what she was trying to communicate by her expression, “I’m doing something with a friend,” she offered, though eventually, after rolling her eyes, Y/n seemingly submitted to the other party’s pleas, “Alright. Fine, I’ll ask.”

Hanging up, Y/n tossed the phone back to the table, not even paying attention as it’s movement scattered more of her stuff. The called seemed to sour her mood and she stood reluctantly, wincing as she did, “I’ve gotta go,” she huffed. 

“Where?” Keanu furrowed his brows, not sure if he was offended or just disappointed that he couldn’t spend the rest of the evening with her.

Sighing, Y/n went through the motions of putting her self back together; straightening her clothes and running corrective fingers through her hair, “My parents are back from Beijing and they want to have dinner tonight,”  she rolled her eyes, adjusting and readjusting her skirt, “They said its important.”

“What about your friend?” Keanu scoffed.

“What?” Y/n scrunched her nose, taking a couple seconds before she realized what he was talking about, “Oh! The friend was you, I didn’t want to go,” she shrugged, “You know,” she grinned mischievously, “They said I could bring you. Do you want to come?”

Shrugging, Keanu shook his head, raising off the chair slightly to pull up his pants. Dinner with her parents didn’t seem like something they should be doing; he and Y/n weren’t a couple. Couple’s did family dinners. They were......well, Keanu didn’t know what they were, but he did know how it would look if he showed up on her arm for a impromptu family meal. “I can’t,” he dismissed, “I’ve got some things to do before I get back to New York.”

Y/n didn’t seem the least bit bothered as she shook her shoulders, “Okay, no problem.” The last thing she set out for was her panties, though, by then, Keanu had already stood too and had just gotten into his jacket.

She eventually spotted them near a table leg and when she stood again, underwear in hand, Keanu cocked a grin as he swiped them away, “I’ll keep these,” he shoved them into his back pocket, the red lace barely peeking out, “To keep the memory alive.”

“Whatever helps you sleep at night,” Y/n teased, standing on the tips of her toes, still having to pull Keanu down with a handful of his t-shirt between her fingers to kiss him quickly; no emotion, barely any meaning above an unspoken thanks. “I need to get back up stairs, can you find your way out?”

“Yeah,” Keanu huffed, leaving the room and walking with Y/n towards the elevators, “I’ll see you around,” he half waved as Y/n got into the first available one. With her final goodbye, the doors slid shut and Keanu got into the elevator that dinged open.

After the valet took her keys, Y/n lingered at the hooded entrance of the restaurant, trying to mentally prepare for what awaited her inside. Her family rarely had dinner together without due cause; her parents were usually too absorbed with work, each other or both to care about where, what or whom with Y/n ate. It never bothered her though; after growing up closely guarded and with very little room under their thumbs, she welcomed the freedom that accompanied their disregard. The only issue was her dire craving for more, because while her personal life was of very little interest to Heather and Michael, but they still tried to micromanage, though from afar, everything else; who Y/n was seen with in public, where she had gone to college, and most obviously, where she worked.

With a final stilling breath, Y/n smoothed a manicured hand over her short, plum colored dress, eliminating the inexistent wrinkles. Her velvet Jimmy Choo’s clicked quietly on the cobblestone, her steps only silenced by the carpet after  she crossed the gold-framed threshold. “Warren,” Y/n offered to the hostess after someone had taken her coat.

“Right this way,” the woman’s rehearsed smile perfectly charming but in no way warm as she led Y/n to a rectangular table for six central to the room, situated under the dim yellow light of a crystal chandelier.  Much to her surprise, all except of one of the seats were taken. Might have been nice to know that they were having company before she got there.

At the sight of her, Y/n’s father stood, greeting her with a hug, “Dad,” she pecked his cheek, leaning in for him to do the same. “What’s going on?” Y/n managed through her plastered on grin.

Heather was the one to speak up, “Darling,” she took Y/n’s hands before greeting her daughter with a trained la bise, “These are the Wang’s, we met them in Beijing.”

“Oh,” Y/n nodded politely in the other family’s direction, wondering what their interaction could possibly be leading too, “It’s nice to meet you.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Michael gestured to a man about his age first, his grey hair still peppered with dark strands, “This is Li Jian and his wife Alice,” a blonde woman smiled warmly in Y/n’s direction, one of her hands loosely griping her husband’s arm, “And this is their son, Daniel.”

At the mention of his name, Daniel stood, offering his hand, “What a pleasure to meet you Y/n; your parents told us a lot about you, but they didn’t mention that you were absolutely stunning.” Just when she thought Daniel as going to shake her hand, he turned it over, instead pressing a chaste to the area just above her knuckles.

When he raised his head again, Y/n couldn’t help but return his charming smile. He was attractive, probably more than conventionally so; all sharp, strong bone structure, dark eyes protected by long lashes and short, perfectly trimmed dark hair. “The pleasure is mine,” Y/n bent her head, hoping to hide the warmth in her cheeks. Daniel couldn’t have been more than thirty-five and Y/n couldn’t believe that he was already having such an effect on her.

Like a gentleman, Daniel pulled out the only empty chair for Y/n, and unsurprisingly, it was the next to him. Y/n’s father sat at the head of the table, nearest to her, Heather on the end to his left, while Daniel’s father was situated directly opposite of him, Alice next to Y/n’s mother. 

When everyone was settled, the waiter poured them some wine and handed over the menus. Their party looked over the selection of international cuisine, and out of the corner of her eye, Y/n could see Daniel stealing glances at her. Otherwise, it might have made Y/n uncomfortable, but for some reason, Daniel’s intrigue flattered her a bit.

When the waiter returned, he took their orders and as he left, Y/n’s mother was the one who struck up conversation, “Y/n, you know, Daniel is an engineer, he designs planes. He’s at the top of his field in China, and soon here in the U.S too.”

“Oh!” Y/n chuckled awkwardly, briefly turning to Daniel, who’s cheeks had just started going pink, “I didn’t know that, but we’ve just met so he hasn’t really had a chance to tell me.” Maintaining her posed demeanor, Heather kicked Y/n beneath the table, an unspoken warning to put on her best behavior. As the pain shot up her shin, Y/n tried to pretend it didn’t affect her, blinking slowly only so she could roll her eyes. With a sigh, she tried to rectify the awkwardness that she had created, “What I mean is; I’d love to hear about your work sometime.”

“Maybe you two could chat about it over coffee. Or maybe another dinner,” Michael interjected and Daniel’s parents seemed readily onboard with the idea. Suddenly, it all made sense. That dinner wasn’t just a casual affair between two families, she and Daniel were being set up. 

Y/n’s face fell but she hoped no one noticed; she didn’t think they’d try something like that so soon. Then again, Jillian was barely five years older than her and her parents had already found her someone.

“We should grab a bite together, just us,” Daniel broke Y/n’s thoughts and she had to blink her internal despair away. “I’d love to get to know you.”

“Yeah,” Y/n huffed, “That would be nice.”

As the food was set in front of them, everyone kept talking, but at some point Y/n zoned out, going into auto pilot. Sinking into her thoughts, Y/n couldn’t decide if her anger was outweighing her feelings of betrayal. How dare they blindside her like that? As if she were child, or worse yet, incapable of making her own decisions.

Y/n’s stare, directed towards the glass of wine in front of her went blank, and that time, the thing breaking her out of her thoughts was her phone vibrating in her purse on her lap. Trying to be discreet, Y/n kept the device below the table as she mined the short text, “Are you alone?”

“No, still at dinner,” for effect, she added a sad-face emoji.

“What a shame,” Keanu sent back almost immediately, “I’m ready for desert.” Attached to his texts was a picture of Keanu’s erection, constrained by his grey sweat pants, her panties from earlier near by, crumpled in his lap.

Y/n’s glass was at her lips, a mouthful of pinot noir nearly half-way down her throat, when she opened the messages. The sheer shock of the matter had her coughing up the wine, leaving Y/n clumsily scrambling for napkin. Daniel beat her to it though, handing one over and placing a gentle hand on her back. The phone fell, thankfully face down, back into Y/n’s lap and as she cleaned up her face just as Daniel offered her a glass half filled with water. “Are you okay?” His touch was soothing and his eyes worried.

Clearing her throat, Y/n took a couple sips of the water, feeling everyone’s eyes on her as she tried to settle herself. “I’m fine,” she managed, “I just....swallowed too quickly.”

“Okay,” Michael didn’t seem to believe her, though he brushed it off, quickly patting her shoulder, “Well take it easy there.”

Scoffing a soft chuckle, Y/n nodded, “Okay, yeah. Sorry about that.” For a moment more, everyone continued staring at Y/n before slowly redirecting their attention to their meals. The peace didn’t last for long though, because just about fifteen minutes later, Y/n’s phone shrieked loudly and she stood abruptly, her chair scraping the marble floor loudly as she excused herself.

“What?” Y/n hissed, her back now pressed the a wall in the narrow corridor that lead to the bathrooms.

On his end, Keanu chuckled, not seeming to care that she was annoyed. It was probably because he knew it wouldn’t last long. “How soon can you leave that restaurant?”

“We’re in the middle of dinner,” Y/n groaned, whatever irritation she had towards Keanu and her attraction to Daniel quickly melting away. By then, the only thing she wanted was to leave that place and go be with him. Keanu didn’t expect anything more than sex from her; no commitments, he didn’t control her unless they were in bed, just how she liked it, and he was certainly more fun than listening to her parents sell her to the Wang’s like she was some kind of prized pig. 

The gears in her head started turning and suddenly, Y/n wanted nothing more than to get out of whatever her parents were trying to do, “I can leave in the next ten minutes.”

“I thought you weren’t finished with dinner?” Keanu sounded intrigued and Y/n could only imagine the look on his face.

“I’m not. But I think I’m more interested in desert now,” her voice dropped lower and as the words travelled through the phone, she licked her lips.

“I’ll text you my address,” Keanu huffed and after a haphazard exchange of goodbyes, they hung up. 

Everyone raised their heads and awaited an explanation for Y/n’s behavior, though, instead she grabbed up her clutch, “I’m so sorry,” she wasn’t, not really, but she could pretend to be, “But I have to go.”

“Why?” Heather put her fork down, communicating with her eyes that Y/n should sit back down that very instant.

“Jill,” Y/n lied defiant and strong-willed, trying to come with something believable, “It’s an emergency, she.....needs me to....pick her up.”

Michael's brows knitted, “From?”

Moistening her lips, Y/n scoffed, “From......a bar. Rob’s busy and she doesn’t have a ride. So I’m gonna go,” laughing nervously, Y/n rubbed the back of her neck, “But this was nice, Mr. and Mrs. Wang, Daniel; it was great to meet you.”

Before anyone could object, Y/n was hurrying out, not even guilty about the whole thing; every other emotion triumphed by the excitement of seeing Keanu again.

If they kept going like that, Keanu was definitely going to get her into trouble. But, at least for now, Y/n couldn’t find it in herself to care. 

*******

Tagging- @baphometwolf666  @a-really-bi-girl  @harrisongslimited  @paanchu786​  @sdaff2

So,

I wasn’t quite asleep yet, and the swirling night wind smelled like smoke.

It was too warm on our back porch for my sleeping bag, so I was laying on a foamie with Muppet nuzzled into my bare chest while the shadows deepened around us. Paisley had been working on her desserts for hours now, stressed and playing Workaholics in the background, and through the open windows I could hear those fictional stoners up to their typical shenanigans. I was sunburnt and half-drunk, feeling satisfied with our summer life and ready for slumber. We’d been in Nelson for over a year now, and I was really starting to feel like this was becoming my real, true home. A refuge from the rest of the world. 

The back door banged open, and Muppet jumped to attention in alarm. Paisley was cradling her open laptop, and she thrust it in my direction.

“There’s like a huge forest fire on the other side of the big orange bridge, everyone’s posting about it on Facebook,” she said.

“Look, see? You can actually see it from here.”

I quickly clambered to my feet in my boxer shorts, a little unsteady, and squinted off into the distance. There was a diagonal stripe flickering beyond the right flank of Elephant Mountain, a mix of deep oranges and blood reds, and it seemed to be growing downhill towards the lake. The flames gave off an ominous Mordor-style glow. Pink smoke billowed above the black landscape. Right away I realized it must’ve started during the windstorm we’d reported on days earlier, which featured multiple lightning strikes. Things were getting apocalyptic around here lately. 

I took the laptop and examined the pictures that had been posted on social media, trying to will myself toward sobriety. People were in panic mode, talking about evacuation, sending out updates about road closures and successfully retrieved family members. I took a deep breath through my nostrils.

“We gotta head out there, like right now. I’ve gotta call Greg,” I said, handing back the laptop and searching for my pants.

“Are you coming?”

Paisley loved to come on assignments. Sometimes she took pictures, other times she actually suggested who I should interview or what I should pay attention to during a community event. Comp tickets were always flying at me, so I took her to free movies and free plays and free fundraisers. She worked her way into my columns as a character, and though she pretended to be embarrassed by the attention that earned her at work, I liked to think she enjoyed having this public persona. She was that Paisley, the girl from the newspaper, the Kootenay Goon’s girlfriend. She’d made a name for herself with her dessert company and her burlesque performances, and I figured one day she would end up being a YouTube chef or something like that. At the very least she would release a cook book, or start a blog. Supporting her ambitions was my favourite thing, and I liked puttering off to pick up ingredients for her on lazy Saturdays, knowing I was helping her achieve a dream. 

We stopped at the 7-11 in town before driving out to the fire, where we picked up Red Bull and Doritos. I needed something to wake me up. I wasn’t sure if the highway would be blocked off, if we’d even be able to make it all the way to the blaze, but I was determined to get as close as possible. We drove with the windows down, talking about Tolkien. We’d seen each of the three Hobbit movies together in succession, as an annual tradition, and we’d been increasingly disappointed. That being said, we still considered ourselves aspiring hobbits and spoke longingly of a future world that was a little more like the Shire. The Kootenays didn’t seem too far off that, actually, as it seemed to be full of fairy hideaways and pastoral communes. If we could make things work long term here, we figured, we could become increasingly hermit-like as the years progressed. 

“You’re my Samwise Gamgee and I’m the little Frodo, and we’re on our way to Mount Doom,’” Paisley said.

“You sure I’m not Gollum? Or maybe I want to be Boromir, since he’s my favourite character. I could even be a dwarf, maybe.”

“No, you’re Sam. You even kind of look like him, but with a beard.”

“You think I look like Sean Astin?”

“Yeah, you’re burly like him. And kind like him. And innocent.”

“I’m not fucking innocent.”

She shrugged, then leaned out her window to get a better look at where we were heading. As we rounded corners the fire came into and then back out of view. It was nearly midnight and there was no traffic, no noise, no spectacle. Just a looming threat. I couldn’t believe we hadn’t seen emergency vehicles yet, or heard choppers. Was the whole firefighter apparatus working like it was supposed to? Were people going to be losing their houses here? I clenched the steering wheel and wondered how much mayhem I could expect to encounter. That’s when I started seeing cars lined up along the side of the road, with people crowding the dark shoulder in packs. There were houses to both my left and right, and I found a place to park that had a sight-line of the burning slope. I left Paisley the keys so she could wait with the car, and she stood taking videos with her phone for social media as I hiked across the street. My main goal was to get some quotes from a resident, someone who was being menaced directly. I decided to walk up the driveway of the first property I saw, where I found a woman uncoiling a hose by a row of vehicles. 

“Excuse me, sorry to bother you. I’m a reporter with the Nelson Star, do you live here? Can we talk?”

She was an older woman, and seemed shy. She waved her arm in the direction of the backyard and told me to head back there to find her husband Bob. I took out my phone and used it as a flashlight to work my way around the side of the house, wondering for a moment about the safety of what I was doing. When I rounded the corner to the backyard I saw multiple sprinklers methodically spraying all along the perimeter of the lawn. In the middle of the grass was Bob, calmly gazing up at the conflagration. It was like he was watching a drive-in movie, one the universe had arranged just for him. There was an empty chair next to him, and once I introduced myself he invited me to sit down.

“I don’t know how they contact you in situations like this. I think they resort to going door to door,” he said. “But I haven’t heard anything yet.”

He said there was a plan for if things went truly awry, but he was hopeful the fire wouldn’t be able to make it all the way down the hill. There was a lot of wind, he said, and the firefighters were on their way. They must be. He went through all of this in a monotone, never glancing over, just staring up the hill with a muted look of dread in his eyes. The sprinklers continue to hiss and spray, creating a contrasting soundtrack to the flames’ crackling, which somehow sounded a bit like boiling water.

“Aren’t you scared right now? Like this thing could wipe out your house, your possessions? The wrong wind and it’s game over, right?”

He snorted, smiled. “That’s one of the most important things you have to learn in life, Will. There’s some things you can control, and there’s some things you just can’t no matter how hard you try.”

“That’s pretty Zen.”

He smiled, turned to me. “What, you think it’ll make a good quote?” The Kootenay Goon

The Singles Jukebox Celebrates 30 Years of Rhythm Nation 1814 (a Janet Jackson retrospective)

Janet Jackson’s had one hell of a career. It’d be glittering even if you were to cut the album she released 30 years ago this week out of history. And historic is what Rhythm Nation 1814 is, not like a war, but like a discovery; it was groundbreaking and influential and so much pop released in its wake owes it a debt of gratitude. The album contained seven top 10 singles in the U.S., each with indelible melodies, state-of-the-art beats and vivid music videos. Janet was always on the radio, always on TV, and welcome everywhere she went. She endured the failure of two albums and the weight of family baggage before reinventing herself, seizing artistic control and having one of the longest and brightest imperial phases of any pop star. Sex positive, romantic, assertive and wise, she’s an icon whose brilliance comes as much from how her songs make us feel about ourselves as they do about her.

Her familial connections might help explain her, but they didn’t define or limit her. She’s a sympathetic performer, an innovator in the development of music video as an art form (someone in her camp needs to fix up her spotty presence on video streaming sites, people need to see these videos in HD) and a smart, underrated songwriter in her own right. There’s a lot of Jackson in Beyonce, in Rihanna, in Britney, and in any woman who makes us smile and makes us dance. Because she did all those things over and over again.

Here’s a bunch of songs by Miss Jackson that moved us, or just made us move:

Katherine St Asaph on “Nasty” [8.14]

Date the quote: “[His] dance cuts have a format-friendly, artificial sheen … but she seems more concerned with identity than playlists.” This is not from 2019, about a post-Spotify pop star (I cheated a bit, leaving out a reference to “Arthur Baker dance breaks”) but from the ’80s. Specifically, it’s from the Rolling Stone review of Janet Jackson’s’s Control, the first half of which is a review of a comparatively nothing Jermaine Jackson album. This was typical: if press didn’t dismiss her as an biographical afterthought who happened to still sing, they wrote about her alongside her family, and specifically her brother. (This continues to this day: Note the sustained attention given to her response to Leaving Neverland, which ultimately was to join her family in condemning it.) The line everyone quotes is “Ms. Jackson if you’re nasty,” but more pointed is one of the lines that precedes it: “my last name is Control.”

The lyric to “Nasty” is full of that sort of role-reversal, like a swordfight where one guy yoinks the other guy’s sword — the sword being the “nasty groove.” But said groove possibly illustrates the lyric even better. Made by producers/former The Time members/future creative partners Jam & Lewis out of big ’80s percussion, plus clanks and repurposed orchestral stabs from an Ensoniq Mirage, one of the earliest sampling keyboards, it doesn’t sound martial exactly, like some of Jackson’s later work, but certainly sounds stark. It sounds like a challenge, one Janet takes up: her past soubrette voice drops to a throatier register, then is stoked into roars. The beat’s not quite its own thing; “Nasty” resembles experiments like Herbie Hancock’s “Metal Beat,” and in turn much of New Jack Swing resembles it. But how Jam & Lewis described it was a rapper’s beat — now standard for pop or R&B singers, from Destiny’s Child to Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish, when they want a tougher image. Meanwhile, Britney took Janet’s soft spoken-word interlude “I could learn to like this” and extrapolated an entire career from it — and covered it, unusually early in her career — but simplified it, mostly collapsing the context of family ties and dignity and creative control onto one axis: sex. But what they’re all doing is asserting this kind of Control.

Part of appreciating songs from the ’80s and ’90s is prying them out of the clutches of the era’s pop-culture jokification– I do like MST3K, but their sort of snappy “Nasty” joke is kind of what I mean. More than one article/restaurant review/listicle attempts to identify, meme-ily, Janet’s idea of “nasty food” (Janet’s answer, dubiously, was whole squid). A certain comment by a certain head of state gave the song a late-breaking sales boost But put on some ’80s radio (or a contemporary playlist of people copying ’80s radio) and wait for “Nasty” to come on. The rest of the radio will flinch.

Kat Stevens on “What Have You Done For Me Lately?” [8.67]

“What Have You Done For Me Lately?” is a sparse, angry snap of a song, the overspill of weeks and months of gradually-building resentment. It’s taken a nudge from bezzie mate Paula Abdul for Janet to fully admit her relationship has gone sour: her once fun-loving, adoring beau has become complacent, content to put his feet up on the sofa and take Janet for granted. Should she leave? She loves him! Or does she? Should love really feel like a heavy weight, pressing down on you? Like your stomach won’t stop churning? Like letting the phone ring out unanswered rather than deal with his temper? Like maybe it’s your fault that he’s like this? “Who’s right? Who’s wrong?” Janet is determined to make a decision with a clear head, but the anxiety and hormones are bubbling underneath (“I never ask for more than I deserve…“). Thankfully Jam & Lewis are on hand with a clinical, whipcrack beat — snap out of it, Janet! The tension manifests itself in her zigzagging shoulders, hunched and strained and contorted, primed to lash out – just as he walks through the door! Janet is wary, but her dude is on his best behaviour, puppy-dog eyes, I’ll do better from now on, I swear. They dance perfectly in time together, remembering the good times: all is forgiven. Surely Janet hasn’t fallen for the same old lines, doomed to repeat the cycle? Paula is rolling her eyes: ugh, not this bullshit again… Then, as the happy couple laugh together over dinner, Janet glances back at us, and the smile falls from her face. The decision has been made. As soon as Mr ‘Not All Men’ leaves for work in the morning, she’s putting her passport in a safety deposit box and setting up a secret savings account to fund her getaway. The plan is in motion. You’ve got one life to life.

Thomas Inskeep on “Diamonds” (Herb Alpert ft. Janet Jackson) [6.80]

After “The Pleasure Principle,” this might actually be my favorite Janet Jackson single (even though she’s technically the featured artist on it). “Diamonds,” written and produced by Jimmy “Jam” Harris and Terry Lewis for Herb Alpert’s 1987 album Keep Your Eye on Me, is, in all but name, a Jam/Lewis/Janet record — with a few Alpert trumpet flourishes. The beats rock hard, and Janet delivers what may be (and certainly was at the time) her most IDGAF vocal: you’re gonna get Miss Jackson (because you’re clearly nasty) some diamonds, aren’t you?

Alfred Soto on “The Pleasure Principle” [8.43]

For all the banter over the years about the cold and steel of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ beats for Control, the coldest and steeliest they had no hand in creating. Songwriter Monte Moir, like Jam and Lewis also a The Time alum, stumbled on the title first: “I had to figure out what it was I was trying to say, I just stumbled into the title and realized it fit.” Sung by Jackson in her airiest, most insouciant coo, “The Pleasure Principle” starts with bass synth and cowbell before settling down into a matter-of-fact tale of a night of sin. To visualize the concept, choreographer Barry Lather put together one of Jackson’s most iconic videos, a masterpiece of athleticism involving chairs. Too cold and steely for the audience, or perhaps the hype cycle for a sixth single had exhausted itself: “The Pleasure Principle” missed the top ten in the summer of 1987, stopping at #14. So ignore the single mix and revel in Shep Pettibone’s Long Vocal Remix.

Kat Stevens on “Let’s Wait Awhile” [6.60]

Can you have an erection-section classic that’s primarily about abstinence? “Let’s Wait Awhile” has all the features of a late-night Magic FM request slot regular: soft electric piano, finger clicks instead of drums, lyrics about promises and feelings and stars shining bright. But this message is about trust, not lust. It takes courage to admit that you’re not ready, and it requires faith in the other person that they’re not going to be a dick about it. I remember the advice columns in Just 17 repeating over and over that as Informed Young Women we shouldn’t be pressured into sex, which was all well and good until it actually came to the act of Doing It, whereupon the fug of hormones and internalised misogyny meant that all rationality went out of the window. It’s the sign of how strong and confident Janet is in her relationship, that she can be ‘real honest’ and discuss her concerns freely with her partner, without worrying that he’s going to a) dump her b) tell his mates that she’s frigid or c) ‘persuade’ her round to his point of view (*shudder*). If he’s not willing to wait, maybe he’s not such an ideal person to be doing this sort of stuff with in the first place? I can hear the dude whining to his mate now: “I took her out for dinner and all I got was a perfectly vocalised key change!” Just 17 would be proud of you, Janet.

Jessica Doyle on “Miss You Much” [7.83]

A little context: in March 1989 Natalie Cole released “Miss You Like Crazy,” a ballad built for Cole to sing wide about longing. In June Paula Abdul released the third single off Forever Your Girl, “Cold Hearted,” whose video made a point of its group choreography. And then in late August came “Miss You Much,” the first single from Rhythm Nation 1814. Did Janet Jackson have beef with her ex-choreographer? Was that the kind of thing people talked about, in the pre-poptimist, pre-TMZ era? Because in retrospect “Miss You Much” looks like a dismissal of “Cold Hearted,” cool and upright where the latter was David-Fincher-directed sleazy. (By contrast, the director of “Miss You Much,” Dominic Sena, had already treated Jackson with respect in the video for “The Pleasure Principle.”) But also “Miss You Much” plays as a broader statement, a refusal of expectations. There’s nothing sad or ballad-like about it. There’s that opening high of “sho-o-ot,” and then Jackson’s on a roll: it’s all about her, the deliciousness of her feeling; she can barely bother to describe the “you” being missed so much besides the blanditries of smiling face and warm embrace. The power in “I’ll tell your mama/I’ll tell your friends/I’ll tell anyone whose heart can comprehend” isn’t in the longing; it’s in how much she relishes being the one who gets to do the telling. By 1989 she was in control enough to not have to utter the word once. “Miss You Much” isn’t a deep song, didn’t set out to accomplish as much as the title track or later songs like “That’s the Way Love Goes” or “Together Again” would. But thirty years later it still looks and sounds like (what we now call) a power move.

Katie Gill on “Rhythm Nation” [8.57]

How does one try to condense the reach and influence of “Rhythm Nation” in a single blurb? Entire articles have been written about this song and video (because really, you can’t talk about the song without talking about the video). It’s influenced singers, dancers, directors, choreographers. It won a Grammy as well as two MTV Music Video Awards when those awards actually mattered. The choreography is perfect. Jackson and her dancers move with military-like precision, flawlessly executing maneuvers and creating a dance that would almost instantly become part of the popular consciousness. The sound is amazing. That bass groove is so tight, adding a layer of funk which the guitar takes to further levels. The tune is an absolute earworm, the chorus is iconic, and Jackson’s vocals are at the best of their game. But I think the most important part of “Rhythm Nation” is that this absolute banger of a song, this masterclass in choreography, has remarkably idealistic lyrics. Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” yearns towards a racially and socially conscious utopia as it attempts to unite people to join together and create this utopia. In a lesser artist, these lyrics would be out and out corny. But when wrapped up in the final package, the lyrics go from corny to believable. Suddenly, the idea of the whole world helping each other or rising up in protest doesn’t sound so far-fetched.

Alfred Soto on “Escapade” [7.67]

With solo credits as common as hair metal solos in Janet Jackson music, I often listen to tracks like “Escapade” and wonder: what did Janet Jackson contribute? Lyrics? Sure. But she has to write them around a Jimmy Jam-Terry Lewis melody, no? Or, as is no doubt the case, she comes up with her own vocal melody to accompany their chord progressions. According to Jam, the trio had “Nowhere to Run” in mind: first as a cover song, then as inspiration. “Escapade” hopscotches away from the sense of danger animating the Martha and the Vandellas chestnut; in 1989, into the eclipse of a grim decade for black lives, looking forward to Friday and drinks and friends would have to do. Over Jam and Lewis’ unrelenting thwack, Jackson sing-songs a valentine to a shy boy whom she hopes will join her in — what? The sheer euphoria of the bridge — a melody as bright as a returned smile — suggests worlds of possibilities when the check’s cashed and the night’s young. After all, MINNEAPOLIS!

Leah Isobel on “Alright” [7.14]

Rhythm Nation might have more banging singles, and it might have songs that more directly diagnose the ills of late capitalism, but no song on the record better encapsulates its utopian aims than “Alright.” Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis famously left the high end of Janet’s songs empty to provide space for her delicate soprano; here, they fill the low end with vocal samples, percussion, submerged synth blats, and tense bass licks. Instead of singing high for the whole track, however, Janet buries lyrical references to magic spells and the end of the world in her lower register, where they blend into the rest of the song. It’s only on the chorus, and particularly on her swooping vocal runs as she riffs on the phrase “you’re alright with me,” that she surfaces from the swirl. On a record where she spends so much time and thought discussing what’s wrong around her, here she takes the time to see and acknowledge what’s right. I don’t know that I’ve heard a better sonic analogue for finding relief from chaos: one voice against a wall of voices and sounds, getting lost and being found over and over to the comforting rhythm of a pop song.

Edward Okulicz on “Black Cat” [6.57]

“Black Cat” was never the huge stylistic U-turn it was perceived as. Janet’s brother had dabbled in rock guitars, and this is in that vein too, while still being of a piece with the other songs on the album. Where it succeeds is because it doesn’t just lean into rock, it’s as credible a rock song as it is a dance-pop song — the riff, which Jackson wrote herself, kicks ass, the drums shake a room as much as the cavernous thuds of her contemporaneous singles, and the song’s melody and the fierce vocal performance straddle both worlds. And if you don’t like the mix there’s like 900 different versions with 2000 different guitarists — only a slight exaggeration. Its overall success is testament to Janet’s persona, sure, because nothing she released could have failed at this point, but you can’t go to Number One with single number six off an album without your usual co-writers and producers unless you’ve written something that connects with listeners and performed it with power. The way she slams down on “don’t understand… why you… insist…” is a moment of perplexed, angry humanity in the middle of a song that tries to understand something tragic — the corrosion of drugs and gangs on young people’s lives — and while the soloing is a little hammy, the song escapes being embarrassingly corny. Because in fact the whole song kicks ass.

Pedro Joao Santos on “Love Will Never Do (Without You)” [8.71]

One of the greatest pleasures in getting into Janet is how deliriously bold all of her work is. A story, if you will: how Jimmy & Terry stepped in to support her emancipation and helped her invent new jack swing all within Control, before taking the formula apart in Rhythm Nation 1814, aiming for pop that was both a manifesto against bigotry and, between a balm and a corrective, a rush of love. It was designed for high impact, meaning it would’ve always been a pop juggernaut — the material was there, even if the marketing was oblique, which it was. Instead of a glamour shot in Technicolor and a flirtatious title, the 12 million copies sold feature a stark black and white portrait backed by a call-to-arms; the pop froth is smattered around the backbone of topical anthems.

From single to single, A&M skittered between the two sides and amassed consecutive top 10 singles, but it was the last calling card that proved career-defining. At first, “Love Will Never Do (Without You)”’s hard-edged beats scan identical to “Rhythm Nation”’s sonic matrix: belligerent and completed by Janet’s frontal vox, only in this instance driven through a more feminine marketing (the music video is a blueprint). That’s the first trick: she unexpectedly launches into the first verse in a tentative, lightly hostile lower register (“like a guy would,” said Jimmy Jam, as it was to be a duet) and keeps it until the chorus wraps up. It’s pop as friction. By the second verse, Janet goes up an octave and matches the now-bubbling passion at the forefront. The tiny synth countdown drives it into a perpetual unfolding, each time emerging to add more (vocal) layers to the cacophony and threaten to wrap it up, before coming back in force.

Janet’s head voice soars up to the grand finale, a pop cataclysm of an ending, one of the best in recorded history — which applies to the entirety of “Love Will Never Do,” a simultaneous pitch for chaotic head-over-heels energy and blockbuster status. It’s a bizarre ride and a joyous knockout: the honeymoon phase juiced into one relentless beast of a banger, one that changed pop for good.

Jackie Powell on “State of the World” [6.67]

“State of the World” deserved a music video. At its heart, this is a dance cut with a little bit less of the hard rock that roars in “Rhythm Nation.” In content and in sound, this track is a sequel and that’s not a criticism. It’s an expansion which encourages a foot tap by the listener and includes an absolutely integral bassline that drives this track through and through. While the song clocks in at under five minutes and could have been a bit shorter, its chorus, which crescendos in clarity and volume, makes up for it. In addition to Jackson’s delivery on the verses, which is rather understated, the sound effects which illustrate “State of the World”  aren’t too kitschy. The cries and crashes aren’t as apparent as in brother Michael’s “Earth Song” for instance, and that’s appropriate. The politics had to run as smooth as the bass on this track, and they did. They didn’t serve as a distraction, but rather as an asset. Janet was the master of New Jack Swing, and while folks look to her brother’s album Dangerous as the most successful of this genre, Janet experimented with it first.  The percussive repetition, serves a purpose for Jackson on the record. It maintains the same intensity throughout as it reflects exactly what she has to say. Lyrically, I wish that Jackson explained how her “Nation” would “weather the storm.” To this day, homelessness and poverty are issues that affect people continuously. Jackson states the cornerstone rather than the specifics, and maybe that’s okay. It’s something that in 2019 we need more than ever. While unity appears so far out of our reach, Janet attested as early as 1991 that we can’t stop and shan’t stop.

Thomas Inskeep on “The Best Things in Life Are Free” (with Luther Vandross, BBD and Ralph Tresvant) [7.60]

To soundtrack his 1992 film Mo’ Money, Damon Wayans (who wrote and starred in the critically-derided box office hit) called upon superproducers Jam & Lewis, and they did work, producing or co-producing 13 of the album’s 14 tracks and writing or co-writing 12 of them. The soundtrack’s lead single was very pointedly a “look at all the cool stars we got together” move, featuring superstars Vandross and Jackson duetting, along with a brief rap bridge from Bell Biv DeVoe (credited here as BBD) and their New Edition compadre Ralph Tresvant. Released as a single in May 1992, it’s a perfect summertime smash, simultaneously airy-light and slammin’, with Vandross and Jackson weaving in and out of each other’s vocals effortlessly. BBD and Tresvant pop in with a nothingburger of a rap (Tresvant gets a label credit for literally uttering one line, the song’s title) that at least serves to provide a modicum of grit to the proceedings, but no matter: Jackson especially sounds breezier than maybe ever, while Vandross seems to float above the record. The two are magical on a track perfectly suited for them (credit Jam & Lewis, of course), and the result is a minor classic.

Jonathan Bogart on “That’s the Way Love Goes” [7.86]

A little over a year ago I rather overshared in this space when discussing Madonna’s “Erotica,” released a year before this single. A year makes a lot of difference: by the time I was listening to Shadoe Stevens count this down on American Top 40, the summer it became the longest-running #1 hit any Jackson family member ever had, radio pop was no longer a dirty, soul-damning secret, just a daily companion, a window into a more colorful, adult, and interesting world than the ones I knew from books. I would probably have had a healthier relationship to romance and sexuality, in fact, if this had been my introduction to overtly sexual pop rather than “Erotica” — both songs share the technique of a sultry spoken-word refrain, but Janet’s is actually grown-up, with the confidence of a woman who knows what she wants and how to achieve it, with none of Madonna’s juvenile need to épater les bourgeois. As it happened I didn’t particularly connect to “That’s the Way Love Goes,” having reached the stage in my adolescence when getting a charge out of raspy-voiced men singing about political instability felt like the more gender-appropriate inevitability. It wouldn’t be until years later when I returned to re-examine the radio pop of my youth with maturer ears that the amazing miracle of this song fully dawned on me: those pillowy guitar samples plucked from songs where raspy-voiced men sang about political instability, but pressed into service of a loping, candlelit coo: equal parts seduction and vulnerability, Janet singing with the authority of someone who had already conquered the world about the grown-woman concerns that really matter: love, and sex, and the impossible beauty that results when they intertwine.

David Moore on “If” [8.33]

Janet Jackson sang explicitly about “nasty boys,” but I was, to use a term my son’s preschool teacher used to describe him, a timid boy, and I soaked up the privileges of maleness with a corresponding fear of performative masculinity. My love of women through childhood was paired with a deep-seated self-loathing that snuffed out friendships, made me uncomfortable in my body, and sparked intense, violent fantasies directed toward unnamed aggressors in my mind, all those “bad guys.” I wouldn’t be able to reflect on any of this until adulthood. But there was a point in preadolescence when the contours of the trap started to become discernible, and Janet Jackson’s “If” was both a cherished song — one I would listen to rapt in front of MTV or on the radio, legs haphazardly splayed behind me — and was also the uncanny soundtrack to my discomfort: a muscular, menacing, alien object that completely unnerved me, made me a supplicant to its rhythm, got into my head and into my guts, made me move, if only for a minute, in a world that glanced contemptuously toward — but stood defiantly outside of — that toxic timidity. I was the woman telling the man what I wanted, and I was also the man obeying; I was the dancer and I was the floor, too. On “If,” Janet Jackson and Jam & Lewis tamed the New Jack Squall that her brother unleashed on Dangerous with Teddy Riley, insisted upon its lockstep subservience to her mission and her groove, and pointed to an R&B futurism that was barely a twinkle in pop music’s eye in 1993. The result is simultaneously mechanistic and wild, rolling waves of noise that you quickly learn to surf or risk drowning in them. That same year, I also found inspiration in angry men, many of them likely nasty ones, the same men I would have assiduously avoided in person and fought off in my dreams. But Janet Jackson kept me honest, reminded me that my anger was a tell for my underlying cowardice and shame. There is never a hint in “If” that her hypothetical proposition — too strident for any coyness or the suggestion of flirting — could ever be satisfactorily answered. Not by you anyway. No boy, nasty or timid, could meet Janet Jackson’s challenge; she’s mocking the guy who would even try. By the time you hit that cacophony of a middle 8 break, defibrillation on an already racing heartbeat, you’re defeated, more thoroughly than any bad guy you might have dreamt up. You’re not ready for this world — you’re not, so you can’t, and you won’t. But what if…?

Jonathan Bradley on “Again” [5.67]

It sounds like a fairy tale: billowing keys, Janet’s tinkling voice, and no drums to earth the fantasy. “Again” was from John Singleton’s Poetic Justice, not a Disney picture, but it shimmers with its own magic anyway. The melody is gorgeous: listen to Janet measuring out the descending syllables in “suddenly the memories came back to me” like they’re sinking in as she sings the words. (She repeats the motif on “making love to you/oh it felt so good and so right” — this is a romance where the sex is as fondly remembered as the emotions.) Janet Jackson is such a versatile performer, and for all the bold strokes and blunt rhythmic force of her best known moments, “Again” is a treasure all of its own for being none of these: it is tiny and tender and sparkles with a real joy that is all the more wondrous for sounding like it could not exist outside of a storybook.

Scott Mildenhall on “Whoops Now” [4.83]

Even outside America, there’s a widespread tendency for people, in search of a lifetime’s grand narrative, to define everything that happened before The Day The World Changed – a coincidental proxy for their childhood, youth or adolescence – as a simpler time. It’s a convenient illusion for anyone in the world lucky enough to be able to believe it, whose formative years were insulated from war or suffering and can be instead defined by the most carefree scraps of pop culture. In that respect “Whoops Now” holds great temptation, it being the breeziest brush-off of burdens, with an all-over Teflon disposition. It’s therefore an almost fantastical ideal of ’90s radio (and still one of Janet’s most played in the UK); a warm and fuzzy-round-the-edges memory of which on closer inspection, the details are inscrutable. Janet, aloft in a proletarian reverie, relates a confusing tale of overnight shift work, a hindrance of a boss and the consequent curtailing of her plans for some fun in the sun this weekend with her friends (who, judging by her extended roll call, seem to mostly be record execs, producers and performers, as well as dogs). Narratively, it’s difficult to tease apart, but all you need to know is that hurrah – she somehow ends up on holiday anyway. A story that sounds more like something from an expletive-laden segment of Airline thus becomes the most casual celebration of the apparent inevitability of positive resolutions when you’re a globe-straddling megastar, or perhaps just a kid in the back of your parents’ car with the radio on. With that certainty of happiness and universal balance, and the belief that it ever was or could be, it’s fantasy upon fantasy upon fantasy. But no bother: Anguilla here we come.

Nortey Dowuona on “Throb” [6.86]

I started listening to Janet Jackson as a happy accident. Her songs were on Atlantic Radio, but nowhere else. I barely heard her music growing up and only knew of her massive career, and not the music that made it so huge.

So when I first pressed play on “Throb,” I was kinda scandalized.

Because it was so directly, overtly sexual, and confident about it. Janet was ready to get down and dirty, without all the mind games, patronization and bullpuddy packed all over it. The lyrics are pretty straightforward, and there are only ten lines of lyrics. Its pretty clear what Janet wants, and she’s gonna get it.

Plus, the bass was slamming, it slunk around my neck and just rested there while the air horn synths washed over my eyes, blinding me. The drums then stepped over me and plucked me up, with cooing and cascading moans and grunts swirled around my body, shredding me to pieces —

Then the song ended. And it was over.

I honestly, can’t really say why this is my favorite Janet song, but I can say that you should probably play it while having sex, and while thinking about having sex, and play this late night in the night if deciding to have sex. I know this’ll be the first thing I’ll play if I have sex with anyone.

Thomas Inskeep on “Throb”

In the summer of 1993, I’d just finished my second freshman year of college, in my hometown. (I’d gone to college straight out of high school in 1988, and dropped out without much to show for it, 16 months later.) One of my best girlfriends had herself just graduated from college and was back at her parents’ house, job-hunting. We were both past 21 and looking for a place to go dancing, and we found it in the nearest big city, Fort Wayne, Indiana, about 45 minutes away. It was a short-lived gay bar — so short-lived I don’t even recall its name, sadly — with a dance floor roughly the size of a postage stamp. I don’t remember meeting anyone there, ever. (I didn’t drive at the time, so Julie always had to, so it’s not like I could’ve gone home with someone anyway.) I don’t remember anything about the bar — except its dancefloor, and the fact that they had a decent DJ on the weekends, who mostly played house music, which I loved. And there were three songs that got played, in my memory at least, every single week. (And Julie and I really did go just about every weekend that summer.)

The first was Bizarre Inc.’s “I’m Gonna Get You,” an ebullient diva-house track which topped Billboard’s Dance Club/Play chart in January but was just peaking at pop radio in June. The second was, really, the gay club record of the year, RuPaul’s “Supermodel.” It peaked at #2 on the Dance Club/Play chart in March, but never left gay clubs at all through 1993. When that got played at the club, I would, week-in, week-out, “work the runway,” lip-syncing my ass off. (It’s just that kind of song.) And the third was an album track from a newly-released album (that would, in fact, eventually be promoted to dance clubs at peak at #2 on the Club/Play chart), Janet Jackson’s “Throb.” This song went where Jackson never had before, both musically (it’s a straight-up house jam) and lyrically (it’s a straight-up sex jam). Its lyrics are minimal but to the point: “I can feel your body/Pressed against my body/When you start to poundin’/Love to feel you throbbin’.” No subtleties there! Accordingly, Julie and I would spend the song grinding up against each other on a tiny riser at the back of the dance floor, because why not? And because it’s fun.

26 years later, ‘Throb” still kills. And throbs.

Maxwell Cavaseno on “Runaway” [6.50]

My childhood managed to dodge the oceanic nature of pop thanks to being struck between two extremes. My father usually kept the car full of rap, via cassettes of assorted rising stars of the moment (Big Pun, Nas, Various Wu-Tang Soloists) or whatever was playing via Hot 97. Meanwhile my mother typically wallowed in a realm of AOR pop a la Amy Grant or the likes who you could never remember anything about. If there was anything majorly important in the history of pop music from 89-98, lemme tell you, that shit didn’t happen anywhere near me. However, one of the few memories that did manage to linger on was “Runaway.” It was a record that managed to ethereally sneak up to me like some kind of weird creep that I just couldn’t understand with its weird foreign instrumentation simulating orientalist visions and Janet’s background vocals harmonizing like a bunch of Buddhist Cats sneering a la Randy Savage’s “nyeeeah.” Whenever I trailed along in supermarkets or tried to keep busy in waiting rooms, I could comprehend what happened on other songs I liked in the outer world like “Take a Bow” or “Kiss From A Rose.” But this? How did you rationalize all of these gliding vocals crooning and this swarm of glittery noises when you have barely any understanding of the world around you, let alone music? No matter how much further away and away I’d get from whenever it was meant to be a single, it could still disruptively appear in the wild and send the whole day into a state of disarray. It’s so alarming to know now as a grown adult that I can personally summon this ifrit of a single, rather than think of it as some sort of rare sighting of trickster energy (all the more bolstered by Janet’s ad libbed teasing of supposed imperfection and other-human excess) that isn’t meant to be heard more than once in a blue moon. To be honest, I may just forget altogether after the fact, the same way I never remembered the name of the song even when considering it for review. Just that “nyeeeah” hung around in my memory.

Danilo Bortoli on “Got ’til It’s Gone” [6.17]

In Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”, a cut from her 1970 album Ladies of the Canyon, she sang of impeding progress as a form of destruction (“They paved paradise/And put up a parking lot”). Often seen as as environmental anthem, actually, she was looking back at the sixties, and then seeing, right ahead, a decade that showcased no promising future, only aching skepticism. This resulted in one the purest, simplest lines she has ever written: “Don’t it always seem to go/That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone”. Almost thirty years later, Janet Jackson conjured those same thoughts, conveying, instead, a different meaning. The Velvet Rope was her very own game of smoke and mirrors, and intimate and often misleading look at her private life. Lying at the center of that album, there is a delicate tribute. “Got ‘til It’s Gone” features a well-placed sample from that line culled from “Big Yellow Taxi.” The context is entirely different however. Here, the same words are uttered between confessions of love. It helps, then, that “Got ‘til It’s Gone” is, in reality, a talk. It’s the way Janet asks “What’s the next song?”. It’s the way Q-Tip responds “Like Joni says.” It’s also the way he asserts finally: “Joni Mitchell never lies.” The brilliance of a sample travelling three decades is that it is deliciously meta. The concept of truth, in Janet Jackson’s universe, is interchangeable. That way, she, too, can never lie.

Josh Love on “Together Again” [6.86]

Together Again was originally conceived as a ballad, and no wonder – it’s a deeply sentimental (borderline treacly, if I’m being uncharitable) song about death and angels and reuniting in the afterlife in heaven. Deciding to record it as a surging house jam instead was an absolute masterstroke, and the result is one of the most purely joyous, transcendent moments of Janet’s career. The idea of carrying a lost loved one in your heart and feeling their spirit in the goodness you encounter in the world, and even the thought of one day joining together with them again in the great beyond – “Together Again” makes you feel that joy rather than merely verbalizing it. So many of us say that when we die we want those we leave behind to celebrate our lives rather than mourn our passing, but Janet is one of the few artists to really bring that radical acceptance of impermanence to life.

Thomas Inskeep on “I Get Lonely” (TNT Remix) [7.43]

Allow me to be cynical for a moment: Janet Jackson, in 1998, is still a superstar. But in the past five years, she’s only had one R&B #1, ‘94’s sex-jam “Any Time, Any Place” (assisted greatly by its R. Kelly remix). So if you’re thinking “What do we do to get Janet back to the summit,” what do you do? Well, it’s 1998. How about calling in Teddy Riley? Better yet, how about he gets a helping hand from Timbaland? And the best: how about Teddy brings his merry men of BLACKstreet with him for a vocal assist? Ergo, “I Get Lonely (TNT Remix),” now label-credited to “Janet [she was just going by “Janet” at the time] featuring BLACKstreet.”

And you know what? It’s genius. The idea, brilliant. The execution, top-notch. Riley on the remix, with instrumental help from Timbo, with guest vocals from BLACKstreet: it’s more exciting than the original (which was already quite good), has a little more junk in its trunk (those should-be-patented instrumental tics that Timbaland is such a wizard with, ohmygod, much like Janet’s big brother’s vocal tics), and the duet vocals are superb (especially as it was so rare to hear Janet singing with others at the time, and every member of BLACKstreet save Riley was a great-to-marvelous singer). Presto! Two weeks atop the R&B chart in May 1998, along with a #3 Hot 100 peak. Mission accomplished — and fortunately, it works even better artistically than it did commercially. Everybody wins!

Pedro Joao Santos on “Go Deep” [7.14]

That The Velvet Rope’s party song is so heavy on gravitas and spine-tingling urgency speaks volumes. In an album so hellbent on carnal and psychological openness, the party of “Go Deep” goes deeper, and makes sense. It’s not just the top-20 banger it factually was, and it’s not just hedonism for the sake of it. That is, if you don’t divorce it from the wounds of longing, manipulation, abuse and distress being sliced fresh. Tension lies within this absolute romp, placed midway through the red-hot catharsis of Rope. It might be that the party acts as a salve for the trauma. Though it isn’t put into words, you can hear it subliminally: Janet’s hesitant vocal; the evocative, near-melancholy synth fluctuating about. You can even imagine the words as portals: making friends come together as support; the sexual come-ons not just because, but maybe as physical relief for the pain.

A bare-bones lyric sheet would give you nothing — but music as context goes a long way. And the music itself from “Go Deep” gets me in raptures after all these years, from that ridiculous boing (perhaps best known from “I Can’t Dance” by Genesis) to the bass driving it, all chunky and rubbery, and the dramatic string arpeggios in the middle-8. If there’s got to be a template for urgent, carnivorous Friday night anthems, let this be the one — and keep it in context.

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa on “You” [7.00]

The Velvet Rope carries a strong and fascinating legacy; It is rightly praised as a predecessor to both mainstream R&B’s exploration of the intimate (the body) and the spiritual (the soul) in the continuing decades, and to the experimental scope and atmospherics later adopted by today’s so-called “Alt-R&B,” and this extraordinary mixture of elements is never more efficient than in the album’s third track “You.” The song is, first and foremost, a triumph of production genius. Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis’s use of space, and the dynamic at play between the then-cutting-edge electronica ingredients and neo-soul’s earnestness and sensual themes, should itself be a case study for aspiring producers, but it’s the way Janet’s vocals are performed and filtered through the track that take the song to unsuspected levels of greatness. There is something in the breathy, low-pitched verses that exudes unadulterated eroticism, and when the post-chorus harmonies kick in where things really become ecstatic. In several interviews, Janet herself defined this album as “baby-making music”, and I can safely bet that “You” is the song she was thinking about. And its echoes still reverberate today, not only in the sound of R&B to come, but in the fact that thousands of people were conceived to this very beat.

Edward Okulicz on “Free Xone” [6.83]

I remember it only vaguely; it was 1995, and for drama class we had to do a performance based on a social theme using a combination of media and methods. I was in a group with a big Janet fan, who decided to use her music as the basis of a combination spoken-word, mime and dance performance on racism. I only understanding the themes in the abstract because I was young, sheltered, and white. I knew racism was a thing I didn’t like, but it wasn’t an existential threat to me. Two years later, on “Free Xone,” Janet would speak directly to me and tell me of a bleak present with the promise of a better future.  Janet told it like it was, and still is for many: if you are gay, despite the fact that love is love, a lot of people are going to hate you or at least be uncomfortable around you. Homophobia isn’t just violence or hostility, it can be any kind of social rejection, and it can happen anywhere, as it does in the anecdote in the first part of the song, where a pleasant conversation with a person sitting next to you on an airplane sours because of it.

Janet Jackson is a dancer, but she didn’t dance around anything if she didn’t have to. She leaned into her status as a gay icon out of love, not necessity. But she made her social justice songs out of both love and necessity. Hating people is so not mellow. Love and sex are never wrong. Janet Jackson has never resiled from that belief, and never shied away from putting it in song. I’d grown up listening to Janet Jackson, but I’d never thought of her as an ally for myself, and it was intensely comforting to hear that she was on my side when nobody else seemed to be (Meshell Ndegeocello’s “Leviticus Faggot” the previous year had more or less convinced me I’d die in the closet).

In 2019, her funk here sounds a little dinky, the transitions between the soft groove and the raucous party bounce are kind of awkward, and the weird song structure sounds like it was cut and pasted together, but it’s a collage of compelling pieces. It got quite a lot of play on the alternative youth station here, the one whose listeners were at the time generally terrified of a) pop superstars, b) Black artists, and c) dancing. Someone thought the kids needed to hear this, and they were right. “Free Xone” helped my nascent consciousness come to grips with earlier songs that I’d just considered a good time before. Its story is less common in the Western world, now, but it’s still true as history for some, and as present for others.

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa on “Tonight’s the Night” [4.50]

I’m a sucker for good covers; we usually tend to give songwriting, the cult of the inspired author, and the concept of originality a certain mystique that grossly overshadows the importance of skilful creative interpretation and re-invention. But many of our most important singers are essentially covers artists — Joe Cocker, Tom Jones, Bettye Lavette, a huge number of blues and jazz singers, most of the 50s-60s Greenwich Village folk scene — because of course we need these musicians to give these tunes another dimension, whether stylistic, generational, or purely emotional. Also, a song’s perspective can change dramatically because of who is singing.  “Tonight’s The Night” works with Rod’s gravelly, rugged voice, and, although it can sound a bit creepy by today’s standards, the arrangements carry it beautifully, but in Janet’s sexually adventurous, musically exuberant The Velvet Rope, it acquires a new dimension, a far more interesting one, might I add. From Janet’s view, and the brilliant decision of not changing genders in the lyrics, her version alludes to bisexuality in a way that makes complete sense within’ the album’s core subject matters, and works wonders within’ its production philosophy. Stewart later presented his live renditions of the song by saying “This is an original by Janet Jackson”. No one will refute that. It’s her song now.

Alex Clifton on “All For You” [6.86]

“All For You” is the first Friday night you go out with your new college friends and that utter sense of freedom where you realize the night is yours without a curfew. It’s sparkling fairy lights in the background, a disco ball overhead, at a roller rink or at a club with a fancy light-up dancefloor, maybe a stolen swig of rum on your tongue. It’s the moment you see someone new and your heart falls into your stomach with no prior warning, and you suddenly know you’ll do anything to talk to them. You simply have to; it’s an animal urge, chemicals and hormones whizzing through you and making it hard to walk because you’re giddy. Maybe you’re braver than I am and you go talk to the person who’s snagged your attention, but maybe you hang back with your friends and pretend you’re not watching out for your crush while also dancing stupidly with your new friends. There’s a pure exhilaration in this song that many have tried to emulate but few match the ease with which Janet performs. She’s flirty and sexy like no other, but “All For You” also makes you, the listener, feel flirty and sexy too — something about it worms its way into you and becomes the shot of confidence you need. Lots of people can write songs about dancing at the club, but Janet turns it into a night you’ll remember for the rest of your life.

Jibril Yassin on “Someone to Call My Lover” [7.00]

Does falling in love always feel the same every time? It’s one thing to keep pushing on in life but what’s striking about “Someone to Call My Lover” is how infectious Janet’s optimism is. Built on an Erik Satie riff by way of the band America, Janet recast herself as a woman excited to love again. Let it be on the record – long-term relationships are fucking terrifying. Moving on from the dissolution of a marriage is disorienting and the songs that use Janet’s divorce as inspiration on All For You share a tentative yet firm belief in renewal.

She uses “maybe” on “Someone to Call My Lover” the way one throws out a “lol” after shooting their shot – you don’t even have time to catch it amid her grocery store list of wishes for her future love. “Someone to Call My Lover” hits all the right places thanks to the careful and immaculate production but it’s Janet’s sincerity that marks it as her best twee performance.

Will Adams on “Son Of A Gun” [5.20]

Given All For You’s post-divorce setting, it was only appropriate that after the aural sunbeam of the title track and giddy optimism of “Someone to Call My Lover,” Janet would do a 180 and proceed to rip him a new one. The opening taunts — “Ha-ha, hoo-hoo, thought you’d get the money too” — against the throbbing kick bass set the scene, but the true genius of “Son of a Gun” comes from its sampling and modernization of ultimate kiss-off song “You’re So Vain.” The classic bass riff, once soft in Carly Simon’s original, is now razor-sharp. The cavernous drum beats sound like you’re trapped in an underground dungeon. All the while, Janet mutters burn after burn right into your ear (“I’d rather keep the trash and throw you out”) before Simon launches into the “I betcha think this song is about you” refrain, sounding like a Greek chorus confirming Jackson’s digs. The album version carries on until the six-minute mark, with Carly Simon waxing poetic about clouds in her coffee and apricot scarves in an extended outro. The video version wisely excises this in favor of guest verses from Missy Elliott, whose reliably grinning performance shoves the knife in deeper. In both versions, however, Janet’s menace is preserved. Forming a trinity with All For You’s preceding two singles, “Son of a Gun” showed just how versatile Jackson is, and how adept she is at encapsulating the messy, complex emotions of an ended relationship.

Will Adams on “All Nite (Don’t Stop)” [6.17]

I had been looking away from the television when it happened. By the time I’d heard the gasps from my parents and I glanced up at the screen, the cameras had cut to an aerial shot of the Reliant Stadium in Houston, where the 2004 Super Bowl was taking place. My 11 year old brain couldn’t process exactly what happened from my parents’ concerned murmurs, and having completely missed the incident (there was no YouTube back then, see), it would take years for me to understand the impact that the “wardrobe malfunction” had on culture and Jackson’s career. The greater impact was to be expected — the six-figure FCC fine on CBS (later dismissed by the Supreme Court) and conservative handwringing about the moral decline of the country — but Jackson in particular suffered unduly. There was the blacklist, ordered by Les Moonves, which kept her off CBS, MTV and Infinity Broadcasting. Jackson’s appearance at that year’s Grammy Awards was canceled. Late-night talk show hosts turned it into monologue fodder, usually grossly and usually at her expense. The controversy hampered her album cycles well into the Discipline era. Meanwhile, Justin Timberlake remained entirely unaffected. His career would skyrocket two years later with the release of FutureSex/LoveSounds; he became a Saturday Night Live darling; he performed solo at the Super Bowl’s halftime show in 2018. This alone puts Damita Jo and “All Nite (Don’t Stop)” in a more sympathetic light, but even then, pop radio missed out on a truly brilliant song here. Janet acts as the Dance Commander, taking the opening guitar lick from Herbie Hancock’s “Hang Up Your Hang Ups” and turning it into a lasso with which she throws you onto the dancefloor. The percussion percolates, each sound placed perfectly to create an undeniable groove. Because of the blacklist, it didn’t even break the Hot 100, and the video was also subject to its own asinine controversy — the few video channels that managed to avoid the blacklist edited out the sexual content, including a scene were two female dancers kiss. Even fifteen years later, it feels like we’re still reckoning with how Jackson was treated in the aftermath. But there’s an inspiring resilience in “All Nite (Don’t Stop)” reflected in the smile she bears on the Damita Jo cover; its unabashed sexuality in the face of all the backlash makes it an even better listen today.

Kat Stevens on “Strawberry Bounce” [7.17]

I like Janet best when she takes risks, whether that be controversial subject matter, a new image or a change of musical direction. Old faithfuls Jam & Lewis are still a solid presence on Damita Jo, but on “Strawberry Bounce” we see Janet plumping for a left field choice in the then-unknown Kanye West. The result is an intriguing Ryvita, all brittle handclaps and feathery faux-ingenue whispering, on the verge of crumbling into nothing. It’s so light that there’s no bassline, just a queasy glockenspiel tinkle and Janet’s butter-wouldn’t-melt sing-song. I keep wondering to myself: why have Janet and Kanye chosen to present a song about working a shift at a strip club in the style of an Aptimil Follow-On Milk advert? Is it a subtle reminder that sexy times may eventually lead to night feeds and dirty nappies? It doesn’t help that instead of a proper beat, we have Jay-Z muttering ‘BOUNCE!’ as if he’s grumpily shooing a dog off his lawn. It’s confusing and uncomfortable, yet compelling and convincing, and I’m still listening. The risk has paid off.

Will Adams on “Rock With U” [5.83]

“Just Dance” is often thought of as ground zero for the rise of dancepop and eventually EDM in the US, but it had been brewing for over a year before the Lady Gaga song topped the Hot 100 in early 2009. From 2007 onward, the increased interest in incorporating elements of disco via four-on-the-floor beats and faster tempos created some indelible hybrids, particularly in the R&B world: “Don’t Stop the Music”; “Forever”; “Closer”; “Spotlight”; and “Rock With U.” While most of those songs stuck to traditional verse-chorus pop structure, “Rock With U” proves that sometimes simplicity is best: A house arrangement of arpeggios and basic rhythms. A single verse, repeated three times and interspersed with wordless vocalizing with nearly no variation, save for Janet’s whispers. All this, combined with the glorious one-shot video, creates a hypnotic effect, like the song will go on forever. On a recent Song Exploder episode about “Honey,” Robyn said of dance music: “It’s about putting you in a place where you’re in your body dancing without thinking about when it’s gonna end. It’s more about the moment and how it makes you feel.” This is the heart of “Rock With U”: an invitation to get lost in the music, forget about the outside world, and just rock.

Maxwell Cavaseno on “So Much Betta” [5.67]

The beginning of the 2010s was way too challenging in retrospect and I regret every minute of it. “So Much Betta” was a song I first heard in a mix by Robin Carolan, now best known for founding and guiding Tri-Angle Records, but for a brief period operated a side-blog called “SO BONES” where he’d pontificate about random gems of pop, R&B and rap but in a way that made records feel gross and sinister. Suddenly Cassie’s “My House” was a ghost story, Vanessa Hudgens’s “Don’t Talk” would be compared to Takashi Miike’s Audition, and so on. In retrospect I think of the Capital P Pop songs of the decade that I’ve responded to enthusiastically like “TT,” “Cheyenne,” “Strangers,” “Somebody Else,” “Backseat,” “Lac Troi” or the dozens of others there is at least usually a despair or gloom I can at minimum project onto the record even where it might not be obvious. And that comes from hearing Janet Jackson whisper over a record that sounded like some toxic goo from out of the dregs of the Rinse.FM swamps I’d often thought to be “the coolest” sounds, before cutting through over glistening synths that felt like a phantom of not Janet per se but her brother’s past. It was a song that felt v. strange in 2010 well after MJ had died with the listless echo of the Pop Monarch feeling less like a dream-like invocation and more like a degraded copy of a copy in its grotesquery. Enough can be said about how cool and timeless and bright and powerful Janet at her best can feel. But it deserves an acknowledgement that she could also make a song that was so evocative in all the most unpleasant of ways.

William John on “Unbreakable” [6.67]

“Unbreakable” as an adjective is applicable to those rare, unending, strong relationships between people, whether they be romantic, platonic, familial, or, as has been intimated in relation to her song of the same name, between performer and audience. But it’s also a word that can be used to describe oneself, and one’s ability to traverse adversity with stoicism. The first song on Jackson’s most recent album doesn’t sound defiant – more “stroll to the supermarket on a warm summer’s evening” than an escapade to Rhythm Nation. But courage manifests in different ways. Jackson’s breezy delivery, which takes on an ecstatic form in the song’s chorus, is indicative of her self-assurance at her status; she’s embracing the languor allowed to her as a legend. She may have been removed of her clothes in front of the whole world a decade prior; she may have spent her whole life in the shadow of her infamous relative – but she hasn’t faltered. She’s still here. As she greets her listeners in her inviting whisper at the song’s conclusion, she notes that it’s “been a while” since her last missive, and that there is “lots to talk about”. But her listeners aren’t impatient; there’s always time for Janet. Her story has always been one of control, of poise, of excellence. Long may it continue.

Pedro Joao Santos on “Dream Maker/Euphoria” [5.17]

When I get to delve deep into a legend, as with Janet, I tend to hit the ground running and have them release a new, great album a few months later. Not having heard 20 Y.O. and Discipline, I was shielded from the Janet-isms from the ’00s and viewed Unbreakable as a proper continuation to her legacy, instead of the grand comeback it actually was — hackneyed artwork, halted tour and all. Janet got the upper hand, finding her reunited with Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, in a steadfast gaze in a steadfast gaze over airtight, pensive and giddy R&B. An exemplary return to form, incidentally devoid of all the raunch, bathroom breaks and Kioko.

One older Janet-ism survived in a marginal capacity: the penchant for interludes, continued here in only two moments (aside from endearing sneezes and spoken-word outros): one was the bizarre preview for a Target-exclusive full track; the other was “Dream Maker/Euphoria”. A precise inflection point scribed upon the passage from “side 1” to “2” — even if things threaten to get a bit pedestrian and humdrum in the last half. The track itself is a dual mood, yet a continual trek through the glow of a renaissance. A seemingly old groove recalling the Jackson 5 gets dusted from the vaults for the first part. That’s ear candy for ages in itself, a web of vox so intensely feverish and melodically preternatural. It gets looped tantalisingly, then it transcends onto the next level. Full-on rapid eye movement: keyboards and ambience make up the sound of eyelids opening to meet a purple, unreal sky — suspended between worlds, a dream dimension of utopia and the reality where those ideas must coalesce. “I guess the dreamer must be awake,” Janet concludes after envisioning a “perfect place” exempt from “jealousy, abuse or hate,” “war, hunger or hate.”

Janet’s  four peak-era albums alone prove she’s been excelling at world-building where and when the world was far from ready. In “Dream Maker/Euphoria,” it isn’t so much the stark condemnations of Rhythm Nation 1814, but its more hopeful fantasies, articulated through the confident tone of Control, set to the type of innovative musical reverie The Velvet Rope predated, softened through janet.’s sensuous filter. But more than the touchpoints of yesteryear, the essence of “Dream Maker/Euphoria” lives in its manifestation of the future: how tangible and expansive it might just become, if given a chance.

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Wordpress sites can no longer afford to ignore SEO.

Nearly all internet activity starts with search: 93% of all Internet experiences start with a search engine and 40% of ecommerce traffic across the world comes from search. Most businesses have recognized this and adapted accordingly — 61% of companies named SEO as their biggest priority last year. Sure, you can generate leads with PPC campaigns and pay to be a top result. But 80% of people say they ignore the advertisements in search results. Take a moment to analyze your own habits. When you want to do something online, where do you start? If you’re anything like me and the majority of internet users, you start with a search engine. You type in some keywords or phrases and probably don’t scroll past the first few results before clicking on a site. Sounds about right then, that the first five SERPs receive 67.6% of all clicks. In short, you need to be prioritizing SEO and be a top result if you want to have any chance of driving organic traffic to your website. But if you aren’t an SEO expert, where do you begin? Fortunately, there are plenty of great SEO tools available. If you have a WordPress site, there are a number plugins you can install that will really help you out. Which ones? That’s exactly why I developed this list of the best SEO plugins for WordPress. It details my top 8 plugins and how they’ll help you improve your SEO. 1. Yoast SEO

The Yoast SEO WordPress plugin has been around for more than a decade. Over five million websites have installed it, making it one of the most popular options. One of the best parts of Yoast SEO is the ability to create and manage your XML sitemaps. This is much easier than having to code your sitemap on your own, especially if you don’t have much of a technical background. Yoast SEO helps you identify and avoid duplicate content, so you won’t have to worry about being penalized by Google, and it offers templates for titles and meta-descriptions, which will make your pages more appealing in SERPs. You can install the Yoast SEO plugin for free to access all of these features and benefits. But there is also a premium version for $89 annually that gives you upgrades like: Page previews on different platforms Suggestions for internal linking Redirect management options 24/7 support No advertisements At the very least, I recommend trying the free Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. 2. The SEO Framework The SEO Framework plugin is another great option for you to consider. I like this WordPress plugin so much because it’s built for smaller enterprises as opposed to massive corporations. Its interface blends naturally when integrated with WordPress, so it feels as though it’s supposed to be there, as opposed to appearing obtrusive. Here’s a look at one of my favorite features on this plugin.

The plugin offers a colored scale, showing you exactly how to optimize each post for search engines. All you need to do is hover your cursor over the bars in the SEO column to reveal notes for how to specifically improve certain pages. As you can see from the screenshot above, this note explains how the title can be improved for SEO purposes. The SEO Framework plugin is free and doesn’t have any ads or upsells to pester you while you’re working. Overall, I’m happy with the way this lightweight plugin performs. 3. SEO Squirrly SEO Squirrly is designed specifically for people who aren’t experts in SEO. Other plugins have different ways to access and implement SEO suggestions, but SEO Squirrly brings this to the next level. Take a look at its live SEO assistant feature.

Here’s how it works. You just have to input the desired keyword that you’re trying to rank for with the article you’re writing. As you write, green lights and popup suggestions will appear in real time explaining how you can work that keyword into your content. Imagine having an SEO expert standing over your shoulder while you’re writing — that’s what you get with SEO Squirrly. The content reports are another great feature that’s ideal if you’re outsourcing writers or using multiple writers across your company to produce content. These reports give writers additional insight about SEO based on what they wrote. SEO Squirrly also has a tool to analyze your competitors’ content, so you can find ways to outrank their pages. You’ll also be able to track your progress on a weekly basis. 4. Broken Link Checker

Google algorithms will penalize you for broken links, so the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin is extremely valuable for your website. If you’re like me, you have tons of internal and outbound links in your blog content. You can control the pages on your own site, but the status of pages on other websites is out of your hands. Here’s an example. Say you used a quote, image, or statistic from another website in one of your blog posts. But for one reason or another, that other site got rid of that page or merged it with another piece of content without including a redirect. Now you have a broken link on your site. The Broken Link Checker plugin will identify any broken link on your site and make it easy for you to remove, edit, or dismiss the problem with just a couple of clicks. Not only is this great for SEO, but it’s also important in terms of user experience. You don’t want your website visitors to click a link to a broken page. 5. All In One Schema Rich Snippets

All In One Schema Rich Snippets will improve the way your pages appear in search engine results with rich snippets, which are a brief and more interactive summary of your page. They contain things like pricing, photos, star ratings, or reviews. This popular schema markup plugin can help you add things such as: Videos Articles Recipes Events People Products Articles Rich snippets benefit all websites, but they are especially important for ecommerce sites. Users won’t have to go through as many steps to read a review of your products. They can see the star-rating from the search engine results page. Adding rich snippets will tell search engines exactly what information to include in the search results. 6. Rank Math Rank Math allows you to manage all of your on-page SEO needs for every type of content on your website. This WordPress plugin is so effective because it’s integrated with Google Search Console, so you’ll see all of the important information directly from your administrative dashboard in WordPress.

Rank Math also lets you manage meta tags for things like: noindex nofollow noarchive This WordPress plugin will tell you which keywords you’re ranking for, and also show you how many impressions you’re getting for various searches. Rank Math also identifies any errors that Google sees on your site. All of this information is easy to access, read, and digest. Furthermore, Rank Math has features for: XML sitemaps Rich snippets Internal linking recommendations 404 monitoring Redirects Local SEO Image SEO Rank Brain is definitely one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress. It’s great for those looking for a one-stop-shop for all of these features. 7. SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant

The SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant plugin for WordPress isn’t as widely used as some of the other plugins we’ve looked at so far, but it’s still a top choice to consider. SEMrush has one of the best online toolkits available for SEO. The brand is a big name in the SEO industry, so I definitely wanted to include its plugin on this list. In order for this plugin to work, you need to have an account with SEMrush, which you can register for free if you don’t have one. The free account will give you access to just one template, so you’ll probably want to upgrade to the premium plan to use this plugin. The plugin analyzes your content and gives you scores based on how SEO-friendly the writing is. You’ll see text suggestions that will explain how to improve your content for SEO purposes. With the writing assistant, you can also add your target keywords. The plugin will offer recommendations for you based on those keywords. For a great SEO WordPress plugin other websites aren’t really taking advantage of, definitely consider the SEO Writing Assistant by SEMrush. 8. All in One SEO Pack The All in One SEO Pack is well-known and popular. It has more than two million active installations on WordPress. As the name implies, it’s another “all in one” plugin for your SEO needs. One of the reasons why it’s so popular is it’s clean and easy-to-navigate dashboard.

The essential features of All in One SEO Pack are free, but you can upgrade to a premium version for $57 per year. If you own multiple websites, you may want to consider a business license, which lets you use this plugin on up to 10 sites for $97 annually. You can even purchase an agency license for $419 per year to use the plugin on an unlimited number of sites. With that said, if you have a basic blog or startup, the free version will likely meet your needs. It’s great for beginners, but I know plenty of advanced WordPress users who use this plugin as well. It’s probably the most similar to Yoast SEO, which we talked about earlier. The biggest difference between the two plugins is the interface and pricing options for organizations of different sizes. Conclusion Your website needs to prioritize SEO, that's an absolute must today. I wouldn't expect you to become an SEO expert overnight. But you should at least be taking advantage of some of the SEO tools available online. If you have a WordPress website, there are countless plugins at your disposal. However, I think it’s best to focus on the top eight that I’ve covered above. There’s something for everyone on this list. Some of these plugins are for specific SEO features, while others cover a wider range of SEO elements.

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Cancelled to Death: The Mike Adams I Knew

“Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial,” write the signatories of the now infamous Harper’s Letter. Despite the hysterical reactions it drew, the letter itself could not be more minimal or measured in its call for a check on “public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.” Last week, this warning was made tragically tangible, as friends and family grieved the loss of Mike Adams—conservative columnist, free speech activist, and gadfly professor of criminology at University of North Carolina Wilmington. A lifelong firearms enthusiast, Adams died by a gunshot wound, now confirmed to be self-inflicted.

Adams had recently stepped down as full tenured professor at the university, under pressure in the wake of his social media comments on COVID and the George Floyd protests. He was vocally anti-lockdown and encouraged people to “defy” North Carolina governor Roy Cooper’s strictures. After pizza and drinks with friends, he made a tweet referring to North Carolina as a “slave state,” concluding “Massa Cooper, let my people go!” He also referred to BLM rioters as “thugs.” UNCW officially condemned the remarks, while several Change.org petitions called for his resignation. Rather than take the school to court again (in a repeat of the grueling seven-year-long battle he finally won in 2014), Adams chose to retire with a half-million dollar settlement.

The reactions to his death could not be more polarized. While friends like David French have eulogized him as a dedicated teacher and a fierce advocate for constitutional liberty, haters have danced on his grave. Mainstream media headlines from NBC News to Buzzfeed played woke bingo with the news, repeatedly attaching modifiers like “racist,” “misogynist,” “vile”—sometimes with the fig leaf of quote marks, sometimes without. 

Journalists also engaged in artfully curtailed summations of Adams’s controversies. The NBC News report referred ominously to his “targeting” of a Muslim UNCW student with no further details given. A little more digging would reveal the context: a Facebook post where the student was making plans to attend a Trump rally, joking, “Y’all are not prepared for what I’m about to do,” and requesting prayer that she “make it out alive.” Adams did not report the student as a serious threat. He simply laughed at her.

Meanwhile, UNCW colleagues tweeted out lip-curling reactions. “Please do mourn,” murmured Dr. L. J. Randolph Jr., “but don’t sugarcoat his rhetoric.” The sum of Adams’s legacy is still, “racist, homophobic and sexist.” Professor Tim Gill opined that he found Adams “repulsive” and “just tried to avoid him,” recalling his few “very awkward” attempts to make friendly small talk. Gill’s point in sharing all this was unclear, but if the intended effect was to paint Adams as a sad object of pity, the actual effect was rather the opposite.

From the outside looking in, Adams may not seem like a typical cancel culture victim. He had successfully won his old lawsuit, secured tenure, and negotiated an early golden handshake. But for friends like myself who actually knew Mike, who knew his passion for teaching and mentoring students, the timing does not seem so odd. To some professors, early retirement equals wish-fulfillment. To Mike, it was undoubtedly a personal and professional blow. Ever the happy warrior, he always projected a fearless optimism that one could fight back, one could hold out hope of beating the machine. But his was the optimism of an era that is going away. When 2020 hit, Mike didn’t know what had hit him.

It was easy for peers who privately agreed with Mike to support him from the sidelines, in whispers. Mike soaked up the heat, after all. This was the guy who turned “I Hate Mike Adams” into his own bumper sticker. This was the guy who would sneak into his own hate rallies and protest himself just for kicks (a joke, but a reflection of Mike’s true dedication to free speech for all, not just for his admirers). So let him do that, people thought. Let him be loud and brash and edgy and hated. We’ll just be over here, golf-clapping.

Mike had no time for golf-clappers. “Boy, some people think I appreciate them. I don’t,” he says in a 2014 interview, recalling a particular instance of hallway-whispered “support.” But he wonders, what if it were different? “What if all of them got up and said no, he’s right, it’s systematic? And even if it were just half a dozen or a dozen at every university that just said ‘Oh no, this stuff goes on all the time,’ then they couldn’t just target one person. So that’s the lesson I hope will be learned. Sometimes we’re our own worst enemy.”

Mike’s words sting now more than ever. Tragically, towards the end of his life, he privately confided to some that he’d come to feel distanced even from fellow conservatives like David French, who served on his defense team in the Wilmington case. While French’s star rose as he developed his brand of Never Trump commentary, Mike’s brand no longer quite fit anywhere. He was no Trump supporter, as I can attest based on our own correspondence. At the same time, he was disinclined to expend energy chiding those who were. And when his social media posts stirred up the hornets’ nest, like Benjamin Disraeli he never explained, never apologized.

As I write, a couple of friends are taking out their bitterness on French. I have not done so, despite my own frustrations at some of his recent rhetoric. Hanging Mike’s death around his neck is not fair, and it’s not the answer. To me, the whole thing seems all too tragic, all too human. His eulogy might be dismissed by some as too little, too late, but from where I sit, it reads as the genuine offering of a grieving friend. 

French writes poignantly about how for Mike, as for so many jesters, the outward brashness concealed deep private pain. He recalls an especially dark moment from the Wilmington trials when Mike sat for cross-examination and listened to a string of decontextualized column quotes, carefully arranged to frame him as a vicious bigot. For a moment, French saw the light go out of Mike’s eyes, his shoulders drooping under the weight. “Mike was not racist,” French writes. “I knew him. I knew his heart.” This is no mere blind loyalty. French speaks as an adoptive father who knows better than many what it’s like to be on the receiving end of actual racist abuse.

Mike had many friends who knew the truth. But one more falling domino in the COVID effect was the cancellation of the Summit worldview workshops where he taught in Colorado Springs every summer. Zoom was a poor replacement. As a teacher and a friend, Mike thrived on live connection, embodied give-and-take. I spent extended time with him during one of these summers and can still recall how his table was always the “it” table come meal times. In all this, I am moved to reflect that there has not been nearly enough acknowledgement of the COVID lockdowns’ intangible losses—losses of human fellowship, human connection, human touch. Perhaps Mike’s death can inspire deeper reflection on that front as well. As cancel culture has claimed more than one kind of victim, so too has COVID.

Still, there is no softening the cruel fact that in the end, Mike was his own perpetrator and victim together. There never can be with a death like this, not without peddling platitudes at the expense of truth. Nevertheless, in a man’s final act of despair, all who drove him to that end are implicated, whether by their speech or their failure to speak.

Let Mike’s death be a warning. Let his life be an inspiration for those who knew him as he was: a flawed but good man, a generous friend, a gentlemanly foe, and a quintessential American conservative. He is mourned. He is missed. He will not be forgotten.

Esther O’Reilly is an American writer and conservative cultural critic. She has written for Patheos, Quillette, The Critic, and Arc Digital. In print, she has contributed to the anthology Myth and Meaning in Jordan Peterson (Lexham Press).

The post Cancelled to Death: The Mike Adams I Knew appeared first on The American Conservative.

Backstory: In Parallel With the COVID 19 Pandemic, We Now Have a Pandemic of Arrests

Lockdown – the word that best describes our present physical and mental state – has now acquired a vicious new meaning. As if in parallel to the COVID-19 pandemic, we now have a pandemic of arrests, with prison gates clanging shut on those marked by the state as anti-nationals. Consider, for a moment, this last fortnight. It began with Gautam Navlakha and Anand Teltumbde, prominent intellectuals and political activists, being jailed. Both marked their impending incarceration with letters that held up a mirror to their country. Navlakha pointed to how the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act has turned jurisprudence upside down: “No longer is it the axiom that ‘a person is innocent unless proven guilty’. In fact, under such Acts, ‘an accused is guilty unless proven innocent’” (‘‘My Hope Rests on a Speedy and Fair Trial’: Gautam Navlakha Before His Surrender’, April 14). Teltumbde begins with the observation that he is aware that what he writes may be drowned in the “motivated cacophony of the BJP and RSS combine and the subservient media”. Sure enough, large sections of the media blanked out all news of the arrest (‘Hindi Newspapers Look Away as Anand Teltumbde Is Arrested’, April 15). This deliberate deletion is part of the larger strategy to erase any evidence of state repression, as Teltumbde’s letter points out: “An individual like me obviously cannot counter the spirited propaganda of the government and its subservient media. The details of the case are strewn across the internet and are enough for any person to see that it is a clumsy and criminal fabrication.” A analytical piece in The Wire (‘Why Is Anand Teltumbde So Dangerous for the Narendra Modi Government?’, April 14) argues that it is his stance as a “progressive intellectual wall against the neoliberal Hindutva of the RSS-BJP”, that makes him such an important target. Similarly, there are excellent reasons why credible, argumentative journalists also invite the displeasure of the powerful. The Wire has had a taste of state repression. On April 10, one of the founder editors of the portal was visited by the UP Police (‘Attempts to Muzzle the Media’: More Than 200 Journalists Condemn FIRs Against The Wire’, April 12) for allegedly causing panic by reporting that the UP chief minister had attended a religious event on March 25. That, of course, is a matter of public record and a wrongly attributed quote in the report had been duly retracted along with a corrigendum. Yet none of this served to halt the UP police from driving all the way from Faizabad to Delhi amidst the lockdown, to serve a notice on Siddharth Varadarajan. This is by no means the first instance of police high-handedness. Over the last year, over a dozen cases have been filed against journalists by the UP police, according to a recent report filed by Kunal Majumder of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Hunting journalists down has now become part of active policing in these COVID-19 times. Over the course of a week, at least four mediapersons in Kashmir have had FIRs filed against them. Two of them were booked under UAPA, photojournalist Masrat Zahra (‘Kashmiri Photojournalist Charged Under UAPA for Unspecified Social Media Posts’, April 20) and author-commentator Gowhar Geelani, who in an interview to The Wire interpreted the move as a bid to criminalise journalism in Kashmir (‘The Assault Is on Journalism’: An Interview With Kashmiri Journalist Gowhar Geelani’, April 23). The case against Masrat Zahra has been registered under Section 13 of UAPA. Revisiting this Section is educative. The key reason why UAPA is so effective as a tool of state coercion is the broad manner in which the offence is framed and this Section lays down that not only are persons who take part in “unlawful activity” liable for punishment,  anyone who “advocates, abets, advises or incites the commission of, any unlawful activity” can be  imprisoned for a term which may extend to seven years under the law. We need to remember here that we are now seeing the results of the amendment to UAPA, passed in parliament in August 2019 shortly before the abrogation of Article 370 on August 5. Through that amendment, the government and its police assumed the power to take action not just against organisations deemed as terrorist, but against individuals, too. Union home minister Amit Shah not only piloted that amendment in parliament but justified it forcefully, arguing that acts of terror are done by individuals, not organisations. The logic inherent in that argument has now led to the scary outcomes that we are witnessing today, with the police drawing up elaborate conspiracy theories in a bid to make the charges stick. Journalists should be alert to the consequences this holds for others, because the same could wreak havoc on their own lives as well. Today it may be the Jamia students who had come out in protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act (‘‘Terrorism’ Charge a Lesson for Jamia Students that Democratic Protest Carries Heavy Cost’) and are now being imprisoned under a draconian law which has no provision for anticipatory bail; tomorrow it could be their colleagues or themselves. It appears that while we wear our masks and stay at home under the lockdown, the Modi government and assorted state governments under BJP rule are displaying an uncommon appetite to place all those it has marked as “enemies of the state” – even if it is just a comment they put out in the public domain – under lock and key. They may not have an UAPA hammer smashing down on them, but they and their families have to contend with the terror of impending imprisonment. Over the last few days, we’ve had the Manipur government locking up Mohammed Chengiz Khan, who is doing his PhD at JNU, for critiquing the state’s government’s anti-Muslim policies. The Gujarat police booked Prashant Bhushan, well-known lawyer, for a tweet. A spirited, socially conscious former bureaucrat, Kannan Gopinath, and a news editor, Ashlin Mathew, have invited police action from the Gujarat state government  for their responses to a government order (‘FIR Against Prashant Bhushan, Kannan Gopinathan in Gujarat’, April 15). As if to indicate the pan-national nature of such aggravated police action, we now have the Coimbatore police march Andrew Sam Raja Pandian, founder of the news portal, ‘SimpliCity’, to jail for highlighting the looting of ration shops and lack of food for students (‘Coimbatore: Founder of News Portal Arrested for Reporting on Government’s Handling of COVID-19’, April 24). Please note that none of the above had Union ministers rushing to defend them, or the Supreme Court keeping aside urgent matters in order to provide them a patient hearing, as was the case with the editor-in-chief of Republic TV (‘SC Allows Hate Speech Probe Against Arnab Goswami to Proceed, Stays Multiple FIRs’, ‘SC’s Interim Protection to Arnab Goswami: What It Does and Doesn’t Say’, April 24). Is this just state paranoia that is playing out, or does this portend a new cycle of ever-deepening, ever-inexplicable state tyranny? COVID-19 is set to alter forever the political and social landscape of the country at multiple levels (‘What Will Politics Look Like in the Post-Pandemic World?’, April 13; ‘The Economy Needs a Survival Strategy – and Not Just Stimulus – to Recover From COVID-19’; ‘Children Will Be More Vulnerable to Trafficking After COVID-19’, April 13), but how alert are we to the permanent damage this phase will wrought on our rights and liberties? How alert is the Indian media to this? Incidentally, India’s free fall in terms of the World Press Freedom Index – it currently stands at 142 in a tally of 180 countries – is a story in itself. Even Bolsanaro’s Brazil is streets ahead. As the writer of the piece, ‘If We’re at ‘War’ With the New Coronavirus, We’re Doing It Wrong’ (April 15), observes, the way we use language to define COVID-19 needs attention.The war metaphor is not useful: “In this conception, the virus becomes an agile enemy, the national leader’s actions are shows of strength, the suspension of civilian rights becomes a matter of necessity, and every citizen is seen as a soldier with well-defined orders and a quasi-duty to self-censor.” Gulshan Ewing:  the most glamorous was also the kindest When news that elderly patients in UK’s care homes were succumbing at an alarming rate to COVID 19, I didn’t imagine for a moment that the disease would also take away 92-year-old Gulshan Ewing, editor of two Mumbai staples, Eve’s Weekly and Star and Style. A resident of a care home in London’s Richmond area, she succumbed to the disease on April 21, a few days before her daughter, Anjali, had tweeted: “My mother is NOT receiving the same level of care in her care home as Boris did in hospital. We are all equal and all in this together. Aren’t we? @BorisJohnson @10DowningStreet @DominicRaab @MattHancock @tnewtondunn @bbclaurak @BBCHughPym @GuidoFawkes” Gulshan’s era was certainly kinder to those who helmed media institutions than is the case today, but what must have helped her longevity as an editor was the kindness and teamship she brought to her long innings. Glamorous she may have been, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Cary Grant and Raj Kapoor, Alfred Hitchcock and Nargis Dutt, partying with beauty queens and supping with the crème-de-la-crème of Bombay society, but within the office she remained cool, unflappable in her brightly patterned chiffons and chunky rings – even when her celebrity columnist, Devyani Chaubal (clad at all times in embroidered white organzas), threw a tantrum and would need to be coaxed to write up her next column. By the 1980s, second wave feminism had made an emphatic entry and the new generation of women journalists who landed up at Gulshan’s desk disdained much of what she took great pleasure in. They loathed the beauty contests that sometimes brought instant international fame – Reita Faria, India’s first Miss India, was Gulshan’s catch, make no mistake – and they even found the very name ‘Eve’s Weekly’, an affront to their senses. But they realised that the matrix of the women’s magazine was a great trojan horse to smuggle in feminist ideas. Along with recipe spreads and knitting patterns, many radical notions would make their way into unsuspecting households. Household hint: squeeze out a little Colgate to clean the family silver and, while you are at it, remember that you, yourself, are not a beautiful object to be displayed at home. Use a little foundation under the eye to cover up those dark circles, but also remember being beaten by the “lord and master” is a criminal, unacceptable act. Gulshan was too intelligent a woman not to recognise the changes that were taking place, and somewhere she made the decision that while she would continue with her social whirl and beauty contests, she would allow her junior colleagues to mould parts of the magazine to their liking. In fact, she also knew how she could make feminism work for her. Among the questions she asked as she interviewed me – a Times of India sub-editor – for a job as chief sub, was what my plans of being a mother were about. When I shrugged away the intrusive query, she smiled, “Yes, you are a modern woman and don’t believe in rushing to have children I am sure!” This live-and-let-live approach helped her to negotiate an unbroken run as editor from 1966 to 1989, possibly making her India’s longest serving woman editor. Lockdown and I In the last column, readers had written in about their experiences of lockdown. This time Khubrooh Siddiqui had this to say: “These are my circumstances during this abrupt and insane  lockdown. I am stranded in Ghaziabad, which has been my home city for the last 15 years. My husband is stuck in Kolkata. His father is in his late 70s and is mentally unstable, making life impossible for my husband, continuously shouting and throwing things around. At one point, he almost threw down my husband’s laptop, which is crucial for his work. I feel helpless because I cannot reach out to him at this time, knowing that he himself is often seized by extreme anxiety, and his doctor has recently modified his medicine dosage knowing that I am not there to help him. I dread to think what may happen over the next days. I don’t know if I am in a better position than others who may not have food to eat, but I can say, for sure, that I am absolutely desperate to reach Kolkata. I can only urge the authorities to let stranded people like us go to our respective destinations.” Attack on press freedom A letter from Satish Mahaldar, chairman, Reconciliation, Return & Rehabilitation of Migrants, New Delhi: “In these difficult times of a pandemic, when people associated with essential services like the Media, Health workers and the Police are doing everything they can to save people, certain vested interests are trying to cause harm.  The responsibility to disseminate news in an atmosphere where rumour mongering and fake news is the order of the day, there have been attacks on media personnel. I wish to draw attention to acts of intimidation by certain elements against the reputed news service, Indo-Asian News Service (IANS).  Its subscribers and journalists are being threatened for its reportage on the issue of Tablighi Jamaat and its role in the spread of the corona virus. As these threats were persisting, IANS has been forced to file three criminal intimidation cases against individuals who claim to be the members of  the Jamaat. The attempts to muzzle IANS and other media organisations are not only criminal but an attack on the freedom of the media. Such acts should not only be condemned but the perpetrators must be held accountable for their anti-democratic activities. We urge stern governmental action against such miscreants.” Songs for the Migrant Kaushik Raj, who described himself as a poet and activist, wrote and recorded this poem on the “plight of migrant workers who had to walk hundreds of kilometres after lockdown in their bid to reach home”. He sent across the IGTV and Facebook links of the two-minute poem: The same topic inspired Poojan Sahil, to compose and perform this three-minute song. He asks why we as a society has always neglected this section of the population: Read the full article

Holiday Season Quotes

Official Website: Holiday Season Quotes

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• Every piece of the universe, even the tiniest little snow crystal, matters somehow. I have a place in the pattern, and so do you. Thinking of you this holiday season! – T.A. Barron • For me, I think everybody with half a heart tries to do their best to do their part of good during the holiday season. – Darren Criss • I don’t believe in western morality, i.e. don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral. The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle). – Manis Friedman

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Holiday+Season', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_holiday-season').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_holiday-season img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • I have to confess I can’t have the holiday season without “Hard Candy Christmas”. For some reason, it makes me think of the sticky ribbon candy bowl my mid-western grandma always had. – Hank Stuever • I keep exercising even when the days are much shorter. Not only is this a great stress reliever for me to get in a nice run, but it’s also my ‘me time’ when I can just get away from all the holiday season obligations. – David Niu • I like to compare the holiday season with the way a child listens to a favorite story. The pleasure is in the familiar way the story begins, the anticipation of familiar turns it takes, the familiar moments of suspense, and the familiar climax and ending. – Fred Rogers • I love the holiday season, almost as much as I love touching myself in – front of orphans. – Zach Braff • I remember being banned from other houses as a younger child during the winter holiday season; I was the only one who didn’t believe in Santa Claus, and I was ruining everyone’s Christmas. – Jami Attenberg • I think one of the finest gifts I can give my friends in the holiday season is to pause with a long enough quality to actually SEE them. My calm, unhurried presence communicates this gift of a message, “I see you. I recognize you. I remember our times of together and am contributing right now to another quality memory. I value you and honor and take the time, right this moment to pause long enough to truly notice you.” – Mary Anne Radmacher • In most instances, at all costs, do NOT check a bag. Especially during the holiday season. You have more flexibility to switch flights, switch airlines or even leave the airport and get a rental car to drive to your next destination. If the airline has your bag, they also have you. – Beth Mowins • In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it “Christmas” and went to church; the Jews called it “Hanukka” and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say “Merry Christmas!” or “Happy Hanukka!” or (to the atheists) “Look out for the wall!” – Dave Barry • Instead of waiting until the holiday season – when mail solicitations flood in from worthy organizations – and making a flurry of gifts because this is the time of year to give, sit down and take stock. Identify your passion, learn about it, and direct your time, mind, and dollars to aligned causes and organizations. – Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen • It is a miracle if you can find true friends, and it is a miracle if you have enough food to eat, and it is a miracle if you get to spend your days and evenings doing whatever it is you like to do, and the holiday season – like all the other seasons – is a good time not only to tell stories of miracles, but to think about the miracles in your own life, and to be grateful for them, and that’s the end of this particular story. – Daniel Handler • I’ve been working with Operation Smile for a number of years, and $240 changes and saves, in many cases, saves a child’s life. But one of the things I’m super excited about is my partnership with Boston Market this holiday season and we’ve partnered up not only to help everybody out during the holidays because we know how crazy it gets. – Kate Walsh • No matter where you go, no matter how many gifts you give and receive this holiday season, unless you are actually present, it all flies by as if in a dream. Satisfaction in anything–a meal, an interaction, a gift, a sunset–depends on your willingness to take it in. Breathe. Feel your arms and your legs. You are allowed to love every little thing about yourself and your life. You are allowed to take up space and be all that you are. Really you are. – Geneen Roth • Once again we find ourselves enmeshed in the Holiday Season, that very special time of year when we join with our loved ones in sharing centuries-old traditions such as trying to find a parking space at the mall. We traditionally do this in my family by driving around the parking lot until we see a shopper emerge from the mall, then we follow her, in very much the same spirit as the Three Wise Men, who 2,000 years ago followed a star, week after week, until it led them to a parking space. – Dave Barry • Once again we find ourselves enmeshed in the Holiday Season, that very special time of year when we join with our loved ones in sharing centuries-old traditions such as trying to find a parking space at the mall. – Dave Barry • Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice. – Dave Barry • One of the best parts of the holiday season is spending time with the special people in your life. – Barack Obama • Overspending is as certain a part of the holiday season as overeating. But pushing away from both the table and the cash register at least a little bit sooner can make the post-holiday hangover hurt a little bit less. – Jeffrey Kluger • The ACLU spent this entire holiday season protesting public displays of the nativity scene. Yeah, that’s the problem with America right now: Public displays of Christ’s birth, that’s the problem. It’s unbelievable to me. The ACLU will no longer fight for your right to put up a nativity scene, but they’ll fight for the right of the local freak who wants to stumble onto the scene and have sex with one of the sheep. – Dennis Miller • The concerted effort to minimize Christmas has resulted in it being our national Happy Holiday holiday. The Christmas season is now the holiday season. Christmas parties are now holiday parties. Christmas is a time for giving and receiving presents and in many homes, nothing more. Who is this fellow, Jesus Christ, anyway? – Lyn Nofziger • The FDA is now warning people not to eat raw cookie dough this holiday season. Is that how fat we’re getting in this country? Our ovens are too slow now? – Jay Leno • The holiday season is a time for storytelling, and whether you are hearing the story of a candelabra staying lit for more than a week, or a baby born in a barn without proper medical supervision, these stories often feature miracles. Miracles are like pimples, because once you start looking for them you find more than you ever dreamed you’d see, and this holiday story features any number of miracles, depending on your point of view. – Daniel Handler • The holiday season promotes a heightened sense of community. It draws our chins up and helps us look above and over the limiting fence of our own events, activities and preoccupations. The opportunity for a heroic gesture can tap you quietly on the shoulder in the midst of a holiday bustle. If you are attentive, you will notice the gentle touch and will be able to respond. Remember… There are no small acts of kindness. Every compassionate act makes large the world. – Mary Anne Radmacher • The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year’s Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you’re married to. – P. J. O’Rourke • There are a lot of Grinches out there that would like nothing better than to take any references to religion out of the holiday season. – Ernest Istook • Thoughts turn to other’s just a little more this time of year. Days grow shorter and memories grow longer. Families and friends gather in celebration or hope. Giving is a reflection of our love and caring for each other and those less fortunate. May your thoughts turn to gratitude this holiday season and carry on throughout the next year. – James A. Murphy III • Wal-Mart doesn’t really care about your faith. Wal-Mart cares if you have money to spend, and it is going to be as generic as possible in exploiting the holiday season for every buck it can make. – Richard Roeper • You folks feeling the economic pinch? Are you a little fed up with the economic news? It’s bad. The department stores, this holiday season, no Santa Claus. They’re laying off department-store Santa Clauses. So more bad news for John McCain. – David Letterman

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling]

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'a', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_a').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_a img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'e', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_e').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_e img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'i', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_i').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_i img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'o', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_o').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_o img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'u', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_u').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_u img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'y', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_y').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_y img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

Holiday Season Quotes

Official Website: Holiday Season Quotes

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push();

• Every piece of the universe, even the tiniest little snow crystal, matters somehow. I have a place in the pattern, and so do you. Thinking of you this holiday season! – T.A. Barron • For me, I think everybody with half a heart tries to do their best to do their part of good during the holiday season. – Darren Criss • I don’t believe in western morality, i.e. don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral. The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle). – Manis Friedman

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Holiday+Season', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_holiday-season').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_holiday-season img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • I have to confess I can’t have the holiday season without “Hard Candy Christmas”. For some reason, it makes me think of the sticky ribbon candy bowl my mid-western grandma always had. – Hank Stuever • I keep exercising even when the days are much shorter. Not only is this a great stress reliever for me to get in a nice run, but it’s also my ‘me time’ when I can just get away from all the holiday season obligations. – David Niu • I like to compare the holiday season with the way a child listens to a favorite story. The pleasure is in the familiar way the story begins, the anticipation of familiar turns it takes, the familiar moments of suspense, and the familiar climax and ending. – Fred Rogers • I love the holiday season, almost as much as I love touching myself in – front of orphans. – Zach Braff • I remember being banned from other houses as a younger child during the winter holiday season; I was the only one who didn’t believe in Santa Claus, and I was ruining everyone’s Christmas. – Jami Attenberg • I think one of the finest gifts I can give my friends in the holiday season is to pause with a long enough quality to actually SEE them. My calm, unhurried presence communicates this gift of a message, “I see you. I recognize you. I remember our times of together and am contributing right now to another quality memory. I value you and honor and take the time, right this moment to pause long enough to truly notice you.” – Mary Anne Radmacher • In most instances, at all costs, do NOT check a bag. Especially during the holiday season. You have more flexibility to switch flights, switch airlines or even leave the airport and get a rental car to drive to your next destination. If the airline has your bag, they also have you. – Beth Mowins • In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it “Christmas” and went to church; the Jews called it “Hanukka” and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say “Merry Christmas!” or “Happy Hanukka!” or (to the atheists) “Look out for the wall!” – Dave Barry • Instead of waiting until the holiday season – when mail solicitations flood in from worthy organizations – and making a flurry of gifts because this is the time of year to give, sit down and take stock. Identify your passion, learn about it, and direct your time, mind, and dollars to aligned causes and organizations. – Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen • It is a miracle if you can find true friends, and it is a miracle if you have enough food to eat, and it is a miracle if you get to spend your days and evenings doing whatever it is you like to do, and the holiday season – like all the other seasons – is a good time not only to tell stories of miracles, but to think about the miracles in your own life, and to be grateful for them, and that’s the end of this particular story. – Daniel Handler • I’ve been working with Operation Smile for a number of years, and $240 changes and saves, in many cases, saves a child’s life. But one of the things I’m super excited about is my partnership with Boston Market this holiday season and we’ve partnered up not only to help everybody out during the holidays because we know how crazy it gets. – Kate Walsh • No matter where you go, no matter how many gifts you give and receive this holiday season, unless you are actually present, it all flies by as if in a dream. Satisfaction in anything–a meal, an interaction, a gift, a sunset–depends on your willingness to take it in. Breathe. Feel your arms and your legs. You are allowed to love every little thing about yourself and your life. You are allowed to take up space and be all that you are. Really you are. – Geneen Roth • Once again we find ourselves enmeshed in the Holiday Season, that very special time of year when we join with our loved ones in sharing centuries-old traditions such as trying to find a parking space at the mall. We traditionally do this in my family by driving around the parking lot until we see a shopper emerge from the mall, then we follow her, in very much the same spirit as the Three Wise Men, who 2,000 years ago followed a star, week after week, until it led them to a parking space. – Dave Barry • Once again we find ourselves enmeshed in the Holiday Season, that very special time of year when we join with our loved ones in sharing centuries-old traditions such as trying to find a parking space at the mall. – Dave Barry • Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice. – Dave Barry • One of the best parts of the holiday season is spending time with the special people in your life. – Barack Obama • Overspending is as certain a part of the holiday season as overeating. But pushing away from both the table and the cash register at least a little bit sooner can make the post-holiday hangover hurt a little bit less. – Jeffrey Kluger • The ACLU spent this entire holiday season protesting public displays of the nativity scene. Yeah, that’s the problem with America right now: Public displays of Christ’s birth, that’s the problem. It’s unbelievable to me. The ACLU will no longer fight for your right to put up a nativity scene, but they’ll fight for the right of the local freak who wants to stumble onto the scene and have sex with one of the sheep. – Dennis Miller • The concerted effort to minimize Christmas has resulted in it being our national Happy Holiday holiday. The Christmas season is now the holiday season. Christmas parties are now holiday parties. Christmas is a time for giving and receiving presents and in many homes, nothing more. Who is this fellow, Jesus Christ, anyway? – Lyn Nofziger • The FDA is now warning people not to eat raw cookie dough this holiday season. Is that how fat we’re getting in this country? Our ovens are too slow now? – Jay Leno • The holiday season is a time for storytelling, and whether you are hearing the story of a candelabra staying lit for more than a week, or a baby born in a barn without proper medical supervision, these stories often feature miracles. Miracles are like pimples, because once you start looking for them you find more than you ever dreamed you’d see, and this holiday story features any number of miracles, depending on your point of view. – Daniel Handler • The holiday season promotes a heightened sense of community. It draws our chins up and helps us look above and over the limiting fence of our own events, activities and preoccupations. The opportunity for a heroic gesture can tap you quietly on the shoulder in the midst of a holiday bustle. If you are attentive, you will notice the gentle touch and will be able to respond. Remember… There are no small acts of kindness. Every compassionate act makes large the world. – Mary Anne Radmacher • The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year’s Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you’re married to. – P. J. O’Rourke • There are a lot of Grinches out there that would like nothing better than to take any references to religion out of the holiday season. – Ernest Istook • Thoughts turn to other’s just a little more this time of year. Days grow shorter and memories grow longer. Families and friends gather in celebration or hope. Giving is a reflection of our love and caring for each other and those less fortunate. May your thoughts turn to gratitude this holiday season and carry on throughout the next year. – James A. Murphy III • Wal-Mart doesn’t really care about your faith. Wal-Mart cares if you have money to spend, and it is going to be as generic as possible in exploiting the holiday season for every buck it can make. – Richard Roeper • You folks feeling the economic pinch? Are you a little fed up with the economic news? It’s bad. The department stores, this holiday season, no Santa Claus. They’re laying off department-store Santa Clauses. So more bad news for John McCain. – David Letterman

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling]

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'a', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_a').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_a img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'e', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_e').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_e img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'i', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_i').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_i img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'o', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_o').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_o img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'u', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_u').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_u img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'y', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_y').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_y img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

The Best SEO Plugins for WordPress (Review Updated for Winter of 2019)

In 2019, websites can no longer afford to ignore search engine optimization.

Nearly all internet activity starts with search: 93% of all Internet experiences start with a search engine and 39% of ecommerce traffic across the world comes from search. Most businesses have recognized this and adapted accordingly — 61% of companies named SEO as their biggest priority last year.

Sure, you can generate leads with PPC campaigns and pay to be a top result. But 80% of people say they ignore the advertisements in search results.

Take a moment to analyze your own habits. When you want to do something online, where do you start? If you’re anything like me and the majority of internet users, you start with a search engine. You type in some keywords or phrases and probably don’t scroll past the first few results before clicking on a site. Sounds about right then, that the first five SERPs receive 67.6% of all clicks.

In short, you need to be prioritizing SEO and be a top result if you want to have any chance of driving organic traffic to your website. But if you aren’t an SEO expert, where do you begin?

Fortunately, there are plenty of great SEO tools available. If you have a WordPress site, there are a number plugins you can install that will really help you out. Which ones? That’s exactly why I developed this list of the best SEO plugins for WordPress. It details my top 8 plugins and how they’ll help you improve your SEO.

1. Yoast SEO

The Yoast SEO WordPress plugin has been around for more than a decade. Over five million websites have installed it, making it one of the most popular options.

One of the best parts of Yoast SEO is the ability to create and manage your XML sitemaps. This is much easier than having to code your sitemap on your own, especially if you don’t have much of a technical background.

Yoast SEO helps you identify and avoid duplicate content, so you won’t have to worry about being penalized by Google, and it offers templates for titles and meta-descriptions, which will make your pages more appealing in SERPs.

You can install the Yoast SEO plugin for free to access all of these features and benefits. But there is also a premium version for $89 annually that gives you upgrades like:

Page previews on different platforms

Suggestions for internal linking

Redirect management options

24/7 support

No advertisements

At the very least, I recommend trying the free Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.

2. The SEO Framework

The SEO Framework plugin is another great option for you to consider. I like this WordPress plugin so much because it’s built for smaller enterprises as opposed to massive corporations.

Its interface blends naturally when integrated with WordPress, so it feels as though it’s supposed to be there, as opposed to appearing obtrusive.

Here’s a look at one of my favorite features on this plugin.

The plugin offers a colored scale, showing you exactly how to optimize each post for search engines. All you need to do is hover your cursor over the bars in the SEO column to reveal notes for how to specifically improve certain pages. As you can see from the screenshot above, this note explains how the title can be improved for SEO purposes.

The SEO Framework plugin is free and doesn’t have any ads or upsells to pester you while you’re working. Overall, I’m happy with the way this lightweight plugin performs.

3. SEO Squirrly

SEO Squirrly is designed specifically for people who aren’t experts in SEO.

Other plugins have different ways to access and implement SEO suggestions, but SEO Squirrly brings this to the next level. Take a look at its live SEO assistant feature.

Here’s how it works. You just have to input the desired keyword that you’re trying to rank for with the article you’re writing. As you write, green lights and popup suggestions will appear in real time explaining how you can work that keyword into your content. Imagine having an SEO expert standing over your shoulder while you’re writing — that’s what you get with SEO Squirrly.

The content reports are another great feature that’s ideal if you’re outsourcing writers or using multiple writers across your company to produce content. These reports give writers additional insight about SEO based on what they wrote.

SEO Squirrly also has a tool to analyze your competitors’ content, so you can find ways to outrank their pages. You’ll also be able to track your progress on a weekly basis.

4. Broken Link Checker

Google algorithms will penalize you for broken links, so the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin is extremely valuable for your website.

If you’re like me, you have tons of internal and outbound links in your blog content. You can control the pages on your own site, but the status of pages on other websites is out of your hands.

Here’s an example. Say you used a quote, image, or statistic from another website in one of your blog posts. But for one reason or another, that other site got rid of that page or merged it with another piece of content without including a redirect. Now you have a broken link on your site.

The Broken Link Checker plugin will identify any broken link on your site and make it easy for you to remove, edit, or dismiss the problem with just a couple of clicks.

Not only is this great for SEO, but it’s also important in terms of user experience. You don’t want your website visitors to click a link to a broken page.

5. All In One Schema Rich Snippets

All In One Schema Rich Snippets will improve the way your pages appear in search engine results with rich snippets, which are a brief and more interactive summary of your page. They contain things like pricing, photos, star ratings, or reviews.

This popular schema markup plugin can help you add things such as:

Videos

Articles

Recipes

Events

People

Products

Articles

Rich snippets benefit all websites, but they are especially important for ecommerce sites. Users won’t have to go through as many steps to read a review of your products. They can see the star-rating from the search engine results page. Adding rich snippets will tell search engines exactly what information to include in the search results.

6. Rank Math

Rank Math allows you to manage all of your on-page SEO needs for every type of content on your website. This WordPress plugin is so effective because it’s integrated with Google Search Console, so you’ll see all of the important information directly from your administrative dashboard in WordPress.

Rank Math also lets you manage meta tags for things like:

noindex

nofollow

noarchive

This WordPress plugin will tell you which keywords you’re ranking for, and also show you how many impressions you’re getting for various searches. Rank Math also identifies any errors that Google sees on your site. All of this information is easy to access, read, and digest.

Furthermore, Rank Math has features for:

XML sitemaps

Rich snippets

Internal linking recommendations

404 monitoring

Redirects

Local SEO

Image SEO

Rank Brain is definitely one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress. It’s great for those looking for a one-stop-shop for all of these features.

7. SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant

The SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant plugin for WordPress isn’t as widely used as some of the other plugins we’ve looked at so far, but it’s still a top choice to consider.

SEMrush has one of the best online toolkits available for SEO. The brand is a big name in the SEO industry, so I definitely wanted to include its plugin on this list.

In order for this plugin to work, you need to have an account with SEMrush, which you can register for free if you don’t have one. The free account will give you access to just one template, so you’ll probably want to upgrade to the premium plan to use this plugin.

The plugin analyzes your content and gives you scores based on how SEO-friendly the writing is. You’ll see text suggestions that will explain how to improve your content for SEO purposes.

With the writing assistant, you can also add your target keywords. The plugin will offer recommendations for you based on those keywords.

For a great SEO WordPress plugin other websites aren’t really taking advantage of, definitely consider the SEO Writing Assistant by SEMrush.

8. All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack is well-known and popular. It has more than two million active installations on WordPress. As the name implies, it’s another “all in one” plugin for your SEO needs. One of the reasons why it’s so popular is it’s clean and easy-to-navigate dashboard.

The essential features of All in One SEO Pack are free, but you can upgrade to a premium version for $57 per year. If you own multiple websites, you may want to consider a business license, which lets you use this plugin on up to 10 sites for $97 annually. You can even purchase an agency license for $419 per year to use the plugin on an unlimited number of sites.

With that said, if you have a basic blog or startup, the free version will likely meet your needs. It’s great for beginners, but I know plenty of advanced WordPress users who use this plugin as well. It’s probably the most similar to Yoast SEO, which we talked about earlier. The biggest difference between the two plugins is the interface and pricing options for organizations of different sizes.

Conclusion

Your website needs to prioritize SEO. I simply can’t stress that enough.

I recommend reviewing my guide on SEO tactics that you need to retire, so you can stop wasting time on strategies that aren’t working.

Look, I get it; I’m not expecting you to become an SEO expert overnight. But you should at least be taking advantage of some of the SEO tools available online.

If you have a WordPress website, there are countless plugins at your disposal. However, I think it’s best to focus on the top eight that I’ve covered above. There’s something for everyone on this list. Some of these plugins are for specific SEO features, while others encompass a wider range of SEO elements.

Either way, I’m confident that you’ll find this guide is a useful reference for adding SEO plugins to your WordPress site.

Which WordPress plugins are you using to improve your SEO strategy?

http://www.quicksprout.com/best-seo-plugins-for-wordpress/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-best-seo-plugins-for-wordpress.html

"Back Over My Shoulder" podcast: Sherlock Holmes was in Glens Falls, NY?

“Back Over My Shoulder” podcast: Sherlock Holmes was in Glens Falls, NY?

Hi! Thanks for joining me. This was to be my January 6th Back Over My Shoulder podcast. However, because of the reprehensible terrorist invasion of our US Capitol on January 6, I felt it more appropriate to hold off posting this until now. This podcast is “Holmes’ visit in 1894 left few clues, my dear Watson.” In it, I tell of the time when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle spoke in Glens Falls. The…

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Home Entertainment Consumer Guide: December 27, 2018

10 NEW TO NETFLIX

"2 Fast 2 Furious" "Apocalypse Now" "Avengers: Infinity War" "Baby Mama" "The Fast and the Furious" "The Innocents" "Kill the Messenger" "The Little Hours" "Maps to the Stars" "The Theory of Everything"

8 NEW TO BLU-RAY/DVD

"Assassination Nation"

I'm only human and so there's a bit of an impulse to include a release in this column on which I'm quoted on the cover, even if the movie itself is something of a mixed bag. The quote "'Mean Girls' meets 'The Purge" is from my Sundance viewing of this divisive genre film, and is more descriptive than praising. What's been interesting to watch about the conversation around this abrasive, incendiary castigation of internet culture is that I have been very lonely in my middle ground opinion. I like its ideas more than its execution, but find it fascinating how many people either LOVE or HATE this movie. Honestly, we need more movies like that—movies that provoke conversation and debate. So you should see this not because I'm quoted on the cover but because you should pick a side ... or join me in the neutral zone.

Buy it here 

Special Features Deleted/Extended Scenes Gag Reel Trailers

"Bad Times at the El Royale"

This is another movie that people seemed to either embrace or abhor and I finished with a shoulder shrug. Maybe that's not fair. I mostly liked Drew Goddard's single-setting bloodbath, but I'm stunned that anyone sees enough to like or hate here to include in either ten best or ten worst lists for the entirety of 2018. On the positive side, the ensemble is fantastic, especially Cynthia Erivo, Jeff Bridges, and Chris Hemsworth. It's never boring, weaving several subplots on a very bad night at the El Royale hotel into one backstabbing tapestry. It's also too long, too unfocused, and slips through your fingers once it's over. There's a tighter, smarter version of "El Royale" in this one that could have been great. But this one is still pretty good—available On Demand now and on Blu-ray on 1/1.

Buy it here

Special Features Making Bad Times at the El Royale Gallery

"Fahrenheit 11/9"

Did Michael Moore's latest provocation influence the election as he so clearly hoped it would when he dropped it in the heat of the season? Maybe. Probably not, though. The fact is that Moore doesn't have the impact he once did, but should that be the only way we judge him as a filmmaker? As an influencer? It will be interesting to see how his most overtly political films like this one stand up with a couple decades of history behind them. For me, the best pieces of "Fahrenheit 11/9" don't focus on the Trump Presidency but the various stories of the last few years that led to the voter apathy that was arguably the biggest reason he won. And, say what you will about this film's lack of focus, there's a great mini-doc buried within this film about the Flint water crisis that you really should see.

Buy it here

Special Features None

"The Predator"

After the TIFF premiere of Shane Black's latest reboot/sequel to the hit '80s sci-fi/action film, I suspected that I would be in the minority of critics who enjoyed it but didn't expect it to be quite so drastic. I stand by my 2am take in Canada that this is a fun action movie that understands what worked about the original film while also taking some of the same ideas in a new direction. No, it's not going to be anyone's favorite movie of 2018, but it's a quick, enjoyable rental on a Saturday night, and it works even better at home than in the middle of the night in Toronto.

Buy it here 

Special Features Deleted Scenes A Touch of Black Predator Evolution The Takedown Team Predator Catch-Up Gallery

"Schindler's List"

Only this column could go from "The Predator" to "Schindler's List," but that's how we roll at the HECG (and the byproduct of alphabetical listings). For the 25th anniversary of one of the best films of the '90s, Universal has upgraded Steven Spielberg's Oscar winner with a 4K release that reminds viewers why this movie was so rapturously praised when it came out in 1993. Given 4 stars by Roger on its initial release, he didn't wait long to put it in the Great Movies pantheon, and it's a movie that has held up remarkably well. The 4K release is accompanied by a new documentary called "Schindler's List: 25 Years Later," adding to the sense that this is one of the essential 4K Blu-ray releases of 2018.

Buy it here 

Special Features NEW 4K RESTORATION OF THE FILM SUPERVISED BY STEVEN SPIELBERG DOLBY VISION/HDR 10 PRESENTATION OF THE FILM NEW Schindler's List: 25 Years Later - Featurette NEW USC Shoah Foundation Story with Steven Spielberg (2018) Voices from the List - Featurette Let Their Testimonies Speak - Stronger Than Hate About IWitness (2018) AND MORE...

"A Simple Favor"

Paul Feig's mystery/comedy looked like a disaster before it was released. It was coming out at a time of year when studios are known for dumping movies that they don't know what to do with, and it didn't play any fests or get much in the way of critics screenings. And then it dropped and most people were pleasantly surprised. A reasonably big hit (almost $100 million worldwide), "A Simple Favor" filled a hole in storytelling for adults that Hollywood simply doesn't care about as much as they used to. In a time when the mid-budget movie is disappearing, it feels like everything is a part of a franchise or a low-budget indie. The mid-budget filmmakers went to TV. And so it's so heartening to see a solid mid-budget flick that offers a night of entertainment for grown-ups away from Netflix. I'm a little less high on the flick than everybody else (I think Blake Lively is amazing but the movie sags a bit when she's absent), but it's totally worth a rental. 

Buy it here    Special Features 3 Audio Commentaries with Cast and Crew 8 Featurettes Gag Reel Deleted Scenes Flash Mob

"Starman"

When the acolytes of John Carpenter talk about the horror icon, they often stick solely to, well, his horror films. How many pieces can the internet produce about the greatness of "Halloween," "The Thing," or underrated pics like "The Fog" and "Prince of Darkness"? Lost in a lot of the talk about Carpenter is what is actually his highest-grossing film outside of Mike Myers, 1984's "Starman." This has always been a film that I hold close to my heart as I was nine when it came out and, well, that's a good age for this movie. It's an underrated film with a truly great performance from Jeff Bridges. As Roger wrote 34 years ago, "Actors sometimes try to change their appearance; Bridges does something trickier, and tries to convince us that Jeff Bridges is not inhabited by himself."

Buy it here 

Special Features NEW They Came from Hollywood: Re-visiting STARMAN – featuring director John Carpenter, actors Jeff Bridges, Charles Martin Smith and script supervisor Sandy King-Carpenter Audio Commentary with director John Carpenter and Jeff Bridges Vintage Featurette Teaser Trailer Theatrical Trailer TV Spots Still Gallery

"Venom"

Ah, "Venom." Is this smash hit a good movie? Noooo. It's clunky and weird. And yet there's something in here that almost brings it together and that's the totally committed lunacy from Tom Hardy. Whether he's talking to the symbiote inhabiting his body or eating a live lobster out of the tank in which he's sitting, there's something inspired in so many of his choices. Sadly, the rest of the movie totally pales in comparison, including something I didn't think was possible: flat performances from Riz Ahmed and Michelle Williams. As much as I don't want to see "Venom" again, I'll be curious about "Venom 2" just to see if Hardy's energy can be featured in a project that deserves it. 

Buy it here 

Special Features Venom Mode: When selecting this mode the film will engage informative pop-ups throughout the film to provide insight on the movie's relationship to the comics, and to reveal hidden references that even a seasoned Venom-fan may have missed! Deleted & Extended Scenes: These deleted and extended scenes will give fans even more of the Venom action they loved in theaters! Ride to Hospital – Eddie and Venom take a ride to the hospital. Car Alarm – Let's just say that Venom is not fond of car alarms. San Quentin – Extended post-credits scene at San Quentin. From Symbiote to Screen: A mini documentary about the history of Venom in comics and his journey to the big screen. Interviews with Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach, Ruben Fleischer, Oliver Scholl, and Director and Comic Fanboy Kevin Smith. The Lethal Protector in Action: Go behind the scenes with the production crew and learn the secrets behind the awesome Motorcycle stunts, wire stunts, and drones. Venom Vision: A look at how Ruben Fleischer came to the project, gathered his team, and made Venom a reality. Utilizes interviews from cast, crew, and producers as well as Fleischer himself. Designing Venom: Designing and creating Venom meant a huge challenge for VFX artists; follow the amazing journey. Symbiote Secrets: Blink and you may have missed it! Enjoy the hidden references throughout the film. 8 Select Scenes Pre-Vis sequences: See the progression of the visual effects, storyboards and fight chorography compared to the finished film. "Venom" by Eminem – Music Video "Sunflower" by Post Malone, Swae Lee (From Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Sneak Peek: Meanwhile in another universe …

from All Content http://bit.ly/2EPZSPN

So,

Election night was all hands on deck — Tamara was with Pat Severyn, I was with Deb Kozak, Calvin was with John Dooley and Greg was back at the Nelson Star office, watching the results come in and getting ready to post everything online. Over the summer our Facebook audience had ballooned, and we were starting to use Twitter a little as well. Calvin wanted us to compose multiple stories, not all of them destined for print, as the night progressed. Obviously the mayoral results were the main concern, but we’d also have six new council candidates all eager for their limelight as well. We huddled in the newsroom beforehand and went through our game plan. It was maybe 4 or 5 p.m., and we were planning to be there until long after midnight. 

“So all of us, throughout the night, need to keep Greg updated by text message. When the results come in, get some quick audio and a few photos, then head back here right away,” Calvin said.

“This is going to be hectic, but if we keep things coordinated we can be constantly posting and updating all evening, in real time. We’re going to plaster this all over Facebook and Twitter, okay? This is the biggest story of the year right here.”

After we talked through some more of the logistics, I headed over to the Legion Hall, just three blocks away, where Kozak was hosting her supporters. As I came in I spotted Cass and Elliot, who had been on her campaign team. There was a lavish spread with brownies and cookies and veggie platters, so like any good journalist I headed straight there.

“How’s she feeling?” I asked Cass. “Stressed?”

“Nah, Deb’s got this. I don’t think anyone’s voting for Severyn.”

“But what about Dooley? Tons of people love him, it seems. Like his people are devoted acolytes.”

“It’s just time for something better. He’s the old-school boys’ club candidate, and that was never the right fit for Nelson.”

Deb was being swarmed by her supporters, but I shouldered through to say hi. She introduced me to her family, and I took some photos. By this point the other female councillors had arrived—Donna Macdonald, Paula Kiss, Candace Batycki—and I spotted a number of familiar faces from the arts scene. People milled around uncomfortably, making small talk and glancing at their phones to check the time. 

Anything yet? Greg texted.

Nothing. Lots of people here but no news.

Polls are closed now so it should be soon.

I didn’t have to wait much longer to find out what would happen. Within an hour of my arrival the final numbers were in, way ahead of schedule. A giddy-looking dude came striding into the hall and tapped Kozak on the shoulder, whispering in her ear conspiratorially. Cass and I were both watching, food trays in our hands, as I realized I was going to need my camera out quick. I fumbled with the bag, pulled off my lens cap, then weaved through the crowd as the celebratory murmuring got louder around me. Deb threw her arms up in the air, laughing, while around her people started to clap. 

Someone yelled “it’s official!”

I saw a flash of movement as a small woman darted in Kozak’s direction. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was Michelle Mungall, our MLA. I lifted my camera just in time to capture their fierce hug. Deb was still laughing, her eyes shimmering with happiness, when I snapped the shutter. It was a profound and intimate moment, one female trailblazer embracing another, and I’d captured it. 

As people continued to celebrate, she followed me over to a quieter spot so I could record some quotes on my phone. She shook her head in disbelief, taking a moment to compose herself.

“I’m looking forward to the next evolution of who we can be. I don’t mean that in an airy-fairy way,” she said. 

“I think that we’ve been resting on our laurels since the ’90s.” 

Kozak said the first point of business was to speak with the new council and hear about the concerns raised by constituents while they were campaigning. That would set the priorities for the next four years to come.

“Elections are a great time of opening in the community, where we’re really engaged in the community and all of  these people have been engaging with different people. I want to know what they heard with this election.”

And she made sure to say there were no hard feelings between her and Dooley. She said he chaired council for nine years and put in a “tremendous amount of work and effort”.

“He loves the community dearly. I respect the work that he did. I’m looking forward to his support for the initiatives that this new council will be taking forward.”

After our interview wrapped, I did a quick round of the room to get reaction quotes from the city councillors. As soon as I was finished I sprinted out of the Legion and back to the office to see what the photo looked like on the big screen. I was humming with energy as I uploaded, as I read quotes out loud for Greg to plug into the evolving main story: “Deb Kozak elected Nelson’s first female mayor”. Meanwhile Tamara and Calvin were processing their stuff from the other camps, both to contribute to the main story and to include in secondary pieces. I wrote and published a side-story quoting the female councillors congratulating Kozak and remarking on the significance of her accomplishment. I delighted in the wealth of social media engagements, the rolling list of comments.

“I still can’t believe John lost,” Calvin said, as things died down.

 “I don’t think anybody in that bar had any idea that he was going to lose. They hadn’t even considered it as a possibility. And you should’ve seen the guy: he deflated like a balloon. I felt really bad for him.”

“You think it’s the split that did it?”

Greg piped in. “Well, if you were to take all of Severyn’s votes and give them to Dooley, then of course he would win by a wide margin. But most of the people voting for Severyn would be more likely to vote for Kozak, because they have more in common. The way I figure, even without Severyn in the race she would’ve still been ahead.”

Tamara laughed. “Severyn’s wife was dancing drunk in the streets. She was like ‘we did it!’, ‘we got him out!’ It was so inappropriate. No class.”

“Holy shit, really?”

“This was an ugly election,” Calvin said. “One of the ugliest I’ve ever worked. And I’ve worked a lot of elections. You guys did a really great job tonight, I mean it. It was nice working as a team like this.”

Around midnight I trudged home in the dark, slowly piecing together my thoughts and trying to translate them into a column. I’d successfully covered an election, now could I comment on it with authority? In the six months since I’d been hired I was averaging a Kootenay Goon column every two weeks, but so far they’d been mostly autobiographical and light. I wanted to continue to build my skill-set, and I felt like I had some unique insights to share with the community. My lede was half-composed as I pushed through the front door of my house and clumped upstairs. 

I crawled into bed with Paisley and the dogs for a while, but eventually went out to sit on the back porch in my robe. The moon was bathing Elephant Mountain in a silvery glow, and I was still buzzing from all the action. This was my life now, being a reporter, and I was getting addicted to it. How had I ever tolerated being a lowly lifeguard? A gas station attendant? I felt like what I was doing mattered. This wasn’t a vocation so much as a calling, and I felt like a true convert. Like I could work at the Star for the remainder of my life and never get bored. It was an excuse, every day, to go out into the world and ask “what don’t I know about yet?” And it gave me access to people and experiences that I never would’ve had access to otherwise. I thought about my family on the coast, who I had barely seen for the past six months, and the friends I was slowly forgetting about. It was true, what people said: Nelson really did feel like a different type of reality. Paisley and I had found ourselves in a magical little enclave, now we just had to make it work. While I pondered this with my chin on my chest, I heard scratching at the door and turned to open it for Muppet. She had trouble sleeping without her Dad. I pulled her on to my lap and listened to the night wind rustling through the trees.

The Kootenay Goon

"Back Over My Shoulder" Podcast #3 - Oh the Power of Santa

“Back Over My Shoulder” Podcast #3 – Oh the Power of Santa

Well, I’m a few days late because of the Nor’easter that blew through (we got about 40 inches of snow). But, snow or not, here’s my third Back Over My Shoulder Holiday Season podcast! In “Oh the Power of Santa,” I share a special Christmas memories from when my wife Sara, our daughter Julia, and I lived in Glens Falls. Julia was around three years old and a neighbor’s rooftop Santa played a…

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Holiday Podcast #2 of "Back Over My Shoulder" now available!

Holiday Podcast #2 of “Back Over My Shoulder” now available!

Here’s my Second Back Over My Shoulder Holiday Season podcast. In “Thoughts of a Christmas couch,” I share memories from back in the day in Ticonderoga of the “distinct” and hilarious approaches my parents, George and Jane King, took to their Christmas shopping.

The podcast is available on all these listening platforms: Anchor; Breaker; Google Podcasts; Overcast; Pocket Casts; RadioPublic; and Sp…

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From The Post-Star to Self-Published: Four Journalists Talk About Their Books

From The Post-Star to Self-Published: Four Journalists Talk About Their Books

Clockwise from upper left: David Blow, Michael DeMasi, Joseph Cutshall-King, and Maury Thompson

Journalists, writers, authors of books—and those aspiring to be! Ever wonder what it’s like to be a journalist for a daily newspaper? Ever think of self-publishing your own book, but wonder how? Then attend “From The Post-Star to Self-Published: Four Journalists Talk About Their Books,”a panel…

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