American movies are dead, people. I know I’ve hinted before that American movies, collectively, were unwell, maybe even terminally ill, but that was in the still-hopeful past. Now it’s officially over. We can stop checking its pulse in the form…

I’ve often wondered why the American Right has been so quiet about V.S. Naipaul. He’s easily the most talented reactionary writer in the English language–maybe the only living talent left in the right-wing zombiesphere. The American Right devotes an insane…

  It’s just a coincidence that I happened to watch a new cable TV show, Jon Benjamin Has a Van, about the same time I got around to seeing the movie Super 8, so now the two of them are…

Since no one else in the pro-drug camp will say it, allow me: Ron Paul is a drug war asshole. He’s a con artist playing a shell game with our liberties with his slippery proposal that the answer to this savage…

The other day I came across a post-WWII government propaganda film called “Meats With Approval” that serves as a great indicator of just how much America’s regressed politically in the past 50 years. This film should be required viewing for…

I just picked up an old paperback copy of a Vietnam War book called SEALs: UDT/SEAL Operations in Vietnam by Tim Bosiljevac. The book chronicles the early history of the Sea, Air and Land Teams, from their founding under President…

Folks, we present the new Anarcho-Libertarian Mark Ames, whose motto is: “If you can’t beat ‘em, privatize ‘em, then fuggetaboutem!”

This anti-TSA protester coming straight outta Waco! On Saturday June 4, a dozen or so anti-TSA protesters marched on the Texas State Capitol, demanding that state legislators and Governor Rick Perry stand up to the federal government and pass a bill…

I’ve decided to write a sequel to my piece about DFW and American drug lit, and talk about how five Aussie writers have handled the same topic. But don’t worry, most of these people have been published in the US…

When I left his ranch back in 2009, I was sure that Glenn Spencer had reached the end of his line. So it was surprising to learn that Spencer was a big player in the Tea Party scene. Suddenly, no one in Arizona cared about his past associations with white supremacists. Instead, Spencer was hanging out with Arizona state senators, hosting GOP political events, speaking at rallies and rubbing shoulders with the creme de la creme of Arizona’s Tea Party beau monde. He was not only back in the game, he’s bigger than ever.

Finally got around to seeing 13 Assassins—couldn’t face any of the new film releases this week—and I can’t tell you how soothing it is. It’s a reverent throwback to the great 1950s-’60s Japanese samurai films, and it’s done in neutral shades of gray and white and tan and black. Other than the copious blood spray, of course…

Mark Ames goes on Boulder, Colorado radio station KGNU to explain the banality of Russian-born author Ayn Rand, the guiding light of the libertarian/teabagger movement. Ames discusses his article “Atlas Shrieked” about how a sad ‘n’ lonely half-wit, Ayn/Alyssa, was nothing but…

  Exiled editor Mark Ames went on MSNBC’s “Dylan Ratigan Show” yesterday to deliver a Memorial Day Rant over the death of the American vacation, and how offensive it is that while Americans get less and less time off from…

Watch The Dylan Ratigan show weekdays at 4pm EST. Also, check out Dylan Ratigan’s podcasts…

The eXile is looking to hire two extremely lucky interns this summer. Looking for the sorts of go-getters ‘n’ whippersnappers with web and design skills; research and editing skills; or, heck, absolutely no skills whatsoever. That sound like you?

An American correspondent stationed in Moscow just forwarded me a WikiLeaked diplomatic cable about me, The eXile, and the Kremlin media-stomping in mid-2008 that killed my newspaper and sent me fleeing home. The June 16, 2008 US Embassy cable–marked “CONFIDENTIAL”–correctly put the crackdown on The eXile in the context of a wider (and scarier) crackdown on other Russian media outlets that coincided with the handover of power from Vladimir Putin to the newly-”elected” President Dmitry Medvedev.

  Before heading back to Moscow in June 2008 to face the Kremlin “audit” of The eXile, which I knew meant the death of the newspaper at the very least, I worked out a deal with my editors at Radar…

You have to give David Foster Wallace some credit – he was better at making his fans bash themselves than any other writer of the Pynchon school. His magnum opus, Infinite Jest, is a 1000-page novel full of intestinally-shaped sentences and fine-print notes on calculus, organic chemistry and VCR programming. Normally, when a book like that comes out, people realise its purpose right away: terrorising B.A. students into meek submission.

So if you’re interested in what a director does, or doesn’t do, go see Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. It’s a great film education watching Rob Marshall, the director replacing Gore Verbinski, wreck the Pirates franchise in one…

I was going through some of my Victorville notes and came across an amazing, untold story that I never had the chance to write up. This story is about California’s Miller family, an aristocratic clan that’s been extracting rent from California taxpayers for the past 150 years, ever since their patriarch started looting land back in the 19th century.

I just learned that a friend of mine got his human rights violated by the Mexican army, when he was grabbed off the street by a couple of soldiers, thrown into some dirty room, tied to a chair, stripped of his clothes and interrogated with the help of a friendly blowtorch.

We’ve been on a suicide mission. And you’ve had front row seats–and a free ride–the whole way. But nothing is free forever, folks. Not even career-suicide. So you need to pitch in and help us see through our mission of making this world a little less comfortable for everyone, especially the satisfied-ites. Help right now, it’ll only take a minute…

The second I had to quit daily blogging they got Osama. That was just one of the joys of starting a new job: Seeing all that great material wasted on mainstream journalists who have got to be the dumbest, most…

Bridesmaids is apparently a big deal. If we don’t all go see it, there will never be another movie made about women again. Or something like that.

Yesterday I confronted Jane Hamsher, founder of Firedoglake, over her refusal to honor a labor boycott against the Huffington Post that two major writers unions, The Newspaper Guild (TNG-CWA) and National Writers Union (NWU), have called for.