• 12 Oct, 2025 *

In keeping with the rhythm I seem to have established, these “best of the internet” issues are released only once its titular season has unquestionably drawn to a close. And “summer 2025” is no exception. I count this summer as having extended fully until the last warm day, last week Sunday, which means contrary to what may be popular opinion, mid-October is the ideal time to release a “summer” edition.

The unintentional theme of this edition is the American South. Like the Midwest, the South lies firmly out of the spotlight of popular culture, like the Midwest, there are many things about it that are worth appreciating.

Tomatoes. Tomatoes! My mother is in love with tomatoes. Her breakfasts have always been eggs with tomato slices and vinegar; throughout late summer, she ensured we always had heirloom tables in a bowl on the counter. On Saturday, we visited one of the last farmers’ markets of the season at closing time, and came away with as many heirloom tomatoes as we could carry. A pound of tomatoes for four dollars, a basket for two – tomatoes that needed to be eaten today, or canned or pickled or frozen.

Last night, I made my own tomato sauce – all the tomatoes that had burst slightly or had spots, chopped up with kalamata olives and a spoonful of brine from feta cheese. Oregano and thyme and black pepper and whatever we had in our spice drawer that looked suitable. It was deep and earthy, it was the perfect thing, it was exactly what I had been craving all late summer.

Saving a New Orleans Banksy – a tale of art restoration taken up by a local truck driver. Vandalized with a layer of spray paint over the original spray paint, smashed into the individual cinder blocks that made it up — yet the pieces were kept together and eventually restored to their former glory.

Inside the Dollar General Workers’ Fight for Safety and Fair Pay – a very telling narrative of what major franchises do to the communities where they operate. This is why buying local and supporting small businesses matters.

A Yellow House in New Orleans – An excerpt from a memoir written in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Who Killed the Mercy Man – using oral history to trace an early-twentieth-century murder through the ballads of Black laborers in levee camps along the Mississippi Delta.\

“Prior to the Civil War, a combination of enslaved men, convicts, and immigrant laborers worked along the river. After Emancipation, and the creation of the Mississippi Levee Board in 1879, Black men with few employment options entered what was effectively a peonage system when they joined a levee camp. Bosses forced them to work 16-hour days, housed them in flimsy tents surrounded by piles of trash and feces, and fed them stews of stale beans, greens, stalks, and roots. They withheld pay, drove men into debt by charging extortionate prices at the commissary and dealing them stopgap loans at 25 percent interest, and beat them with impunity. A worker could leave at his own risk, but he had no legal recourse; contractors and their henchmen were the law of the levee. ‘It is no exaggeration,’ wrote the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins in 1933, ‘to state that the conditions under which Negroes work in the federally-financed Mississippi levee construction camps approximate virtual slavery.’

From that misery came a bittersweet music—specifically the slow-moaned, hypnotic work songs known as levee camp hollers. Men pushing wheelbarrows or driving mule teams filled the air with what Lomax called the ‘wondrous recitativelike vocalizing through which black labor voiced the tragic horror of their condition.’ These hollers, along with the more rhythmic work songs of section and chain gangs, prefigured the Delta blues.“

Racialized, American oligarchy. It’s worthwhile, especially as the next opportunity to cast a ballot comes up, to remember horrors like these and ask if this — capitalist oligarchy, with no protections for workers — is really what we as a country want to go back to.

If you’re looking for a modern adaptation of this genre of music, the musical Hadestown borrows heavily from this history with its music and plotline. All… too… familiar.