PicoBlog

Holly Knight is a trailblazer. While it is still rare for women to find success exclusively as songwriters, it was even rarer in the 1980s. During that decade, Knight became one of the most sought after hitmakers in the industry, writing everything from Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield” to Tina Turner’s “The Best” to Patty Smyth’s “The Warrior”. Last week, the two of us sat down for an hour to talk about her upbringing, how she manages to capture such drama in her songs, and her recent memoir, I Am the Warrior: My Crazy Life Writing the Hits and Rocking the MTV Eighties, available now via Permuted Press.

“Can we do the interview now?” the voice asked me through the phone. “I was thinking we would find a different time for the actual interview, so I could prepare a bit,” I answered. Silence. I looked at the clock and knew I had a half hour free. “You know what? Let’s do it.” I am usually all about hyper-preparation, but when you have someone interesting on the phone — someone whose music is the most recognizable on Earth — you have to throw caution to the wind.

A new podcast from Serial and the New York Times takes a deep dive into an unsolved Laramie murder. The Coldest Case in Laramie explores the death of Shelli Wiley, a University of Wyoming student who was murdered in 1985. Her assailant stabbed her, dragged her into her apartment and set it ablaze. Kim Barker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for the New York Times, remembers learning about the murder back when she was a student of Laramie High School.

8-25 2022 (issue No. 50) Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. This week DuPage County Judge George J. Bakalis’ wish came true. When sentencing then-44-year-old Marilyn Lemak to life in prison without the possibility of parole in May 2002 for the crime of murdering her three young children, he told her he hoped that “every day as you look at the (prison) walls, the floor, the ceiling, the bars, you will see the faces of these young children and hear these young voices asking you, `Why, Mom?

I recently had a conversation with the poet and literary essayist Norman Finkelstein. The conversation touched on his work and mine, as well as on poetry, prose, dreams, gnosticism, psychotherapy, consciousness, thin places, dogs, cats, and a number of other things. I will say only that I found it all immensely enjoyable. It has come to my attention that the Substack player does not always work particularly well. If you have any difficulties, therefore, you can also watch the interview on the YouTube annex of Leaves in the Wind.

Rosalind Fox Solomon is one of the giants of photography whose work never fails to make itself felt. Her subjects have included ritual practices in Peru, Guatemala, Brazil, India; the racial dynamics of a post-civil rights American South; and the social landscape of AIDS in the late 1980s. For more than five decades she has travelled the world to make photographs, creating a vision of people and landscape, mystery and strangeness, “chaos and pressure”.

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces. Steve Sachs is managing director of the Guardian US, a role he assumed in October 2022. He also serves on the Board of the Texas Tribune, and has worked with Cityside and other nonprofit news orgs. Previous roles included leading tech start-ups and a significant stint on the business side of Time Inc.

This warning comes from Chris Rosebrough, a pastor formally trained in biblical languages, Christian doctrine and comparative religion. As the creator of the “Fighting for Faith” podcast, Pastor Rosebrough has devoted himself to exposing cults, including Awaken Church of San Diego. I had the opportunity to interview the pastor this week to get his take on Awaken and its founder, Jurgen Matthesius. Along with the FBI, there are numerous concerned parties monitoring Awaken, including “christofascism and extremism” researcher Kate Burns, who has compiled an in-depth look at the history, politics and culture wars of Awaken:

I’ve been wanting to write about Cyberpunk for a while now. It’s one of my favorite games I’ve ever played, though I did play it on PC and several months after release to give the developers some time to fix an obviously broken game. I consider it to be a masterpiece and in my pantheon of games I hold most dear (along with Skies of Arcadia, Outer Wilds, Halo and Destiny).