Kevin Koczwara

The thing no one tells you about freelancing is the constant waiting game for answers.

I’d missed this at the time - good interview with Jayson, who also (by the way) has a strong Sunday Review up on Pitchfork today about Redman.

It was. I also think it should have never have gotten to that point and oh boy it was bad before that.

The man knows how to build a winner and I’ll never blame that World Cup on him.

Respect the book at the bar game here.

How he continues to do this is remarkable. The Revolution have rarely been entertaining to watch, but bring Bruce in and they were a big-flying act for those breathless seasons.

Deep crossover cut

What’s amazing is playgrounds are way better today and you can in fact take your kids there. And if you like playgrounds as an adult they have adult ones for you to go to.

There are few pleasant surprises there days that seeing an anti-ICE and Trump gathering in downtown Shrewsbury of all places brought a big smile to my face as I drove my children across central mass for soccer games.

Side note: My daughter, a few years old, called AF LP3 "sad dad music" as a three year old because I was listening to the record on repeat in preparation for talking to Kinsella and I don't know if I've ever felt so seen.

I had an editor respond to a pitch I wrote about AF and Kinsella with a short answer: "I disagree with your premise" and now this profile fulfills that idea I had and I'm so glad someone finally did it.

Listen to all the emo wave iterations and we've gone full circle back to American Football (LP1), Cap'N Jazz, Braid, Joan of Arc, and far from My Chemical Romance (thank god) and other bands like that. And Kinsella's production no his Owen records has held up as well.

But I'd argue he is one of the most important musicians of the 21st century sonically. Listen to modern pop (Halsey, Olivia Rodrigo, even T Swift and Selena Gomez) and you will hear some inflection that sounds like Owen/American Football. Phoebe Bridgers? Yeah. There too.

He really didn't want to be there. He didn't want to be in Cambridge, Mass, at all really. I, and everyone else, didn't know his personal life was falling apart. But he also didn't understand why he was such an interesting person for me to want to write about.

Curtain Call in Cambridge: The Honesty of Mike Kinsella - Believer Magazine Mike Kinsella never intended to get that drunk. Dressed in the appropriate hipster-dad apparel of flannel shirt, dark, tight jeans and clean black-and-white checkered Vans, he walked on stage at the M...

To get Mike Kinsella to sit down and do an interview about himself is nearly impossible. I tried once and wrote a story for @thebeliever.net (www.thebeliever.net/logger/mike-...) and it was almost impossible.

American Football’s True Confessions When an album they'd made in college became an unlikely inspiration to generations of young rock bands, American Football got back together and hit the road—but can the reluctant Midwest-emo heroes su...

This profile is remarkable because it lays on the line a lot about a band that never expected to be a band and about a bunch of adults messing up and that's not what we get when we read about people we regard as our "heroes". And there's more. www.gq.com/story/americ...

Many conversations I have with friends about a book start with “I could have cut a third of it without a problem.”

(Someday I’ll write an essay about this teaching experience and AI and how they couldn’t read The Scarlet Letter or like Station Eleven because they can’t decipher nuance or understand time.)

At some point scoring points leaves you beat down with no sense of self or an identity. And then you die early because you’ve worked for something that doesn’t matter.

AI makes sense for them because school is transactional. It’s become a game. It’s about scoring points to get into a college that will score them more points for a job they think they’ll get, which is more points to their score, when that isn’t how life works or should work because

I’ve noticed my students can’t handle multiple point of view narratives or jumps on time in books or novels because they can decipher anything that isn’t clear cut and given to them because that’s how they’ve learned: they ask the internet for answers and get something back.

I tell my students once a week that they want you to use AI so you can’t think or do things for yourself so you become reliant on it and then they’ll charge you for it because they’ve brainwashed you into thinking it’s vital.

All these companies are like "We can't just turn these chatbot services off," really, I'm old enough to remember Vine

I tried to pitch a story about his brand and his dealings to a few places and got nowhere because he has crafted something of a legitimate identity. (Remember when the guardian credited him on transfer stories??)

Last week I started teaching my sophomore "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and most of them had little idea where Iran was or its history and I asked them again today and they still had no idea, never mind that we've gone to war with the country. TikTok and Snapchat don't rule the world.

Slowdive was built for this medium.

Chuck Schumer thinks letters work and that’s all you need to know about him.

To those of you who have read and enjoyed any of my three books, the reason they wound up in your hands is that in 2004, Ann Godoff, the editing and publishing giant who founded Penguin Press, took a chance on me. She died yesterday at 76. I owe her more than I can say. She changed my life. >

I think he’s fine. Atletico goes through midfielders and Simone knows he runs them into the ground. Johnny would be smart to start planning for a move before his legs go. He should be set for the WC roster as a bench option.