Category: Other Writing

Our Most Important Thanksgiving Traditions 🦃💀

I repost this (or a variant of it) every year. This is a year, and so I repost. QED. After all, without our traditions, we are as shakey as a fiddler on the roof.

1. “What do Jews do on Thanksgiving?”

I wrote this essay a few years back, as a little bonus for the folks kind enough to have subscribed to my newsletter.  A good friend, Chris Salzman, was gracious enough to make something pretty of it. I relish the opportunity to reshare it each year, and I’m doing so once again.  Every word here is both true and factual—which is a harder trick than you’d think.

You’ll be 15 minutes into that Lesser Family Feast in Michigan when your mother-in-law will turn to you and ask:

“What do Jews do on Thanksgiving?”

You should be prepared for this sort of thing in Michigan. But even though I’m warning you in advance, you still won’t be prepared.…

(read more: IN MICHIGAN: A PRIMER, A TRAVELOGUE)

2. “As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!”

THANKSGIVING TURKEY GIVEAWAY! (WKRP in Cincinnati) from Tony DeSanto on Vimeo.

I repost this every year mostly because I love this gag, and because watching this on TV—and rehashing it with my mom and sisters each year—is one of my fondest holiday memories. But I also come back to it again and again because it is a damned near perfect piece of writing. (If you wanna read more of my thoughts on this specific gag and what it can teach writers, you can do so here.)

3. “…your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs; we will sell our bracelets by the road sides…”

I share this because the song cracks me up and I sorta love Wednesday’s “Pocahontas” speech, but also because there is a way that the writers put “majority unpleasantness” on display here that I really miss. The depiction of “Running Bear” is cruel, but also empowering. I felt seen, as a chubby insecure Jewish kid watching this scene.

4. ♬♫♪ “Caught his eye on turkey day / As we both ate Pumpkin Pie … ” ♬♫♪

Man, I remember when this song was big when I was little; you couldn’t turn on AM radio without hearing those synths from Halloween onward. Man, the memories! ♬♫♪

5. The Alice’s Restaurant Massacre (in four part harmony)

I’m a child of the 1980s, so most of my nostalgic holiday memories are TV- or radio-related. 🤷‍♀️

I hope your T-day is good and sweet.  Gobblegobble! 🦃💀

Fake Outrage, Real Damage 🤖✨💀

The real lesson of the Great Cracker Barrel Logo Debacle of 2025: Stop and think, dammit.

In August a struggling restaurant chain whose customer base is mostly over 65 made a mild logo change. (That change wasn’t even really a change: the “new logo” closely matched the alternate version of the logo Cracker Barrel had been using on menus and digital ads for six years.)

This “change” triggered a social media firestorm, which ignited a minor culture war brushfire. A week later ~40% of that company’s market value had gone up in smoke, and already weak foot traffic dropped another 8% (per WSJ). That’s $545 million gone, and no doubt more than a few jobs with it.

Within 60 days the chain pulled a complete 180, trashing 18 months of work on everything from visual identity to food-prep procedures.

Then it turns out that the social media firestorm was mostly fabricated. Around half of all the griping was automated bots (via NRN and Restaurant Business). Much of the “real” complaining from humans was in response to the fabricated controversy.

Now the whole story comes out, and I’ve seen a string of mediocre “thought leadership” posts on LinkedIn using this as an object lesson. Those pieces of “thought leadership” invariably have turned out to be entirely AI written. ( 🤖✨ writing is pretty easy to spot, but I still use Pangram to check my work.)

Meanwhile, Cracker Barrel still serves mediocre food slowly to a dwindling audience under the auspices of a logo and decor that haven’t changed since the Carter administration. At every stage in this farce, people are reacting to and amplifying artificial signals rather than honestly listening and talking to each other—and causing real harm in the mix—and never stopping to ask if they actually care, if any of this matters, if what they are doing is tending toward making things better, if they even have a goal or preferred end-state in mind…oy.🤦‍♀️

Archive.org brings you Halloween Treats! 🍬🍭🎃👻🔪💉👶⚰️

"Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child's Book about Satanic Ritual Abuse" cover

I’ve spoken at length about the Satanic Panic in the past, especially Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse—which was a real book that was earnestly written and actually published in order to (traumatically) teach children and parents how to recognize the signs of something that was believed to be an epidemic when I was a kid, but in fact never ever ever happened to anyone (more details, with links to sources, at my original post).

"Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child's Book about Satanic Ritual Abuse" ritual

Sadly, I’d never come across a print copy of the complete book. Happily, that no longer matters because the good folks at Archive.org have digitized it and you can now read the whole thing online for free:

Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse on Archive.org

(As an added bonus, Archive.org also has this law enforcement training video on Satanic Cults from 1994! Again: real resources for taking real actions in the real world to address a made-up thing, often with disastrous consequences for people who did nothing wrong.)

The full text of Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy is worth a look. Seeing the whole book really does underscore that this was a well-intentioned project (and even decently trauma informed, for the period). But those good intentions were tragically misdirected, literally paving a road to hell for some folks who were accused of imagined atrocities.

I suppose there is a lesson there, America. I don’t imagine we’ll learn it.

“Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”

Yesterday was Yom Kippur, which means there was a Yizkor service with my congregation, which means I spent much of the day thinking of my father (of blessed memory), who I loved a great deal, despite not necessarily liking him very much.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

by Richard Wilbur

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul   

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple   

As false dawn.

                     Outside the open window   

The morning air is all awash with angels.

    Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,   

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.   

Now they are rising together in calm swells   

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear   

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

    Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving   

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden   

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

                                             The soul shrinks

    From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,

And cries,

               “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,   

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

    Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,   

The soul descends once more in bitter love   

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,   

    “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;   

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,   

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating   

Of dark habits,

                      keeping their difficult balance.”

Your introduction to the Crypto-Jews of the American Southwest

Some readers are thrown by a reference in my latest story to the protagonist, home inspector and minor-TV celebrity Sadie Espinoza, who describes getting bullied in high school, noting that:

Jewish Espinozas weren’t remotely “wetbacks.” They weren’t even “immigrants”: they’d been in New Mexico—where her dad and his brother grew up—since before it was “New Mexico.” The only thing calling her “wetback” did was make it clear how stupid those girls were, like a house cat strutting around thinking it caught a snake when all it had was a shitty old lizard tail.

Some folks are confused because they had an American public school primary education east of the Mississippi (as I did), and thus don’t know that Santa Fe is the oldest state capitol in the US, having been establish 150 years before the country was founded.

A much greater portion of readers are confused because they think of all Jews as European shtetl folk who came here in the late 19th and early 20th C (as mine did), and thus know nothing about the extremely long history of Jews in the New World (short version: we’ve always been here, and you’ve never liked us).

Anyway, if you’re curious about any of this, the graphic novel El Illuminado is a good introduction to Crypto-Jews and the impact the Inquisition had on world Jewry. Maybe more importantly, it’s really fair in how it illustrates the divisions and discomforts within and among Jews of different traditions/colors/descents, as well as the way that even established, assimilated, respected, modern, “White” Jews often find themselves alienated no matter where they try to stand or sit.

To be clear: I am in no way suggesting that IKEA may pose an existential threat to the fabric of reality

My latest horror story, “The Nölmyna,” is now officially published and free to read on Reactor: https://reactormag.com/the-nolmyra-david-erik-nelson/

A few months back I hung out with Ann VanderMeer, who edited this story for Reactor, at a conference in Florida. We ended up talking about Grady Hendrix, and I mentioned that this story sort of arose out of my frustration with Hendrix’s first book, Horrorstör. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with that book—which I really liked—just that it wasn’t the story I would have written about IKEA. This one is. 

I’ve spoken before about how much of my writing (and, I believe, much of art in general) arises from frustration that some artist Isn’t Doing It Right, Dammit!™. That’s certainly the case here: I wrote “The Nölmyna,” in part, because Hendrix hadn’t Done It Right, Dammit!™, and so I’d better just jump in and take care of that.

But it wasn’t until this morning that it dawned on me how deeply unreasonable it was for me to pick up Horrorstör and expect it to be the story I expected, because I have deeply weird feelings about IKEA that are simply not the norm:

Almost 20 years ago I was diagnosed with panic disorder with agoraphobia. This is well managed now, but I continue to struggle with certain public spaces, especially those like IKEA: cavernous places that have poor sight lines, lots of people, no windows, and obtuse wayfinding. I can function in these places, but I experience dissociation and depersonalization, intrusive thoughts, a free-floating dread, and pretty much would rather be anyone or anyplace else. If you’ve ever been too stoned on too much edibles, you’re in the ballpark. 

IKEA is the seat of cosmic horror for me. This morning it dawned on me that maybe other people don’t experience this. Like, when I say “I hate IKEA,” what I mean is “When I’m in IKEA, I often feel like it would be better to stop breathing and being alive anymore.” I’m beginning to suspect when other people say “I hate IKEA,” they just mean “it’s crowded and weirdly stuffy” or “that furniture only holds up half the time” or “my partner and I always get in arguments there about lamps.”

Anyway, the publisher’s legal team very nicely asked me not to call the store “IKEA” in this story. But it’s IKEA. This story is about the true nature of IKEA and the distinct possibility that, through no fault of their own, they are creating the conditions for the absorptive annihilation of All of Everything by an Eminent and Imminent Immanence.  You’ve been warned.

This might be an extremely important short story to read right now

“In My Country” by Thomas Ha in Clarkesworld magazine.

As an aside, and totally unrelated to why this is an important story (and especially so right now), this piece both explains and perfectly epitomizes why I love the stories I love, and what’s missing from those I don’t love, for whatever that is worth.

Cyberpunk is Gen X’s “populuxe”—or using aesthetics to predict the future

Burning Chrome was a favorite of mine in the mid-1990s, when I first read the title story in an Oxford sci-fi anthology I found for a couple bucks at a used bookstore.

Cover art for William Gibson's short story collection BURNING CHROME. Shows a pixelated blue/grey hued bust of a human figure.

Before that decade (and century, and millennium) was done, I’d read every one of these stories more than once, fascinated with the future Gibson painted, one I could see just around the corner. Some of these stories (like “Johnny Mnemonic” and “Burning Chrome” and “Dogfight”) I read over and over and over again. The best of these (esp. those last two) are really solid, tight, classic noir tales (albeit ones modeled after Jim Thompson’s The Grifters more than Dashiel Hammett’s gumshoes). The rest are, at best, stylistic sketching exercises; they more often have punchlines than plots. Gibson wrote all but three of these stories before Neuromancer, his debut and breakout novel (published in 1984.) Prior to 1982, Gibson doesn’t appear to have precisely known what a plot is. I’m not sure he’d argue with me on that; he’s said himself that although he’d been writing “stories” since the 1970s, the first one that was actually a proper story was ”Burning Chrome” (published in 1982, and basically a prototype for Neuromancer).

Cyberpunk is a future that looks an awful lot like the past, especially now (although even then, Gibson was firmly rooted in the past, sometimes formally—as with “The Gernsback Continuum”, other times more subtly, as with the noir plots he gravitates toward, and which become the heist/resistance themes that seem to form the skeleton of most cyberpunk stories still).

I’m old now, and Gibson, it turns out, is to me what Hugo Gernsback/1950’s “Populuxe“/Frank Frazetta/“Googie”/Eero Saarinen were to him. I think it’s appropriate that these are primarily visual artists and movements: Gibson has always been more of a visual artist and stylist than a writer, despite how culturally and politically prescient his writing has been. I’m given to wonder if that is why he’s proven so upsettingly accurate in his predictions (which I don’t think he thought of as predictions at all): the “Deep Pilot” might express itself in words, but runs its pattern matching on a purely aesthetic basis. We may be talking apes today, but at heart we will always be the monkeys that first daubed paintings of the world we hoped—or feared—we’d soon see on French cave walls.

“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

William Gibson

The bravest and most horrifying book I’ve read in ages

Before this year, I had no clue The Power or Naomi Alderman existed—despite the acclaim the book met when it was published in 2016, and the fact that its apparently been made into an Amazon mini-series starring Toni Collette, who I absolutely love. A colleague in a crit group read a story I was working on, and recommended I read this. She was absolutely right.

Cover are for the near-future scifi dystopia novel THE POWER by Naomi Alderman shows red hand print overlayed with a winding root-like/lightning-0like pattern in grey.

When I say this is the bravest and most horrifying book I’ve read in ages, I’m not exaggerating. I actually had to stop about 10 minutes from the end because I was in a Thai restaurant in Orlando and was on the verge of bursting into tears, and didn’t want everyone staring at me. This book is easily better, and darker, than Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale (both a book and artist I hold in hella high regard).

One clarification: when I told my wife that this book was the bravest and most horrifying thing I’d read in years, she totally misunderstood what I found horrifying in the book. She assumed I was upset by the rapes. There are several very graphic and traumatic rapes of men by women in this novel, as well as broader sexual subjugation of men.

Frankly, none of that really bothered me. I’ve read fictional depictions and non-fictional accounts of the rapes of men and boys that I’ve found more upsetting. Talk to anyone who’s worked for child protective services and you’ll hear an earful. Humans are, on balance, awfully creative when it comes to being awful.

What got me about this book is that, evidently and despite it all, there was some small part of me that had continued to really and deeply believe that “everything would be better if women were in charge.” Alderman meticulously dismembered and violated that foolish, optimistic child that was still hiding inside me.