Lots of recent articles I haven’t shared here yet! First up, I’m in the Unpopulist talking about Superman, MAGA, and Grant Morrison:

To start with the obvious—and with a once unobjectionable aspect of the character that the current crop of right-wing commentators find deeply upsetting (more on that below)—Superman wasn’t born here. He is an immigrant, an alien, a refugee, a baby sent via rocketship from a dying planet to come crashing uninvited into the arms of America. His Kryptonian biology and the rays of our yellow sun would eventually make him stronger than a locomotive and faster than a speeding bullet, but it’s the benevolence of Smallville farmers Ma and Pa Kent that make him Superman. To take the story literally, America’s most iconic superhero spent his youth as an undocumented farm worker.

From the very beginning, the story of Superman—originally co-written by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, both sons of Jewish immigrants—is the promise of America: no matter where you come from there is room for you here to become your greatest self. The fantastical hero they created together in Cleveland may have looked like a corn-fed Kansas farmboy—a Black or Jewish Superman wouldn’t have flown in 1938—but it’s no coincidence that he came from another world.

Also at Unpopulist, I wrote about tariffs as a tax on delight:

We often think about tariffs as merely increasing prices, which is certainly bad enough. But you can also think of them as forcing regression to a less prosperous time. One of the most notable ways American life has improved in recent decades is our abundance of higher quality and more varied food and drink. Tariffs threaten to reverse that progress.

For the Examiner, I reviewed Penn Jillette’s fun new novel Felony Juggler:

“Bob Dylan never really did it, he never hopped a train, but I really did,” writes Poe Legette, the protagonist of Felony Juggler, a new novel from magician, upright bass player, and author Penn Jillette. Or maybe it’s Jillette talking. The line between Poe and Penn is blurry. The book draws heavily on Jillette’s years as a street performing juggler and self-described “carny trash” before he hit it big as the talkative half of the magic duo Penn and Teller. There are no TV shows or glitzy Vegas theaters here; this story takes place on street corners and at Renaissance fairs of the 1970s, any place a loudmouth with three clubs and a dialed-in routine could make a little cash.

For Inside Hook, I reviewed the stellar new mixer from Ooni:

For those of us who are into making pizza, the past decade has been an exciting era of innovation for the final minutes of the process: most notably, the invention of home ovens capable of reaching temperatures in excess of 900 degrees, bringing true Neapolitan-style pizzas right to our backyards. There’s been less innovation aimed at the crucial first few minutes, the time when flour, water, salt and yeast come together to make a dough. That changes with the release of the new Ooni Halo Pro Spiral Mixer, a versatile appliance that’s designed specifically with great pizza in mind.

Lastly, in June I traveled to Warsaw to give a keynote presentation at the Global Forum on Nicotine covering tobacco harm reduction and the media. You can stream it here.