Brutal South

Discursive, self-indulgent, and inconsiderate of the audience’s time or interests, it’s everyone’s favorite Brutal South tradition: The exchange of rare and unusual Wikipedia articles with my pal the sportswriter Michael Baumann. Find him on Fangraphs where he writes about baseball, on Medium @wheelysports , and on Bluesky @baumann.bsky.social I needed this. Maybe you did too. This is a public epi...

Every December, my friend the sportswriter Michael Baumann joins me for a festive exchange of Wikipedia articles we gathered through the year. We’ve been exchanging them informally for well over a decade now, but in recent years we decided to make a podcast out of it. Mike covers baseball for FanGraphs.com . You can follow him on Twitter at @MichaelBaumann . If you’d like to follow along, here are...

My guest is Aaron Carey of the West Virginia black metal band Nechochwen. Aaron is a true Appalachian hesher who's also trained as a classical guitarist, and he's been using his musical project to retell and reinterpret indigenous history in his part of the world. He learned growing up that he was descended from some prominent members of the Shawnee and Lenape tribes, and he frequently talks about...

My guests today are Amber Campbell-Moore and Dr. Matt Cressler with the Charleston Area Justice Ministry, a good, radically inclusive organization working for social and economic justice in Charleston, S.C., and the greater Charleston area. As we speak today, the ministry is gearing up for its biggest public-facing event of the year, the Nehemiah Action. Every year at the Nehemiah Action, members...

I have a new piece of short fiction out today in the Charleston City Paper Lit Issue . It’s called “Possum Island,” and you can read it online or pick up a paper if you’re in the area. I thought it would be fun to make an audio version, so that’s what I did. Enjoy! If you’re looking for more stuff to listen to, check out the Brutal South podcast on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get podcasts. If...

We're gathered here today to speak of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a tremendous beautiful bird that is gone forever ... or so some people think. Hey. Welcome to Episode 29 of the Brutal South Podcast. The ivory-billed woodpecker has been on my mind again since late September when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed moving it and 22 other species from the endangered species list forever, ef...

My guest on the pod is Michael Smallwood ( @mikeluvsgushers ), an actor, director, podcaster, and screenwriter from Charleston. He recently appeared in the biggest movie role of his career as the character Marcus in Halloween Kills , the latest installment of the Michael Myers saga. If you've seen it, you'll recognize him as the guy in the doctor costume from the first 20 or so minutes of the movi...

Welcome back to the Brutal South podcast, Episode 27. I guess this was inevitable: We're going to talk about critical race theory, both as an actual framework for understanding the world and as a mostly unrelated buzzword that conservatives have been screeching about nonstop since this summer. It's been more than 3 months since I put out an episode, and customarily this is where I as a podcast hos...

My guest is Shane Claiborne, a Christian activist fighting against war, gun violence, and the death penalty. I got to meet him recently at a death penalty abolitionists' meeting in Columbia, S.C., and he graciously set aside a little time to talk about the struggle to end state-enforced killing in my state and across the country. On a personal note, Shane's writing has meant the world to me. His f...

Quick note in case you missed it: I’m trying to decide on a T-shirt design for Brutal South, and my friend CJ Bones came up with three metal-inspired logos to choose from. Click here to check them out and let me know which one you like the best. *** Brood X is upon us. I'm talking about a brood of cicadas that emerges mature from the earth just once every 17 years. They scream, they mate, and they...

My guest is Amethyst Ganaway, a chef and writer from North Charleston, South Carolina. Amethyst has been working in the restaurant industry for about 12 years, and during the past year she got deep into researching the history of food from our part of the country. She has published a few great pieces on what she's learned. The articles we'll be discussing are " Black Communities Have Always Used F...

My guest is Gardnsound , an Atlanta-based electronic music composer who is also one of my oldest and truest friends. I know him as Gardner. As long as I’ve known him, he has been a restless experimenter, from his classical training on the bass to his hard-partying dubstep phase to that time he wrote a song a day for an entire year . Along the way, he taught me a few things about music theory and k...

My guests are Bristow Marchant ( @BristowatHome ) and David Travis Bland ( @dtravisbland ), reporters at The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C. They and their colleagues went public with the formation of The State News Guild this week, seeking voluntary union recognition from management. On this episode we talk organizing strategy, debunk some common myths about “right-to-work” laws, and obsess ove...

My guest is Pastor Jim Conrad of Towne View Baptist Church in Kennesaw, Georgia. His church was, until recently, one of the only Southern Baptist churches that openly accepted and affirmed lesbian, gay, and transgender people. His church has been in the news since February because the Southern Baptist Convention, or SBC, voted to remove his church and another from Louisville, Kentucky, for taking...

My guests on today’s podcast are Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent of the band Shovels & Rope. Most of the songs featured in this episode are from their latest album, Busted Jukebox Vol. 3 , which you can buy at your local record store or download on Bandcamp . I was thinking back to 2012, when I interviewed them for a profile in the Charleston City Paper . They were hugely popular in Charleston a...

My podcast guest is Chuck Johnson, a musician who composes meditative songs on the pedal steel guitar. Chuck grew up in North Carolina, where he heard pedal steel in the context of country music. After building a career playing fingerpicked acoustic guitar in the style of Elizabeth Cotten and John Fahey, he picked up the pedal steel and took it in a new direction, using its vocal quality and unlim...

My guest is Kate Wagner ( @mcmansionhell ), architecture critic at The New Republic and proprietor of the McMansion Hell blog. Like me, Kate grew up in the South, and like me, she is a defender of brutalist architecture. Unlike me, Kate really knows what she's talking about. Brutalism is a style that grew out of 20th-century modernism, and it usually features hulking geometric forms and a lot of e...

Halfway through John Warner’s new book about higher education, it dawned on me that I was reading a manifesto. The book is called Sustainable. Resilient. Free. The Future of Public Higher Education (2020, Belt Publishing). It’s a sweeping diagnosis of what ails higher education in the United States, written from a place of deep frustration. John spent 20 years teaching in colleges and universities...

Michael Baumann ( @MichaelBaumann ), staff writer for The Ringer, joins me for the second annual Wikipedia Holiday Special. Mike and I met at the University of South Carolina, and one of the ways we’ve stayed in touch since graduating is by sending each other articles we find on Wikipedia. You could say it’s our love language. If you’re following along at home, here are the Wikipedia pages we’re d...

I convened this emergency podcast shortly after the release of Taylor Swift’s evermore , the out-of-nowhere follow-up to folklore . Joining me on the panel are my colleagues Michael Majchrowicz ( @mjmajchrowicz ) and Ari Pérez-Mejía. Subjects of interest for this episode include Myspace, parasocial relationships, Shakespeare, Cats , Zardulu the Mythmaker , eucatastrophe, Noah Baumbach divorce movi...

I’m publishing a new piece of fiction today. The title is “Charity,” and I’m releasing it in three parts. You can  read Part 1 via the Wednesday morning newsletter edition , or listen to the audio version here. Part 2 ,  Part 3 , and the  full audio edition  are available to paying subscribers only. Subscriptions are $5 a month and get you access to  exclusive content  and subscriber-only podcast...

My guest is the Rev. Dr. Jeremy Rutledge, the minister at Circular Congregational Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Jeremy and I have crossed paths several times over the years. He’s involved with social justice work in Charleston, we have a lot of friends in common, and I’m pretty sure I interviewed him a few times when I worked at the newspaper. I always loved talking with him, and recording...

My guest is Marvin Pendarvis, my state House representative here in South Carolina. He's about my age, one of a handful of millennials in the legislature, and he's been one of the loudest voices in the state capital on the issues of housing insecurity and evictions. I wanted to have him on the show because, 1, he's fighting an uphill battle that I think more people should know about, and 2, his ha...

This one’s a subscriber-only episode. Paying subscribers to the Brutal South newsletter get today’s full episode and access to all of the archives at brutalsouth.substack.com/archive . It’s $5 a month. Think about it. My guest is Ian Nix, lead vocalist and songwriter for the South Carolina metal band WVRM. If you follow heavy music, WVRM probably falls into genre labels like grindcore and death me...

I wrote in the newsletter a few weeks ago about this thing I saw with my kids when we were camping in the South Carolina Upstate. It was long and yellow and it moved like a slug, but it was shaped like a snake and it had a flattened sort of hammer head. It was horrifying. When we got home I wrote in to Rudy Mancke, who is sort of a legendary naturalist with a show on South Carolina Public Radio, a...