MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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ABOUT US
Dagblog was founded in the mid-1960's as an homage by devoted followers of deceased UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold. After Al Gore invented the Internet, these "dagbloggers" began "posting" their "blogs" on said Internet. Today, they number eight strong, and beneath a series of "avatars" they hold forth every day on topics, including politics, international affairs, sports, entertainment, and their lives. They, and dagblog, are simply all that. In short, to paraphrase Gwen Stefani, their shit is bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S.
But seriously, dagblog is six guys and two woman who don't get enough attention in their personal lives and want to post anonymously about issues of common concern, to get your attention. They have conference calls sometimes, but can't agree on a dagblog T-shirt design. In short, to paraphrase Gwen Stefani, their shit is bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S.
Michael Wolraich co-founded this little blog with a few friends back in 2008. After spending far too much time toying with internet trolls, he decided to become a writer because “writer” sounds cooler than “software freelancer” and way cooler than “founder of some blog that you’ve never heard of, and OK Zoomer, do you even know what a blog is?”
Under the naive impression that one can earn a living by writing books, Wolraich set about writing a book, and lo and behold, a publisher agreed to publish it. Indeed, as of 2025, with dagblog.com mere moments away from permanent hibernation, Wolraich has published three whole books, some of which have even been reviewed, nay praised, by respectable newspapers that start with the word “The.”
Wolraich has also published pieces at various highfalutin media outlets like Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, TIME Magazine, New York Magazine, CNN.com, Reuters, and Talking Points Memo—the blog that inspired the whole dagblog thing in the first place, so you can blame Josh Marshall for all that has happened since.
Wolraich is also the computer genius who maintains (or rather maintained) dagblog’s state-of-the-art software, but he denies responsibility for technical glitches and advises users to “quit sniveling.” In his spare time, Wolraich raises peach mold and performs live impressions of the law of gravity while referring to himself in the third person.
Anyway, here are the books, in case you’re curious. Please consider purchasing several thousand copies of each. (Warning, the last one is a mouthful. Alas, Wolraich did not get to choose the title.)
THE BISHOP AND THE BUTTERFLY: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age (Union Square & Co., 2024, Edgar Allen Poe Award finalist)
UNREASONABLE MEN: Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Rebels Who Created Progressive Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
BLOWING SMOKE: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual (Da Capo Press, 2010)
Michael Maiello (also known as "Destor23") is a New York based columnist, performer, fiction author and playwright. He is the author of Shuts & Failures, Rejected New Yorker Pieces (Also Rejected by McSweeney's!). He worked for ten years at Forbes Media, writing and editing for both Forbes Magazine and Forbes.com and also appeared frequently on CNBC, Fox News, Fox Business News, CNN and MSNBC. He is also the author of the 2004 book Buy The Rumor, Sell The Fact: 85 Wall Street Maxims and What They Really Mean. He has performed stand up comedy at The Laugh Factory, The Comic Strip and the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Mama D's Arts Bordello and The Lost and Found Show. He has had four plays published (Night of Faith and Waiting For Death by Playscripts.com; Principia and Troy! Troy! Troy!by The New York Theatre Experience/indiethieatrenow). He has written for Rolling Stone, The Daily, Reuters, Esquire, McSweeney's the Liar's League reading series and theNewerYork.
Doctor Cleveland is a transparent pseudonym for Shakespeare scholar Jim Marino, who blogs about politics, education, literature, and the arts. His personal obsessions include live theater, Red Sox baseball, and powerful black coffee. He teaches college, somewhere along America's glorious North Coast. He has also been known to write about Shakespeare and early modern theater.
While he blogs about the general academic life, he does not discuss his current institution, its students, or its employees on the blog. Nor does he use any university resources to blog. Opinions expressed on the blog are not those of his employer, and do not reflect the content of his classes.
Ramona used to write nice feature pieces for newspapers and magazines, along with columns that, yes, got testy once in a while (Ronald Reagan was president. What could she do?) but were basically and overall nice.
But then. . .
. . .then came the hanky-panky and subsequent impeachment of Bill Clinton! Then Bush v. Gore! Hanging Chads! Katherine Harris! Supreme Court busy bodies! 9/11! War with Iraq! (Iraq??) The right wing! The religious right! The TEA PARTY, for God's sake!
Whatever she is today is the fault of all of the above. She is not to blame.
Born in swaddling clothes (designer, of course) at the confluence of big waters, my first recorded words were "Dad, can I have the keys to the car?" Raised a Southern Pedestrian, my musical talents were recognized at an early age, leading to my being exiled to the shed out back with a stack of books that became my eddykayshun - advanced readin', writin' & ritmytick, creating a major quandary of "what will I do, oh what will I do?" (Gunslinger)
As an old black man advised in song, "You Gotta Move", so move I did, traveling the byways sideways even a lot of driveways, picking up sticks and psychological tics, even movin' to Beverlee through a quaint misunderstanding of the seriousness of TV series, until finally I blew up so big the carry nation incarnation tarnation couldn't hold me no more, so I fixed my sights on yonder sitar, and like Queequeg and Paul Bowles and one of those abducted kids by the Pied Piper of Hamelin, I ventured forth to the larger world, pickin' and grinnin', doin' me some reckonin' and naughts from naughts, occasionally rightin', building me some buildings and wiring and just trying to understand the babble comin' out of people's mouths and heads, I finally ended up in what Rummy quaintly calls "New Europe", which ain't so new from what I sees, but that pit in my stomach from lack-of-moving-sickness finally disappeared, and instead I sit behind a whopping big desk stacked with missives from all the chiefs with big whampum around the world telling me "what's going on". Which seems like a load of boolshit to me, but I guess that's what keeps me busy and entertained now, separatin' the weeds from the chapstick.
So my name is Perry Keys, or Peracles to you, and since my mammy always said, "say please and thank you", I added the please, but I'm holdin' back on that thankee until I feel you've earned it. But do welcome, and I hope we's a gonna have a real good time. It all starts with, "I wuz born a poor young white chile livin' in the South..." and we cycle through again, like Nietzsche and his infernal regurgence. So enjoy, and let's spin a spell...
Danny Cardwell believes he was born to love, read, think, write, and die. He's a Deacon at Piney Grove Baptist Church in Hot Springs, Virginia. He has tutored, lectured, and mentored at risk youth in churches, group homes, and inside the Virginia Department of Corrections. He's a contributor at Faithfully Magazine, the station coordinator at WCHG Allegheny Mountain Radio, and serves on the board of directors for Preservation Bath.