Mae Brussell (1922-1988), also known as "the Queen of Conspiracies," would have been 104 years old today.
Take some time to learn about a small fraction of Mae Brussell's considerable accomplishments by clicking HERE.
Buy a copy of THE ESSENTIAL MAE BRUSSELL (2014) by clicking HERE.
And avail yourself of Brussell's groundbreaking articles right HERE.
Recommended Listening: Given the delirious fact that the topic of missing and dead scientists is now in the news again, perhaps this would be an appropriate day to revisit Mae Brussell's analysis of Leslie Watkins, David Ambrose, and Christopher Miles' chimerical 1978 book, ALTERNATIVE 3. Fifteen years after ALTERNATIVE 3's debut, the late Jim Keith contributed to this ongoing parapolitical saga with the publication of his 1994 book, CASEBOOK ON ALTERNATIVE 3 (later republished under the more generic sounding title, MIND CONTROL AND UFOS).
You can find both of Brussell's Alternative 3 episodes directly below...
#380 03.16.79 Mae Brussell:
#381 03.23.79 Mae Brussell:
"There's no news service in the world that makes the connections between the events they're describing... and the past."
My friend and colleague, Stephen Cooper, recently published his debut collection of short stories, RIVER OF ANGELS (What Books, 2025). An examination of both the landscape and mindscape of Southern California, this collection delivers subtle, quotidian surprises on nearly every page. Since Cooper's first book was a biography of John Fante, it's not unexpected to see Fante's shadow haunting the outermost edges of these stories. Other important influences pervade RIVER OF ANGEL'S arid landscapes as well. Andrew Tonkovich, editor of SANTA MONICA REVIEW, identifies several of them in his perceptive cover blurb: Isaac Babel, Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov, and Flannery O'Connor.
Upon reaching the conclusion of the collection's fourth story, "The Lash of Saint Francis," I couldn't help but think about the under-acknowledged Scottish writer, George Mackay Brown (whose work influenced the music of Peter Maxwell Davies). I first discovered Brown's fiction as a teenager when I read his 1969 collection, A TIME TO KEEP, and unexpectedly found myself swept away to a distant, cold, isolated world populated by the fishermen and farmers of the Orkney Islands. The stories possessed an ineffable quality that appealed to me for reasons I couldn't quite nail down (perhaps it was my Scottish roots calling out to some hidden part of my brain). Brown often wrote about the trials and travails of conflicted Catholics and did so with simple, straight-forward, unadorned prose. For that reason, I detected Brown's spirit haunting the very edges of "The Lash of Saint Francis," a quiet tale about a fourth grade Catholic school teacher named Theresa Landry whose mounting mental crisis is juxtaposed effectively against the absurd and gaudy backdrop of a cheap carnival that has set up shop in the school's parking lot. In Cooper's stories, the characters are entwined so intimately with their environment that they almost become one and the same, as in this passage from "The Lash of St. Francis":
"The first drop of rain fell on the corner of Theresa's mouth. She licked her lip tasting what it must taste like to lick the newest street in Los Angeles, tarry and granular and unnamed. And then, trembling up from under her, the thunder.
"The downpour came fast and pounding. People were covering themselves, running, splashing through puddles. Theresa walked on, soaking through. Soon all the exposed rides had stopped turning, the whirling caged things, the infernal Ferris wheel. The carnival was almost deserted and still Theresa walked, through swirling veils of rain..."
She is compelled to take a ridein the Cyclo-Rama-Clone, a "small hangar-like enclosure" that reminds Theresa of "an ancient cistern," which only heightens her anxiety. The increasing claustrophobia of this scene fuels the story's climax, a psychological apotheosis for our disorientated grade-school instructor.
Cooper's characters sometimes find themselves both mentally and physically alienated from the rest of society. In "River of Angels," the adrenaline-fueled relationship of two reckless artist-lovers comes to an explosive conclusion "in the shadow of a vaulted overpass" populated by the urban strays of Los Angeles: coyotes, cats, dogs, possums, and even fellow human beings.
In "Terminal Island," the narrator learns bittersweet truths about his past--as well as his inevitable future--from an old wartime bunker cut off from the rest of the world just beneath the idyllic, oceanview landscape of the Palos Verdes Hills.
If you want to hear Cooper talking about these stories and more, I recommend listening to his recent two-part BIBLIOCRACY radio interview. Just click HERE and then scroll down to the 1-14-26 and 1-21-26 episodes.
Directly below you will find a link to Cooper'sreading at the legendary Beyond Baroque bookstore in Venice, CA from the night of November 21, 2025:
An Evening with What Books Press & Giant Claw:
And if all that isn't enough for you, Cooper recently published a brand new essay about the work of John Fante ("John Fante, Unwritten") in the most recent edition of the SANTA MONICA REVIEW...
In this Golden Age of AI-generated eye vomit, I highly suggest acquiring an unshakeable addiction to outmoded forms of physical media as soon as possible. To that end, why not start with honoring what would have been Harlan Ellison's 92nd birthday by picking up these rapidly vanishing spoken word CDs (ON THE ROAD WITH ELLISON VOLUMES 1-8), which are still available for purchase from Deep Shag Records? Particularly illuminating is Harlan's anecdote on Volume 5 about watching Robert Zimmerman get his ass handed to him in a New York dive bar in the early 1960s. If you want a sneak preview of what you will find on these discs, click HERE for Harlan's classic gopher story.
Click HERE to order the CDs directly from Deep Shag Records.
Needless to say, you should also go out of your way to pick up a copy of HARLAN ELLISON'S GREATEST HITS, the second volume of which is forthcoming (or so I hear).
Rep. Thomas Massie has claimed that Melania Trump “knows” Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t running his child sex abuse ring alone.
Massie, 55, appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday and confirmed that he personally planned to reveal more names from the Epstein files after a lack of clear action from the acting attorney general.
“Todd Blanche is violating the law. There’s still millions of files they haven’t released,” he said.
“We know from talking to the victims’ lawyers that their own 302 forms haven’t been released. We know the files have been over-redacted. I have released at least three names of billionaires who are implicated in this.”
The Republican, who lost his House primary last week, added, “I don’t think it’s possible to get to convictions with Todd Blanche at the top and with the FBI director, Kash Patel, at the top, because they have effectively both perjured themselves by saying there’s nobody else in the files.”
He then claimed of Donald Trump’s wife, “Even Melania doesn’t believe that. The first lady knows that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t act alone” [...].
The Trump critic has vowed to spend his final seven months in office continuing to push for transparency, having joined Ro Khanna in naming billionaire Leon Black, banker Jes Staley, and businessman Leslie Wexner as three names originally redacted in the files—along with six others they described as “likely implicated” in Epstein’s orbit.
From Ashleigh Fields' 5-14-26 THE HILL article entitled "What Is MK-Ultra and Why Is It Making Headlines?":
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) has amplified her push to uncover the details of CIA’s Project MK-Ultra with claims this week that the agency took relevant documents from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence [...].
Luna is planning to resume congressional hearings on the topic following a February article from the Daily Mail noting that a new report on the intelligence service studying mind control was added to the CIA reading room last year [...].
Testimonies provided to Congress in 1977 outline the repeated use of criminals and cancer patients as subjects in the behavioral modification research led by the CIA [...].
Experiments took place in hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies, according to the Times’s reporting [...].
Lawmakers have long pushed for access to documents detailing information and participants in Project MK-Ultra.
“Many of the people experimented upon were unaware of what was happening to them and suffered catastrophic, sometimes lifelong, consequences,” per the Harvard research paper.
In 1973, during the Watergate scandal, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the agency to destroy records related to the MK-Ultra study, but more than 20,000 documents survived due to misfiles, according to the Harvard paper and a separate report from the El Pais newspaper in Spain.
Questions are still swirling over how many of the people and institutions involved in the study were informed of the CIA’s aims or involvement [...].
Luna says she’s attempting to locate some of these documents, but on Wednesday she accused the CIA of confiscating records from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s office.
The lawmaker, who chairs the House Oversight Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, said late last month that the task force would soon hold a hearing on MK-Ultra files.
My latest story, "They Creep in the Dark," has just been unleashed in the pages of EXPERIMENTAL FILES: AN ANTHOLOGY OF TALES INSPIRED BY "EXPERIMENTAL FILM" BY GEMMA FILES (published by Weird Fiction Quarterly), an all-new collection of cinematic horror stories edited by Elizabeth Mitchell and Sarah Walker! This hefty anthology also includes hand-made illustrations drawn by Gemma Files herself.
Those of you who have read BELA LUGOSI AND THE MONOGRAM NINE (the 2019 cinema book I co-wrote with Gary D. Rhodes) will appreciate the peculiar connections between this tale and William Beaudine's cult classic 1943 Lugosi film, THE APE MAN.
Please note that all profit generated by this anthology will be donated to autism research efforts. You can buy your copy of EXPERIMENTAL FILES right HERE!
I took advantage of OR Books' recent May Day sale to snatch up the quartet of peculiar books you see below. Leaving aside the fact that OR has released two of my own books (CHAMELEO and OPERATION MINDFUCK), I'm also a huge fan of their work. In an age when the Fraternal Order of Tech Bros is spending trillions of dollars trying to brainwash the general public into accepting AI slop as manna from the skies, I suggest throwing some financial support toward a genuinely progressive company that is on the front lines of publishing (and republishing) fearless, independent works. OR Books is without a doubt one of the most efficient and creative publishers I've ever worked with. Whether they're having a sale or not, I recommend picking up a few titles from their extensive catalogue (and if one or two of those titles happen to be written by Yours Truly, you won't hear me complaining). You can check out their website right HERE!
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