Classic Emmylou and a Simple Simon

Plus today's hotshot cartoons

Greg Mitchell is the author of more than a dozen books and now writer/director of three award-winning films aired via PBS, including “Atomic Cover-up” and “Memorial Day Massacre.” Now Watch trailer for acclaimed 2025 film “The Atomic Bowl.” Before all that, he was a longtime editor of the legendary Crawdaddy. At Blue Sky and Twitter: as @gregmitch. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for FREE—so see new links to read about/order his books at bottom of this newsletter.

Headline from comic Andy Borowitz today: “Putin Agrees to Negotiate with Musk over Ownership of Trump.” Too on the nose? From NY Times this morning: “Trump’s remarks, when he sided fully with Russia’s narrative blaming Ukraine for the war, have now fortified the impression the US is prepared to abandon its role as a European ally and switch sides to embrace Vladimir Putin of Russia.”

Usual cartoons below, many from abroad.

Can’t get too excited about various honors conferred by the Grammy folks—there are so many every year—but still nice to see their choice this week of Emmylou Harris’ career-altering 1997 “Wrecking Ball” album for their Hall of Fame. It was one of the great albums of the 1990s (and since), with the usual inventive and swampy production and guitar work by Daniel Lanois. Songs by Lanois, Neil Young, Lucinda Williams, the McGarrigles, Julie Miller, young Gillian Welch, even Jimi Hendrix. She and Dan played much of it in this PBS “Sessions” program, below, and see if you can spot me in the crowd (I never have been able to)….

One track that would have fit in nicely on the album but didn’t make it: Richard Thompson’s “How Will I Ever Be Simple Again,” released later.

Meanwhile, Paul Simon has announced an extensive spring/summer tour, alone with wife Edie Brickell, calling it a “Quiet Celebration.” Surely in the works for awhile but announced the day after he kicked off the “SNL 50” special, if in faltering voice. Promo here:

See new links at bottom if you wish to sustain this (still somehow free) newsletter.

Monsters on the Loose

Steve Brodner:

Some of Greg Mitchell’s books, you might order one or more to help sustain this FREE newsletter (links to Amazon but most also available elsewhere), in no particular order.

>The best-selling “The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall—and the Historic Films JFK Tried to Kill” (Crown, 2016).

>Award winning “The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (The New Press, 2020).

>Another award winner (and considered a “classic” by many election nerds and others), “The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics” (Random House, 1992, and later editions).

>”So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits—and the President—Failed on Iraq” (Union Square Press, 2008), with a preface by Bruce Springsteen, Forword by Joe Galloway).

>”Tricky Dick and The Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas, Sexual Politics and the Red Scare” (Random House, 1998), a New York Times Notable Book.

“Vonnegut & Me,” an inexpensive (some would say cheap) little ebook recalling my interviews with the author and humorist in the 1970s, including a much-anthologized profile of the author by one Kilgore Trout.

>Best-seller “Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial,” with Robert Jay Lifton (Putnam’s, 1995).

>”Atomic Cover-up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and the Greatest Movie Never Made” (Sinclair Books, several updated editions), inspired my award-winning film of the same name.

>”Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried” (Sinclair Books, 2024), companion to my PBS film on the 1937 police murder of striking steel workers and activists in Chicago.

>”Who Owns Death? Capital Punishment and the American Conscience,” with Robert Jay Lifton (Morrow, 1999).