The Monday Media Diet with Dan Sinker

On rebel spirit, Dead Eyes, and Hanif Abdurraqib

Dan Sinker is an American journalist known for creating Punk Planet, a punk rock zine which ran from 1994 to 2007. Thanks to Harper Reed for the introduction. -Colin (CJN)

Hi, I’m Dan! I’m a journalist, podcaster, multimedia artist, and maker. I have spent decades making things like the magazine Punk Planet (RIP), the @MayorEmanuel Twitter account (and book The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel), the journalism-tech nonprofit OpenNews and the current events podcast Says Who which was supposed to last for eight episodes but has been going for eight years. I’ve written for the New York Times and the Atlantic and especially Esquire, where I’ve profiled everyone from musicians to professional wrestlers. I am constantly looking for new things to make and new stories to tell. 

The two things I have done most recently are among the things I am most proud of:  

• I created the fictional world of Question Mark, Ohio with the author Joe Meno. It was a year-long storytelling project that spanned the entire internet, from multiple social platforms to over 40 stand-alone websites. We built it all to tell the story of a town that is disappearing and the way the residents of that town react and, in the process, to tell a story about grief and change.

• I am producing the podcast Rebel Spirit, from iHeart and Akilah Hughes. It is the story of Akilah’s attempt to change her high school mascot from the Rebels, named after the confederacy, to the Biscuits, a piece of Southern culture everyone can love. It is hilarious and furious and each episode offers a deep dive into everything from sports mascot design to the history of post-Civil War white terrorism, but what it is really about is the clash between moving forward and turning back. A clash that we’re seeing play out every day as we lead up to the election.

Describe your media diet. 

My media diet 10 days before election day 2024 is the equivalent of just sucking down cigarettes and chasing them down with grain alcohol. It’s completely ill-advised, definitely unhealthy, and probably will kill me. I’m just mainlining news sites constantly, checking polling averages, looking at the various live updates that the main news orgs all have now. Refresh refresh refresh. My anxiety is spiked as the election gets closer and closer. But I can’t stop, as if somehow one final refresh will solve it all. It won’t. 

I do try and consume a little bit of media that isn’t going to cause me to stroke out. I’ve really been enjoying binging the podcast Dead Eyes, which came out a few years ago but is new to me, about actor and comedian Connor Ratliff’s attempt to find out why he got fired by Tom Hanks back in 2000. And I’ve been obsessively playing the game UFO 50, which is actually 50 games all “restored” from a fictional 1980s game console. And when I really just want to switch off and laugh, the 15th season of the absolutely brilliant British panel show Taskmaster has been there for me.

What’s the last great book you read?

A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them. I am not sure I’ve ever stopped thinking about this book since I got it from the library last year. It’s an unblinking history of 1920s America when the Klan–the hooded white supremacist terrorist organization–was entirely mainstream. Like held-a-parade-in-Washington-DC mainstream. Like had-a-youth-organization-that-competed-with-the-Boy-Scouts mainstream. And while the whole book is a really engrossing narrative, what has stuck with me ever since is how much of the history that it documents has been completely memory-holed. And how it would be good to remember it right now, as the US teeters once again on a moment of mainstream white supremacy.

What are you reading now?

I think like everyone else I’ve been working my way through the Slow Horses series, compelled by how good the TV show has been. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a British spy book where the spies are all incompetent. I also just finished Death at Morning House by Maureen Johnson, my co-conspirator on the Says Who podcast and honestly there is almost nothing better than getting lost in a book written by a friend and realizing just how lucky you are to have such talent in your life.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

I will forever love the front-of-book of a magazine. The way a good editor puts together a lot of short, disparate pieces that end up feeling like a satisfying whole, I love it so much. So that’s where I’m always stopping off at first when I pick up a magazine, whatever magazine. You get so many bites at whatever the editors and writers are passionate about that month, it’s great every time. I also think that the front-of-book is something that the internet still hasn’t done a great job of replicating, so it still feels really unique to the medium.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

Hanif Abdurraqib, essayist and poet. Hanif crafts perhaps the best sentences I have ever read in my entire life. When I got his A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance from the library, I read it, immediately started it over and read it a second time, then returned it and bought it and read it again. His latest, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, I have been reading slowly, little sips to savor it as long as possible. Every single word exists for a reason, every sentence in conversation with the ones next to them. Sometimes I get jealous of how good he writes but mostly I appreciate being able to read it.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone? 

It’s not so much an app but man whoever figured out the button combo for screenshots is my hero.

Plane or train?

Plane. We roadtrip a lot, spending most summers in the back of our Airstream trailer, plodding across the landscape a few hundred miles at a shot. It’s a very slow way to travel–towing miles are a lot longer than regular miles–but also a very rewarding one. But you don’t get anywhere very fast and so planes feel completely magical to me. It takes a few hours to get somewhere that it would normally take us days. And all I have to do is sit in a tube in the sky. Incredible!

What is one place everyone should visit? 

Just one place? Yeesh. People should travel. Go everywhere. So many problems right now are because people are incurious about the world around them. Be curious.

But, OK, the question isn’t my treatise on travel, it’s about one place: The gallery at the LA County Museum of Art that houses Chris Burden’s incredible installation Metropolis II. To do this incredible piece of art a major injustice, I’ll describe it as a room-sized Hot Wheels track. There are over 1000 toy cars that traverse a massive—like truly massive—cityscape.  There are two huge conveyor belts on either side that the cars travel up before being sent whizzing down dozens of curving ramps, powered by nothing but gravity. The scale of it is unreal. You can view it from ground level or from a balcony that wraps around it. Because the constant motion is hard on the toy cars’ axles, they only open the gallery a few times a day, and only run the conveyor belts for an hour at a time. The last time I was there, in February 2020 just before the world shut down and well into knowing that something terrible was about to happen, I got there before they turned on the conveyor belt for the first time and stayed the entire hour it ran. About halfway through I started weeping. There’s just something about it that is so moving to me. Go see it.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

I feel like my whole life is spent traveling down rabbit holes. That’s really what reporting is in a lot of ways: traveling down a rabbit hole as deep as you can go. When I joined Akilah as a producer for the Rebel Spirit podcast, the first rabbit hole I went down was trying to prove out a hunch. The origin story of the Rebels team name that we’d been told was that it was named after Rebel Without a Cause, the James Dean film that came out in October of 1955. Considering that the school mascot was a giant foam-headed Confederate General named Mr. Rebel, not a greaser in a leather jacket, it sure seemed like bullshit, but how do you prove a 70-year-old story where most eyewitnesses are either ancient or dead? We knew the school had been founded in 1954 before the movie came out, so OK that was something, but what I wanted to know was when was the team named? Thankfully the Boone County Kentucky newspaper had decades digitized at the library, and I went through every single issue from 1953-1956 to figure out if there was any reference to the origin of the team name. But reporting back then was pretty sparse. Nobody was really on the high school beat, and, often when the newspaper from this largely agricultural area would cover it, they wouldn’t actually use the team name. It was really frustrating, I felt like I was chasing ghosts. Plus, I was doing it in the least-efficient way possible: I was actually in my trailer at the time, two-finger pinching through these PDFs on my phone. Finally, after a few days of digging, I came across an article about the grand opening of the school. And there, a few paragraphs in, they gave up the goods with a paragraph about the newly-named Rebels. In October of 1954, a year before Rebel Without a Cause would be released. It was so satisfying to go down that rabbit hole on a hunch and be able to prove it beyond a single doubt. I’ve gone down so many rabbit hole since then, including an absolutely insane one about a white supremacist camping trip, but I’ll keep that one for another day.