mike miliard

Latest Articles

Hoop nightmare

Len Bias’s death was more than just a basketball tragedy.
It wasn’t quite the world-shattering, where-were-you-when moment as the space shuttle Challenger exploding into cottony plumes earlier that year. But I still remember my naive and dazed disbelief upon hearing that basketball star Len Bias had died of a cocaine overdose on June 19, 1986
By MIKE MILIARD | October 28, 2009

Monkey Business

Boston's an academic city, even for capuchins who attend Brighton's Monkey College, where they're trained to be lifesavers for the disabled
Craig Cook remembers when friends tried to draw him out of a deep depression — by offering to get him a monkey.
By MIKE MILIARD | October 21, 2009

No alternative

Authentic Journalism Dept.
“I got very tired of being called an ‘alternative journalist’ for so many years,” says former Phoenix reporter Al Giordano. “Alternative to what?"
By MIKE MILIARD | October 14, 2009

Slideshow: Inside today's graphic novels

An exclusive look into a collection of graphic novels
Images from graphic novels like World War 3 , Drunk , Asterios Polyp , and more.
By PHOENIX STAFF | October 14, 2009

Lie of the land

Lying liars, and the end of accountability
In his new film, The Invention of Lying , Ricky Gervais plays Mark Bellison, a pudgy everyman who lives in Anytown in a utopian world where lies don't exist — until he tells one.
By MIKE MILIARD | October 07, 2009

It's hip to be icosahedral

In a new book, Ethan Gilsdorf tracks his global quest to visit the holiest nerd-world sites
Be they beer geeks, comic-book geeks, or music geeks, nowadays people flout their geekdom proudly, even wearing it like a badge.
By MIKE MILIARD | October 05, 2009

10 years later, we told you so

Ten years of being right (well, mostly)
Like many in the alternative press, we pride ourselves on being ahead of the game. Sometimes, of course, that means we're wrong about what might be coming down the pike — that's part of the risk of being "out front" and not just reacting to the news as it happens.
By DEIRDRE FULTON | September 16, 2009

Storied treasures

Arts and Crap Dept.
How much would you pay for a nutcracker James Dean used — precisely how, we can't guess — to pleasure himself? Or a cow-shaped creamer that once belonged to Norman Rockwell during a particularly dark period of his life?
By MIKE MILIARD | September 10, 2009

High dives

It's harder than ever to find a bar with soul in town these days. But it's not impossible.
Dive bars. Where the drinks are cold and stiff. Where the air wafts with the unmistakable but not-altogether-unpleasant tang of suds long since spilled. Where the neon shines bright and true and the jukebox plays good and loud.
By MIKE MILIARD | August 31, 2009

Big Fat Whale gets even fatter

Laugh Factory
Brian McFadden's comic strip Big Fat Whale — which can be seen semi-regularly in these very pages — had an inauspicious beginning.
By MIKE MILIARD | August 26, 2009

Why wind power blows

Why we shouldn't overload our energy basket with wind eggs
The world is looking for a no-brainer solution to the 21st century's impending energy crisis, and wind power seems to provide many of the right answers.
By DEIRDRE FULTON | August 19, 2009

A mighty wind

New England plays catch-up in the green-energy race
This past Earth Day, President Barack Obama, speaking at an Iowa wind-turbine factory, delivered a gusty peroration. "The nation that leads the world in creating new energy sources will be the nation that leads the 21st-century global economy," he said. "America can be that nation. America must be that nation."
By MIKE MILIARD | August 24, 2009

Photos: Stetson Wind in Maine

Images of Stetson Wind
Photos of Stetson Wind in Washington County, Maine
By MIKE MILIARD | August 19, 2009

The Funn(k)y Drummer

What's the connection between comedy and percussion?
Johnny Carson was revered for his impeccable comic timing. It was "so precise," wrote one newspaper in his obituary, "that we wouldn't be surprised to find buried in his skull a quartz crystal." And why might that be? Perhaps because Johnny Carson was a drummer. In drumming, after all, timing is everything.
By MIKE MILIARD | August 13, 2009

Rethinking liberal arts in the digital age

Liberal Arts is due for an update
They didn't teach genderfuck, iteration, or micropolitics when I was in college. But times have changed.
By MIKE MILIARD | July 23, 2009

Corporate parent kills WBCN

Closing time
WBCN-FM, a/k/a the “Rock of Boston,” has as storied a history as any Boston radio station, but its 41-year run on the local airwaves is ending with a whimper.
By ADAM REILLY AND MIKE MILIARD | July 17, 2009

Photos: WBCN through the years

Photos of WBCN and its personalities from the Boston Phoenix archives
A look back at WBCN
By PHOENIX STAFF | July 17, 2009

Weed picking up speed?

Just say now
When the Phoenix published a cover story about the potential tipping point in the fight to end marijuana prohibition, we smelled something in the air: it seemed more than ever that such a resolution might be possible.
By MIKE MILIARD | July 09, 2009

Factory food

Why the cheap, mass-produced food we eat is killing our environment, our economy — and us
Since Squanto taught the Pilgrims to plant maize, no food has been more emblematic of the evolution of American eating habits than corn. That's been true from the sepia-tinged golden age of the Midwestern breadbasket to the present day, where those yellow kernels are lab-engineered and recombinated into a dizzying array of futuristic foodstuffs.
By MIKE MILIARD | June 25, 2009

Review: Food, Inc.

As visually flashy as it is viscerally alarming
You are what you eat. And if you're like most Americans, you eat hamburgers made from cows who likely spent their lives crowded in fetid factory farms, ankle-deep in mud and excrement.
By MIKE MILIARD | June 16, 2009

Harvard riled by close encounters

Illegal Aliens Dept.
On September 16, 1994, 62 children in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, said they saw a spacecraft land near their school.
By MIKE MILIARD | June 10, 2009

Drawn together

Comic Koffeeklatsch
Boston needs more superheroes. Not because our metropolis is gripped by an unprecedented crime spree, but, says Dave Kender, because our comics are perhaps not muscular enough for their own good.
By MIKE MILIARD | June 03, 2009

Legalize pot now

With support from the unlikeliest circles, this could be marijuana's moment
The Obama administration, already overtaxed with two foreign campaigns, made headlines this past week when the White House's newly minted director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy called for an end to the "War on Drugs."
By MIKE MILIARD | June 01, 2009

Immaculate reception

The New England Patriots played host to a very different out-of-towner last week, as the Dalai Lama made a most incongruous visit to Gillette Stadium
Two Saturdays ago, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama sat cross-legged on the 50-yard line and gently intoned that "the path to happiness in the individual and with society is through inner peace."
By MIKE MILIARD | May 13, 2009

Good dirt

Davy Rothbart of Found magazine reads from Requiem on Saturday night at Precinct in Union Square
"Part of the mystery, when you find a love letter that was torn into bits: was it torn up by the person who received it, or did the person that wrote it tear it up before they even gave it to them?"
By MIKE MILIARD | May 06, 2009

Luis's Lost Years

After five decades of exile, Red Sox great Luis Tiant journeys back to Cuba
It had been nearly half a century since Luis Tiant stood on the Cuban soil where he was born, and where he first learned the skills that would see him become one of the greatest and most beloved pitchers in Red Sox history.
By MIKE MILIARD | April 22, 2009

And here's the verse part

The rivalry continues
I think it was Bashō who said, "Yankees suck three ways. So hard. So bad. Wicked bad."
By MIKE MILIARD | April 22, 2009

Unsexy is right

Letters to the Boston editor, April 17, 2009
Two weeks in a row your paper trumpeted the fact that Rush Limbaugh is at the top of your “Unsexiest Men” list.
By BOSTON PHOENIX LETTERS | April 15, 2009

Post-steroid baseball

Nine questions that will shape the new season
The bunting is hung. The chalk lines are laid out with Euclidian precision.
By MIKE MILIARD | April 02, 2009

Review: The Rocket that Fell to Earth

Roger Clemens's fall and rise and fall
On July 18, 1992, in a celebrated post-game meltdown at the Metrodome in Minneapolis, the pitcher formerly known as the Rocket expressed his displeasure over a column I had written.
By GEORGE KIMBALL | April 01, 2009

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