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MIKE MILIARD

Latest Articles

Interview: John Oliver

The British comic and Daily Show correspondent on Glenn Beck, gun nuts, and the National Health
John Oliver is English. There's no getting around it, really.

By: MIKE MILIARD | August 27, 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

Davis Guggenheim films his essay on the electric guitar
Some guitar teachers will tell you there’s a right way and a wrong way to play the guitar. But Davis Guggenheim’s rousing new documentary, It Might Get Loud, reminds us that that’s not true at all.

By: MIKE MILIARD | August 27, 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

Holding a finger to the wind

An energy expert forecasts a blustery day ahead for the region
Across New England, there's currently less than 150 megawatts worth of wind turbines installed and operational. That's small change compared with what's happening in places such as Texas and California. But it's a whole lot more than existed just a few years ago.

By: MIKE MILIARD | August 19, 2009

Photos: Stetson Wind in Maine

Images of Stetson Wind
Photos of Stetson Wind in Washington County, Maine

By: MIKE MILIARD | August 19, 2009

Photos + Review: Pretenders, Cat Power at Pavilion

The Pretenders + Cat Power + Juliette Lewis | August 12, 2009 at Bank of America Pavilion
The Pretenders + Cat Power + Juliette Lewis | August 12, 2009 at Bank of America Pavilion

By: MIKE MILIARD | August 14, 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

Mr. Peepers in Mumbai

Can Chris Kattan be a Bollywood Hero?
Here's something Chris Kattan probably rarely hears in real life: "In Night at the Roxbury, you were awesome!" Such, however, is the encomium proffered by two young Indian fans toward the beginning of IFC's somewhat random but not altogether terrible new mini-series Bollywood Hero .

By: MIKE MILIARD | August 05, 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

Madcap laffs

The Mighty Boosh comes to DVD
Come with us now, on a journey through time and space to the world of the Mighty Boosh.

By: MIKE MILIARD | July 15, 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

Endurance Reads

Summer-Book Therapy Sessions
Beach reading . The very phrase is abhorrent to book lovers, connoting as it does cheap paperbacks, tumescent with air-dried seawater and crunchy with sand, paragraph after paragraph of poorly written pulp meant to be read as fast as the passing of summer itself.

By: MIKE MILIARD | June 17, 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

Review: Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh

Tragic and moving
Budapest-born Hannah Senesh was safe in 1943.

By: MIKE MILIARD | June 10, 2009

Hard times

A former junkie looks back at tough days in Lowell
"You just shit yourself — every muscle, every joint aches. Your entire body cries for heroin. Just one bag of heroin, you know that's all you need, and you'll feel better."

By: MIKE MILIARD | June 08, 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

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