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Dan Perkins, whom Kurt Vonnegut calls “the wry voice of American common sense, humor, and decency,” is better known as Tom Tomorrow, creator of the award-winning syndicated strip “This Modern World.” This year, he published his third anthology, The Wrath of Sparky (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin).

Mother Jones asked Perkins what he’s been reading lately. He suggested re>Wired (New York: HarperPerennial, 1996):

“This Wired parody captures the magazine’s smug, self-contained, and ultimately empty techno-libertarianism while satirizing digital elitists Nicholas Negroponte, John Perry Barlow, and Wired co-founder Louis Rossetto (here ‘Lewis Risotto’). Unfortunately, while the concept is on target, the follow-through tends to fall flat. But the two-page spread that takes Wired‘s read-me-if-you-can design to its logical extreme is worth the price in itself.”

Perkins also recommends:

A cynical, charming, and unpredictable road novel-slash-romance set in and around Alamogordo, N.M., Cathryn Alpert’s Rocket City (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1996) begins with a classic opening line — “Three melons and a dwarf sat in the front of Marilee’s ’72 Dodge, but the cop was not amused…” — and it just gets better from there.

On Grown Man (New York: Virgin Records, 1995), Loudon Wainwright III sings about aging, infidelity, genetic predetermination, his acknowledged failings as a father (in a brutally honest duet with his daughter), and his response to a female friend who idly wishes she was a lesbian (“…now at that point,” he sings, “I wanted to say, you mean you wish you were a lesbian, because grammatically…”).

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PLEASE—BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

We’ll say it loud and clear: At Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please do your part and help us reach our $150,000 membership goal by May 31.

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