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MIKE MILIARD

Latest Articles

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

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