Michael Hood

By Bob the Dog Listen up, bipedal creatures: I've been sniffing around the pharmaceutical fire hydrant of American politics long enough to recognize the distinctive aroma of pure, concentrated bullshit. I’m a four-legged truth-seeker with a wet nose calibrated for detecting political deception from three counties away.

By Mike Eight years had elapsed since Voltaire abandoned Candide on a suburban farm outside Constantinople, leaving him to contemplate vegetables, mortality, and his Netflix queue. The author was bored with his creation—a occupational hazard when you invent characters more optimistic than golden retrievers on antidepressants. Cunegonde, Candide’s

By Bernice the Fly, Special Correspondent (Diptera Division) Filed from a lampshade above the espresso machine in the FOX News boardroom Lesley Stahl herself tapped me on the thorax and said, "Bernice, darling, it's time." With that, she handed me a press credential smaller than a

By Bob the Dog, Political Correspondent-at-Large and Obsessive-Tree-Sniffer Democracy smells like a fire hydrant. Not the sanitized, civics-textbook version they peddle to schoolchildren alongside plastic presidents and freeze-dried founding fathers, but the real thing—rusted metal pungent with ammonia, wet concrete, and the collective piss-dreams of a republic in heat.

by Penelope the Owl, Who Would Call but the Existential Abyss Swallowed Her Cell Tower. I perch here, on this branch of cosmic understanding, watching you humans perform the strange ritual you call "socializing." Once upon a moonlit yesteryear, Americans gathered around tables laden with overcooked vegetables and

I, Maurice the Goat—philosophical ruminant, connoisseur of tin cans and truth—have been observing your species with the intensity of a Buddhist monk watching paint dry on the walls of eternity. My beard catches not just brambles but broadcast signals from the cosmic comedy channel known as American Democracy.

By Em (publisher, writer, and reluctant stand-in) Our regular menagerie of literary beasts—Ed the dog, Penelope the owl, and Maurice the goat—are enjoying their day off, presumably engaged in whatever activities animals pursue when not forced to compose prose for human consumption. Thus, you find yourself subjected to