"Food for Thought,” the surreal short directed, shot, and edited by Gary Hanna and written by and starring Adam Nelson, has been named Best Experimental Film at the 26th Annual Coney Island Film Festival in Brooklyn, New York. The win follows the film’s Best Silent Film award at the 9th annual Festival Del Cinema Assurdo — the Absurd Film Festival — held at the Auditorium Centro Culturale “Il Pertini” in Cinisello Balsamo, just outside Milan, Italy.

Adrift on the Asbury Park boardwalk, a half-starved sailor searches for scraps — of food, of memory, of meaning. Sun-struck and drifting between hallucination and history, he wanders through the ruins of a world that left him shipwrecked. The result is a salt-rusted meditation on hunger, erasure, and the price of progress.

Now in its 26th year, the Coney Island Film Festival has been named one of MovieMaker Magazine’s “25 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee” and “25 Coolest Film Festivals.” Produced by the nonprofit Coney Island USA, the festival has earned a reputation for grit, whimsy, and an unapologetically independent spirit, screening a deliberately eclectic slate across every genre imaginable. Past honorees include Darren Aronofsky.

“Food for Thought” was created for the AP’N3 Film Challenge, the Asbury Park Arts Council’s fiercely inventive three-week filmmaking competition. On Day One, each team received a theme, prop, line of dialogue, and location, the only ingredients allowed. Competing in the On Location category, every frame had to be filmed entirely within Asbury Park’s borders, transforming the city itself into both subject and character.

The twin wins mark the latest chapter in an unlikely creative partnership. Nelson and Hanna first met when Hanna cast Nelson as a subject in University of the Arts – We’re Still Here, his ongoing documentary series investigating the abrupt 2024 collapse of the nearly 150-year-old Philadelphia institution where both filmmakers studied at very different times — Hanna as a Film major in the Class of 2004, Nelson as a Theatre student in the Class of 1991.
​
What began as an interview about the shuttered school became a working friendship, and then a creative engine.

Hanna is an accomplished director, cinematographer, editor, and 3D artist whose multi-decade career spans filmmaking, animation, and digital storytelling. He began at Banyan Productions, assisting on Trading Spaces and Ambush Makeover, before spending more than a decade as a camera operator and live editor at Crystalline Studios, capturing high-profile corporate events with the precision of a newsroom and the polish of a studio feature. As the founder of Psynema, he expanded into 3D animation and game asset production, developing the Houdini-based plugin Hairdini, adopted by mainstream gaming studios and featured on 80.lv. His production credits include a Little Caesars commercial for Current TV and an NHL Winter Classic highlight picked up by the league. He continues contract work with New Pace Productions, New Cape Pictures, and ES3D Studios, contributing camera, lighting, and advanced 3D modeling for Unreal Engine medical simulations and RPG environments. Hanna’s work blends cinematic instinct with technical innovation — a restless, evolving artist grounded in story, texture, and the drive to elevate every frame.

Nelson is an actor, writer, filmmaker, and founder of Workhouse, the nationally recognized PR agency he has run for nearly three decades. Trained at Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, the University of the Arts, Yale, and the British American Drama Academy at Oxford, he was a founding member of New York’s Workhouse Theater alongside Adrienne Shelly, Mira Sorvino, Calista Flockhart, and Tom Sizemore, and later secured rights from the Lenny Bruce estate to adapt How to Talk Dirty and Influence People into an Off-Broadway one-man show. In 2001 he co-produced The 24 Hour Plays: Broadway for the World Trade Center Relief Fund and was named a winner of the Writer’s Digest International Writing Competition for screenwriting. His previous short, Flower, shot on an iPhone during COVID lockdown, won Best Mobile Short at the Berlin Indie Film Festival.

Nelson also serves as Professor and Academic Lead for the New Jersey Film Academy’s Script to Screen program, a workforce-development course preparing students for New Jersey’s rapidly expanding film and television industry. The curriculum moves from story development and pre-production through on-set protocols, departmental structure, and distribution, bridging the classroom and the working set.
​
His debut novel, Huckleberry Jim, was developed over six years at The Novelry under a former Penguin Random House editor. Two actors try to hold a children’s tour of Huckleberry Finn together — while the country tries to tear them apart. The debut novel that rips the curtain down on America’s oldest performance.​ 

He is the publisher of Socko! Magazine which recently launched at the New Jersey Film Expo. 

With two international festival wins in hand, Hanna and Nelson are already deep into their next collaboration: BUSE!, a factory-inspired comedy that will serve as their official entry in the 2026 AP’N3 Short Film Challenge. Production will begin this summer in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

“Food for Thought” — Awards & Selections
Winner: Best Experimental Film, 2026 Coney Island Film Festival (Brooklyn, NY)
Winner: Best Silent Film, 2026 Absurd Film Festival (Milan, Italy)
Official Selection: 24th Annual Garden State Film Festival (East Coast Premiere)
Finalist: 2025 AP’N3 Film Challenge, Asbury Park

Credits
Directed by Gary Hanna
Written by Adam Nelson
Produced by Adam Nelson and Gary Hanna
Cinematography & Edited by Gary Hanna
Original Music by Adam Nelson, in collaboration with ElevenLabs
​
Key Cast
Adam Nelson – “Sailor”
Edmondo Abbruzzese – “Signore”
Nicole Abbruzzese Nelson – “Senora”
Janet Abbruzzese – “Signora”
Jessica Abbruzzese – “Senorita”
And introducing Viva June Nelson as “Baby"

New Jersey is the fastest-growing film production market in the United States. Its filming count jumped 45 percent in Q1 2026 while every other major market in the country declined. Netflix is building a billion-dollar studio at Fort Monmouth. Lionsgate is rising in Newark. Paramount just signed a ten-year lease in Bayonne. And until now, the state that invented American cinema has never had its own film focused publication.
​
That changes on April 30.

SOCKO!, a new magazine built both for the New Jersey film and television industry and its fans, launches its inaugural issue at the New Jersey Film Expo at Meadowlands Arena in East Rutherford. The issue is titled “New Jersey Now!” and its cover, photographed by Samad Haq, features two-and-a-half-year-old Viva June as a goddess of entertainment, golden lightning bolt in hand, standing at the gates of a new era. It is intentionally symbolic: old Hollywood DNA, young Jersey fire.

SOCKO! is co-founded by Angela Matusik and Adam Nelson. Matusik, who serves as Editor in Chief, was one of the founding editors of InStyle, held senior editorial leadership roles at People and NBCUniversal, and ran global brand and content at HP. She has produced several award-winning documentary film series including The Big Idea, which won a 2024 Webby, and is co-founder of the Maplewood Film Society. Nelson, SOCKO!’s Publisher, wrote the issue’s cover story, is founder of Workhouse, an award-winning public relations agency, and a professor at the New Jersey Film Academy at Brookdale Community College.

“The idea for SOCKO! rose out of a constant drumbeat about how much is happening around film and entertainment in New Jersey right now,” said Matusik. “We’ve seen our charming village taken over by production crews. Everyone you meet is working on a new show, play, or film project. The new studios are rising. One thing is clear: New Jersey deserves its own publication that not only celebrates its historic influence on film, but its new starring role as the heartbeat of the entertainment industry.”
​
“I have spent my whole life at the intersection of performance and storytelling, and I have never seen anything like what is happening in the state right now,” said Nelson. “We named it SOCKO! because that is the sound a great story makes when it hits you in the chest. Which is what is happening in New Jersey right now, the original home of American cinema. It’s waking up after a hundred-year nap. Every great industry deserves a voice that matches its ambition. There is no publication like this because there has never been a moment like this. Somebody needed to be in the room writing it all down. That’s us.”

The inaugural issue is stacked. Nelson’s cover story, “New Jersey Now!,” is a full-throated declaration on the state’s return to the center of filmmaking. Nicole Acosta of the Thomas Edison Foundation contributes “The Mother of All Film Studios,” tracing the story of Edison’s Black Maria in West Orange, the $650 shack where all of this began, and in a magazine born in the same state as the medium itself, the piece reads less like history and more like a birth certificate. “There Is Oil in the Ground” dives into the Netflix studios at Fort Monmouth, the gold rush it ignites, and the warning the state cannot afford to forget. “America’s Greatest Export Is Leaving Home” makes the case for a federal film tax incentive through the Coalition for American Production, the nationwide alliance fighting to keep production on American soil. Barry Lyga profiles legendary producer Michael Uslan, the New Jersey Hall of Famer behind the Batman franchise, in “Life Lessons from Batman’s Protector and Defender.” Nelson sits down with Diane Raver, the woman who built the New Jersey Film Academy, in “The Keeper of Jersey’s Cinematic Flame.” Wilhelm Kuhn profiles master film editor Tim Squyres, Ang Lee’s longtime collaborator, in “Shining Light on the Man in the Dark.” Matusik profiles renowned production designer Jane Musky, the talent behind When Harry Met Sally and Ghost, in “Magic Maker,” and much, much more.

SOCKO! launches at the second annual New Jersey Film Expo, the largest gathering of the state’s film and television production community. Last year’s inaugural Expo drew more than 3,000 attendees and 80 vendors. This year returns bigger, with speaker panels, exhibits from indie suppliers to major studio operations, and a keynote address by Governor Mikie Sherrill. The Expo is hosted by the Screen Alliance of New Jersey, April 30 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Meadowlands Arena, 50 State Route 120, East Rutherford, NJ 07073. Admission is free. Register at screenalliancenj.com/nj-film-expo.

Founding partners of SOCKO! include the Edison Foundation, the New Jersey Film Academy, the New Jersey Production Guide, the Garden State Film Festival, and Workhouse.

For more information, visit sockomagazine.com.

Gary Hanna and Adam Nelson's sun-struck short takes top honors at Milan, Italy's Absurd Film Festival as the duo prepares their next collab "BUSE!"

"Food for Thought," the surreal short directed, shot, and edited by Gary Hanna and written by and starring Adam Nelson, has been named Best Silent Film at the 9th annual Festival Del Cinema Assurdo—the Absurd Film Festival— held at the Auditorium Centro Culturale "Il Pertini" in Cinisello Balsamo, just outside Milan, Italy.

The film will next screen stateside at the 26th annual Coney Island Film Festival, playing as part of Program 7 — Music Video/Experimental on Saturday, May 2, 2026 at 7:00 PM at the Coney Island Museum in Brooklyn.

Adrift on the Asbury Park boardwalk, a half-starved sailor searches for scraps — of food, of memory, of meaning. Sun-struck and drifting between hallucination and history, he wanders through the ruins of a world that left him shipwrecked. The result is a salt-rusted meditation on hunger, erasure, and the price of progress.

The Absurd Film Festival celebrates filmmakers who dare to be different, challenge conventions, and break the mold, a fitting home for a film built under extreme creative pressure. "Food for Thought" was created for the AP'N3 Film Challenge, the Asbury Park Arts Council’s fiercely inventive three-week filmmaking competition. On Day One, each team received a theme, prop, line of dialogue, and location, the only ingredients allowed. Competing in the On Location category, every frame had to be filmed entirely within the City of Asbury Park’s borders, transforming the city itself into both subject and character.

The win marks the latest chapter in an unlikely creative partnership. Nelson and Hanna first met when Hanna cast Nelson as a subject in University of the Arts – We're Still Here, his ongoing documentary series investigating the abrupt 2024 collapse of the nearly 150-year-old Philadelphia institution where both filmmakers studied at very different times — Hanna as a Film major in the Class of 2004, Nelson as a Theatre student in the Class of 1991.

What began as an interview about the shuttered school became a working friendship, and then a creative engine.

Hanna is an accomplished director, cinematographer, editor, and 3D artist whose multi-decade career spans filmmaking, animation, and digital storytelling. He began at Banyan Productions, assisting on Trading Spaces and Ambush Makeover, before spending more than a decade as a camera operator and live editor at Crystalline Studios, capturing high-profile corporate events with the precision of a newsroom and the polish of a studio feature. As the founder of Psynema, he expanded into 3D animation and game asset production, developing the Houdini-based plugin Hairdini, adopted by mainstream gaming studios and featured on 80.lv. His production credits include a Little Caesars commercial for Current TV and an NHL Winter Classic highlight picked up by the league. He continues contract work with New Pace Productions, New Cape Pictures, and ES3D Studios, contributing camera, lighting, and advanced 3D modeling for Unreal Engine medical simulations and RPG environments. Hanna's work blends cinematic instinct with technical innovation — a restless, evolving artist grounded in story, texture, and the drive to elevate every frame.

Nelson is an actor, writer, filmmaker, and founder of Workhouse, the nationally recognized PR agency he has run for nearly three decades. In 2001 he co-produced The 24 Hour Plays: Broadway for the World Trade Center Relief Fund and was named a winner of the Writer's Digest International Writing Competition for screenwriting. His previous short, Flower, shot on an iPhone during COVID lockdown, won Best Mobile Short at the Berlin Indie Film Festival.

He also serves as Professor and Academic Lead for the New Jersey Film Academy’s Script to Screen program, a workforce-development course preparing students for New Jersey's rapidly expanding film and television industry. The curriculum moves from story development and pre-production through on-set protocols, departmental structure, and distribution, bridging the classroom and the working set.

His debut novel, Huckleberry Jim, was developed over six years at The Novelry under a former Penguin Random House editor, and revolves around two actors trying to hold a children's tour of Huckleberry Finn together — while the country tries to tear them apart.

The Coney Island screening marks the film's Brooklyn debut. Now in its 26th year, the Coney Island Film Festival has been named one of MovieMaker Magazine's "25 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee" and "25 Coolest Film Festivals," with a reputation for grit, whimsy, and an unapologetically independent spirit fitting for a beachside festival whose past honorees include Darren Aronofsky. The fest is produced by the nonprofit Coney Island USA and screens a deliberately eclectic slate across every genre imaginable.

With the Italian win, Hanna and Nelson are already deep into their next collaboration: BUSE!, a factory-inspired comedy that will serve as their official entry in the 2026 AP'N3 Short Film Challenge. Production will begin this summer in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

"Food for Thought" — Awards & Selections
Winner: Best Silent Film, 2026 Absurd Film Festival (Milan, Italy)
Finalist: 2025 AP'N3 Film Challenge
Official Selection: 2026 Garden State Film Festival

Credits
Directed by Gary Hanna
Written by Adam Nelson
Produced by Adam Nelson and Gary Hanna
Cinematography & Edited by Gary Hanna
Original Music by Adam Nelson, in collaboration with ElevenLabs

Key Cast
Adam Nelson - "Sailor"
Edmondo Abbruzzese - "Signore"
Nicole Abbruzzese Nelson - "Senora"
Janet Abbruzzese - "Signora"
Jessica Abbruzzese - "Senorita"
And introducing Viva June Nelson as "Baby"

Interested media contact Workhouse, Account Director, Kat Carlson via kat@workhousepr.com

Venessa Peruda brings her solo show All the Rage to the 2026 NYC Fringe Festival next week with four performances at The RAT—April 4, 5, 12, and 14—as part of FRIGID New York.

The show tackles female anger head-on. 

"I'm a clown, I'm an artist, I'm a woman who has deep feelings about the state of our World and how Patriarchy has driven us to the breaking point," Peruda says.

All the Rage premiered at Edinburgh Festival Fringe before heading to New York. Peruda calls it "entertaining and educational, unhinged and therapeutic"—a description that signals exactly the kind of experience audiences are walking into.

Her core claim is blunt: women have been tricked out of one of their most useful emotions.

"Anger is the key. The greatest trick Patriarchy ever pulled was convincing women their anger was wrong and shameful. When in fact it is the key to our liberation, and the path to rebuild the World."

The show works as comedy, but a specific kind. Peruda's clown training means she knows how to physicalize what usually stays invisible—the internal churn women learn to suppress in order to get through a workday, a date, a doctor's appointment, a conversation with someone who won't stop interrupting.

"I think it's hysterical. Displaying the ironies and pitfalls women are forced to endure is hilarious and cathartic in a pee-yourself-a-little kind of way." 

Interested media contact Workhouse, CEO, Adam Nelson via Nelson@workhousepr.com

Read the full article here 

She uses humor to expose what everyone already knows but nobody says. When a room full of people laughs at the same buried truth, something cracks open.

"I'm thrilled to relate to women how we can channel our anger through humor when we feel overwhelmed, helpless, or backed into a corner."

Peruda's material comes from her own history. She didn't theorize her way into this subject.

"I come from a single mom home with siblings who tortured and loved each other fiercely. I had a difficult upbringing which taught me that humor can not only soothe but bring people together. I was a good kid, until I wasn't. I railed against the World and nearly destroyed myself in the process. Then I worked tirelessly to lift myself out of an old story that said I was supposed to stay small and accept the hand I was dealt."

That railing nearly cost her everything. What saved her was learning to turn raw emotion into craft.

"Now I still rail against the World but with a deadly wit and the knowing that I can do great things."

The New York premiere lands at a charged moment, and Peruda knows her audience.

"My feed is filled with furious women desperate for answers, for something to do with their inescapable rage they carry with them when they go to work, when they drop their kids off at school, or when they bravely try to go on a first date. Women need this catharsis right now. We need to scream, we need to laugh, and we need to come to an understanding that we absolutely have the power to change things."
​
What the show delivers isn't instruction or ideology. It's an hour where no one has to hold it together.
​
"I'm reminding women of the innate and righteous power we all have inside of us. Our anger is sacred, and our collective anger can change this World."

Peruda doesn't wait for endorsement to do this work.

"I'm very proud of myself and the work I do. It takes a great deal of focus and courage to combat the violent and fear-based systems of this World."

And when asked who authorized her to go this far, the answer is instant.
​
"The voices in my head. They said I don't need permission."

All the Rage runs April 4, 5, 12, and 14 at The RAT as part of FRIGID New York. Tickets available through frigid.nyc.

​Janna Scott saw this coming. The founder of DeFi Tax spent two years studying exactly this kind of structural breakdown before launching her platform this month.

Back in December 2021, Scott’s accounting clients started asking whether their crypto tax reports were accurate. She decided to test the question directly. She took one wallet and ran it through fourteen major tax platforms. The results came back fourteen different ways, with discrepancies sometimes reaching tens of thousands of dollars on identical data.

“I kept seeing the same pattern,” Scott said. “People thought their taxes were handled until an audit or notice showed up. When I audited crypto tax platforms themselves, I realized many of them couldn’t explain their own numbers.”

Why the Form Falls Short
The 1099-DA’s missing cost basis isn’t an accident. The IRS built in a phase-in period because crypto brokers often lack visibility into basis data—especially when assets have moved between exchanges, sat in self-custody wallets, or were purchased on platforms that have since shut down. Full basis reporting won’t kick in until the 2026 tax year, with those forms arriving in 2027.

Until then, taxpayers are on their own.
Scott’s two-year research initiative, conducted alongside the SEC, IRS, and university researchers, revealed why that’s a problem. Most crypto tax software was never built to handle the complexity that now defines the market.

“Most tools were designed for basic buy-and-sell activity,” Scott said. “Once you introduce DeFi, LPs, bridges, and wrapping, the math breaks. The biggest issue isn’t missing features; it’s the lack of explainability. If you can’t explain how a number was calculated, it won’t hold up under audit.”

Decentralized Finance, Centralized Confusion
For anyone who has participated in DeFi, the 1099-DA’s limitations cut deeper. Liquidity pools, token bridges, and wrapped assets do not fit the transaction categories most software recognizes.

“Bridging isn’t selling, and wrapping isn’t disposal, but most software treats them that way,” Scott said. “DeFi activity exposes the cracks in legacy tax logic.”

Traditional platforms let users patch over these gaps by editing data manually, changing timestamps, reclassifying transactions, and adjusting basis. Those edits might quiet an error message, but they also destroy the records that matter when regulators start asking questions.

“Automation without transparency is just a faster risk,” Scott said.

Reading Directly From the Chain
DeFi Tax, now live, abandons the CSV upload model entirely. The platform reads transaction data straight from the blockchain. No imports. No manual edits. No user-adjustable fields. One wallet, one result, every time.

“We don’t optimize for speed or simplicity at the expense of accuracy,” Scott said. “DeFi Tax is built around audit defense. Every figure needs to be traceable, consistent, and defensible. That mindset changes everything about how the system is designed.”

Scott draws a sharp line between producing a tax number and producing documentation that survives examination.
“An auditor doesn’t just want totals,” she said. “They want to know how you got there. Audit-ready reporting is structured, consistent, and explainable.”

The Matching Has Begun
The IRS now receives a copy of every 1099-DA. Automated systems will compare those forms against filed returns. Discrepancies—from missing basis, miscategorized trades, or software inconsistencies—will trigger notices.

“As reporting requirements tighten, crypto audits are becoming more common,” Scott said. “The risk isn’t just enforcement; it’s being unprepared when questions come.”

DeFi Tax serves investors, DeFi participants, startup founders, DAOs, and the CPAs and tax attorneys who advise them. Scott rejects the idea that crypto holders are looking for loopholes.

“Most people aren’t trying to avoid crypto taxes,” she said. “They’re trying to understand them.”

Her advice for anyone staring down an April deadline:
“Don’t wait until tax season or an audit to understand your exposure. If you can’t explain your report today, that’s a signal to fix it.”

“Clarity is the most undervalued feature in crypto finance,” Scott said. “The future of crypto taxes is explainability.”

​A ​ UK-based journalist who was among the first participants in Johns Hopkins University’s landmark psilocybin trials has published a memoir that arrives as a critical intervention in debates about psychedelic medicine’s commercialization. Erica Rex’s Seeing What Is There: My Search for Sanity in the Psychedelic Era, now available through Simon & Schuster, documents her journey from cancer patient to vocal critic of an industry she believes has lost its way.
Rex won a National Magazine Award for fiction and has reported for The New York Times, Scientific American, The Independent, Salon, and Poets & Writers. Her 2014 essay “Calming a Turbulent Mind” in Scientific American Mind offered one of the earliest patient accounts of clinical psychedelic therapy following her 2012 participation in Hopkins trials testing whether psilocybin could treat depression in cancer patients.
The memoir traces psilocybin research to origins often overlooked in American accounts: the French Museum of Natural History, where first clinical trials were conducted at a Paris psychiatric hospital in the 1950s. This historical recovery forms part of Rex’s broader argument that psychedelic medicine’s current trajectory risks repeating mistakes of the past by prioritizing profit over genuine healing.
Rex’s critique draws from extensive platform work examining psychedelic therapy’s evolution. She has contributed multiple episodes to the Psychedelics Today podcast, including discussions on “Understanding Bad Trips: The Power and Potential of Adverse Psychedelic Experiences” and “Clinical Trials and Spontaneous Mystical Experiences.” Her 2021 presentation at the National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute’s psilocybin speaker series, “A Breast Cancer Patient’s Perspectives on the Uses of Psychedelics in Medicine,” ran 44 minutes and remains available online.

​Articles for Mad in America—”Psychedelic Therapy Will Not Save Us” and “The Culture Is the Poison: Why Psychedelics Are Dangerous Medicine in a Neoliberal Society”—articulated concerns about venture capital’s entrance into trauma treatment. For The Independent, she wrote “Magic mushrooms and cancer: My magical mystery cure?” while “The Power of Psychedelics” appeared in Scientific American.
Currently serving as an advisor to the Congressional Psychedelic Therapy Caucus, Rex has presented at NIH psilocybin research series and maintains regular podcast contributions examining psychedelic research integrity, adverse experiences, and the intersection of pathology and mystical states.
Her personal history informs the book’s perspective. As daughter of two psychiatrists—her mother trained under Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray, whose experiments reportedly influenced Theodore Kaczynski—Rex experienced childhood psychiatric treatment resulting in Complex PTSD. The memoir positions this experience within broader examination of systems claiming to heal while potentially deepening wounds.
Asked about venture capital’s impact on trauma treatment, Rex offers unsparing assessment: “Commercialization is designed to create efficiencies of scale, maximizing throughput as though humans and healing were components of computing systems. By its nature, commercialization removes all of the curative humanistic and cultural ingredients from the experience in order to maximize profit. These include: community, authentic connections with other human beings, taking part in a ritual or sacramental curative process. All venture capital exists to do is to extract the maximum profit out of any material or any generative system, including human relationships and cultural practices. It is murderously destructive to institutions that serve precisely the people who stand to benefit most from psychedelic treatment, and voids any consideration of the aspects of the psychedelic experience which make us human.”

​The book documents experiences with psilocybin, MDMA, and 5-MeO-DMT while examining exploitation risks in settings where emotional exposure is extreme and regulation minimal. Rex addresses why women particularly face dangers in psychedelic therapy environments and questions spiritual language disguising commercial interests.
Narrative structure deliberately rejects conventional memoir arcs. “Yes. If you want accounts of romps with psychedelics or ‘how I ate ‘shrooms/went to the ayahuasca retreat/microdosed with LSD/smoked DMT and saw stuff’ there are plenty of books and articles to read. This isn’t one of them,” Rex states.
Joe Moore, Co-Founder and CEO of Psychedelics Today, writes: “This important memoir critiques psychiatry and the psychedelic movement, exploring trauma, healing, and the ethical challenges of contemporary psychiatry. Through her journey with psilocybin, MDMA, and 5-MeO-DMT, Erica Rex reveals the promise of transformation while advocating for a future where true healing includes social support, equity, and community. Students of psychedelics and psychiatry would do well to read this book.”

​Stephen Mills, author of Chosen: A Memoir of Stolen Boyhood, describes it as “an extraordinary, beautifully written account of one woman’s lifelong journey out of unimaginable childhood trauma… Hers is a singular and prophetic voice, summoning the healing power of community in a culture that has pathologized human suffering.”
Jeffrey Masson, author of Assault on Truth, calls the work “brave, passionate, and powerful” noting it “combines research and lived truth. Difficult at times, but impossible to put down—it will leave you wiser, shaken, and opened in ways few books ever do.”
Rex returns to the United States on Friday, February 20th for the book’s launch at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn. The evening event at 28 Adams Street runs 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM, followed by formal Q&A and book signing.
Seeing What Is There: My Search for Sanity in the Psychedelic Era is published by She Writes Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster. Trade paperback retails $17.99, ebook $12.99, available through Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookstores.

​There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being told, over and over, that you’re feeling the wrong thing at the wrong volume. Too loud. Too intense. Too much. Women learn early that anger is the emotion they’re supposed to swallow, redirect, or dress up in something more acceptable—frustration, maybe, or disappointment, or that tight smile that says I’m fine when nothing is fine at all.

Venessa Peruda isn’t interested in that performance anymore. Her solo show All the Rage arrives at the 2026 New York City Fringe Festival like a pressure valve finally giving way—loud, messy, funny as hell, and completely unwilling to make female anger palatable for anyone’s comfort.

The show runs April 4, 5, 12, and 14 at The RAT as part of FRIGID New York, and if the title alone doesn’t tell you what you’re walking into, Peruda’s own description should. “I’m a clown. I’m an artist. And IDGAF,” she says. “I’m a woman who has deep feelings about the state of our World and how Patriarchy has driven us to the breaking point. And I’m that bitch who’s going to speak up about it.”

​What makes All the Rage different from the growing shelf of feminist comedy is that it refuses to treat anger as a thesis statement. This isn’t a show that argues women should be allowed to feel rage. It assumes they already do—and asks what happens when they stop pretending otherwise.

Media: For complimentary New York Fringe festival show tickets or to schedule an interview with Venessa Peruda, contact Workhouse, CEO, Adam Nelson via Nelson@workhousepr.com

Peruda gets at something that rarely makes it onto stages, even progressive ones: the sheer accumulation of it all. The medical appointments where you weren’t believed. The workplace conversations where you had to explain something three times while a man said it once and got the credit. The constant, low-grade threat assessment that runs in the background of walking home, taking transit, existing in a body that other people feel entitled to comment on, touch, evaluate. None of this is dramatic. All of it adds up.
​
“Displaying the ironies and pitfalls women are forced to endure is hilarious and cathartic in a pee-yourself-a-little kind of way,” Peruda says. The show doesn’t abandon humor for sermon. It uses comedy to point directly at the absurdity of what women are expected to tolerate, then refuses to wrap it up neatly. There’s no moment where the lights soften and everyone learns a lesson. There’s just the mess, the recognition, and the relief of being in a room where nobody’s pretending.

The feminist comedy landscape has expanded in recent years, but there’s still an unspoken expectation that women will make their pain charming. Relatable. Something that goes down easy. All the Rage skips that entirely. Peruda isn’t here to reassure anyone that things are getting better, or that anger can be channeled into something productive and tidy. She’s here to say the thing out loud and let it sit there.

“I’m taking the gloves off,” she explains. “I’m pulling the curtain back to reveal the wizard is a scared man with scrawny legs that probably doesn’t pay his child support.”
​
As for why now, Peruda doesn’t mince words. “If you have to ask that you’re not paying attention. My feed is filled with furious women desperate for answers, for something to do with their inescapable rage they carry with them when they go to work, when they drop their kids off at school, or when they bravely try to go on a first date.”

Her central argument lands like a dare: “Anger is the key. The greatest trick Patriarchy ever pulled was convincing women their anger was wrong and shameful. When in fact it is the key to our liberation, and the path to rebuild the World.”

It’s a line that could scan as bumper-sticker feminism, except that Peruda earns it. The show isn’t built on slogans. It’s built on specificity—the particular texture of being dismissed, the exact weight of being told you’re overreacting when you know you’re not. That’s what makes the comedy land.

Peruda’s path to this work wasn’t linear. “I come from a single mom home with siblings who tortured and loved each other fiercely,” she says. “I had a difficult upbringing which taught me that humor can not only soothe but bring people together. I was a good kid, until I wasn’t. I railed against the World and nearly destroyed myself in the process.” Now, she says, she still rails against the world—”but with a deadly wit and the knowing that I can do great things.”

That confidence matters. Women aren’t exactly encouraged to say things like that out loud. Certainty is unfeminine. Pride is unseemly. Refusal is uncooperative. Peruda’s built a show out of all three.
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All the Rage isn’t going to solve anything. It’s not trying to. What it offers is simpler and maybe more valuable: a room where women don’t have to perform okayness, where anger isn’t a symptom of something wrong with you, where the mess is just the mess. “Women need this catharsis right now,” Peruda says. “We need to scream, we need to laugh… and be liberated to be the bitch we wish to see in the World.”

All the Rage runs April 4, 5, 12, and 14 at The RAT as part of FRIGID New York. Tickets available through frigid.nyc.

Workhouse grieves the loss of the Asbury Park Casino—iconic history turned to dust. To those committed to preservation, we are prepared to offer pro bono service and resources to advance viable alternatives to demolition.
#asburypark #asburyparkboardwalk #asburyparknj

Cracks in Crypto’s Tax SystemDaniel FuschJanuary 12, 2026

Janna Scott discovered the problem the way most people discover structural flaws: by accident, and then by obsession.
It was late 2021, and Scott—a former government fiscal analyst who’d spent years reviewing Treasury reports and compliance audits—was doing something millions of Americans were attempting that year: filing taxes on cryptocurrency trades. Her wallet contained roughly 300 transactions. Nothing extraordinary by crypto standards. A few trades, some DeFi experiments, the digital equivalent of a moderately active portfolio.

She ran her data through one of the popular crypto tax platforms. Got her numbers. Then, more out of professional habit than suspicion, she ran the same wallet through a second platform.
The results didn’t match.

So she tried a third. Then a fourth. Fourteen platforms in total—essentially the entire landscape of crypto tax software available to American taxpayers.

Not one produced the same result.

One platform reported tens of thousands in taxable income. Another showed a capital loss. The variations weren’t marginal—they were fundamental disagreements about the same financial reality, derived from identical data, with no explanation for the contradictions.

“It wasn’t noise in the data,” Scott says. “It was the math itself that was broken.”
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For most people, that discovery would have prompted a call to an accountant and a decision to pick the most conservative estimate. For Scott, whose career had been built on identifying exactly these kinds of systemic vulnerabilities, it was an invitation to look deeper.

The Architecture of Error
What followed was a nine-month investigation that unfolded with the methodical precision of academic research and the urgency of a detective story.
Scott went to the source: the blockchain itself. She began manually validating thousands of transactions, pulling raw data directly from distributed ledgers, checking cost basis calculations, timestamps, token movements line by line. She developed her own APIs to bypass the CSV files exported by exchanges—files that, she discovered, often served as the shaky foundation for most tax software—and instead retrieved immutable records directly from the chain.
The patterns that emerged were troubling.
The same wallet produced tax liability swings exceeding $25,000 depending on which platform processed it. Coinbase might report significant taxable income while a partner tax service showed a loss on identical data. In some cases, routine transfers between a user’s own wallets were being classified as taxable sales, creating what the original article describes as “phantom income”—tax obligations on transactions that never actually occurred.
More concerning still: Scott found that many platforms allowed users to edit core transaction data. “These platforms allow users to edit the date, time, value, and currency of a blockchain transaction,” Scott explains. “The moment you do that, the audit trail is gone.”
The implications extended beyond individual tax returns. This was infrastructure failure at the foundation of an emerging asset class.
Scott brought her findings to federal regulators. In March 2023, the IRS quietly suspended crypto audits after reviewing her research and concluding that their CSV-based audit methodology was unreliable. Universities were brought in to peer-review Scott’s analysis. The conclusion held: none of the fourteen platforms tested could consistently produce accurate tax reports from blockchain data.
The Growing Divide
While regulators paused to reconsider their approach, cryptocurrency adoption continued its upward trajectory. Approximately 6 million Americans reported crypto on their 2023 tax returns—roughly double the previous year. Meanwhile, through exchange subpoenas and transaction records, the IRS maintains data on nearly 50 million U.S. residents who have interacted with cryptocurrency at some point, whether they’ve reported it or not.
Scott describes this widening gap between regulatory visibility and reporting accuracy as a “tax time bomb.”
“Crypto evolved,” she says. “Tax software didn’t.”
Most crypto tax platforms, she explains, were designed for straightforward transactions: buying and selling digital assets. But decentralized finance introduced complexity those systems weren’t built to handle—liquidity pools, cross-chain bridges, wrapped assets, staking rewards, yield farming. The old categorical logic doesn’t accommodate the new financial behaviors.
CSV exports from exchanges frequently lack essential data: timestamps, transaction hashes, accurate pricing information. Software fills the gaps with assumptions. And assumptions, in tax reporting, create liability.
“Automation without transparency is just a faster risk,” Scott says.
After presenting her findings to the fourteen companies whose platforms she’d tested, ninety percent declined to address the structural issues she’d identified. That response—or lack thereof—prompted Scott and her team to build an alternative.
Designing for Scrutiny
DeFi Tax launches publicly this month with a different foundational premise. It doesn’t accept user-edited spreadsheets. Instead, it retrieves raw, timestamped transaction data directly from blockchains and exchanges, structures it into a transparent audit trail, and generates reports that can be traced and verified line by line.
“Run the same wallet twice, you get the same answer twice,” Scott says. “That’s not a feature. That’s the baseline for compliance.”
The platform is designed for users with complex on-chain activity—DeFi participants, crypto founders, decentralized organizations, and the accounting professionals who serve them—who need more than speed or simplicity. They need audit readiness: documentation that explains exactly how every calculation was derived and can withstand professional scrutiny.
“Audits don’t ask which tool you used,” Scott says. “They ask how you calculated your numbers.”
With the IRS preparing to expand digital asset reporting requirements and new 1099-DA forms on the horizon, Scott believes the industry is entering a new phase—one where trust-based assurances are no longer sufficient for software handling tax obligations.
Transparency as Design Principle
There’s a particular irony in Scott’s work. Cryptocurrency’s foundational promise was transparency—immutable public ledgers, cryptographic verification, systems designed to operate without requiring trust in centralized authorities.
Yet when it came to the practical task of accounting for activity on those transparent ledgers, the industry largely defaulted to opaque tools that couldn’t explain their own calculations.
“Most people aren’t trying to avoid crypto taxes,” Scott says. “They’re trying to understand them.”
Her research suggests that the barrier to compliance isn’t willful evasion—it’s infrastructure inadequacy. People using flawed tools to meet complex obligations they don’t fully understand, in an emerging regulatory landscape that’s still taking shape.
DeFi Tax’s public launch arrives at a moment when that understanding is becoming essential. As regulators prepare to resume audits and millions of Americans face increasingly sophisticated reporting requirements, Scott’s work offers something that’s been notably absent: clarity derived from verifiable calculation.
“Chaos is optional,” she says. “Clarity is a design choice.”
For an ecosystem that built its identity on transparency and trustless verification, it may be the most important design principle of all.
Those seeking transparent, blockchain-verified tax reporting can find DeFi Tax at https://defitax.us