Books Read 2020

  1. Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature Before Heterosexuality by R. Bach

  2. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

  3. Transformers: Unicron by Frank Barber

  4. Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Intervention Since World War II by William Blum

  5. The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley, and the Debate Over Race in America by Nicholas Buccola

  6. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz

  7. Selected Non-Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

  8. Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan Africanism by Stokely Carmichael

  9. Relentless Pursuit: My Fight For The Victims of Jeffrey Epstein by Bradley J. Edwards

  10. NITRO: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner's WCW by Guy Evans

  11. Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman

  12. A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

  13. Dune by Frank Herbert

  14. Transformers: The Manga Volume One by Masumi Kaneda

  15. Transformers: The Manga Volume Two by Masumi Kaneda

  16. Prejudential: Black America and The Presidents by Margaret Kimberly

  17. Football Against The Enemy by Simon Kuper

  18. The State and The Revolution by Vladimir Lenin

  19. Stream Of Life by Clarice Lispector

  20. Superman: Red Son by Mark Miller

  21. I Fight For A Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood 1880-1915 by Louis Moore

  22. James Baldwin: Living In Fire by Bill V. Mullen

  23. Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over The World by Jathan Sadowski

  24. Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In by Bernie Sanders

  25. A History Of Medieval Islam by John Joseph Saunders

  26. Hate Inc: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

  27. The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

Weekly Reader

She was a dyed-in-the-wool anarchist who founded an influential anarchist journal, Mother Earth, gained a reputation for her stirring speeches (delivered on extensive speaking tours to crowds of immigrant workers in German, Yiddish, and English), and wrote many books and essays on the subject. Goldman also wrote copiously on capitalism, labor, marriage, birth control, sexual freedom for people of all sexual orientations, prisons, war, art, and freedom of speech, and wrestled with thorny ideological issues within the ranks of leftist thought. She was proud of her Jewish identity but spurned religion as a tool of oppression. Her body of work (including her epic 1931 autobiography, Living My Life) spans decades, and thanks to her gifted writing ability and overall verve holds up far better than many other seminal anarchists’ texts.

Whether it’s social-network analysis or social-credit scoring, we should expect these opaque processes that depend on inherently biased data will lead to unjust discrimination and unaccountable outcomes. This is a familiar series of events, as many have pointed out before, that plays out again and again for the simple reason that data has a point of view; it’s embedded with human choices, and it’s the product of social processes. But the difference here is that governments and corporations now possess an end that justifies any means. They can paint any critical concerns as dangerous to the public, not by gesturing to some vague notion of national security or by repeating hollow warnings about increased crime this time but by using the sick as human alibis for anything they deem necessary.

As Jessa Crispin writes in her 2017 manifesto Why I’m Not a Feminist, when you make feminism so accessible and palatable it can be universally adopted, you put the “focus on labels and identity, rather than on the philosophical and political content of the movement, [and] what becomes most important are the things on the surface.” Things like Chanel products, velvet chairs, and pretty websites.

Probably. For me personally, yes. I played with free speech movement leader Mario Savio's kid. Our parents were friends. But for every Dave Yippie or Tim Yohannan, there were nihilists and apolitical people. I think initially, the east bay scene was more distinctive for its variety and weirdness than politics. Tim's imprint on the scene is huge, and he was heavily influenced by the Revolutionary Communist Party, Spartacist Communist ideology he subscribed to. As an anarchist, I saw Tim as an ally overall. He was also a super nice guy and quite sociable. For those of us really into radical politics, the connections were obvious, but not everyone had that overt political focus. Just being a punk weirdo in the world at that time was a political and social statement, so everyone had skin in the game so to speak.

The Harlem Defense Council’s wanted poster predicted that existing avenues of remedy for police abuse would be dead-ends. Sure enough, the NYPD’s civilian complaint review board, composed of departmental appointees, absolved Gilligan, the cop, of wrongdoing. A grand jury cleared him as well. Black New Yorkers already shared a widespread consensus that the existing civilian review board, created in 1953, was toothless. In fact, the initial mobilization in Harlem, the day after Powell’s death, was a rally demanding the creation of a new and independent review board. The next day, protesters marched on a precinct house, calling for Gilligan to be suspended. Cops soon responded with gunshots, rifle butts, and truncheons.