Worth Reading September 2022

Books Read 2021

  • Green Arrow: A Celebration of 75 Years

  • Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold

  • Palestine: A Socialist Introduction by Sumaya Awad

  • Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America by Russ Baker

  • Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

  • Small Magic: Short Fiction, 1977-2020 by Terry Brooks

  • The Last Druid by Terry Brooks

  • I Remember Death By Its Proximity to What I Love by Mahogany L. Browne

  • Star Trek: Alien Spotlight by John Byrne

  • The Watcher and Other Stories by Italo Calvino

  • Into The War by Italo Calvino

  • The Road To San Giovanni by Italo Calvino

  • Marcovaldo by Italo Calvino

  • Under The Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino

  • If I Were Another by Mahmoud Darwish

  • Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas by Henry Dumas

  • Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas by Henry Dumas

  • Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd

  • Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice by Jesse Hagopian

  • Ibsen's Selected Plays by Henrik Ibsen

  • They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie Jones-Rogers

  • We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Abolitionist Papers) by Mariame Kaba

  • Transformers: The Manga Volume Three by Masumi Kaneda

  • Eternals: The Complete Collection by Jack Kirby

  • The Battle For Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists by Naomi Klein

  • Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin

  • Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language by Seth Lerer

  • Legends of Localization: The Legend of Zelda by Clyde Mandelin

  • Transformers: All Hail Megatron Volume 1 by Shane McCarthy

  • Transformers: All Hail Megatron Volume 2 by Shane McCarthy

  • Transformers Historia by Chris MxFeely

  • Thick: And Other Essays by Tressiue McMillan Cottom

  • The Wrestling Observer Yearbook '93: The Year of Major Beginnings and Major Endings (Wrestling Observer Newsletter) by Dave Meltzer

  • The Wrestling Observer Yearbook '97: The Last Time WWF Was Number Two by Dave Meltzer

  • The Major Works by John Milton

  • Strong In The Rain: Selected Poems by Kenji Miyazawa

  • Milky Way Railroad by Kenji Miyazawa

  • Night On The Galactic Railroad and Other Stories by Kenji Miyazawa

  • Night On The Milky Way Train by Kenji Miyazawa

  • Once and Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa by Kenji Miyazawa

  • Growing Up with Manos: The Hands of Fate: How I was the Child Star of the Worst Movie Ever Made and Lived to Tell the Story by Jackey Newman

  • Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams by Robert Peterson

  • River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey by Sister Helen Prejean

  • Straight Edge: A Clear-Headed Hardcore Punk History by Tony Rettman

  • Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing by Stuart Schrader

  • The Monsters and the Critics: And Other Essays. J.R.R. Tolkien

  • Star Trek: Way Point by Dayton Ward

  • Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism by Jillian York

  • Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary

  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Weekly Reader

If he ever conceded so, Obama would likely insist nevertheless that the truth doesn’t matter nearly as much as maintaining faith in the American project. “I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America,” Obama writes in another excerpt published in The Atlantic, “not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind.” But he clearly understands, too, as Biden surely does on some level, that our situation is bleak. “I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures can’t help but collide,” he writes. “In that world—of global supply chains, instantaneous capital transfers, social media, transnational terrorist networks, climate change, mass migration, and ever-increasing complexity—we will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish.” It’s a passage far less inspirational than it is chilling—evidence that as determinedly as he might disparage cynicism, Obama knows exactly what horrors await us in the years to come and that the curmudgeons and cranks on the left are, again, substantively correct about the trajectory we’re on.

But this collection and operationalization of biometric data — at the border, at the entrance to an office, on the floor of a warehouse — is not some neutral means for assessing the risk a given individual poses, with respect to Covid-19 or any other hazard, any more than biometric data in general simply represents the reality or perceived reality of someone’s identity. Such biometric forms of control replicate already existing biases about who must bear the brunt of surveillance technologies, marking out particular populations for more intensive scrutiny. This was true when concerns about terrorism after 9/11 led to the sorting of foreign workers, immigrants, asylum seekers, and noncitizens into “desirable” and “undesirable” categories, as David Lyon explains in Surveillance, Power and Everyday Life. It was also true with predictive-policing algorithms, which, as Ruha Benjamin and Simone Browne have intensively catalogued, were first deployed against Black populations.

The great myth that underpins policing in the United States is that it remains a purely local affair, with police responding to the safety needs of individual neighborhoods. Setting aside the numerous federal law enforcement agencies, the grants to municipalities from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, and the nationwide professional and fraternal organizations that cops belong to, what unifies police in the United States today is their global reach. It is common today to hear criticisms of the militarization of US policing. But beneath this trend is a much-older process that has ebbed and flowed over time: the globalization of US policing.

Debs’s approach to the “popularity question” differs from one of his ideological heirs, Bernie Sanders. After languishing in minor party obscurity through the 1970s, Sanders dropped the most radical planks of his platform (including socializing the economy’s commanding heights) and gained political office by pursuing policies thwarted not by lack of popularity but by the plutocratic order. Often, his goal has been less to gainsay prevailing opinion — though he’s done plenty of that, too — than to press for public sentiment to be reflected in public policy. Popular social democratic reforms like taxing the rich, funding public programs, and boosting worker power are his bread and butter.

If your political aspirations are mainly about getting a seat at the table, these appointments may feel worth lauding. But they are in many ways symbolic gains, a point that even some of those who celebrate such symbolism can accept. Their takeaway is that girls will see these women in these jobs and realize “they can do that, too”—not that they will also have the means to do it or that it will necessarily improve many other women’s lives. It’s a regression to the kind of individualistic, girlboss feminism we have been trying to pull away from but that still has a powerful hold on those who posit a commitment to “gender equality” largely confined to who holds the power, not what they do with it.

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.