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

The scope of this kind of space opera also functions to demonstrate the limitations of ruling-class values. As the critic Fredric Jameson has pointed out, the traditional novel is a bourgeois literary form which is structurally dependent on a formal resolution, like the entry of one of Jane Austen’s heroines into a marriage contract, which upholds property relations and the social order. In contrast, science fiction is a genre that desires to boldly go beyond those kinds of constraints. By shifting the scale of action from the confines of modern life, defined by birth circumstances and job opportunities, to an infinite universe, it opens up an exploration of individual and social possibility without limits; once you’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate, there’s no going back to passive late-capitalist life.

Capitalist systems are designed to pummel us into submission, preventing us from imagining life could be any other way, let alone allowing us to go on the offensive. But successful movements against tech elites’ further encroachment shows that the fight is not over. The resistance of the activists in Toronto is a recent example in a long tradition of Luddite action that smashed the technology that made their lives more miserable and targeted the capitalists who used it to hold power over them. Dismantling the machinery of capital is also an attempt to challenge the “form of society which utilizes those instruments,” Marx writes in the first volume of Capital. Their guerrilla tactics against one of the most powerful and richest corporations ever to exist demonstrates that even a behemoth can be stopped in its tracks and forced to re-evaluate its strategy.

I started listening to and thinking about “Alabama” a lot in the aftermath of Philando Castile’s murder in the summer of 2016, which was reminiscent of the murders of Samuel DuBose, Alton Sterling, Terence Crutcher, Walter Scott, Jamar Clark, Sandra Bland, and countless others. I’d lay down and loop the song through my bedroom speakers because the sonic landscape that Coltrane conjures on the track suggests something about the temporality in which black grief lives, the way that black people are forced to grieve our dead so often that the work of grieving never ends. You don’t even have time to grieve one new absence before the next one arrives. (We hadn’t time to grieve Ahmaud Arbery before we saw the video of Floyd’s murder.) “Alabama” gives this unceasing immersion in grief a form. It’s there in the song’s disconcerting stops and starts, its disarticulated notes, its willingness to abandon virtuosity in favor of a style of playing that is repetitive, diffuse, tentative, and dissonant.

Regardless, digitization is not the problem. It’s a potential public good, representing an important step in the development of cultural productive forces. It means that all the diverse culture of the world can be made available rather than hidden or deleted from existence because of licensing restrictions or creative differences. It means that old film or music, for example, can be eternally preserved and infinitely shared, instead of going up in smoke or rotting in vaults because it isn’t considered profitable.

In fact, in many cases the only thing keeping a piece of media alive is either a digital library or file-sharing site, while confusing copyright schemes may prevent fragile works from being digitized at all. As tech journalist Benj Edwards argued in 2012, pirates perform an important service by preserving old software, including games, programs and other copyrighted but abandoned data that many writers and researchers rely on.

With an attention-grabbing snare snap, the title track begins this blistering collection. Overall, their sound doesn’t deviate too far from the blueprints of Against’s muses, but there’s also a lot that’s distinctive about it. Bearing little resemblance to the hoarse bellow of Discharge vocalist Kelvin Morris, Jerry Clarke’s parched and gaunt-sounding voice adds an extra sense of urgency to the apocalyptic roar of “All Too Late,” “Pain Never Ends,” and “Mao.” “Burned Beyond Recognition,” meanwhile, throws in pinches of T.S.O.L., Adolescents, and others from the Southern California beach punk scene that was going on at the time. As L.A. hardcore extended into the ’80s, Final Conflict, Diatribe, and other members of SoCal’s anarchist peace-punk contingent, attest to Against’s local influence, despite the fact it would take years until they would finally be heard by the rest of us.

Weekly Reader

A person without health insurance can still catch the coronavirus, infect others, and get dangerously or fatally sick, without knowing that they are supposed to be able to go to the doctor about that for free: The Department of Health and Human Services reported last week that it has paid out far fewer claims for Covid-19 testing and treatment for the uninsured than it expected. Everything about the health care system is complicated, hostile, and potentially ruinous for people without health insurance, so it’s not surprising if a lot of people couldn’t shake that experience off within a matter of weeks and months. It’s true that our health care system was not designed to handle a pandemic, but it would be more accurate to say that our system was not designed to provide health care to people en masse, whether that is regular checkups or chemotherapy.

But Debs directed his critique of Christian churches not at their faith in the Gospels, but their failure to follow them. We don’t have to wonder how Debs would reconcile his affection for Jesus’ message with the so-called prosperity Gospel embraced explicitly, and more often implicitly, by so many affluent Christians today. “(T)he dead Christ was metamorphosed from the master revolutionist who was ignominiously slain, a martyr to his class, into the pious abstraction, the harmless theological divinity who died that John Pierpont Morgan could ‘be washed in the blood of the lamb,’” Debs wrote.

LF: To me, this is a feature, not a bug. Bill Maher has been joking about “pedophile island” on television for 20 years; I spoke with someone recently who claimed that everyone on the Upper East Side in society circles referred to Jeffrey’s townhouse as “the veal farm” (a particularly gruesome nickname). However, I think that this is actually typical of these kinds of stories. Part of the fact that it was out in the open, at least partially, is what allowed it to go on for so long.

People get up in arms and say, “I can’t believe people didn’t say anything.” Who was going to say something? Donald Trump? Bill Clinton? Come on now. This is fundamentally not how power works. You cannot appeal to some unnamed, fantastical authority. This is the case with everything: you cannot appeal to an authority when the authority itself is implicated and indeed incentivized to keep this crime — whether it is this specifically or, as we talk about on the podcast, more generally — going. This is what power exerting power looks like.

Inside Out was considered little more than a side project for Zack de la Rocha (yes, of Rage against the Machine), and Rob Haworth, the two guitarists in the Orange County-based Hard Stance. When they opened a show consisting of local bands in the fall of 1988, Hard Stance drummer Alex Barreto was impressed with the way de la Rocha took naturally to being a frontman, after years of being strapped to a guitar. “There was something really sincere in his eyes when he was singing,” Barreto says. “I was really intrigued by that.” Barreto managed to steal the role of Inside Out’s drummer away from Half Off’s Vadim Rubin, and hounded de la Rocha to pursue the band further. But de la Rocha was afraid that giving more attention to Inside Out would cause rifts within Hard Stance. “Hard Stance was his baby, and everyone else in that band had been friends since middle school,” says Barreto. “I was just this outsider who replaced the original drummer. But it was clear to me that Inside Out should happen.”

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.

Books Read 2017

  1. The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism by Trevor Aaronson
  2. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Unknown, Simon Armitage (Translator)
  3. Transformers: Robots in Disguise, Volume 1 by John Barber
  4. Transformers: Robots in Disguise, Volume 2 by John Barber
  5. Transformers: Robots in Disguise, Volume 3 by John Barber
  6. Transformers: Robots in Disguise, Volume 4 by John Barber
  7. Transformers: Robots In Disguise Volume 5 by John Barber
  8. Transformers: Robots in Disguise Volume 6 by John Barber
  9. Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman by Harold Bloom
  10. The Black Elfstone (The Fall of Shannara, #1) by Terry Brooks
  11. Enter Naomi: SST, L.A. and All That... by Joe Carducci
  12. The Nonexistent Knight by Italo Calvino
  13. The Awakening and Selected Stories by Kate Chopin
  14. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary
  15. Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto by Jessa Crispin
  16. Captain Marvel (Marvel NOW!) #1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick
  17. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
  18. Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
  19. Star Trek: Harlan Ellison's The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay by Harlan Ellison
  20. The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition by Friedrich Engels
  21. Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings by Manny Farber
  22. Essays, Speeches & Public Letters by William Faulkner
  23. The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Tim Ferriss
  24. When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World by Leon Festinger
  25. Clinton in Haiti: The 1994 US Invasion of Haiti by Philippe Girard
  26. Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984 by Ian Glasper
  27. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  28. A Philosophy of Tragedy by Christopher Hamilton
  29. Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation by Blake J. Harris
  30. A People's History of the French Revolution by Eric Hazan
  31. Film After Film: (Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?) by J. Hoberman
  32. Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign by Michael K. Honey
  33. Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies by bell hooks
  34. An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen
  35. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
  36. Perpetual Peace and Other Essays by Immanuel Kant
  37. The Future is Queer: A Science Fiction Anthology by Richard Labonté
  38. Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge by Alison Landsberg
  39. The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories by Nella Larsen
  40. Wellsprings by Mario Vargas Llosa
  41. Identity Crisis by Brad Meltzer
  42. My Damage: The Story of a Punk Rock Survivor by Keith Morris
  43. Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore by Albert Mudrian
  44. A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey by Kevin Murphy
  45. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle
  46. Employee of the Month and Other Big Deals by Mary Jo Pehl
  47. Visual Storytellling: An Illustrated Reader by Todd James Pierce
  48. Why Be Something That You're Not: Detroit Hardcore 1979-1985 by Tony Rettman
  49. Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson
  50. Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution by Heather Rogers
  51. Get In The Van: On The Road With Black Flag (Second Edition) by Henry Rollins
  52. American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson
  53. Lazarus, Vol. 1: Family by Greg Rucka
  54. Der Mond: The Art of Neon Genesis Evangelion by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
  55. Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai
  56. A New Companion to Digital Humanities by Susan Schreibman
  57. The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet
  58. Change Agent by Daniel Suarez
  59. Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings by Mark Twain
  60. Saga, Vol. 1 (Saga, #1) by Brian K. Vaughan
  61. Saga, Vol. 2 (Saga, #2) by Brian K. Vaughan
  62. A Brief History of Portable Literature by Enrique Vila-Matas
  63. Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas
  64. Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1: No Normal by G. Willow Wilson
  65. Ms. Marvel, Vol. 2: Generation Why by G. Willow Wilson
  66. The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople by Susan Wise Bauer
  67. How Fiction Works by James Wood
  68. No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes: An Oral History of the Legendary City Gardens by Amy Yates Wuelfing
  69. What's My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States by Dave Zirin