Generally speaking, I could not care less about the Academy Awards. Even the fashion is hard to get worked up about, since stylists have squashed the amusing bad taste some stars used to exhibit. Hollywood does not strike me as a vital zone of American culture. TV is actually more interesting. But there is one [...]
Alternative and Activist New Media by Leah Lievrouw (more info) Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire by Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald (more info) In Kashmir: Gender, Militarization and the Modern Nation-State by Seema Kazi (more info) Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth Century New [...]
“Living in the United States, it is often difficult to imagine anything but a fair election for president and the other major government positions” (snip) Yep. In the U.S., I can’t imagine a presidential election where the winner of the popular vote does not become president. I can’t imagine an election where efforts are made [...]
This post, about some awful column in the Washington Post, reminds me yet again of why I consider ‘restoring civility to our political discourse’ to be a low priority. Denying collective bargaining rights to public sector workers is a way to degrade their working lives (and their retirement, for that matter). It is mean-spirited and [...]
Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America by John McMillian (more info) Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination by Andy Merrifield (more info) Making War, Making Women: Femininity and Duty on the American Home Front, 1941-1945 by Melissa A. McEuen (more info) Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of [...]
Many know by now that protests exploded in Madison, Wisconsin last week in response to the drive by Republican Governor Scott Walker to ban collective bargaining for most public sector workers. Thousands of workers, including firefighters and police not directly threatened by the governor’s actions, and a multitude of supporters, flooded the state capital. Notwithstanding [...]
Wisconsin erupts. Apparently they have not yet bothered to cordon off government buildings from the public, as they do in NYC. (LBO) Brutality cannot stop the people’s revolt. But Bahrain will try anyway. (Democracy Now!) He should spend some time at protests in London, or for that matter in NYC. Nicholas Kristof thinks protests aren’t [...]
What is the relation between changes in media and social struggle? This question will not go away. “The Tipping Point” author, Malcolm Gladwell, has staked out a firm position – the two have nothing much to do with each other. In a piece in the New Yorker, he claimed that real struggle, as witnessed at [...]
From this defense of Erik Olin Wright by Michael Buroway, I learn that the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) next meeting’s theme will be ‘Real Utopias,’ i.e. trying to understand the radical social institutions that could be developed out of already existing developments. This isn’t a bad idea, but the ASA meeting also is an academic [...]
Making the Mexican Diabetic: Race, Science and the Genetics of Inequality by Michael Montoya (More info) Proxy Warriors: The Rise and Fall of State-Sponsored Militias by Ariel Ahram (More info) Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle by Leigh Renee Ralford (More info) A Saving Remnant by Martin Duberman (More [...]
Roots Action, which was launched about a month ago to a certain amount of fanfare, as a kind of further-to-the-left version of Moveon, is today urging its followers to sign a letter to Spain. The letter urges the Spanish government to prosecute various Bush administration who facilitated torture. Were they to do so, I would [...]
Our new edition of Dubious Books has the usual characteristics–voices that ‘transcend right and left’, people who are trying to find some way to convince themselves that Western elites will save the world, and a new ‘scientific’ effort to figure out what’s distinctive about those dang Muslims. Monkeys On Our Backs: Why Conservatives and Liberals [...]
Rape New York by Jana Leo (more info) Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France by Laurent Dubois (More info) Shadow Mothers: Nannies, Au Pairs, and the Micropolitics of Mothering by Cameron Lynn McDonald (more info) Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement by Tomiko Brown-Nagin [...]
The uprising in Egypt, a crucial ally of the U.S., marks the undoing of four of the five pillars–built on past defeats of revolutions and movements– that have maintained the current economic order. As I write this hundreds of thousands have again filled Tahrir Square in Cairo, and hundreds of thousands more march in Alexandria [...]
Neon Wasteland: On Love, Motherhood, and Sex Work in a Rust Belt Town by Susan Dewey (Powells) Remembering Palestine in 1948: Beyond National Narratives by Efrat Ben-Ze’ev (Powells)
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