By Karen M. Gagne I am here with Yusef Bunchy Shakur, author of “Window 2 My Soul: My Transformation from a Zone 8 Thug to a Father and Freedom Fighter”, to talk about the book “Marshall Law: The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther,” by Marshall “Eddie” Conway, former minister of defense of [...]
The terms we use to describe historical developments are of more than academic interest. They shape our ability to analyze, and thus strategize, for political change. Recent discussions of the notion of “neoliberalism” provide one example. Anthropologist Sherry Ortner has an interesting post that takes as its starting point a ‘koan’ by fellow anthropologist, Marshall [...]
Author Ross Perlin has an op-ed in today’s New York Times. Here’s what his book is about (publisher’s comments): “Every year, at least half a million Americans work as interns. They famously shuttle coffee in a thousand newsrooms, congressional offices, and Hollywood studios, but they also deliver aid in Afghanistan, build the human genome, and [...]
I have mixed feelings about the Left Forum, which ended on Sunday March 20 at Pace University in Lower Manhattan, “in the shadow of Wall Street” as Paul Sweezy once remarked. It is the most important annual coming together of the left on the East Coast (inasmuch as ‘the left’ is roughly divided between intellectuals [...]
The prospects for the left reviving itself in the United States have not been so good in decades. Notions that have long been popular on the left, already gaining traction, will become far more central to the thinking of large numbers of people. Politics will flow more and more through channels besides the institutionalized ones [...]
Does African American literature still exist? Not according to Kenneth W. Warren, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, who summarizes his new book in an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education: African American literature was a Jim Crow phenomenon, which is to say, speaking from the standpoint of a post-Jim Crow world, [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Since the ‘Carter Doctrine’ of the late seventies, and particularly since September 11, the Middle East has been an area of ‘special interest’ to the U.S., featuring the invasion of Iraq (Afghanistan isn’t exactly a part of the Middle East, and won’t be dealt with in this post), support for Israel even in the face [...]
There is a study getting some attention, suggesting that Harvard University Press leans strongly to the left: David Gordon, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and Per Nilsson, a Swedish consultant, scrutinized—but did not always actually read—494 titles Harvard published between 2000 and 2010 in economics, history, philosophy, political science, and sociology. [...]
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