Protest has helped define the first two decades of the 21st century – here’s what’s next
The question of how to create new vehicles of representation to assert popular control over the economy will keep emerging.
Europe
Queer Relics: A Review of Beautiful Untrue Things
Just as he had lived a double life, Oscar Wilde was destined to a double afterlife.
Gas shortages paralyze Haiti, triggering protests against failing economy and dysfunctional politics
Fuel shortages and government corruption are behind over a year of popular uprisings in Haiti
Big Tech ‘Nudges’ Our Behavior for Its Own Greed: Here’s a 4-Step Social Media Self-Defense Class
The surveillance industry sees us as little more than raw materials.
Book Review: Naomi Wolf’s Outrages against the world of fact
Naomi Wolf loves suppressed books; she loves them so much that she’s managed to suppress her own. One way of extinguishing a brilliant idea is to smother it under an enormous quantity of misinformation. Another is to discredit the author. In her new book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, Wolf seems to have accomplished both.
The signal error, grabbing headlines immediately upon the book’s release, was her claim that “several dozen” men inVictorian England were executed for sodomy. They were not: the last were hanged in 1835. Wolf’s error was the result of an understandable but embarrassing misreading of the legal arcana: taking “death recorded” to indicate a completed execution rather than the mere documentation of a formal sentence that the judge expected to see commuted. The goof was made known to Wolf in a most public way, in the midst of a BBC interview. This led to the recall of the first British printing and the delayed release of the US edition. Some observers took the opportunity to soak in the schadenfreude, but I suspect a larger number started quietly humming “There but for Fortune.” I know I did.
Sons of Night: Antoine Gimenez’s Memories of the Spanish Civil War
Of the recent windfall of books published around the 80th anniversary of the end of the Spanish Civil War, Antoine Gimenez’s memoir Sons of Night stands out. The book does a good job of capturing the spontaneous and hope-filled mood of the times. This is an exhilarating and somewhat swashbuckling tale. The reader is treated to a ringside seat of what it is like to be caught up in the maelstrom of a revolution in progress.