MSNBC reports that the cover of Doug Henwood’s recently announced book, My Turn, has drawn a strong response.
The International Business Times spoke with Sarah Sole, the cover’s artist, about her inspiration for the book cover.
On CounterPunch, John Halle praised the provocative cover for forcing Clinton’s liberal supporters to face her hawkish record.
News of the book cover also made the front page of the Drudge Report.
I ended up on social media for a reason, and though the reason escapes me during moments of sheer panic and anxiety, I take part, no matter what — the pursuit of relevancy, or, in the strictest sense of the term, validation, is an imperative that exists as a key part of humankind’s quest for meaning. Self-definition has become intertwined with social media. We are all here for each other.
I wake up staring at my phone. I fall asleep to the glow of the very same screen.
To read the rest of the article, visit Buzzfeed.
For Gulf Labor, the ban on some of our members was a setback. Ours is a solidarity campaign, so any kind of restricted access hampers our capacity to build cross-class relations with Gulf workers. Even so, the clampdown helps illustrate a key principle of our campaign—that the rights of artistic expression and academic freedom are inextricable from the rights of those who build museums and classrooms. It is on the basis of that principle that we have begun a dialogue with the Guggenheim trustees about how to realize the three demands of our campaign: a debt-settlement fund to reimburse workers for their heavy recruitment fees, a living wage, and the right to worker representation. And it was to amplify those demands on a larger art-world stage that we accepted the invitation to participate in the Venice Biennale this past summer.
To read the rest of the article, visit Artforum.
I see the body. I don’t know what to feel.
I drop my phone. I drop the gun.
There was a noise.
It was the sound of the screen cracking in three places.
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit The Offing.
“Our labor analytic…is not just about artists and writers,” Ross says. “It’s about the folks who are building and maintaining and operating the infrastructure for those forms of expression…. The root principle is that freedom of artistic expression or academic expression is incomplete right, it is a flawed right if it’s enjoyed at the expense of these other workers’ rights.”
There’s no blueprint for activism, but rather an impulse to recapture and rebrand cultural capital from below, so all workers can wield culture as a tool for dismantling social hierarchy, and building anew.
To that end, the new vanguard of creative laborers are constructing a new platform for protest as they go, and redefining the work of the artist, and the labor of creative protest, alongside workers of every stripe.
To read the rest of the article, visit The Nation.
Vol 1 Brooklyn: How did you first end up reading Camus? And what about The Stranger initially appealed to you?
Seidlinger: I wasn’t much of a reader until after I moved away from music (I’m a failed musician), and it was when I finally went to college that I came across books like House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski, Life After God by Douglas Coupland, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, and, yup, Albert Camus’s The Stranger. It all happened in quick succession. I bought House of Leaves and swiftly devoured countless other books, many of them transgressive, experimental, surreal, and absurdist in nature. The Stranger crept up on me; I believe I bought it alongside a few other titles by Hubert Selby Jr, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec. At the time, I had become completely enamored by the Oulipos and other formally experimental practitioners. Structure was paramount and a puzzle I became obsessed with solving. The Stranger was an accident. Amazon “also bought” wormhole style purchase. I think I tossed it into my shopping cart because it was under ten dollars. I had no idea what awaited me. The book completely changed me, more than most. Perhaps more than any other title ever will.
To read the rest of the review, visit Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
Charles Glass discusses the Syrian civil war and Syria Burning with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!. Visit Democracy Now! to watch the full program.
Yesterday evening, Charles Glass, author of Syria Burning, spoke to Boston College at an event sponsored by Christian Solidarity International.
In a press release, CSI summarizes Glass’s talk:
According to Glass, “The U.S., Britain and France had long harbored a wish to get rid of the Syrian regime.” When the Syrian revolution began, Glass said, his contacts in the opposition told him they were determined to keep the movement nonviolent, “to use a strategy the regime couldn’t cope with”: mass civil disobedience and general strikes. “It might have failed, but it would not have led to 250,000 dead and half the country homeless.”
Instead, Western states and their allies in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey “persuaded members of opposition to take up arms, and turn peaceful demonstrations in a civil war.”
Glass described the spread of violent sectarianism in Syria as a consequence of this policy. Minority Christian, Alawite and Druze contacts of Glass’ who initially participated in the peaceful, secular uprising against the Syrian regime “have been driven out of the revolution by jihadists, and forced to side with the regime just to survive.”
Despite the utter lack of political freedom in Syria before the war, Glass said, there was “social freedom,” particularly for Christians, religious minorities and women.
But if the United States and its Islamist regional allies prevail, “that means Jahbat al Nusra [al Qaeda’s Syria affiliate] wins, Syria will be religiously cleansed, and its people will be enslaved to an ideology they don’t believe in.” Alternatively, if Russia, Iran and the Syrian regime prevail, “there will be reprisals and massacres against Syrians who opposed the regime”. On the current trajectory, Glass said, the most likely outcome is not victory for either side, but “a long and bloody war with a big impact on Europe that endures as a problem in U.S. foreign policy for years to come.”
Instead, Glass argued, the two superpowers should reach a settlement on Syria, and impose a peace on the country’s warring parties, as was done in Lebanon in the 1989 Ta’if accord. “Lebanon healed very quickly, in one respect,” Glass said. “That could happen in Syria. The most urgent thing is for the outside powers that are keeping this war alive to stop.”
Click here to watch a full video.
To listen to the full broadcast, visit Uprising Radio.
Israel stands at a precipice, with a deranged head of state who thrives on orchestrating national hysteria, barging in on the US Congress and directing bug-eyed stares at the UN General Assembly. Netanyahu in many ways personifies the reality that the occupation has only exacerbated the most egregious features of Israeli society.
To read the rest of the review, visit The Naiton.
In the Paris Review, Myles discusses her work with Ben Lerner. An excerpt of this interview is available on Lit Hub.
New York Magazine profiles Miles and celebrates the recent attention she’s received. The Guardian and New Yorker likewise applaud her much deserved surge in popularity.
Seidlinger introduces the playlist:
This is what I’d like to call “a playlist of internet moods,” or really a group of tracks that personally exhibit how one may feel while interacting with the online world, specifically social media. How does it relate to the book? It’s a strange world, you know, social media, and there’s nothing stranger than some of the moods and miseries we feel after having been online, connected, for so long that maybe, just maybe, we start to feel a little… disconnected.
To see his choices and listen to the playlist, visit Largehearted Boy.
The Strangest is a stark and deliberate analysis of life in the 21st Century. Its evaluation of not just social media, but modern presence and its adaptation of what I’ll refer to here as a the new human condition, is, much like Camus’ Stranger, authoritative and convincing. Of the string of, or even genre of, contemporary works concentrated on these themes, I found Seidlinger’s The Strangest to have been, thus far, the most concise and expressive.
To read the rest of the review, visit The Modern Review.
Read the opening chapter of The Strangest on Lit Hub.
To listen to the interview, visit Darkness Radio.
Writes Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing: “In Beyond Zero and One, neuroscientist Andrew Smart investigates the relationship of hallucinations to consciousness, and raises some provocative and cool questions about how this relates to AI.”
Kim Longinotto has been named the 2015 recipient of the BBC Grierson Trustees’ Award.
The documentary filmmaker is known for titles including Sisters In Law, which won the CICEA award at Cannes in 2005, Pink Saris and latest release Dreamcatcher, which won the Directing Award at Sundance in January.
Announcing the award, a statement from The Grierson Trust described Longinotto as: “the creator of numerous groundbreaking films which focus on and explore the lives of women across the globe,. Throughout her career she has consistently given voice to those who have no voice living in some of the world’s most repressive and hostile societies.
To read the rest of the news, visit Screen Daily.
Leave it to Lish then, to construct a narrative that is almost exclusively filler, to bury any conventional meaning in the filler itself, and to make it all work. Sometimes the point of wading through the cesspool is the unknowingness, the fear buried in the back of one’s mind that language might not be doing what it’s supposed to be doing. That is, after all, where it all begins to come together.
To read the rest of the review, visit Electric Literature.
With Sherman’s approval, the trainee doctors ordered an injection of meperidine, an opiate sedative, to try to quell her jerking. Then the intern and resident intermittently spent about two hours with her, until Stone went across the street to the hospital’s sleeping quarters to nap. Weinstein concentrated on the other patients. Around three in the morning, a nurse called her to report that Libby was trying to yank her tubes out. Weinstein ordered restraints and a shot of haloperidol, an antipsychotic. Libby slept, but at dawn her fever surged to 107 degrees, she went into cardiac arrest, and died.
Weinstein called the family. She and the hospital took the position that the young woman had a “bad outcome” from a strange and unknown infection. Soon it became known that mixing the dying woman’s antidepressant Nardil (phenelzine) with Demerol (meperidine hydrochloride, an anti-spasmodic and painkiller) could trigger a fatal drug interaction.
Sidney Zion’s rage was towering, his grief bottomless, and his connections legendary. “Murder” was how he described his daughter’s demise: “They gave her a drug that was destined to kill her, then ignored her except to tie her down like a dog.” He lacerated the venerable hospital for the hazing of residents that forced them to work for days at a clip and sometimes over a hundred hours per week. “You don’t need kindergarten,” he inveighed in a New York Times op-ed piece, “to know that a resident working a 36-hour shift is in no condition to make any kind of judgment call—forget about life and death.”
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit TruthDig.
I don’t want to be paralyzed in the face of catastrophic climate change or any other looming calamity. I want to be motivated and spurred to action not by an apocalyptic vision of our local playground engulfed in flames or submerged under several feet of water, but by the potential for the brighter future than is surely within our grasp — within my grasp today and Madeline’s in some future that she truly deserves.
To read the rest of the piece, visit TomDisptach.
To listen to the reading and conversation with Gerry Fialka, visit Skylight Books.
The United Nations’ latest “Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic” paints a depressing portrait of the population’s unimaginable torment at the hands of government and opposition forces alike. The regime drops barrel bombs in Aleppo, and the rebels respond with gas cannisters of explosives and shrapnel. ISIS rapes and brutalizes Yazidi women whom it has declared slaves to be bought and sold. The regime’s security services practice torture on an industrial scale. Both sides besiege villages, and both sides commit massacres. The UN report’s forty-four pages of horrific war crimes should be sufficient for the outside powers to budge and call a halt to this war. What are they waiting for?
To read the rest of the article, visit The New York Review of Books.
Dale Jamieson explains the ever-present role of nature in interpersonal relationships:
“Part of what the book is really trying to present us with is the idea that the relationship between two people necessary involves a relationship to nature. It’s not accidental or a byproduct. And that’s coming up again in ‘Holiday’ as well. Because nature is never absent. Even a degraded nature is still asserting itself in the relationships of these three women. Both in that fact that they have to actually come to a fantasy place to escape the realties of nature. And also because their imagination of nature is also informing what is they’re experiencing in their fantasy.”
To listen to the rest of the interview, visit KCRW.
Shevinsky admits to being “a compulsive writer” who scribbles notes continuously, but the fully formed essays she contributes to “Lean Out” required drastic measures. “I had to lock myself away. I booked a hotel room. I slept, wrote, didn’t talk to anyone. It’s a solitary thing.”
But her debut book is exactly the opposite of solitary. “I did a big people search. The world needed this book. It isn’t ‘the Elissa book.’ We really want to hear unheard stories. I felt even well-intentioned journalists were putting their story in my story. We needed women’s stories to be unedited. I respect their voices.”
The voices are as varied as the visible light’s color spectrum. Twilio software engineer Dom DeGuzman’s perspective and can-do “rock climbing” steps to success are calm and encouraging; Google engineer Erica Joy writes poignantly and vulnerably of “losing herself” as a woman of color for the sake of being included with co-workers whose behavior ranged from covert discrimination (pay inequities) to blatant sexist and racist behavior; Lesbians Who Tech founder Leanne Pittsford boldly reflects a recurring theme that instead of building complaint lists or deepening their voices at the corporate board table, women (and men) in tech must be architects of actual infrastructures that support diversity.
To read the rest of the review, visit San Jose Mercury News.
Advertisements for New Harmony had been accurate. Bring your hungry, your traumatized, your bored, your restless, your longing to forget. It was as green and vibrant a city as any of them could have imagined. There were lakes, gardens, schools, restaurants, shops, museums, and yes, an ocean complete with a necklace of islands and a pounding surf of beginner-, intermediate- and advanced-sized waves dissolving in a white lace of clean sea foam on golden sands.
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit Reality Sandwich.
The sketches in True False evoke, in their noir surrealism, something of the icy oddness associated with the work of the film director David Lynch. This is not an effect that is easily achieved, and the author is to be commended for pulling it off.
Read the full review in the Times Literary Supplement.
Lean Out is clearly a response to Sheryl Sandberg’s wildly successful book Lean In, which convinced a small army of women to step up, “lean in” to their workplaces, and demand more responsibility and more respect. Shevinsky and the authors of the essays in this book take a different angle: If tech companies are unwelcoming places, to hell with them. Start your own company and run it better.
Read the full review in Venturebeat.
“Coast to Coast AM: Organisms, Interrogations, and Gang-stalking”
“We burrow way down deep through the rabbit hole, through the looking glass…dark stuff, creepy, disturbing…shines light on the people who really pull the levers of power. …After I read the book we’re going to be discussing tonight, I had to rethink my postions. Spies, and lies, and high-tech, where the stakes are huge, and no one can be trusted… It’s a mindbending story, funny in places but ultimately very unsettling.”
Listen to the full interview at Coast to Coast.
“Our model of selling direct works best where we can identify communities that will be interested in a particular book we’re publishing,” says Robinson.
“Increasingly,” he continues, “as we build our customer database, we are transitioning from trying to find an audience for our books — which conventional publishers regard as their primary responsibility — to trying to find books for our audience, which, in my opinion, will be the approach of publishers in the future … the modern, forward-looking ones.”
Finding it “odd that publishers generally say their first obligation is to their authors, rather than their readers,” Robinson instead follows a consumer-first approach.
Read the full piece at PYMNTS.com.
An anthology calling upon American writers to address the plight of the Palestinians. Editor Freeman notes in her introduction, “what can and cannot be done in America is a question that carries enormous hope on the part of people who do not live here.” ….A vibrant, high-spirited collection that will appeal to those on one side of this complex geopolitical conundrum.
To read the full review of Extraordinary Rendition, visit Kirkus Reviews.
A succinct, disturbing report on the prevalence of malpractice in modern medicine. Fortunately, Lieber doesn’t decorate his study with scare tactics or confusing jargon; his perspective is clearly that of an informed consumer concerned with the welfare of those seeking American medical care. …An imperative analysis that begs for discussion by industry watchdogs and consumers alike.
To read the full review of Killer Care, visit Kirkus Reviews.
