Cuba in Splinters is the portable homeland that I brought from Cuba. It’s a literary miracle rescued from the solemn censorship on the Island. It’s a bunker of outlaws resisting the barbarity of cultural collectivism.
To read the rest of the review, visit Words Without Borders.
I spent some time this week reading Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-Up Culture, a collection of essays, articles, and blog postings written by 25 women in, as you might guess, the technology field. Their collective experiences make depressing reading despite the courage, humor, and thoughtfulness with which they approach their various situations. Here we are in 2015, nearly 50 years since feminism became a mainstream movement, and, as the book’s editor, Elissa Shevinsky, writes, many women are departing the technology industry because they find the conditions too hostile.
To read the rest of the review, visit Wendy Grossman’s blog.
Attendees at Wednesday’s event, especially the Italians, seemed shocked by the revelations and asked the speakers questions after the conference. Even though Italian media have reported on labor conditions for migrant workers in the UAE in the past, the issue seems virtually unknown to the Biennale public. Hopefully, the Gulf Labor Coalition’s presence in Venice will help remedy this.
To read the rest of the review, visit HyperAllergic.
“Parents are afraid to send their children to school. They’re afraid to go to any community events, weddings or funerals, because drones are known to target weddings and funerals. It’s a terrifying thing, to live under drones.”
To watch the rest of the interview, visit C-SPAN.
Overall Love in the Anthropocene is an original and highly creative look at the future we are currently creating for ourselves. Instead of exaggerating the stories into tales of a wild dystopia, the two authors use gentle details that affect the reader on a basic emotional level and are perhaps even more disturbing than a disaster novel.
To read the rest of the review, visit Sabotage Reviews.
Ninety minutes later, secreted in a holding room off stage as he waited to be introduced, Clint rejected the offer of face powder. “I want to shine,” the actor explained. Listening to others praise Romney from the podium, he decided he didn’t want to be the tenth guy on the program repeating the same cliches as the others. Eastwood wanted to try something different. “Do you have a stool?” Clint asked a stagehand. “Could you put it onstage before I go out? Just to the left of the podium? Thanks.”
Once he took the stage and after the huge roar of the crowd settled down, Clint started talking, addressing the large audience (auditorium and television) but also (shifting his glance) the chair. What was up with that? Who was Clint talking to? “I’ve got Mr. Obama here,” Eastwood explained, “I was going to ask him some questions …”
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit TruthDig.
To see the full list of recommended books, visit TMC’s Blog, Movie Morlocks.
The Kennedy administration moved to gain control over CIA-funded Cuban exile commando groups in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, when the United States and the Soviet Union went to the brink of nuclear war in October 1962. The CIA cut off its generous subsidies to Cuban exile action groups that launched commando raids in Cuba from bases in Florida. (In 1963, the CIA would covertly arm and fund the “autonomous operations” of Manuel Artime and Manuel Ray.)
Cuban exile leaders had not expected the Cuban missile crisis to end peacefully. They believed the United States would intervene militarily to remove the Soviet missiles and overthrow the Cuban revolution. When U.S. law enforcement agencies cracked down on unauthorized Cuban exile paramilitary operations and terminated its supply of aid and arms for exile action groups, Cuban exile leaders went into a funk.
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit Progreso Weekly.
Washington, D.C. gangster Joe Nesline cut a dapper figure. Nesline dressed smartly and sported a diamond ring on his finger and diamond cufflinks. At a little over 5 foot 7 inches, he was not a big man. But he had swagger when it came to gambling, boasting to the FBI he was the world’s “best crap-shooter.” He had been arrested more than 20 times for liquor law violations and gambling, yet he only spent three years in jail.
From the 1950s to the mid-1960s, Nesline was D.C.’s best known and best connected gangster. He came up in the tradition of past D.C. crime bosses. From the Warring brothers, who ran bootleg whiskey during Prohibition and numbers in the 1930s in Foggy Bottom and Georgetown to Roger “Whitetop” Simkins, who ran a numbers operation in Petworth, to Nesline’s gambling houses, D.C. underworld operations were local in character and relatively small-scale. The Mafia did not absorb local gangster operations in D.C. as it did in other cities. And the Mafia never became entrenched in D.C. as it did in Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, New York, or Philadelphia.
In Nesline’s declassified FBI file, there is no evidence he was a “made man” of a Mafia family. He was not Italian. But Nesline’s close ties to leading Mafia gamblers made him unique among D.C. gangsters.
To read the rest of the story, visit Tampa Mafia.
To listen to the full interview, visit PRI.
Perhaps, Watchlist finally suggests, we in the West can never be truly alone and unobserved.
To read the rest of the review, visit Sabotage Reviews.
Mark Karlin: Your book is an extraordinary account of a Gazan journalist with a family enduring the 51-day Israeli killing spree both personally and as a journalist reporting on the assault. How did you overcome the fear of possible death – and limitations such as the infrequent availability of electricity – to file such informative and vivid accounts, something akin to a written version of Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica”?
Mohammed Omer: I have known this fear all my life, so far, personally and nationally. If you let the fear of death paralyze you, then you can achieve nothing for yourself, your family, homeland or dignity. You grab whatever chance, whatever time, light and energy to carry on and get the message out to the world. We love our homeland and are proud of our identity; that is always worth defending with my pen or camera.
To read the full interview, visit TruthOut.
Mohammed Omer’s Shell-Shocked is a vivid series of despatches from what in other conflicts would be called the front line. In the open-air prison of Gaza, though, everywhere is the front line. Or as he puts it, “everyone is running everywhere and nowhere, because there is nowhere to hide”.
To read the rest of the review, visit The Independent.
Interviewer: At the time of the original American hardcover release, you called the book as a critique of a certain kind of male critical adoration of Eastwood. That seems even more relevant today.
McGilligan: Some of the favorable reviews said that and [read the biography] as a critical look at Hollywood and America and a certain image. The fascinating part with Clint is he represents both the actor as auteur, with this vast body of work, and Clint the director as auteur. They complement and overlap and at times they are very separate. It represents a very rich source of investigation and discussion. There is a great number of people who idolize him to the point they are blind.
To read the full interview, visit RogerEbert.com.
Elissa Shevinsky speaks about her life, work, and Lean Out in Williams Magazine:
As she made her way in her career, she says she responded to “the dominance of white male nerd culture” in tech constructively: by founding her own startups. That way, she says, “You create your own culture, and you create your own path. I love my companies, because I hire everyone who’s there. If someone is out of line, I can fire them.”
Calling herself a “serial entrepreneur,” she worked in product development for several startups and co-founded an online dating site called MakeOut Labs before joining Glimpse, an app for disappearing text messaging.
She also published her first book in June, an anthology called Lean Out (OR Books). With a nod to Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, Shevinsky calls her book an exposé on the reality of the tech industry for women.
“I can speak from my own experience: I have dropped out of more than one company because bigots were not going to let work get done,” she says. “Women are leaving tech, and it’s clear that intolerance is a real factor.”
To read the rest of the profile, visit Williams Magazine.
This excerpt from Mohammed Omer’s Shell-Shocked: On the Ground Under Israel’s Gaza Assault discusses the reality of life in the Gaza Strip, noting the humanity that persists there against all odds:
Every minute of every day we live in a distorted reality, a man-made catastrophe crafted to protect and enshrine a peculiar manifestation of overt racism that grants privilege and life solely on the basis of religion and race, and then denies it exists. Its purpose is to make the lives of those of us who belong to the non-favored race and religion unbearable. Its objective is to force us to “volunteer” to abandon our country, businesses, family, homes, ancestry and culture. The tool of this persecution is systemic and infects all aspects of life. It ranges over preventing us from rebuilding our homes to military aggression, targeted killings, imprisonment, starvation diets enforced by siege and an array of punishments that dehumanize and strip us of our rights. And then there are the obstacles to our movement— walls and checkpoints for “security.”
And yet, despite all this, we’re still here. It’s true: In Gaza we find ways to survive. Our women recycle the spent tank shells that have destroyed our homes into flowerpots. Students return to bombed-out schools determined to complete their education. Torn books are taped together, pens are jerry-rigged back into service. At night we often study by candlelight. The frequent cutting off of gas, water and electricity is another daily reality of life in The Strip. And so we carry on, focusing on the basics and muddling through with proud determination. We are human, with dreams and nightmares, equally strong and equally vulnerable. We pride ourselves on our self-sufficiency and humbly thank God for the help of others as we hope and pray for justice.
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit Truthout.
In an exclusive excerpt of Shell-Shocked: On the Ground Under Israel’s Gaza Assault, Mohammed Omer surveys Gaza one year after Operation Protective Edge and finds two reasons for hope:
I conclude on two positive points: the resilience of Palestinians is intact, despite being constantly hit hard with daily despair and huge unemployment throughout the Gaza Strip. The younger generation do all they can to hold on to their lives and human rights–they attend schools and colleges, and continue to value education highly as a foundation for their future careers, even if very few have been allowed by Israel to leave the Gaza Strip and pursue their dreams. This is the new generation that Israel should be seeking to make peace with, rather than setting up as an enemy.
The second positive point relates to the United States. I can recall my first talks at Harvard and Columbia universities, and in several synagogues across the USA, where most people listened but some came to heckle and shout against the truth being told. This trend is now changing, and there is a stronger connection with young Jewish American people. The tide is turning toward justice and equitable peace. I know it is a slow process and may take years, but it feels right. Change is coming. And that is a good thing.
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit Socialist Worker.
Let’s stop blaming women for the failure of big tech companies and VCs to appreciate, respect, hire, fund and promote them. And let’s stop trying to solve an urgent, time-sensitive HR problem—the need for big companies to create genuinely hospitable environments for a diverse set of employees—with unrelated measures like teaching kindergarteners how to code or feel-good conferences that don’t change how women are hired, promoted, funded or respected. Women are not the problem. Let’s fix the thing that is.
To read the full excerpt, visit Metro.
“I’m now of the opinion that pervasive bro-ness is enough of a distraction to be worth dismantling,” Shevinsky tweeted, joining a chorus of outrage over the TechCrunch scandal. She elaborated on her rekindled feminism in a follow-up blog for Business Insider titled, “That’s it—I’m finished defending sexism in tech.” “I thought that we didn’t need more women in tech,” she wrote in the impassioned manifesto that elevated her to the role of social justice warrior. “I was wrong.”
Yet in her new book Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Startup Culture, Shevinsky says her initial response was flawed. Recruiting more women is not the answer, she writes, because women are not the problem. “The solution is to respect the professional environment,” says 36-year-old Shevinsky, an acclaimed designer of female-centric dating apps and cybersecurity software. “Simply having more women in the room doesn’t fix that. We need to fix the root issues in tech, to overhaul the entire culture. Women are smart to not show up to an industry that doesn’t welcome them.”
To read the rest of the review, visit Metro.
Historian Jack Colhoun documented the evolution of the nexus between the American state and organised crime in his exhaustively researched book “Gangsterismo: The United States, Cuba and the Mafia, 1933 to 1966”.
Cuba’s debut as what Colhoun called a “neocolony” of the US took place at the end of the 19th century when the latter intervened in the Cuban war of independence from Spain, effectively nipping the whole “independence” option in the bud and appointing itself Cuba’s new master.
To read the rest of the review, visit Al Jazeera.
Al Kamen writes:
The Hillary Rodham Clinton e-mails recently released by the State Department include some interesting exchanges between Clinton and her pal and informal adviser (and our former colleague here at The Washington Post) Sidney Blumenthal.
They don’t shed much light on what she knew and when she knew it and what she did about anything having to do with the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and three others on Sept. 11, 2012.
But we’ve found someone who’s finally figured a way to make gainful use of at least one e-mail by turning it into a book promotion blurb for London journalist Patrick Coburn’s new offering: “The Jihadis Return.”
To read the rest of the article, visit The Washington Post.
“I got hit on all the time. I was trying to talk business and they were trying to date me. I’ve gotten very good at navigating, but women shouldn’t have to.”
By all accounts, Shevinsky said she’s been lucky. She’s used to being one of the guys and says for the most part, her experience in tech has been positive. But she became particularly aware of sexism in tech while working on her new book, Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-up Culture.
It’s a compilation of first-person essays by women and transgender people in tech that portray a broad range of experiences in the industry. It includes everything from stories of sexual harassment by prominent VCs, to what it’s like to be a person of color at Google, to a transgender person’s account of being both a man and a woman in the tech world.
Shevinsky said working on the book inspired her to be more transparent about her own life.
To read the rest of the review, visit CNN.
“Ultimately, I think the problem with Reddit, with Facebook, with Google, with so many of these social and data-oriented companies is that they were designed by men. So you have products designed for men, by men, for a corporate world built and run by men.”
To watch the rest of the interview, visit Huffpost Live.
RT: What was it like reporting during those 51 days?
Omer: I must say, those 51 days were the most difficult days of my entire 31-years of life. I saw so much during those days. My sleep was from 7:30 till 10 AM in the morning. The rest of the night there was constant bombardment. You could be bombed at any moment. The problem with this attack was that you didn’t know when it was going to end. You didn’t know who was going to be the next target. You don’t know where the tank shell would be landing next. You don’t know if it was going to be yourself, your wife, your son, your neighbor.
To watch the rest of the interview, visit RT.
“Gaza is still in the same situation as right after the War. The only thing we don’t have are F-16s flying overhead or Israeli drones flying overhead. Nothing has been fixed — not one single home has been built. Gaza is still struggling to survive.”
To read the rest of the interview, visit Democracy Now!.
Mohammed’s book tries to tell the human stories behind the figures.
“The book is based on people that I met, events I have survived and attacks I have seen with my own eyes,” he explained.
“The international media has dealt with people killed in the Gaza Strip as numbers. But who are the Palestinians?
“There are the mothers, there are the children, there are the fathers. There is the little girl who got stuck, and her body needs to be dug out of the ruins of her destroyed home. And her brother is alive underneath the rubble—but they can’t get him out under the heavy bombardment of tank shells.”
To read the rest of the interview, visit Socialist Worker.
JOHN HOCKENBERRY: Do you see a negotiated solution here — and that would involve people who really don’t have any warmth for each other — actually sitting down at the table across from each other?
CHARLES GLASS: There can only be a negotiated solution. Neither side in the conflict, neither the Assad regime or the Islamist, have the power to defeat the other. They can bleed the other, which means basically bleeding all of the Syrian people. In the mean time, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and the United States should be leaning on the rebels to stop fighting, and Iran and Russia should be leaning on the regime to put an end to the fighting, and come up with some patchwork, even temporary agreement to stop the fighting and allow Syrians to come home and rebuild their lives.
To listen to the rest of the interview, visit The Takeaway with John Hockenberry.
Then, after I finished reading the book and faithfully reported to my wife that Gordo has gone and done it again, written another great work, I decided to revisit the list test of Aunt Adele’s. Seems there were a few words important enough to me to take another look. But not all than the more than thirty-five hundred of them that he persistently listed. I began to place into order what words I believed Gordon absolutely wanted me to know that I might prove to him my strict and undying adherence to his tyrannical orders, and to muster the required energy to prevail against my own ineptitude. My short list held the following: impudent, sepulchral, millenary, jocundity, saxifrage, spiracle, promiscuous, vignette, seditious, spall, nocturne, civility, rosette, shibboleth, axiomatic, egodicy, foolocracy, emiserate, palimpsest, inglorious, unction, possibles, nondurables, possibles (again), pizzlelicker, possibles (again), fettled, saxifrage (again), spiracle, factitious, possibles (again), swale, slaverous, soffit, jissam, cambered, riprap, doggery, bibulous, ponderables, recumbent, adamant, repulse, supersaturate, fugacious, facticity, locutive, penchant, adamic, plenum, and tell me please you finally get my drift.
THIS IS HELL: Since 2000, one hundred thousand people have been killed in the US-Mexico drug war. We have tens of thousands of people who have disappeared. Also, I believe in your book, you talk about roughly two thousand people who have been decapitated. As you know, here in the US when the Islamic state decapitates somebody, that gets a ton of press. Yet I only discover from your book that thousands of people have been decapitated within Mexico.
CARMEN BOULLOSA: More than two thousand.
THIS IS HELL: What explains to you that kind of disconnect here in the United States? Sure, we’ll report on the brutality of what the Islamic state might be doing, but even when that occurs to a much larger degree within Mexico we’re not reporting on it.
MIKE WALLACE: It’s a terrific question and it goes to the heart of your larger question about the relations between the U.S. and Mexico. I teach a course on the history of crime in New York City, and in one session I was offering some comparison with the drug war in Mexico and what has happened in the U.S. in earlier days. And I said, you know, it really is remarkable that we’re at war again, because there are true atrocities, and there were a handful of people who were decapitated. How do we account for this? Maybe people just don’t know. And then one kid raised his hand, hadn’t said a word all semester, clearly Hispanic, and said “no, professor, it’s not true. They know, they just don’t care.”
To listen to the rest of the interview, visit This Is Hell.
Iraq, its frontiers inscribed by British colonialism, had not known democracy since the dawn of civilization. Now it offers a second home to ISIS. Was this, too, inevitable?
Cockburn’s narrative suggests otherwise. As a somnambulist march toward disaster, America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq was a tour de force. After the ill-conceived initial conflict, the by now familiar drama unfolded with America’s dismemberment of the country’s overwhelmingly Sunni army and Baath party, paving the way for a Sunni rebellion. The White House, as if cued by Iran, organized elections won by the Shiite majority, installing in power an incompetent if ruthlessly sectarian Shiite government, aided by Shiite militias allied with Tehran. America’s “surge” only delayed the looming catastrophe. Then came U.S. military withdrawal in 2011, by which time ISIS was on its way. Given the repression by militias and the U.S.-backed government, Sunnis, as Cockburn notes, “have no alternative but to stick with ISIS or flee, if they want to survive.”
To read the rest of the review, visit The Baffler.
