Latest News: Author Archive

“How a COVID-era Federal Writers Project went from wild idea to a proposed bill” — THE DEEP END featured in the Los Angeles Times

Friday, May 7th, 2021

“Jason Boog can tell you firsthand about the struggles of writers in the 21st century. During the 2008 recession, he lost his job when the publication he worked for, Judicial Reports, shut down. For freelance writing gigs, he used the New York University library as his office, and when he wasn’t writing, he was reading.

Intrigued by the challenges of his forebears in unemploymentBoog began pitching pieces about writers during the Great Depression. Twelve years later (by which point he was the West Coast correspondent for Publishers Weekly), he collected them into his own book, published last year: “The Deep End: The Literary Scene in the Great Depression and Today.

Reading about the Depression during the Great Recession had given Boog hope amid profound stress and uncertainty. He’d even entertained the idea of federal intervention to help thousands of writers who, like him, had been laid off from steady jobs.

Help didn’t come in 2008, but then came the pandemic — truly a once-in-a-lifetime cataclysm. It felt to him like a possible sea change. But the long wait and the lessons of history have also made him realistic. “The sad and hard lesson that I learned from the Great Depression is that it takes a long time to recover from this,” Boog said, “and it takes a long time to make meaningful changes…

Writers will struggle for years to come, Boog said, “but if we follow the example of the 1930s and stay in the streets and we keep mobilizing, raising our voices, asking for support, and making sure people recognize that writers and creative people are suffering during this time too and need help — once that happens, then maybe we can see some change.”

Read the full article here.

“The urgency of universal healthcare” — THE MONSTER ENTERS featured in New Frame

Friday, May 7th, 2021

“As Mike Davis writes in The Monster Enters: Covid-19 and the Plagues of Capitalism, the global economy is fundamentally unsustainable. The relentless pursuit of profit is causing ecological havoc and creating the conditions for even worse plagues in the near future. It is sobering to realise there is a high likelihood that Covid-19 will not be the most severe pandemic we see in our lifetime.”

Read more here.

“Cuomosexual Conversion Therapy” — THE PRINCE author Ross Barkan interviewed on Pod Damn America

Friday, May 7th, 2021

Pod Damn America · Cuomosexual Conversion Therapy w/ Ross Barkan

“How Cuomo’s bevy of scandals is affecting legislation” — THE PRINCE author Ross Barkan interviewed on Bad Faith

Friday, May 7th, 2021

“A critique of how ‘middle class’ is defined” — THE SINKING MIDDLE CLASS featured in the Economic Times

Friday, May 7th, 2021

“Patterns of who has historically done hard manual labour and of relative access to education have left whites overrepresented in professional, white collar and managerial labour. Loose talk of saving the middle class obscures this past and present.”

Read more here.

“Ending Police Immunity” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed on the Mehdi Hasan Show

Friday, May 7th, 2021

“Qualified immunity prevents holding cops accountable” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed for the Hill

Friday, May 7th, 2021

“Cohen regards this statute as one of the roots of systemic racism and policing.”

Read the interview here.

“Qualified immunity is essentially a get out of jail free card for bad cops” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed for the Santa Cruz Sentinel

Thursday, April 29th, 2021

“‘Above the Law,’ author Ben Cohen weighs in on enhancing police accountability.”

Read the interview here.

“Qualified immunity is an insult to Americans whose rights have been violated by public officials.” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed on the CATO Daily Podcast

Thursday, April 29th, 2021

“Ben Cohen tells some of those stories in Above the Law: How ‘Qualified Immunity’ Protects Violent Police.”

Listen here.

THE FASCINATION OF WHAT’S DIFFICULT author Kim Bendheim interviewed on This Irish American Life

Thursday, April 29th, 2021

“On this week’s This Irish American Life, Dr. Miriam Nyhan Grey interviews Kim Bendheim about her new book, The Fascination of What’s Difficult: A Life of Maud Gonne (OR Books, 2021). “

Listen here.

“What happens when you discover your heroine was a vile anti-Semite?” — THE FASCINATION OF WHAT’S DIFFICULT author Kim Bendheim writes for Air Mail

Thursday, April 29th, 2021

“Do we cancel people because of their corrosive words and deeds or do we try to see them as flawed human beings? This question came up while I was writing the first American biography of Maud Gonne in 40 years.”

Read the article here.

“An insightful analysis and takedown of hipsterdom” — DECOLONIZE HIPSTERS reviewed in Morning Star

Thursday, April 29th, 2021

“DECOLONIZE HIPSTERS, the opening salvo in a new series of handbooks, places hipsters at the vanguard of a movement that starts with gentrification but ends with gifting Trump the White House and giving rise and misguided succour to white supremacists… Quoting Karl Marx through to Lemmy from Motorhead, Pierrot fleshes out the essence of modern hipsterdom and its pernicious contemporary manifestations…. Fast, furious and best read in one sitting… in your face for all the right reasons, it’s full of fun and thoughtful facts, interesting anecdotes and parallels that all lead in the same direction — how hipsters steal, suck up and squander what they should hold dear… A quick and thought-provoking read that eloquently sets an agenda, justifies it and demands that action is taken. Read it, think again, and make change your goal.”

Read the full review here.

“Part-primer, part-primal scream” — THE CENTER DID NOT HOLD reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement

Thursday, April 29th, 2021

“Spelled out in relentless detail… [are] plenty of baleful statistics about income stagnation, inequality and the loss of manufacturing jobs… Eisenberg is particularly appalled by Obama’s treatment of Edward Snowden… He is also furious that Obama made nice with Wall Street… And he accuses Obama of profligacy – in eight years the former president racked up $100 million in travel expenses on luxury family vacations… Biden is not spared Eisenberg’s outrage… The then vice president ran up a bill of $1 million per year shuttling between Washington, DC and his home in Delaware (a tradition he has continued as president). Moreover, humble “middle-class Joe” earned $15.6 million in two years after leaving office. Eisenberg accuses Obama and his vice president of having left ‘a lingering bad taste in the mouths of many progressives.’

Read the full review here.

“Rachel Maddow is the new Bill O’Reilly” — HATE INC author Matt Taibbi interviewed on Rising

Tuesday, April 27th, 2021

“A compelling critique” — PANDEMIC! reviewed in Gript

Tuesday, April 27th, 2021
Read the review here.

“I briefly crawled out of my little hole and saw the grim shadow of the country’s pandemic inaction and now it’s COVID for another six months.” — LOCKDOWN IN HELL WORLD author Luke O’Neil writes for Protean

Tuesday, April 27th, 2021

“Breathe In, Breathe Out”

Read the article here.

“A vivid memoir of a storied attorney” — MOVING THE BAR reviewed in the Progressive

Tuesday, April 27th, 2021

“There is so much more here, chapter by chapter, from the 1970s up to Ratner’s life-robbing illness, that the reader can take in, along with Ratner’s self-presentation, how he understood cases over the decades, how he figured out strategies and worked so furiously—and also brilliantly—to make those strategies work.

Dig in, reader. You are in for a treat, and an education.”

Read the review here.

“Scandal-plagued Cuomo and Organized Labor’s Bizarre Silence” — THE PRINCE featured in Strikewave

Tuesday, April 27th, 2021

“Unions that have grown close to Cuomo over the years would do well to remember who he really is. As Ross Barkan writes in his new book The Prince: ‘Cuomo’s first campaign for governor reflected his fundamental political beliefs. Unlike his father, he had no interest in speaking the language of the left. He campaigned, and would subsequently govern, as a triangulating Democrat, vowing to slash taxes, shrink government, and empower the state’s finance and real estate lobbies against organized labor.'”

Read the article here.

“The Urgent Need to Change the Language We Use to Talk About the Climate Crisis” — TALES OF TWO PLANETS editor John Freeman writes for Time

Friday, April 23rd, 2021

“The pandemic shows we’re capable of drastic change. It’s time to stop telling ourselves we can’t do the same to save the planet.”

Read the article here.

“Kim Stanley Robinson on Cities as a Climate Survival Mechanism” — REDISCOVERING EARTH contributor writes for Bloomberg

Friday, April 23rd, 2021

“A future with far more cities, and cities that are asked to do far more.”

Read the article here.

“The history of hipsters is a not-so-secret history of race in the Atlantic world.” — DECOLONIZE HIPSTERS excerpt published in Guernica

Friday, April 23rd, 2021
Read the excerpt here.

“[Fernández] has a finely tuned ironic sensitivity that picks up on the many quirks and foibles of humans at work or play wherever she goes… Her writing is energetic, engaging, loquacious.” — CHECKPOINT ZIPOLITE reviewed in CounterPunch

Friday, April 23rd, 2021

Fernández likes people and, even in our jaded age of relativism, it acts as a pick-me-up tonic to know that there are people out there like Belén are tickled by the characters they meet up with… One of the really wonderful things about Fernández’s writing, aside from its mirth and ironic observation, is its humanity.

Read the review here.

“A scathing assessment of New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo’s handling of the Coronavirus pandemic.” — THE PRINCE reviewed by historian Chris McNickle on Medium

Friday, April 23rd, 2021

Barkan is nearly as tough on his fellow journalists, whom he views as deeply complicit in levitating Cuomo to undeserved hero status…

Read the review here.

“We must end ‘qualified immunity’ for police. It might save the next George Floyd” — ABOVE THE LAW excerpt published in the Guardian

Tuesday, April 20th, 2021

“We have got to go further than simply seeking punishment for individual officers after they have ended a life. We have to change the culture of policing itself, to save the next life. We have to end qualified immunity,” Killer Mike writes.

Read the excerpt here.

“Let’s get ‘Qualified Immunity’ thrown out.” — ABOVE THE LAW contributor Killer Mike interviewed on CNN

Tuesday, April 20th, 2021

“When it comes right down to it, Cohen demonstrates, Qualified Immunity (QI) is not only evil as a police protection against ‘frivolous lawsuits’ but absurdly illogical” — ABOVE THE LAW reviewed in CounterPunch

Tuesday, April 20th, 2021

Quick-paced, well-edited, and educational. The intelligent reader will find it cogent, reasonable and offering actions that can be supported or accomplished… In the Foreword to Above the Law, rapper Michael Render (“Killer Mike”) provides an excellent emotional overview of the events at hand… Above the Law provides one example after another of the legal inanity that protects police.

Read the review here.

“The US government’s solution to the migrant crisis is militarization… again.” — CHECKPOINT ZIPOLITE author Belén Fernández writes for Al Jazeera

Tuesday, April 20th, 2021

“Biden’s anti-migrant ‘surge’”

Read the article here.

“Facing Our Global Crises & Maintaining Hope” — PANDEMIC! 2 author Slavoj Žižek interviewed on Parallax Views

Tuesday, April 20th, 2021

“The austerity doctrine in the time of coronavirus” — EVERYTHING MUST CHANGE! contributors Yanis Varoufakis, Stephanie Kelton, and Brian Eno in conversation with Naomi Klein on Let’s Talk It Over

Friday, April 16th, 2021

“[Captures] how the New Deal was actually lived at the ground level by Bernie’s generation” — BERNIE’S BROOKLYN featured in the Jewish Currents newsletter

Friday, April 16th, 2021

“…with significant investments in housing, education, and infrastructure that promised a more just and equitable social contract and made it possible for someone like Bernie, the son of a Jewish paint salesman from Poland, to benefit from upward mobility. It was precisely through the affordable education the New Deal state provided that Bernie became equipped to confront the racial and economic injustices that the New Deal either failed to alleviate or actively entrenched, and eventually was able to develop the critique that has inspired a new generation of leftists today.”

Read the full newsletter here.

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