Latest News: Author Archive

“Biggest threat COVID-19 epidemic poses is not our regression to survivalist violence, but barbarism with a human face.” — PANDEMIC! author Slavoj Žižek writes for RT

Wednesday, March 25th, 2020

Slavoj Zizek: Biggest threat Covid-19 epidemic poses is not our regression to survivalist violence, but BARBARISM with human face

The impossible has happened and the world we knew has stopped turning around. But what world order will emerge after the coronavirus pandemic is over – socialism for the rich, disaster capitalism or something completely new?

These days I sometimes catch myself wishing to get the virus – in this way, at least the debilitating uncertainty would be over. A clear sign of how my anxiety is growing is how I relate to sleep. Until around a week ago I was eagerly awaiting the evening: finally, I can escape into sleep and forget about the fears of my daily life. Now it’s almost the opposite: I am afraid to fall asleep since nightmares haunt me in my dreams and make me awaken in panic – nightmares about the reality that awaits me.

What reality? Alenka Zupancic formulated it perfectly, and let me resume her line of thought. These days we often hear that radical social changes are needed if we really want to cope with the consequences of the ongoing epidemic (I myself am among those spreading this mantra). But radical changes are already taking place.

The coronavirus epidemic confronts us with something we considered impossible. We couldn’t imagine something like this to really happen in our daily lives – the world we knew has stopped spinning around, whole countries are in lockdown, many of us are confined to one’s apartment (but what about those who cannot afford even this minimal safety precaution?) facing an uncertain future in which even if most of us survive an economic mega-crisis lies ahead…

What this means is that our reaction should also be to do the impossible – what appears impossible within the coordinates of the existing world order.

The impossible has happened, our world has stopped, and now we have to do the impossible to avoid the worst. But what is that ‘impossible’?

I don’t think the biggest threat is a regression to open barbarism, to brutal survivalist violence with public disorders, panic lynching, etc. (although, with the possible collapse of health and some other public services, this is also quite possible.) More than open barbarism I fear barbarism with a human face – ruthless survivalist measures enforced with regret and even sympathy, but legitimized by expert opinions.

Read the full op-ed here.

“Are your decisions made by your brain, or via the experience of the world relative to your body?” — DIALOGUES ON CONSCIOUSNESS excerpted in Aeon

Monday, March 23rd, 2020

You Are the World

For any materialist vision of consciousness, the crucial stumbling block is the question of free will. A modern, enlightened person tends to feel that he or she has rejected a mystical, immaterial conception of the eternal soul in exchange for a strictly scientific understanding of consciousness and selfhood – as something created by the billions of neurons in our brains with their trillions of synapses and complex chemical and electrical processes. But the fact of our being entirely material, hence subject to the laws of cause and effect, introduces the concern that our lives might be altogether determined. Is it possible that our experience of decision-making – the impression we have of making choices, indeed of having choices to make, sometimes hard ones – is entirely illusory? Is it possible that a chain of physical events in our bodies and brains must cause us to act in the way we do, whatever our experience of the process might be?

In my conversations with Riccardo Manzotti, professor of theoretical philosophy at the IULM University in Milan, we have explored his mind-object identity theory, a hypothesis that shifts the physical location of consciousness away from the brain and its neurons. In Manzotti’s version of events, the brain does not ‘process information’ coming from the senses to create illusory representations of an external reality that it can never really know (the hypothesis supported by most neuroscientists and many philosophers); rather, the encounter of the body (brain and senses included, of course) with the world allows the world to occur in a certain way, to become an object relative to the body; and that occurrence, that relative object, is what we call perception, consciousness, and it remains exactly where it is, outside our body. Our experience, our mind, is the world as it is in relation to our body. And the ‘I’ is identified neither with the brain, nor more extensively with the body, but with our experience which is the world in relation to the body.

However, if this is the case, if subject and object, or rather mind and relative object, are one in experience, does this not make it all the more difficult to explain our impression of free will? Isn’t it precisely our moment-by-moment awareness of making decisions that proves that we are separate and sovereign subjects moving in a world of objects that remain quite distinct from us and over which we seek to have mastery?

Read the full excerpt here.

HATE INC. author Matt Taibbi wins 2020 Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media

Wednesday, March 11th, 2020

2020 Izzy Awards Honor Journalist Matt Taibbi, News Inside and The Center for Investigative Journalism

The 2020 Izzy Award “for outstanding achievement in independent media” will be shared between three recipients: journalist Matt Taibbi, the publication News Inside and Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism.

Longtime reporter Matt Taibbi has focused on media bias, government misconduct, and the presidential campaign, calling into question corporate and so-called liberal media coverage of politics. He is the author of the book “Hate Inc.” and co-host of the “Useful Idiots” podcast. News Inside was launched by The Marshall Project in 2019 and provides reporting on criminal justice issues for prisoners with articles written by current and former inmates. Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism published 900 pages of damning messages last year between then-Governor Ricardo Rosselló and other top-level officials, triggering a mass uprising that led to his resignation.

The Izzy Award is presented by the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College and is named for legendary dissident journalist I.F. Stone.

Read the full announcement here.

New Video: I ACCUSE! author Norman Finkelstein outlines the obstacles to holding Israel accountable for war crimes at the International Criminal Court on The Real News Network

Monday, March 9th, 2020

I ACCUSE! author Norman Finkelstein outlines the obstacles to holding Israel accountable for war crimes at the International Criminal Court on The Real News Network

 

“A devastating personal denunciation… a thunderbolt in the form of a legal document.” — I ACCUSE! review published by Jewish Voice for Labour

Wednesday, March 4th, 2020

I Accuse! – Letting Israel Off the Hook

In his previous book, the monumental Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom (2018), Norman Finkelstein depicted the Israeli attack on the Mavi Marmara, on the night of May 31, 2010, as an integral part of the recent story of Israeli atrocities against Gaza, ranging from Operation Cast Lead in 2008 to Operation Protective Edge in 2014 – massacres committed against an imprisoned population already suffering from a humanitarian crisis caused by a blockade imposed in 2007.

Finkelstein described the victims of the assault on the Mavi Marmara – ten murdered, scores injured — as “the first casualties of the interment of the Goldstone Report” on Operation Cast Lead – referring to the backpedalling from that Report by the human rights community, including Goldstone himself, that had taken place even before his recantation on April 1, 2011.

In its turn, Finkelstein claims in his Conclusion to I Accuse!, the refusal of Fatou Bensouda, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC ) — who evidently feared the vilification campaign experienced by Goldstone — to launch a full investigation into the Flotilla Incident “paved the way” for the atrocities committed against peaceful civilian demonstrators in the Great March of Return that began in the spring of 2018.

It is precisely because the Prosecutor (as Bensouda is referred to in the book) does NOT situate the Flotilla Incident within the ongoing agony of Gaza that Finkelstein has launched against her, in his new book, a devastating personal denunciation. Essentially, the book is a thunderbolt in the form of a legal document.

Read the full review here.

New Video: LUCID DREAMING author Pamela Cohn interviewed on TRT World’s Showcase

Thursday, February 27th, 2020

Pamela Cohn’s Lucid Dreaming

“By depriving the WikiLeaks founder of his freedom, prosecutors in the US and Britain are intimidating journalists—and abetting torturers, war criminals, and kleptocrats everywhere.” — IN DEFENSE OF JULIAN ASSANGE contributor Charles Glass writes in the Nation

Wednesday, February 26th, 2020

Free Julian Assange!

I declare an interest: Julian Assange is my friend. But I do not defend him because he is a friend. He is a friend because he is worth defending, because he disclosed vital information to the public on actions taken in our name and because he has sacrificed his freedom to do it. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, has visited Assange in Britain’s high security Belmarsh prison and concluded that he is suffering “full-fledged psychological torture.” In addition, Spanish contractors working for the CIA have monitored privileged lawyer-client discussions with his defense team. Assange is not receiving a fair hearing in Britain. He is unlikely to receive a fair trial in the United States, when the prosecution knows all about his legal strategy while he knows nothing of theirs.

The criminals who perpetrated war crimes revealed in their own communications documented and made public by WikiLeaks did not want you to know about them. Nor do they want you to know about those they commit in the future. To conceal the truth, they will put the truth-teller in an oubliette where he will never again discover and reveal anything. By depriving Julian Assange of his freedom and thus intimidating his journalistic colleagues, US and UK prosecutors are abetting criminality by spies, secret policemen, torturers, and kleptocrats everywhere. If they succeed in putting Julian Assange in a concrete cell for the rest of his life, it will give them a long breathing space to commit more crimes and amass illegal wealth in secret.

Read the full article here.

“Finley’s voice rages on, whether she’s tackling Trump and right-wing America in her performances, eulogizing the friends she lost to AIDS, or teaching performance to a new generation” — GRABBING PUSSY author Karen Finley interviewed in Interview

Wednesday, February 26th, 2020

The World According to Karen Finley

Karen Finley had already made a name for herself as an artist in San Francisco when she moved to New York City in 1983. I remember her arrival on the East Village art scene—all of us do—because her work instantly stood out for its bravery, punk-rock vitality, and breakthrough radicalism. I saw her perform on stage at the downtown club Danceteria one night in the mid-’80s and was blown away by her ability to inject passion, humor, honesty, and aggravation into one of her signature monologues, set to a disco beat. Finley has always been able to turn up the temperature of the room to boiling. Of course, it wasn’t just New York artists who took notice of her raw, uninhibited performance works, which covered politics, sex, and feminism, and which often involved her stripping down to her bare skin. In 1990, in a piece called “We Keep Our Victims Ready,” she famously smeared chocolate on her nude body at Lincoln Center to prompt questions about sexual violence and the degradation of women. Soon after that, Senator Jesse Helms went on a full-scale attack of her work, and that of three other NEA grant recipients, leading the National Endowment of the Arts to rescind her grant with the charge of “indecency.” This attempt by Washington to censor the arts forever changed the structure of public funding in the United States. Over the next eight years, Finley fought her way to the Supreme Court. She lost that suit but championed the freedom of artists and their voices and bodies the entire way. (She even posed, covered in chocolate, for Playboy in 1993 to draw attention to the hypocrisy coming out of the nation’s capital.)

Finley was an early pioneer of interdisciplinary art, working as she did in performance, music, graphic texts, sculpture, installation, poetry, and drawing—all in the spirit of a public conversation. In 1990, she mounted her poem, “The Black Sheep,” cast in bronze right at the corner of Manhattan’s First Avenue and Houston Street. “We are the sheep with no shepherd,” she wrote. “We are the sheep with no straight and narrow. We are sheep who take the dangerous pathway thru the mountain range to get to the other side of our soul.” This was the first time I had witnessed an experimental artwork taken seriously by the general public. Everyone who rode the subway on the Lower East Side engaged with her piece, and we were its subject—all of us who came to New York City in the late 1970s and early ’80s looking for a place to belong. We had, she was telling us, found it.

Today, Finley’s voice rages on, whether she’s tackling Trump and right-wing America in her performances, eulogizing the friends she lost to AIDS, or teaching performance to a new generation of New Yorkers at NYU. I have always thought of her work as a kind of panacea for society. It’s fitting, then, that we met at a place called Remedy Diner on Houston Street to have this conversation.

Read the full interview here.

“One of the most poignant, searing, and, at times, deadpan critiques of the United States and its mass media that I have ever read… An extraordinary and unorthodox travelogue.” — EXILE reviewed by the Los Angeles Review of Books

Wednesday, February 12th, 2020

A Personal Journey: On “Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World”

ONE WAY TO LOSE a popularity contest in the United States is to mention in polite company — who may be chatting about, say, the impeachment or the Mueller investigation — the numerous ways the United States has meddled in the affairs of other countries throughout many years.

Rigging elections might be the most benign offense on a list that includes engineering military coups, forcing economic policies beneficial to corporations, or blasting another country to bits. And if you mention any of these truths, and the wrong person is in the crowd, there is a chance that the rebuttal will be the following old insult: if you don’t like the country, why don’t you just leave?

Belén Fernández did just that. And it was no whim. As she explains in her book Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World, she left because the United States is, as she writes, a “large-scale lab experiment on how to best crush the human soul.”

The book carries the momentum of that very sentence, as Fernández relates more than 15 years spent journeying through Lebanon, Honduras, Turkey, Italy, and other places. The result is one of the most poignant, searing, and, at times, deadpan critiques of the United States and its mass media that I have ever read.

Fernández begins by describing her upbringing in the United States, including debilitating panic attacks that persisted into her university years. She attributed the panic attacks to “the fear that no one would help me — hardly an irrational sentiment in a system predicated on individual isolation and general estrangement from humanity.” This led to her 2003 departure from the United States, for good, with no other plan but just to get out. She left and never came back.

The result is an extraordinary and unorthodox travelogue.

Read the full review here.

“The justice system has been perverted for blatantly political purposes and a neoliberal social and economic agenda is now being imposed on the Brazilian people.” — IN SPITE OF YOU editor Conor Foley quoted in the Humanist

Thursday, February 6th, 2020

Dreams of Dictatorship and the Nightmare of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro

A collection of essays titled In Spite of You: Bolsonaro and the New Brazilian Resistance edited by Conor Foley, a professor of Law and International Relations at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, was published by OR Books in 2019. Foley told the Humanist there were two urgent goals for the book, which was conceived and published within a span of only five months.

First, to “tell an English-speaking audience what had actually happened in 
Brazil, to contextualize Bolsonaro’s victory and discuss its significance.” Second, “to give a voice to those involved in the fight against him: political activists such as Dilma Rouseff and Fernando Haddad, feminists such as Marcia Tiburi, and others in the anti-racist movement, land rights and indigenous rights activists, human rights campaigners, and those working for justice reform.”

The book’s title was inspired by the protest song “Apesar de Você” (“In spite of you” when translated from Portuguese into English) by Brazilian musician and poet Chico Buarque. The song criticizes the country’s military dictatorship, the same regime Bolsonaro so fondly reminisces about.

“[‘Apesar de Você’] became a rallying cry for the campaign for the return of democracy, and its message of defiance—in spite of you there will be another day—seemed appropriate to the mood of the time that we were thinking about producing the book,” Foley says.

Read the full article here.

“How do you balance the importance of sharing our experiences with the system—giving it a human face—with fear of putting our loved ones at risk?” — ABOLISH ICE author Natascha Elena Uhlmann asks Selena Gomez about immigration activism for DAZED

Thursday, February 6th, 2020

A new decade, a new Selena Gomez: Back with a new album, the pop star goes deep on immigration activism, Latin identity, and her favourite karaoke song, with questions from the likes of Timothee Chalamet, Jim Jarmusch, and Yara Shahidi—plus, her biggest fans in the world

Natascha Elena Uhlmann: Thank you for your vulnerability in sharing your own family’s experiences with immigration. My family has felt the pain of borders and it terrifies me how hostile the world has become since then. How do you balance the importance of sharing our experiences with the system—giving it a human face—with fear of putting our loved ones at risk?

Selena Gomez: It’s definitely frightening, but I think sometimes you have to do the things that scare you in order to shake people up. My goal was to simply humanise my people, because they were being called aliens, criminals, and I can’t even imagine what these kids being separated from their families are going through. It’s something that is going to traumatise them for the rest of their lives. And it just seems animalistic; it is scary but I think it needs to be talked about, so that’s where my heart was coming from when I signed on to do a project (Living Undocumented) that addressed such a big issue.

Read the full interview here.

“Labour’s rival factions do share common ground, which is where the party’s future lies” — PEOPLE GET READY! coauthor Christine Berry writes in the Guardian

Wednesday, February 5th, 2020

Labour’s rival factions do share common ground, which is where the party’s future lies

Despite Labour’s intensely factional politics, there’s a consensus quietly brewing in the party. It looks something like this: our economy and our politics are broken, but we can’t respond by resurrecting the models of the past. Instead, Labour must take seriously the sense of disempowerment that drove the Brexit vote and embrace more localised, participatory ways of running the economy and doing politics. Rather than imposing change from above, this new politics must be built through grassroots organising and imaginative local government, paving the way for national success. You could call this consensus “participatory socialism”.

Read the full piece here.

“‘In Spite of You’ lays bare the dire consequences for [Brazil] following Jair Bolsonaro’s election” — IN SPITE OF YOU reviewed by Morning Star

Wednesday, January 29th, 2020

Troubling times in Brazil

“In Spite of You” provides a valuable insight into the rise of Bolsonaro and the state of Brazilian politics in 2020. For those seeking to avert the global upswing of the racist, xenophobic, socially conservative and neoliberal far right, these are crucial topics to explore.

Read the full review here.

“At this moment I am reading Ariel Dorfman’s extraordinary new novel, ‘Cautivos.’ Even though it is set in the final years of the 16th century, in the world of Cervantes, it is a novel about today and the discovery of song in the dark times.” — Colum McCann recommends CAUTIVOS in the Chicago Tribune

Monday, January 27th, 2020

Feeling overwhelmed by the news? Authors recommend books to read as we enter a new decade

Bertholt [sic] Brecht once asked if there would be singing in the dark times and he concluded that yes there would be singing, because we would have to sing about the dark times. I think it is one of the primary jobs of literature to excavate the heartbreak of the world around us. In the course of that excavation we, as readers, try to find some beauty in the rubble. We sift through and find consolation, sometimes in the smallest, most unlikely moments. I find this music in just about every book I read. At this moment I am reading Ariel Dorfman’s extraordinary new novel, “Cautivos.” Even though it is set in the final years of the 16th century, in the world of Cervantes, it is a novel about today and the discovery of song in the dark times. Great books open up the lungs of the world for us. We are never the same when we read the right words put down in the correct order. I constantly turn to writers like Michael Ondaatje, John Berger, Louise Erdrich and so many others. Literature is where I find my faith.

— Colum McCann, author of “Apeirogon”

Read the full list of recommendations here.

“Riccardo Manzotti and Tim Parks Debate the Internalist View of Consciousness” — DIALOGUES ON CONSCIOUSNESS excerpted on Lit Hub

Friday, January 24th, 2020

How, Exactly, Does Neuroscience Account for the Way We See Color?

There are no colors out there in the world, Galileo tells us. They only exist in our heads. In the first of our dialogues about the mind, Riccardo Manzotti and I established that by “consciousness” we mean the feeling that accompanies our being alive, the fact that we experience the world rather than simply interacting with it mechanically. We also touched on the problem that traditional science cannot explain this fact and does not include it in its account of reality.

That said, there is a dominant understanding of where consciousness happens: in the brain. This “internalist,” or inside-the-head, approach shares Galileo’s view that color, smell, and sound do not exist in the outside world but only in the brain. “If you could perceive reality as it really is,” says leading neuroscientist David Eagleman, “you would be shocked by its colorless, odorless, tasteless silence.” What Riccardo and I want to do today is ask how, in the neuroscientists’ opinion, we see color. What are the implications of believing that this experience is all inside our heads? And how have scientists reacted to the difficulties they have encountered verifying this theory?

Read the full excerpt here.

“O’Neil opens up a space to redirect the energies of anger and guilt away from ourselves and toward the systems of oppression.” — WELCOME TO HELL WORLD reviewed by Full Stop

Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020

Welcome to Hell World – Luke O’Neil

The result, if you really dig down to the very core of that what-the-fuck moment that happens again and again throughout the book, is not a sense of morbid delight or nihilistic surrender but rather a fragile, translucent shard of hope. It’s small and it’s tender and I certainly wouldn’t go digging around too hard just yet in the hope of holding it in your hands, but it’s there all the same. And at no time is this pathetic little scrap more apparent than in that brief moment when O’Neil lays out a story about baby jails or the Sackler family or fucking Amazon and it hits you, yes, this whole thing is unbelievable. You’re not weak or subpar or unfit for the game, it is being played under conditions objectively terrible and cruel. Moreover, the rules are designed to hide the fact, to pathologize the suffering as a failure of the individual. In acknowledging this, O’Neil opens up a space to redirect the energies of anger and guilt away from ourselves and toward the systems of oppression. Which is to say, O’Neil might have no answers here, but at least he’s figuring out what, and more importantly who, to ask.

Read the full review here.

New Video: SURF, SWEAT AND TEARS by Andy Martin

Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020

Coming Soon: SURF, SWEAT AND TEARS by Andy Martin

“Radical demystification of Daniel Defoe’s iconic work” — CRUSOE AND HIS CONSEQUENCES reviewed by Morning Star

Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020

Radical demystification of Daniel Defoe’s iconic work

Dunkerley delivers an informative contextual account of the author of this fictional autobiography. The “hyperactive” Defoe turned his prodigious energies to mercantile trade as wine merchant, brickyard owner, journalist, novelist and as both government critic and spy-provocateur. For his Whig masters he was “a radical star.”

In appraising what is unquestionably Defoe’s finest poem, his Satyr on The True-Born Englishman, where, after describing the mixture of races that fuel our “native” bloodline, he concludes: “From this Amphibious, ill-born mob began/That vain ill-natured thing, an Englishman,” Dunkerley believes he mirrors not only his own times but “the age of UKIP, the DUP and Brexit.”

Read the full review here.

“A lot of times you have to censor yourself if you’re writing for a big outlet, you can’t literally just say ‘This is fucking terrible. These people are vampire ghouls and they deserve to die,’ you know?”—Luke O’Neil, author of WELCOME TO HELL WORLD, interviewed by The Alternative

Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020

Interview: Luke O’Neil Author of ‘Hell World’

“Luke O’Neil is one of my favorite writers and journalists. I guess that’s not a mainstream pick because he hasn’t written any famous novels or won any big journalism awards (yet), but he has gotten hate from the MAGA chuds because he wrote that people should piss in Republicans’ food in a major city’s newspaper, so I think that’s equivalent as far as I’m concerned.

Luke is a longtime writer about issues in social justice, criminal justice, financial inequality, and American war crimes. Occasionally his articles are featured in big outlets like (insert corporation #1) and (insert corporation #2), but more recently he has been writing a weekly newsletter called Welcome to Hell World which presents stories and research about the many different issues and injustices that make living in America in the 2020’s such a hellscape, and delivering it direct to his readers himself. Just a few months ago, he compiled the best of the first batch of newsletters into a truly touching and emotional read of a book, which is also hilarious in the dark humor sort of way that the title, Welcome To Hell World, illustrates.”

Read the full interview here.

“Despite doing more to expose the actions of the rich and powerful than any other journalist in modern times, Assange’s plight has been ignored by the mainstream media who have either forgotten or turned against him on account of a longstanding and well orchestrated propaganda campaign to demonise a man who poses a grave threat to the established order.” — IN DEFENSE OF JULIAN ASSANGE reviewed by Morning Star

Friday, January 10th, 2020

Must-read on the persecution of Wikileaks whistleblower

Never before have so many states, intelligence agencies and powerful individuals invested such effort into confining, silencing and neutralising a single individual on account of his desire to inform people about the misdeeds of their governments and elites. In Defence of Julian Assange is an anthology of essays, articles, and commentaries written by journalists, lawyers and supporters among others who discuss Assange’s enduring persecution, his countless successes in exposing those deemed untouchable through the medium of Wikileaks and the terrifying implications that an extradition to the United States would pose not just to Assange but to journalism and democracy as a whole.

Divided into four sections, the book focuses on Assange’s confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy, his expulsion and arrest, the internet and censorship and the legacy of Assange and Wikileaks.It reveals how Assange, alongside whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, knowingly took great risks to perform an invaluable service to journalism and the truth by informing the public about war crimes and other wrongdoings committed by those in power.

Read the full review here.

“I’d never judge someone else for not working. But if I myself didn’t work, work, work, without slumping into psychic extremes I castigated myself as a corrupted failure.”—Alissa Quart, author of THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS, discuss her work in Poetry Society of America

Friday, January 10th, 2020

Alissa Quart on “In Ballard”

The event was a family vacation, in a rapidly gentrified neighborhood in a Northwestern city. The month was August, the end of the summer, a time when some people get manic from the increased light, like Norwegians finally seeing sun. My age was early middle. My professional anxiety was unusually high, as if to match the climate-weird hot temperature around me. By that year, 2015, newspapers had seen forty five percent of their jobs shrink since 2004, with freelance pay sometimes below minimum wage.

Over the course of the 48 hours in which I wrote “In Ballard,” I underwent what could be called an extended panic.

I was a lifelong freelancer, who also ran an organization devoted to journalists writing on inequality as they tried to survive themselves. I had started to report a book on the subject as well. In other words, I personalized my industry’s vulnerability:

Read the full piece here.

“The 2018 election of Far-Right politician Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency shook the Federative Republic of Brazil and rippled across the globe in a way similar to the shockwave caused by the US election of Donald Trump two years earlier.”—The Humanist interviews Conor Foley, editor of IN SPITE OF YOU

Thursday, January 9th, 2020

Dreams of Dictatorship and the Nightmare of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro

Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world, as well as the largest economic force in South America. One of the most diverse societies globally (with a population over 211 million people) is now being led by a man who promotes military dictatorship, violence against political opponents, and strengthening the rule of the rich at the expense of the poor and the oppressed.

Wrapping himself in the Brazilian flag (figuratively speaking), Bolsonaro preached a political gospel of liberating the country from socialism, from “gender ideology,” and from “political correctness” with his inaugural speech on January 1, 2019. He called on “each congressperson to help me in the mission of rebuilding and restoring our homeland.” The term “homeland” here has more sinister connotations than “patriotic populism”—it’s a move into fascist territory. His vision of a country “whitened by iron and fire” is a more obvious example of such rhetoric.

Read the full piece here.

“As you collect documents and bring new information to light, be aware that you are in an escalating digital arms race.” —A PUBLIC SERVICE by Tim Schwartz excerpted in Boing Boing

Thursday, January 9th, 2020

Documentation Gathering, Sanitization, and Storage: an excerpt from A PUBLIC SERVICE

There will always be new ways that data forensics can identify you, or uncover information based on data that you inadvertently leave in your files, or data that is retained in logs noting who has accessed what files on what network. Recently it was discovered that noise from electrical grids can be used to quite accurately pinpoint when, and potentially where, an audio recording was made. The best way to win this war—or at least to avoid becoming collateral damage—is to work outside the standard methods and find partners who have experience.

Of course, the actual collection of documents has changed dramatically over the years. In 1969, Daniel Ellsberg systematically removed documents, including the Pentagon Papers, from the RAND Corporation in his briefcase, taking them to an advertising agency where he (sometimes with the help of his 13-year-old son) photocopied them, one page at a time. Though this took enormous courage and psychological stamina—and in 1969 all that copying was certainly time-consuming and undoubtedly tiresome—it was also technologically straightforward and relatively safe. As long as the guards didn’t stop and check his briefcase, and as long as no one saw him remove and return the reports, Ellsberg could duplicate the papers undetected.

Read the full excerpt here.

“Parts of A PUBLIC SERVICE read like a spy-thriller, covering detailed operational security planning, everything from buying a burner phone to doing research into possible journalists to take your docs to — all without leaving a trail that can be traced back to you.” —Cory Doctorow reviews A PUBLIC SERVICE by Tim Schwartz in Boing Boing

Thursday, January 9th, 2020

A Public Service: a comprehensive, comprehensible guide to leaking documents to journalists and public service groups without getting caught

Every technical lesson is presented in clear, easy-to-follow terms — and more importantly, this technical material is embedded in super-sharp context explaining how to assess your risks and use your technological information to counter them. Schwartz begins at the beginning, with steps for getting data out of a network without leaving signs that point to you, and then carries on through the whistleblowing process — sanitizing identifying information in the files, securely transmitting them, and then covering any trace of your possession.

Just as important are Schwartz’s chapters on how to figure out who you should leak your documents to, and then how to contact them in a way that is likely to get your leaks taken seriously enough to rate a followup (both public interest groups and journalists get far more tips than they can handle, so this is every bit as important as the security advice). He also discusses when you might expect to have to go public — as with a workplace sexual assault accusation, say — and how to prepare yourself both mentally and technologically for the inevitable fallout.

Read the full review here.

“The narrator in Dorfman’s short novel tells the story of a captive Cervantes and his meditations on writing, life, suffering and creativity.”—Morningstar reviews Ariel Dorfman’s CAUTIVOS

Wednesday, December 18th, 2019

Letters From Latin America

Miguel de Cervantes, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world’s pre-eminent novelists, was kept in captivity between 1575 and 1580 in the city of Algiers, then one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the Ottoman empire.

After his return to Spain, he briefly worked in Andalusia as a purchasing agent for the Spanish navy. This led to his imprisonment for a few months in Seville after a banker with whom he had deposited Crown funds went bankrupt.

It was during his brief stay at a jail in Seville that Cervantes started his masterpiece Don Quixote, a picaresque narrative that would become a founding work of Western literature — it’s often labelled the first modern novel.

Read the full review here.

“Unethical acts — not just illegal ones — need to be revealed. Society can only evolve when individuals stand up and shine a light on unethical practices. If you see something that doesn’t seem right, speak up.” —Tim Schwartz, author of A PUBLIC SERVICE, writes in A Public Seminar

Wednesday, December 18th, 2019

Whistleblowing, Disclosure and Anonymity

In 1965, 28-year-old Peter Buxtun was hired by the U.S. Public Health Service in San Francisco as a venereal disease investigator. Shortly after starting his job, Buxtun began hearing about a little-known, ongoing study on African-American males with syphilis. To Buxtun’s ears, this didn’t sound right — by the late 1940s, penicillin had been shown to be an effective drug against syphilis. How could there be an ongoing study of people with a disease that had become rare, thanks to a cheap and effective treatment that was discovered 20 years ago?

Though distracted by a return to school and a law degree, Buxtun continued to follow the trail, contacting the Centers for Disease Control and gathering documentation on the under the radar study. He continued to share the story with those around him, but no one he spoke with knew what to do. Was the study illegal? Surely it was unethical, but would it be possible to do anything about it?

Read the full excerpt here.

“There’s a saying at The Nation magazine: what’s bad for the nation is good for The Nation. When the right is ascendant, in other words, so are subscriptions to the left-wing magazine.”—The Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Matt Taibbi’s HATE INC.

Monday, December 16th, 2019

Making Money from Division

This might be called a business model, but not very convincingly. After all, left-wing magazines don’t make much money even in the worst years. (The Nation hosts, however incongruously, an annual cruise to help keep the lights on.) If their main aim was to make money fanning the flames of political division, they’d work elsewhere.

Matt Taibbi might say they’d find more lucrative work at MSNBC. In his biting new critique of partisan media, Hate Inc., he puts the progressive cable news channel in the same dishonorable category as Fox News. Despite their obvious political differences, he argues, both have made the news a consumer product designed “not just to make you mad, but keep you mad, whipped up in a state of devotional anger.”

Even if the information reported on MSNBC or Fox is factually correct, Taibbi says their work doesn’t amount to traditional journalism because their aim isn’t to inform viewers but to addict them — and addict them, particularly, to a narrative of permanent conflict where one side is always right and the other always wrong.

Read the full review here.

“What we did in assembling IN DEFENSE OF JULIAN ASSANGE was to take every single facet of the case and present it before a reading public. And one reason we had to do this is because the [liberal] press have given up on him, having used WikiLeaks, having got their scoops, having raised their own circulations.” —Tariq Ali, IN DEFENSE OF JULIAN ASSANGE co-editor, talks toScheer Intelligence’s Robert Scheer

Monday, December 9th, 2019

The Plot to Discredit and Destroy Julian Assange

A day after dozens of doctors around the world released a statement about their mounting concerns regarding Julian Assange’s health as he’s detained in a U.K. prison, Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer spoke with Tariq Ali, a renowned British journalist and co-editor of the recent collection of essays, “In Defense of Julian Assange.” To Scheer, Ali and the many contributors to the book, the case against Assange boils down to an international effort to suppress press freedoms. Yet as Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States have all co-authored the WikiLeaks founder’s demise, many other journalists and publishers, including at The Guardian and the New York Times—two publications that published work based on Wikileaks—have refused to defend Assange.

“What we did in assembling ‘In Defense of Julian Assange,’” explains Ali, “was to take every single facet of the case and present it before a reading public. And one reason we had to do this is because the [liberal] press have given up on him, having used WikiLeaks, having got their scoops, having raised their own circulations.”

Listen to the full show here.

“Their raw images of living through this horror, day in and day out, is one that continues to haunt the readers long after the book is over. “—Cathy Otten’s WITH ASH ON THEIR FACES reviewed in Feminism in India

Friday, December 6th, 2019

Book Review: With Ash On Their Faces By Cathy Otten

This book particularly focuses on the genocidal attack, executed one summer afternoon in 2014 when thousands of men were massacred, and women and children were enslaved. Otten talks about the slavery these women went through at the hands of ISIS men and their experiences of living with this horror for years, before their stories could be told. This book is a much-needed attempt to document the struggles of the Yazidi community.

Considered to be one of the first accounts of the genocidal attack unleashed by Daesh against the Yazidi community in Iraq, With Ash on Their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State speaks volumes about the resilience of Yazidi women. It is a collection of survivor’s accounts; stories of women who sailed through those turbulent times to tell their story. It begins with a short analysis of the political scenario present in Iraq with reference to the Yazidi community, the Kurdish (minority) and the government, both during and after Saddam Hussein’s rule. Further, the book is divided into three parts taking us through the course of events as and when they happened.

Read the full review here.

“I believe that Quart’s work in the so-called abstract cultural superstructure is not opposed to, but rather, at the very least, a necessary complement, to physically trying to unarm a rabid white supremacist terrorist.”—Alissa Quart’s THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS reviewed in Entropy Mag

Friday, December 6th, 2019

Everything can go/on the grill: A combined review of Alissa Quart

Forgive me if I emphasize the thought over the lyricism, but “everything goes/on the grill” in Alissa Quart’s capacious writing. Her recent prose (Squeezed, 2018) and poetry (Thoughts & Prayers, 2019) appeal to both my “Creative Writing” as well as my “Critical Thinking” sides—or what some college composition classes call pathos, logos, and ethos and some poets call music, logos, and image, and in the process, Quart is able to reframe the relationship between the ‘public’ and ‘private,’ commercial and non-commercial, seriousness and humor, work and care, as well as the stigma of the ‘Jewish mother’ stereotype.

Read the full review here.

Verified by MonsterInsights