“Ford’s depth of analysis and the breadth of topics he analyzed is awe-inspiring… May more people be inspired to do the honest journalism he modeled.”
Read the full review here.
Latest News: Author Archive
“A blueprint for honest journalism… [Glen Ford] merges the art of storytelling with a revolutionary conscience” — THE BLACK AGENDA reviewed by Toward Freedom
Tuesday, August 9th, 2022“Matt Taibbi on the Depravity of the Media and Liberal Interventionists” — HATE INC. author interviewed on The Scott Horton Show
Monday, August 8th, 2022“Educating and agitating a new generation of activists, organizers, and intellectuals” — Glen Ford’s THE BLACK AGENDA featured in LA Progressive
Sunday, August 7th, 2022“It’s Time for Public Power. New York State Could Lead the Way” — PEOPLE’S POWER author Ashley Dawson writes for Truthout
Saturday, August 6th, 2022“Energy should be a public good, reliable and accessible to all, regardless of one’s ability to pay. It’s time to take power out of the hands of polluting, for-profit corporations. To decarbonize rapidly, we need to democratize our energy systems. It’s time for public power.”
Read the full article here.
“Rebelling against poor representation” — THE WORK OF LIVING author Maximillian Alvarez featured in Columbia Journalism Review
Friday, August 5th, 2022“‘I let my editorial strategy be that I let ‘the rabble’ in more as a collaborator,’ Maximillian Alvarez, editor in chief of The Real News Network and a former temporary warehouse worker, says. ‘I give them the platform and the tools to report on their own struggles.’ Alvarez recalls working twelve-hour shifts in that earlier position, where he helped supply big box stores with products like feather pillow inserts. At home, when he watched television news, he rarely saw people whose circumstances reflected his own, or those of his coworkers or family members. He has brought that perspective, he says, to his editing and also to his podcast about working-class people.”
Read the full article here.
“Fed Up With Democratic Emails? You’re Not the Only One” — THE BIG DISCONNECT author Micah L. Sifry writes for The New York Times
Thursday, August 4th, 2022“If democracy is indeed on fire, the thing to do is to stop asking people to buy water bottles and organize them into fire brigades instead. Neither the national Democratic Party nor progressive leaders seem to have learned that lesson. They aren’t wrong to call the next election the most important in our lifetimes. And abortion bans and the Jan. 6 committee hearings may well recharge their base. But it’s what the base manages to build with that energy that will matter.”
Read the full article here.
“Glen Ford’s Irreplaceable Journalism” — Margaret Kimberley’s foreword to THE BLACK AGENDA published in Eurasia Review
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2022“I was very proud to write the preface to Glen Ford’s book, The Black Agenda , which was published posthumously by OR Books. As we approach the first anniversary of Glen’s passing, I endeavored to explain why his journalism was truly irreplaceable.”
Read the full foreword here.
“The world according to Žižek” — HEAVEN IN DISORDER reviewed by Morning Star
Monday, August 1st, 2022“As Žižek explains, the challenges we face in the 21st century are unprecedented and the situation is far from excellent (as could be the future) unless a unified movement arises to address issues such as global poverty, climate change, the Covid pandemic, political apathy and other social ills… Whether or not you agree with Žižek, his ideas are worthy of consideration and encourage us to reflect upon our own views and actions.”
Read the full review here.
“A stirring record of life in an emergency” — Maximilian Alvarez’s THE WORK OF LIVING reviewed by Publishers Weekly
Tuesday, July 19th, 2022“[Maximillian] Alvarez debuts with an empathic interview collection featuring people who kept ‘the gears of commerce and society turning’ during the Covid-19 pandemic.… The conversations shed light on a wide variety of jobs and convey the essential humanity of the interviewees. This is a stirring record of life in an emergency.”
Read the full review here.
“The devastating afterlives of colonial rule” — Shimrit Lee’s DECOLONIZE MUSEUMS excerpted in The Evergreen Review
Sunday, June 19th, 2022“That museums are today seen by many as ‘neutral’ is a testament to the extent that the histories of museum spaces have been buried by their modern operators. To examine those histories is to know that museums are really crime scenes–to use a metaphor proposed by Wandile Kasibe of IZIKO Museums of South Africa—spaces that house the memories of atrocities committed during the colonial period, including theft, murder, and genocide… Today, it is impossible to find a Western museum that doesn’t hold some amount of cultural material from Africa, Asia, Oceania, or Native America—an enduring sign of the devastating afterlives of colonial rule. Wall texts often tell neutral, authoritative narratives of the objects displayed, but that passivity fails to reckon with the extractive nature of colonialism by which most of the Global South was robbed of culture, resources, and people in plain sight.”
Read the full excerpt here.
“Labor is and will remain the wave of change” — THE WORK OF LIVING author Maximillian Alvarez interviewed on The Zero Hour
Sunday, June 19th, 2022Listen to the full interview here.
“It may have been forgotten in the collective memory, but the effects of the polio epidemic continue to be felt by survivors” — Patrick Cockburn’s THE BROKEN BOY featured in The Irish Examiner
Sunday, June 19th, 2022“In his 2006 memoir The Broken Boy, which has recently been reissued with a chapter on Covid, journalist Patrick Cockburn recounts his experience of contracting polio at the age of six, while living in Youghal, Co Cork. His brother Andrew, who was three years older, also contracted the disease. Cockburn describes himself as ‘uniquely unlucky’ — his parents Claud and Patricia, returned from England to their house in east Cork, despite the fact that Cork city was in the midst of a polio epidemic. At least 50,000 people got the virus during the outbreak — one of the last great outbreaks of polio in western Europe, ahead of the first doses of the Salk vaccine that arrived in Cork in 1957.”
Read the full article here.
“What Makes Narrative Change So Hard?” — THE ART OF ACTIVISM featured in Stanford Social Innovation Review
Sunday, June 19th, 2022“That protest, as described in the new book The Art of Activism by Steve Duncombe and Steve Lambert … was just one effort in a decades-long campaign by activists around the world to bring down the price of essential medicines and ensure they are accessible and affordable to everyone.”
Read the full article here.
“A rich mix of blues, swing, bop and ballads that’s also a testament to [Tiyo] Salah-El’s own efforts to reform the prison system” — PEN PAL author featured in Daily Hampshire Gazette
Sunday, June 19th, 2022‘“I was really struck by Tiyo’s music and by what I learned about him as a person,’ Salles said. As part of his preparation for recording the music, he read the 2020 book ‘Pen-Pal: Prison Letters from a Free Spirit on Slow Death Row,’ which features many samples of the correspondence Salah-El had with different people during his 40-plus years serving a life sentence, including Ahrens and the late historian Howard Zinn. ‘He was someone who remained positive and engaged in life, engaged in music and committed to changing the prison system,’ Salles said. ‘He didn’t let prison destroy him. As much as I admired his music, it was the social justice aspect of this project that was really important to me.’”
Read the full article here.
“Called to action by his legacy” — PEN PAL author Tiyo Salah-El featured in The Shoestring
Sunday, June 19th, 2022“In prison, Salah-El was able to find ways to live a rich life even in the face of a system built to repress him. He taught saxophone lessons, tutored hundreds of people in order to help them obtain GEDs and thus be eligible for parole, wrote extensively about prison abolition, completed and published an autobiography, was a correspondent for Gay Community News in Boston (even though he was not gay himself), and earned both a bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree. Above all, says Ahrens, ‘he was able to keep his personality to a large degree: very open, very loving, very engaged, very positive despite being in prison for 50 years.’ This, along with all of his accomplishments (that are impressive in their own right), was his ‘revenge to the system,’ according to Ahrens, who remarks that ‘they tried to grind him down and they couldn’t.’”
Read the full article here.
“Tiyo’s Songs of Life” — Bombyx Center for Arts and Equity to host musical tribute to PEN PAL author Tiyo Salah-El
Sunday, June 19th, 2022“‘Tiyo’s Songs of Life’ is a project seventeen years in the making. It began in 2005 when prison abolitionist Lois Ahrens sent fifty blank sheets of music paper to Tiyo Attallah Salah-El, a musician, composer, published writer, teacher, prison abolitionist, and good friend to people throughout the country and beyond. By then Tiyo, who had been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, had been incarcerated in Pennsylvania for close to 50 years. Within months, Tiyo sent the pages back to Lois, filled with his songs… ‘Tiyo’s Songs of Life’ is a musical celebration of Tiyo Attallah Salah-El, and a tribute to friendship and persistence. Tiyo would be proud and very happy knowing his music lives on. To quote Tiyo, ‘Long live love and good music!’”
Read the full article here.
“It’s a simple demand: give the stolen land back” — EXTINCTION author Ashley Dawson writes for Resilience
Wednesday, June 8th, 2022“The idea that mainstream conservation—which should be seen clearly as a form of colonialism—will reverse the sixth extinction is an illusion, one carefully cultivated by the corporations and governments that happily bankroll the big conservation NGOs. In the face of mounting environmental and social calamities, the only coherent stance must be to join indigenous and local communities around the world in demanding the return of stolen land, respect for their sovereignty, and a radical transformation of the CO2lonialism that characterizes the unsustainable behavior and policies of the wealthy.”
Read the full article here.
“He Fought For Truth and the Freedom to Publish — Now We Must Fight to Save Him” — JULIAN ASSANGE IN HIS OWN WORDS editor Karen Sharpe writes for CounterPunch
Wednesday, June 8th, 2022Read the full article here.
“The West’s ‘Triumphalism’ in Ukraine Could Prolong Conflict Indefinitely” — WAR IN THE AGE OF TRUMP author Patrick Cockburn speaks with Democracy Now!
Wednesday, June 8th, 2022Listen to the full interview here.
“A rip-roaring historical romp… You get two books in one from this well-told tale” — Patrick Cockburn’s THE BROKEN BOY reviewed by Morning Star
Wednesday, June 8th, 2022“His account of polio conveys powerfully the sense of panic and fear among parents, and the traumas suffered by children in isolation hospitals under the care of often insensitive and even cruel nursing staff.”
Read the full article here.
“Learning from Southern frontline struggles” — POWER CONCEDES NOTHING book event hosted by Convergence Magazine
Wednesday, June 8th, 2022Watch the full event here.
“Unions Rising: Amazon v Labor” — THE WORK OF LIVING author Maximillian Alvarez speaks with The Marianne Williamson Podcast
Wednesday, June 1st, 2022“One of the things that I so appreciate about [Maximillian Alvarez] is that [he is] a big picture person… [He] talks very specifically about the plight of working people in the United States, particularly their betrayal by the economic and political structures of our day, giving a historical context that always makes things much easier to understand and is very empowering.”
Listen to the full interview here.
“Stop putting police officers above the law: End qualified immunity in New York State” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen writes for the Daily News
Wednesday, June 1st, 2022Read the full article here.
“The former mayor of the largest city in America should have better things to do — THE PRINCE author Ross Barkan writes for New York Magazine
Wednesday, June 1st, 2022Read the full article here.
“A rickety but potentially stable balance of power is unravelling in Northern Ireland thanks to the crass manoeuvres of the British government” — THE BROKEN BOY author Patrick Cockburn writes for the i
Wednesday, June 1st, 2022Read the full article here.
TALES OF TWO PLANETS editor John Freeman named a finalist in The Los Angeles Press Club’s 64th Southern California Journalism Awards
Wednesday, June 1st, 2022Read the full article here.
“The work of creating a more just society” — POWER CONCEDES NOTHING excerpted by Political Research Associates
Wednesday, May 25th, 2022“The stakes in 2022 and 2024 remain extraordinarily high… Whether the rich lessons of 2020 are absorbed and put to use by an expanded and more united progressive current in US politics will, in no small measure, shape the future of democracy.”
Read the full article here.
“New York’s post–Andrew Cuomo governor, Kathy Hochul, has been taking a page from her disgraced predecessor” — THE PRINCE author Ross Barkan writes for Jacobin
Wednesday, May 25th, 2022Read the full article here.
“What are the chances of a return to violence in Northern Ireland?” — THE BROKEN BOY author Patrick Cockburn writes for the i
Wednesday, May 25th, 2022Read the full article here.
