Month: July 2023

Making Sense of the 1950’s Teamsters

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations merged in 1955, with big talk and high hopes for organizing the remaining non-union strongholds in the nation’s economy. Three years later, they were laying off organizers on staff and settling into a routine, on the way to a long, slow decline towards a loss of power, influence and bargaining power. In New York City, though, the newly merged federation approached new union organizing with something like messianic zeal–pioneering new union organizing in the public sector and in health care, and fighting for a labor college and statewide system of socialized medicine–at least until the fiscal crisis. That broad sweep of history is, in a nutshell, what I’m researching for my next possible book project: a history of the New York City labor movement from the merger until the fiscal crisis. First, though, the AFL and CIO needed to merge. […]

The Specificity/Universality of Sinead O’Connor

To the extent that casual music fans (which is to say, most people) know her, it’s as a “one-hit wonder” whose best known song was a cover. It happened to be written by the legendary artist Prince, whose own songwriter demo of “Nothing Compares 2 U” didn’t get released from his vaults until after his untimely death, largely because her performance of it made it hers. Sinead O’Connor was a hell of a songwriter in her own right, and a screaming banshee and pure force of nature on record and stage (I never got to see her live, alas). The songs she wrote, including her best one, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” were brilliant, but so idiosyncratically about her that they’ve been deathly-intimidating for another artist to cover.  In that stream-of-consciousness diatribe, addressed to an un-named “you,” a poison pen letter without a standard verse-chorus-verse structure, but with a refrain that […]

Teh Socials

The ignominy of remaining on Elon Musk’s Twitter is becoming too much. As luck would have it I got an invite for Bluesky on the day that the Chief Twit renamed his hopelessly broken, hilariously over-leveraged former public square, “X.” John Scalzi wrote a pissed-off and slightly elegiac blog post about the community that many of us have lost through this one idiot billionaire’s “emperor has no clothes” debacle, and how and when to disentangle one’s writerly platform from that dumpster fire. We could go on about how Musk will be an immediate business school case study for taking the value of a unique, universally-known and globally-appreciated brand and absolutely trashing it in exchange for a symbol best known for porn and/or the button you press on your computer whenever you want to leave something, but… well, actually, I kind of want to talk about the latter! With the switchover […]

Back On My Bullshit

Hello, Internet. I’m blogging again. Or possibly not. I’m starting to re-work my website, in anticipation of my next book. My first website, hosted on a comrade’s server, probably began around 1998. I called it “Why Did Shaun Richman Create This Homepage?” and mostly used it to store pictures, audio files, an occasional written piece for a couple of years. In 2005, I took a break from union work and revamped the website to try this new-fangled “blogging” thing. I registered a domain name, shaunrichman.org (.org because I’m not running my life at a profit; Ha!) and that same comrade, Don Doumakes, hosted and helped me set up Bloxsom software to host it. For several years, I reviewed books, movies and records. I wrote political pieces, vaguely-biographical journal posts and generally tried to hone my craft with an eye towards eventually publishing. At some point, I returned to active union […]