A New Debs For a New Era
The tagline “Before Bernie Sanders, before Zohran Mamdani, America’s favorite socialist was Eugene Debs” adorns the back flap of Shawn Gude’s American Socialist. It’s an obvious hook to entice the double-digit percentage of socialist-curious voters turning up in surveys, but it actually sells its subject—who was so much more than a perennial political candidate—short.
Jeff Bezos, Pamela Paul, David Graeber and Me (Or, If You Hate SEO, “Book Reviews”)
I like books. I like writing them. I like reading them. I like reviewing them.
That puts me in strange company. Each year, a record number of books get published, something on the order of four or five million books. Most of them get a handful of readers. A lucky few get read by thousands. Continue reading “Jeff Bezos, Pamela Paul, David Graeber and Me (Or, If You Hate SEO, “Book Reviews”)”
Currently Reading
I’ve started reading fiction again. I’m not entirely sure when I entirely stopped. I never stopped reading (unlike some people), but at some point I convinced myself that I was too busy with research to bother with novels, and that when I wanted to scratch that itch I could invest a long Saturday in watching some epic, corpus callosum-expanding non-linear epic movie, or at least some twisty, buzzy prestige TV mini-series.
Fast forward a few years, and every 2.5 hour “epic” movie could have been a taut 90 minute thriller, every premium streaming TV series could have been a movie (epic or otherwise), and Hollywood’s alliance with dipshit private equity and fascistic Silicon Valley has me boycotting streaming subscriptions in favor of scouring garage sales and used book stores for “new” sources of entertainment. Continue reading “Currently Reading”
Review of “The Pandemic and the Working Class: How US Labor Navigated COVID-19” for H-Sci-Med-Tech
It is sometimes said that there are decades in which not much changes and years in which an entire decade’s worth of sociopolitical tumult occurs. The so-called COVID year, March 2020 until the vaccine rollout of the following year, is an example of the latter. The COVID year markedly reduced average American life expectancy, nurtured extremist politics and conspiracy-minded cynicism, frayed communities, and eroded trust in institutions.
For workers who, in the words of Nick Juravich and Steve Striffler, were briefly “elevated from disposable to ‘essential,’” the period led to an uptick in worker self-organizing, new wage demands and concessions on work-from-home flexibility, some successful union organizing, and a nearly impossible amount of worker protest to fully quantify, including “quiet” and actual quitting. “Not in nearly a century had so many people felt the failure of government and indifference of the bosses so quickly and so deeply, on a scale and with an intensity that was difficult to ignore.” Continue reading “Review of “The Pandemic and the Working Class: How US Labor Navigated COVID-19” for H-Sci-Med-Tech”