It's pretty clear that a lot of people don't understand the way that more extreme elements on the right try to build support for their agenda of harm and violence and a base to pursue it by organizing things like the anti-queer/anti-trans actions across the country last week and the convoy occupation last year. Not understanding how this works makes people more vulnerable to being taken in by ..read more

I have realized in the last few days that social media – especially but not only Twitter – has made me a worse reader.I mean this in a specific way. For me at least, this is not about, say, social media use monopolizing time that I would otherwise use to read books, or about social media-induced fragmentation of my practices of attention making it harder for me in general to read longform ..read more

 [Richard Seymour. The Twittering Machine. London: The Indigo Press, 2019.]There is practically an entire industry devoted to churning out think-pieces, studies, books, and articles expressing concern about the impacts of social media and the broader spectrum of information technology of which it is a part on our lives and our world. It comes in lots of flavours, many neither convincing nor ..read more

 [Kim Stanley Robinson. The Ministry for the Future: A Novel. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2020.]Science fiction. Starts fifteen minutes into the future and extends for several decades, focusing on the climate crisis at a global scale. Begins with a powerful chapter describing in an embodied way one character's experience of a devastating heat wave that ultimately kills 20 million people – made ..read more

 [Oliver Burkeman. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Toronto: Allen Lane, 2021.]An anti-productivity book, of sorts. In most books that are either directly or indirectly about how we individually make use of our time, the goal is to enable the reader to do more. Now, I don't actually often read that sort of book, at least in its most blatant neoliberal-cult-of-productivity ..read more

  Many years ago, I was walking in downtown Hamilton with a friend. As often happens in downtown Hamilton, a woman we walked by asked us for spare change. I no longer remember exactly how the interaction played out – then as now, I often give change if I have it, but not always (particularly after the n'th time of being asked on a given day), and anyway I don't always have any ..read more

 [Gerald Horne. The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020.]Historical scholarship. A sweeping history of the long sixteenth century, from the first voyage of Columbus in 1492 to the establishment of the first permanent English-speaking settlement in North America in ..read more

 [Shari Stone-Mediatore. Reading Across Borders: Storytelling and Knowedges of Resistance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.]  A lot of Serious People who do Serious Things when it comes to knowledge tend to treat stories and other kinds of experience-based narratives as inherently suspect and not terribly useful. Some do this from a sort of empiricist place, an unreconstructed Enlightment ..read more

[Sara Evans. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. New York: Vintage Books, 1980.] Movement history. An interview-based and archival history of the emergence of the women's liberation movement in the United States in the late 1960s. It particularly focuses on the ways in which women's liberation came out of the experiences of women ..read more

[Peter Linebaugh. Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard. Oakland CA: University of California Press, 2019.] A sprawling, intricate history set in the Atlantic world, particularly Ireland and England but also connecting events there to America and Haiti and France and beyond, during the ..read more