GreatReads - Blog Aggregator · Phoenix Framework

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A Working Library 1 weeks ago

Trauma and Recovery

Judith Herman’s canonical work on trauma remains one of the core texts on the topic, over thirty years since its first publication. Critically—and in contrast to much current popular discourse about trauma—Herman locates psychological trauma in a social and political context, arguing that the political standpoint and testimony of survivors are necessary to an understanding of how trauma is remembered and mourned, and how stories can be reconstructed for more just futures. “Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told,” she writes. We live in a time of ghosts; we live among storytellers. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 2 weeks ago

Hurry-up-quick!

I’ve written before about the Army intelligence tests: an experiment in which millions of Army recruits were subject to an early version of the IQ test. As Stephen Jay Gould documents , the tests were chaotically—almost deliriously—managed. Illiterate recruits were given a version of the test in which proctors walked around yelling inscrutable instructions and pointing at pictures on sheets of paper; many of these recruits did not speak English as their first language, and had never before used a pencil. Gould shares some of the instructions given to the proctors: The idea of working fast must be impressed upon the men during the maze test. Examiner and orderlies walk around the room, motioning men who are not working, and saying, “Do it, do it, hurry up, quick.” At the end of 2 minutes, examiner says, “Stop! Turn over the page to test 2.” This is, as Gould notes, diabolical. How could a test given under these conditions possibly evaluate some innate quality of “intelligence”? But the designers of the test were so enamored of their theories of racial hierarchy that they either couldn’t perceive the irrationality of their own design, or else they knew it for a facade. The practice of the eugenicist is invariably that of the error or the con. But that phrase, hurry up, quick, struck a bell—I had heard it before. In Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest, human colonizers arrive on the planet Athshea, seven lightyears from Earth and rich in trees—a rarity on their deforested home world. The Athshean people are small, furred, and green; the humans name them “creechies,” deem them to be of lesser intelligence (an error, as it turns out), and proceed to enslave them, rape them, and kill them with impunity. In the opening pages, we see the Captain of New Tahiti Colony rise in the morning, and yell to an Athshean: “Ben!” he roared, sitting up and swinging his bare feet onto the bare floor. “Hot water get-ready, hurry-up-quick!” Le Guin’s concatenation of the phrase transforms it from merely extreme into something sinister: the way the words roll out all together escalates the inane redundancy, the empty urgency. Speed is not useful to the task at hand; the hurried pot does not boil faster. Rather, the purpose of the haste is to prevent any semblance of rest, to prohibit even a moment of peace. But rest is reserved for those deemed sufficiently wise, and sufficiently human. The Captain will eventually learn that Ben’s ingenuity far exceeds his own—a lesson that comes at a very steep price for them both. Whether our present-day and present-Earth supremacists will ever learn remains to be seen. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

Culture Science

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A Working Library 3 weeks ago

Self-exploiting workers

In an essay titled, “Why Revolution is Impossible Today,” Byung-Chul Han writes: The system-preserving power of the disciplinary, industrial society was oppressive. Factory workers were brutally exploited by factory owners, and this violent exploitation prompted protest and resistance. In that situation, a revolution that would overturn the ruling relations of production was a possibility. In that system, it was clear who the oppressors, as well as the oppressed, were. There was a concrete opponent, a visible enemy who could serve as the target of resistance. The neoliberal system of rule is structured in an altogether different fashion. The system-preserving power is no longer oppressive but seductive. It is no longer as clearly visible as it had been under the disciplinary regime. There is no longer a concrete opponent, no one who is taking away the freedom of the people, no oppressor to be resisted. Out of the oppressed worker, neoliberalism creates the free entrepreneur, the entrepreneur of the self. Today, everyone is a self-exploiting worker in his own enterprise. Everyone is both master and slave. The class struggle has been transformed into an internal struggle against oneself. Those who fail blame themselves and feel ashamed. People see themselves, rather than society, as the problem. Disciplinary power, attempting to control people by force, by subjecting them to a dense matrix of orders and prohibitions, is inefficient. Much more efficient is that technique of power that ensures that people subordinate themselves to the system of rule voluntarily. Han has previously written about the “entrepreneur of the self” in The Burnout Society , which connects such self-exploitation to its inevitable outcome. The turn, here, is to note that what’s burned up is both the individual worker and the collective they might have belonged to. That is, when the worker absorbs the management ethos and becomes their own manager—when they see themselves as a project to be designed, branded, and marketed—they lose all sense of solidarity with other workers. Other workers become competitors instead of comrades. And everyone loses. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 3 weeks ago

Capitalism and the Death Drive

A person dies, but capital is forever. Byung-Chul Han argues that capitalism “rests on a negation of death,” which requires that everyone subject to it be as the undead: that is, in its refusal of death, capitalism renders everyone, and everything, lifeless. Within capitalism, Han locates the death drive in the ideology of transparency, in the “quantified self,” and in the self-exploitation and narcissism that lead inevitably to burnout, depression, and worse. There’s a glimmer of sunlight amid the despair, however, in Han’s description of philosophy as an attempt to imagine different ways of living. Because surely we cannot go on like this . View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 4 weeks ago

Waking the Moon

Sweeney arrives for her first day of college and finds herself swept up by a beautiful young man and equally beautiful woman, both seemingly unreal and unmoored from reality. Soon, she learns that the University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine is run by a clandestine order called the Benandanti, practitioners of magic and meddlers in global politics going back to the Fall of Rome. Now, they find themselves up against their most powerful foe: the Moon Goddess, after centuries of sleep, has returned. The plotting is campy and the characters, if they were actors, would all be acting too much. But the book is fun and subversive and the world is intensely short of angry goddesses these days; I loved it. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 1 months ago

We, the Heartbroken

“Heartbreak is the heart of all revolutionary consciousness. How can it not be? Who can imagine another world unless they have already been broken apart by the world we are in?” Gargi Bhattacharyya sees our grief for a broken world as the tool we use to weave a new one. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

Web

AI

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A Working Library 1 months ago

To live

Gargi Bhattacharyya rightly connects the impulse to “self-improvement” with coming face-to-face with our own mortality: The secular religions of self-help, self-care, and self-improvement are devised to meet this horror. The central tenet of each circles around regret and the avoidance of regret, all of which could be summarized as an injunction against mourning your own life. At the same time, the differently constituted anxiety of the age of social media pushes home the uncomfortable knowledge that none of us can in fact do it all, and also that however much we are doing, it will come to an end. Living a life well lived must surely include coming to an acceptance of your own finitude. Including an acceptance of what cannot be and what cannot be done. Of the time that there will not be to fill. Of the countless paths that can never be taken. Serenity must include an ability to register the ever-spiralling possibilities and snippets of other not-yet-imagined lives and to be at ease in our connectedness to what others have been and done but that we will never do ourselves. I think here of how difficult it can be to make a decision , the agony in wanting to make the right choice, knowing all the while that “right” is impossible. There’s an oft-unspoken effort to avoid regret in that agonizing. But that effort represents a kind of paradox: the anguish exists because regret is inevitable. To live is to regret. More than that, to live well is to care for your regrets, to accept their role as teacher and guide. In Madeline Miller’s Circe, the witch-goddess speaks one evening with Telemachus, son of Odysseus. They have confessed their sins to each other: he of the murders he committed at Odysseus’s command, she of how she created Scylla, the monster who torments sailors. Telemachus says: “Her name...Scylla. It means the Render. Perhaps it was always her destiny to be a monster, and you were only the instrument.” “Do you use the same excuse for the maids you hanged?” It was as if I had struck him. “I make no excuse for that. I will wear that shame all my life. I cannot undo it, but I will spend my days wishing I could.” “It is how you know you are different from your father,” I said. “Yes.” His voice was sharp. “It is the same for me,” I said. “Do not try to take my regret from me.” He was quiet a long time. “You are wise,” he said. “If it is so,” I said, “it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes.” Wisdom arises from foolishness, from errors and wrongs. From regret. Do not let anyone take your regret from you! Do not dishonor it by flinching when it shows its face. It is both what made you who you are, and a tool for weaving a different world. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 1 months ago

Apocalypse

An apocalypse is always both an ending and a beginning. Lizzie Wade charts past apocalypses, correcting glib narratives that too often presume neat binaries of winners and losers, or assert that apocalypses were always complete. In fact, what happens during and after an apocalypse is never straightforward, and a great deal of adapting—and surviving—takes place amid the ruins. Wade shows how we live in a post-apocalyptic world, one wrought by colonial atrocities of which the consequences are still unfolding. But within that acknowledgement is a hint of power: if we choose to heed the lessons of the apocalypses of the past, we just might learn how to survive the one we’re in now—and all the ones ahead. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

Journalism

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A Working Library 1 months ago

Everything

It’s common to talk about Taylorism—the practice of so-called “scientific management” that’s most known for it’s reviled use of stopwatches—as if it were a thing of the past, as if we had somehow moved beyond it. But like a lot of coercive practices, Taylorism didn’t so much retire as rebrand. As workers rebelled against oppressive bureaucracies, the postindustrial work ethic shifted from work as a moral imperative to work as self-realization in a process that Nikil Saval grimly calls “ self-Taylorization .” In essence, the timekeeper was internalized. Whereas, for Taylorism, the self-organization, ingenuity, and creativity of the workers were to be combated as the source of all dangers of rebellion and disorder, for Toyotism these things were a resource to be developed and exploited. The total and entirely repressive domination of the worker’s personality was to be replaced by the total mobilization of that personality. Toyotism—contrasted with Ford ism, which adopted Taylor’s model—involved a practice where small teams of people would manage a limited amount of work-in-progress through communication with teams up- and downstream of their work. Versions of it were subsequently adopted in “agile” software development and have become so engrained in product organizations that they are often barely remarked upon; it’s just how things are done. But as with most just-so stories, it’s worth considering how it came to be—and who benefits from the way things are. [The head of training at Volkswagen] first explains that “transferring entrepreneurial skills to the shopfloor” makes it possible “largely to eliminate the antagonisms between labor and capital…If the work teams have great independence to plan, carry out, and monitor processes, material flows, staffing, and skills…then you have a large enterprise made up of independent small entrepreneurs, and that constitutes a cultural revolution.” That is, by offering “elite” status to some workers, and building a system in which they monitored their own work in excruciating detail, Toyota could keep the administrators in their offices while remaining confident that the same surveillance, operational focus, and company-first perspective would be maintained—this time by the workers themselves. Giving some workers permission to perform as entrepreneurs just meant they worked harder for the company even as they became convinced they were working for themselves . Men in stopwatches are unnecessary when the worker’s own conscience will do the job. And of course, that “elite” status is, by definition, scarce. It depends on other workers continuing to toil in the old, Taylorist ways, performatively monitored and repressed. (Gorz points out that at the time he was writing about Toyota, the workers organized under the entrepreneurial model represented a mere 10-15% of the workforce; the rest were subcontractors, who were “increasingly Taylorized” as they moved down the ladder.) And, more to the point, it depends on a system in which fewer and fewer people are employed at all. It could hardly be more clearly stated that the workers taken in by the big companies are a small “elite,” not because they have higher levels of skill, but because they have been chosen from a mass of equally able individuals in such a way as to perpetuate the work ethic in an economic context in which work is objectively losing its “centrality”: the economy has less and less need of it. The passion for, devotion to, and identification with work would be diminishing if everyone were able to work less and less. It is economically more advantageous to concentrate the small amount of necessary work in the hands of a few, who will be imbued with the sense of being a deservedly privileged elite by virtue of the eagerness which distinguishes them from the “losers.” Technically, there really is nothing to prevent the firm from sharing out the work between a larger number of people who would work only 20 hours a week. But then those people would not have the “correct” attitude to work which consists in regarding themselves as small entrepreneurs turning their knowledge capital to good effect. So the firm “largely…eliminates the antagonisms between work and labor” for the stable core of its elite workers and shifts those antagonisms outside its field of vision, to the peripheral, insecure, or unemployed workers. Post-Fordism produces its elite by producing unemployment; the latter is the precondition for the former. The “social utility” of the elite cannot, for that reason, be assessed solely from the angle of the use-value of its production or the “service rendered to users.” Its members can no longer believe themselves useful in a general way, since they produce wealth and unemployment in the self-same act. The greater their productivity and eagerness for work, the greater also will be unemployment, poverty, inequality, social marginalization, and the rate of profit. The more they identify with work and with their company’s successes, the more they contribute to producing and reproducing the conditions of their own subjection, to intensifying the competition between firms, and hence to making the battle for productivity the more lethal, the threat to everyone’s employment—including their own—the more menacing, and the domination of capital over workers and society the more irresistible. That is, the existence of an elite workforce—whether it’s workers managing a kanban process in a Toyota factory, or workers driving agile development at a product company—is predicated on an underclass of people who either work in less sustainable conditions or else are proscribed from work at all. The former has come into some awareness in recent years, as workers at Google and elsewhere have organized not only well-paid engineers and designers but also support staff and contractors who are paid in a year what an engineer makes in a month. Those very highly-paid engineering roles simply couldn’t exist without the people toiling in the support mines or tagging text and images for AI training —often dreadful work that’s barely remunerated at all. But what Gorz is calling out here is that isn’t only bad work that the elite work depends on—it’s also the absence of work. The “disruption” that the tech industry has so long prided itself on is just another word for “unemployment.” But there’s also a gesture here towards another way: the less that elite identifies with their work and with their companies’ successes, the more they admit of their own insecurity and of their collaboration in creating it, the less menacing that threat becomes, the more space is opened up for different futures. I am not saying, however, that post-Fordist workers cannot or ought not to identify with what they do. I am saying that what they do cannot and should not be reduced solely to the immediately productive work they accomplish, irrespective of the consequences and mediate effects which it engenders in the social environment. I say, therefore, that they must identify with everything they do, that they must make their work their own and assume responsibility for it as subjects, not excluding from this the consequences it produces in the social field. I say that they ought to be the subjects of—and also the actors in—the abolition of work, the abolition of employment, the abolition of wage labor, instead of abandoning all these macroeconomic and macro-social dimensions of their productive activity to market forces and capital. They ought, therefore, to make the redistribution of work, the diminution of its intensity, the reduction of working hours, the self-management of the hours and pace of work, and the guarantee of purchasing power demands inherent in the meaning of their work. Abolition is both destruction and reconstruction; in abolishing work, you become able to create it anew. For too long, “work” has been synonymous with waged work, with the work we long for an escape from. And everything else becomes the “life” that stands in opposition to work, as if work were somehow an equal to the life it sucks dry. But what if work was all the change we make in the world, with all the people we make that change with—colleagues and comrades, neighbors and friends, kin in all the kingdoms. What if work wasn’t only what we do at work, but all the ways that work moves out into the world, and all the work we do elsewhere—whether in our homes or in our streets. What if our work is all the things we give a fuck about ? What becomes possible then? View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

Agile

Business

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A Working Library 1 months ago

Reclaiming Work

“We must dare to prepare ourselves for the Exodus from ‘work-based society’: it no longer exists and will not return.” André Gorz observes the increasing precarity and inconstancy of wage-based labor and argues that rather than trying to preserve the old ways, we should look to transform our work into something better: work that is chosen, self-directed, and creative. And, critically, work that is less , that takes up less time and less space, and leaves more of both for other ways of being. Written more than two decades before the first of the so-called AI models landed, it’s not hard to see the parallels. If jobs are to be lost forever, perhaps there’s something better on the other side. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

Business

Career

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A Working Library 1 months ago

Exit strategy

In the opening of Reclaiming Work, André Gorz writes provocatively: We must dare to prepare ourselves for the Exodus from “work-based society”: it no longer exists and will not return. We must want this society, which is in its death-throes, to die, so that another may arise from its ruins. We must learn to make out the contours of that other society beneath the resistances, dysfunctions, and impasses which make up the present. “Work” must lose its centrality in the minds, thoughts, and imaginations of everyone. We must learn to see it differently: no longer as something we have—or do not have—but as what we do. Gorz is writing long before AI hypemen started to promise the elimination of millions of jobs, but automation has always been the aim of capitalism, since the first steam-powered looms displaced experienced weavers and installed children in their place. Now, that automation is coming for “knowledge” work—for work that was hailed as somehow exempt from the degradation and alienation of all other work, but whose hailing was only ever a thin and shabby cover . [The work that is ending] is, unambiguously, the specific “work” peculiar to industrial capitalism: the work we are referring to when we say “she doesn’t work” of a woman who devotes her time to bringing up her own children, but “she works” of one who gives even some small part of her time to bringing up other people’s children in a playgroup or a nursery school. That is, the work that is being abolished is work that is institutionalized and exploited, that makes a profit for someone other than the worker. Work where there are rules and metrics, performance-improvement plans, stack-rankings, hastily arranged all-hands where executives perform the meanest apology after the latest round of layoffs while suggesting those workers had it coming (and you likely do, too). This isn’t “work” in the sense of making change or making a contribution to the world, but work as the price you pay for the privilege of keeping a roof over your head—absent any promise that the roof will always be there. [I]t is precisely in the sense of self-realization, in the sense of “ poiesis, ” of the creation of work as oeuvre, that work is disappearing fastest into the virtualized realities of the intangible economy. If we wish to rescue and sustain this “real work,” it is urgent that we recognize that real work is no longer what we do when “at work” ; the work, in the sense of poiesis, which one does is no longer (or is increasingly rarely) done “at work”; it no longer corresponds to the “work” which, in the social sense of the term, one “has.” Poiesis is the emergence of something that wasn’t there before; it’s the work of creation. But so much knowledge work—even before AI started to be shoved down our throats—wasn’t creative but necromantic: raising up the de-fleshed bones of past successes and reconfiguring the joints into recognizable but beastly products with glossy marketing wrapped around them like an emperor’s cloak. The assertion that slop-makers will replace most jobs is a pathetic attempt at resurrection: only work that has been demeaned into the grave could be supplanted by such boring and obsequious ghosts. The real work has always been elsewhere. Perhaps it’s time we follow where it takes us and leave the dead to their tombs. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

Business

Career

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A Working Library 1 months ago

The other side

In Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite, an anthropologist named Marghe arrives on the planet Jeep in order to research a lost human colony. When she stumbles into sacred territory, she is taken hostage by the Echraidhe, a people who live an isolated and difficult existence in the cold northern climes. Against the odds, Marghe escapes, and later meets Thenike, a viajera —one who travels from place to place, serving as storyteller, news bringer, healer, negotiator, and more. Marghe had asked Thenike why the Echraidhe were so inflexible, so bound by tradition. “Because they are so few,” Thenike had said. “Because their sister’s mothers are also their choose-mothers’ sisters. They’re born too close. All their memories interlock and look down the same path to the same places. Each memory reflects another, repeats, reinforces, until the known becomes the only. For the Echraidhe, it’s not real if it can’t be seen elsewhere, in their mother’s memory, or their mothers’ mother. For them, perhaps, there is no such thing as the unknown.” Thenike shook her head. “It’s a danger to all who are able to deepsearch into their memories well, or often.” To “deepsearch” is to enter a trance-like state, one in which a person travels back among the memories of their ancestors, seeing and experiencing what people who lived before them saw and experienced. Thenike continues: “You can see so much of the world through others’ memories, places you’ve never been, faces you’ve never seen and never will, weather you’ve never felt and food you’ve never tasted, that sometimes it’s hard not to want to just feel, taste, see those familiar things over and over. Truly new things become alien, other, not to be trusted. There are those who know their village so well, through the eyes and hearts of so many before them, that they can’t leave it to go somewhere else. They can’t bear to place their feet on a path they have never trodden, on soil they have never planted with a thousand seeds in some past life as lover or child. Some become unable to leave their lodge or tent, or can’t sail past the sight of familiar cliffs. Many who can deepsearch powerfully enough to be a viajera end like this.” The danger of deepsearch is that of nostalgia : a wistful longing for the past that never was exactly as we remember it. However real and strong a memory is, it is still an echo, still a reflection, not the experience itself. The women of the Echraidhe have become enthralled to that reflection, such that they cannot see what’s ahead, cannot imagine anything changing. And so they become unable to see the change that is already underfoot, the way the winters are getting longer and colder, their children sicker, the tribe smaller and weaker. In this way, nostalgia can be a kind of toxin , a poison that keeps us forever walking backward, gaze directed at our footprints while our feet step awkwardly into a future we scorn to see. Communities which are hardened to outsiders—which refuse trade and companionship from other people (as the Echraidhe refuse), which demand that nothing changes even as the seasons pass and the rivers shift and new mountains form—begin to rot from within, to eat themselves because there is nothing outside to eat. Like an AI training on its own output, each generation disintegrates further into madness. Here Thenike had smiled, though Marghe saw memories of bitter times written on her face. “I’m fortunate enough to have the memories of a thousand different foremothers, some clear, some not. Fortunate, too, to become bored with the past and eager to sail over the horizon or walk over the crest of the hill and see what’s on the other side.” Because the other side is where the life is. To live is to accept the discomfort—and pleasure—of a future that is undiscovered, undetermined, uncertain. Unknown and unknowable. But alive, alive as only that which changes can ever be. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

AI

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A Working Library 1 months ago

Slow River

Lore wakes up in an alley, naked, a huge gash running down her back, her identity implant—the only proof of her heritage in one of the world’s richest families—gone. Hearing footsteps, she calls for help, and meets Spanner, a hacker and opportunist who knows how to take advantage of anyone in anyplace. In her hands, Lore becomes someone else. But her past is never too far away, and her knowledge of how systems operate far too valuable to keep to herself. Her family’s history parallels a precarious operation to remediate the city’s polluted waterways—with both tracks as likely to end in disaster as redemption. Griffith’s characters always cut through the world like a knife, and Lore is no exception. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 2 months ago

Ammonite

Marguerite (“Marghe”) Taishan is about to step foot on the planet Jeep when she receives a warning: if she goes on, she will never come back. But she’s come too far, and worked too hard, and Jeep is too interesting for her to turn back now: across its continents lives a scattered human colony, forgotten for centuries, but apparently thriving. Which might be unremarkable except for the fact that all the people are women. Marghe’s job is to investigate how they have survived, and to test a vaccine against the virus that killed the men. But her own survival, and the planet’s, are more precarious, and more intertwined, than she predicts. Nicola Griffith’s first novel is about making a home, and remembering the past, and the impossible beauty and danger of knowing women are human. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

Science

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A Working Library 2 months ago

Always

Aud is back in Atlanta, teaching a self-defense class to a ragtag group of women, when one of her students takes her lessons in a direction she didn’t imagine. She heads to Seattle for a break, and to look into what seems like routine mismanagement at one of her investment properties. But once there she uncovers evidence of sabotage—of the movie being shot in her building, and of her own body. In an unfamiliar city, she becomes unfamiliar to herself. The final book in the series is where Aud learns both the limits, and power, of violence. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

Entertainment

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A Working Library 2 months ago

Stay

Aud Torvingen is tucked away in a remote cabin, grieving and alone. “Stay in the world,” her lover said, and Aud promised, but she doesn’t know how. Then her friend Dornan shows up and asks her to find his runaway fiancée, and she surprises herself by agreeing. In the search, she finds that sometimes people need help, and sometimes they need to know that they have something to offer, and the line between the two is thin and easy to cross. And Aud will have to cross it herself, if she’s to keep her promise. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

Entertainment

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A Working Library 2 months ago

Obligation to possibility

In Let This Radicalize You, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba write: Governed by fear, people are largely cooperative with systems that produce torture, mass death, and annihilation. That is the greatest danger that fear poses: not panic amid disorder, but cooperation with an order that we ought to find unspeakable—one that is actually poised to bring about our own extinction. ( Emphasis mine. ) To cooperate is a core human capacity, a vital part of living and thriving in interdependence. That’s one of the ways fear works, by drawing on our innate desire to live and work together. But with whom are we cooperating? Which systems, which people? As humans on Earth in these times, we are raised into a rigged game, traumatized by its violence, and coached to replicate its dynamics. We are surrounded by lies, illusions, and coercion. We are sold punishment as justice and annihilation as progress, and many people cannot imagine anything else. But just as we do not abandon people we love who are in crisis, we have not given up on humanity. We have witnessed transformation too often to dismiss its possibility, and we have an obligation to that possibility in individual lives and in large groups of people. Or, to frame this a different way: which possibilities are we obligated to? View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 2 months ago

Let This Radicalize You

“Radical” means “pertaining to the root,” that is, the foundation or center of things, the point from which something grows. To be radicalized, then, is to attend to the root, to reach for that center, to refuse the easy distraction of the surface. Here, Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes draw from abolitionist thinking and mutual aid practices to crate a primer on what it means to organize—to draw down into that root and to invite others to join you in the struggle. Among the principles they articulate is one of rebellious care, that is, a care for each other and the living world that demands nothing less than rebellion against the systems of neglect and oppression that surround us. That intensity of care, that radical care, is a great power for making change, and the only thing that can sustain us through it. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 3 months ago

The Blue Place

Aud Torvingen is a Norwegian living in Atlanta, a former cop moonlighting as security, an expert in several forms of martial arts, and six feet tall. Out late one evening, she collides with a woman running the other way. Moments later, a house behind her explodes—and the woman is gone. Griffith borrows the noir suspense novel but reshapes it to fit the rangy, fluid muscles of a woman who learned early that protecting yourself means hurting other people. I’ve never been able to start one of her books and put it down unfinished, and I’ve never wanted to. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

Entertainment