Book picks similar to
Canaries in the Mineshaft: Essays on Politics and Media by Renata Adler
essays
non-fiction
politics
nonfiction
Justice, Gender, and the Family
Susan Moller Okin - 1989
In the first feminist critique of modern political theory, Okin shows how the failure to apply theories of justice to the family not only undermines our most cherished democratic values but has led to a major crisis over gender-related issues.
Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History
Staughton Lynd - 2008
Andrej Grubacic is an anarchist from the Balkans. Staughton Lynd is a lifelong pacifist, influenced by Marxism. They meet in dialogue in an effort to bring together the anarchist and Marxist traditions, to discuss the writing of history by those who make it, and to remind us of the idea that "my country is the world." Encompassing a Left libertarian perspective and an emphatically activist standpoint, these conversations are meant to be read in the clubs and affinity groups of the new Movement. The authors accompany us on a journey through modern revolutions, direct actions, anti-globalist counter summits, Freedom Schools, Zapatista cooperatives, Haymarket and Petrograd, Hanoi and Belgrade, "intentional" communities, wildcat strikes, early Protestant communities, Native American democratic practices, the Workers' Solidarity Club of Youngstown, occupied factories, self-organized councils and soviets, the lives of forgotten revolutionaries, Quaker meetings, antiwar movements, and prison rebellions. Neglected and forgotten moments of interracial self-activity are brought to light. The book invites the attention of readers who believe that a better world, on the other side of capitalism and state bureaucracy, may indeed be possible.
The Common Reader
Virginia Woolf - 1925
This collection has more than twenty-five selections, including such important statements as "Modern Fiction" and "The Modern Essay."
Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019
James Wood - 2019
His essays on canonical writers (Gustav Flaubert, Herman Melville), recent legends (Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson) and significant contemporaries (Zadie Smith, Elena Ferrante) have established a standard for informed and incisive appreciation, composed in a distinctive literary style all their own.Together, Wood's essays, and his bestselling How Fiction Works, share an abiding preoccupation with how fiction tells its own truths, and with the vocation of the writer in a world haunted by the absence of God. In Serious Noticing, Wood collects his best essays from two decades of his career, supplementing earlier work with autobiographical reflections from his book The Nearest Thing to Life and recent essays from The New Yorker on young writers of extraordinary promise. The result is an essential guide to literature in the new millennium.
Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed
Vandana Shiva - 2007
It covers the questions:How are seeds cultivated and saved? How far must food travel before reaching our plate? Who gets paid for the food we eat? Why does our food taste like this? We live in a world where of the eighty thousand edible plants used for food, only about 150 are being cultivated, and just eight are traded globally. A world where we produce food for 12 billion people when there are only 6.3 billion people living, and still, 800 million suffer from malnutrition and 1.7 billion suffer from obesity. A world where food is modified to travel long distances rather than to be nutritious and flavorful.Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed lays out, in practical steps and far-reaching concepts, a program to ensure food and agriculture become more socially and ecologically sustainable. The book harvests the work and ideas produced by thousands of communities around the world. Emerging from the historic gatherings at Terra Madre, farmers, traders, and activists diagnose and offer prescriptions to reverse perhaps the worst food crisis faced in human history.There is a growing realization that food politics is vital to the health of our bodies, economies, and environment—in other words, a matter of life or death. Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, writes, “Reinstating food as a central, primary element in our lives seems an obvious thing to do, since without food, no living things would exist.” Thousands of communities around the world are working to do just this.A world-renowned environmental leader and thinker, Vandana Shiva is the author of many books, including Earth Democracy, Water Wars, and Staying Alive. Manifestos includes essays by Prince Charles and Carlo Petrini.
States of Denial: A New Perspective
Stanley Cohen - 2001
these are all expressions of 'denial'. Alcoholics who refuse to recognize their condition, people who brush aside suspicions of their partner's infidelity, the wife who doesn't notice that her husband is abusing their daughter - are supposedly 'in denial'. Governments deny their responsibility for atrocities, and plan them to achieve 'maximum deniability'. Truth Commissions try to overcome the suppression and denial of past horrors. Bystander nations deny their responsibility to intervene. Do these phenomena have anything in common? When we deny, are we aware of what we are doing or is this an unconscious defence mechanism to protect us from unwelcome truths? Can there be cultures of denial? How do organizations like Amnesty and Oxfam try to overcome the public's apparent indifference to distant suffering and cruelty? Is denial always so bad - or do we need positive illusions to retain our sanity?States of Denial is the first comprehensive study of both the personal and political ways in which uncomfortable realities are avoided and evaded. It ranges from clinical studies of depression, to media images of suffering, to explanations of the 'passive bystander' and 'compassion fatigue'. The book shows how organized atrocities - the Holocaust and other genocides, torture, and political massacres - are denied by perpetrators and by bystanders, those who stand by and do nothing.
Screen Tests
Kate Zambreno - 2019
The series of essays that follow, on figures central to Zambreno’s thinking, including Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, and Barbara Loden, are manifestos about art that ingeniously intersect and chime with the stories that came before them.
Rights of Man
Thomas Paine - 1791
One of Paine's greatest and most widely read works, considered a classic statement of faith in democracy and egalitarianism, defends the early events of the French Revolution, supports social security for workers, public employment for those in need of work, abolition of laws limiting wages, and other social reforms.
The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library
Trevor Noah - 2018
Trump Twitter account, with analysis and “scholarly” commentary from the writers of The Daily Show and an introduction by Trevor Noah. In June 2017, just steps from Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah opened The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library, a 4,000-square-foot museum space that gave the 45th president and his amazing Twitter legacy the respect they deserve. In the single weekend it was open to the public, the Library pop-up drew 7,500 visitors and had to turn away countless others.But the Presidential Twitter Library experience should not be limited to the elite coastal few. Not fair! All citizens, even the Mexican ones, should have the chance to see Donald Trump’s tweets in their rightful context—organized and commented on in the fearless, hilarious, insightful voice of The Daily Show.This one-of-a-kind exhibition catalog presents the Library’s complete contents, including: • The Masterpieces: In-depth critical appreciations of history’s most important Trump tweets, from “Very Stable Genius” to “Covfefe” to “Trump Tower Taco Bowl/I Love Hispanics!”• The Greatest Battles: @realDonaldTrump’s brutal Twitter campaigns against fellow Republicans, Diet Coke, women generally, and Kristen Stewart specifically• Sad! A Retrospective: a compendium of the many people, events, and twists of fate that apparently made Donald Trump feel this human emotion• Trumpstradamus: DJT’s amazing 140-character predictions—none of which came true!• The Hall of Nicknames: the greatest of Trump’s monikers, from “Lyin’ Ted” to “Low I.Q. Crazy Mika,” accompanied by original caricature artwork• Trump vs. Trump: You’re going to want to sit for this one. Donald Trump has sometimes been known to contradict himself.• Always the Best: the greatest boasts of the greatest boaster of all time, ever!Comprising hundreds of Trump tweets, and featuring a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham, and even a place for readers to add their own future Trump tweet highlights—because he is making new Twitter history literally every day—The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library is a unique portrait of an artist whose masterworks will be studied by historians, grammarians, and mental health professionals for years to come.
Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World
Kathleen Dean Moore - 2021
In her newest collection, Moore selects essays that celebrate the music of the natural world as a reminder of what can be taken from us—the yowl of wolves, tick of barnacles, laughter of children, shriek of falling mountains. Alongside these selections are brand new essays born from the sorrow and iniquity of this new age of extinction, all bearing witness to the glories of this world and the sins against it. Each group of essays moves, as Moore herself has been moved, from celebration to lamentation to bewilderment to the determination to act.In Earth's Wild Music, Moore reminds us that whatever is left of the planet after its pillaging is the world in which those who remain must live. Whatever genetic song-lines, whatever fragments of whale-squeal and shattered harmonies are left, that's what evolution will have to work with. Music is the shivering urgency and exuberance of life on-going. In a time of terrible silencing, Moore asks, who will forgive us if we do not save the songs?
The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition
Maurizio Lazzarato - 2011
They are all 'debtors,' guilty and responsible in the eyes of capital, which has become the Great, the Universal, Creditor."—from The Making of the Indebted ManDebt—both public debt and private debt—has become a major concern of economic and political leaders. In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato shows that, far from being a threat to the capitalist economy, debt lies at the very core of the neoliberal project. Through a reading of Karl Marx's lesser-known youthful writings on John Mill, and a rereading of writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, Lazzarato demonstrates that debt is above all a political construction, and that the creditor/debtor relation is the fundamental social relation of Western societies.Debt cannot be reduced to a simple economic mechanism, for it is also a technique of “public safety” through which individual and collective subjectivities are governed and controlled. Its aim is to minimize the uncertainty of the time and behavior of the governed. We are forever sinking further into debt to the State, to private insurance, and, on a more general level, to corporations. To insure that we honor our debts, we are at once encouraged and compelled to become the “entrepreneurs” of our lives, of our “human capital.” In this way, our entire material, psychological, and affective horizon is upended and reconfigured.How do we extricate ourselves from this impossible situation? How do we escape the neoliberal condition of the indebted man? Lazzarato argues that we will have to recognize that there is no simple technical, economic, or financial solution. We must instead radically challenge the fundamental social relation structuring capitalism: the system of debt.
Ok Boomer, Let's Talk: A Millennial Defense of Our Generation
Jill Filipovic - 2020
In this eye-opening book, journalist Jill Filipovic breaks down the massive problems facing Millennials including climate, money, housing, and healthcare. In Ok Boomer, Let’s Talk, journalist (and Millennial) Jill Filipovic tells the definitive story of her generation—and it’s no joke. Talking to gig workers, economists, policy makers, and dozens of struggling Millennials drowning in debt on a planet quite literally in flames, Filipovic paints a shocking and nuanced portrait of a generation being left behind: -Millennials are the most educated generation in American history—and also the most broke. -Millennials hold just 3 percent of American wealth. When they were the same age, Boomers held 21 percent. -The average older Millennial has $15,000 in student loan debt. The average Boomer at the same age? Just $2,300 in today’s dollars. -Millennials are paying almost 40 percent more for their first homes than Boomers did. -American families spend twice as much on healthcare now than they did when Boomers were young parents. Filipovic shows that Millennials are not the avocado-toast-eating snowflakes of Boomer outrage fantasies. But they are the first American generation that will do worse than their parents. “OK, Boomer” isn’t just a sarcastic dismissal—it’s a recognition that Millennials are in crisis, and that Boomer voters, bankers, and policy makers are responsible. Filipovic goes beyond the meme, upending dated assumptions with revelatory data and revealing portraits of young people delaying adulthood to pay down debt, obsessed with “wellness” because they can’t afford real healthcare, and struggling to #hustle in the precarious gig economy. Ok Boomer, Let’s Talk is at once an explainer and an extended olive branch that will finally allow these two generations to truly understand each other.
Civil Disobedience and Other Essays
Henry David Thoreau - 1849
Contained in this volume are the following essays: Civil Disobedience, Natural History of Massachusetts, A Walk to Wachusett, The Landlord, A Winter Walk, The Succession of Forest Trees, Walking, Autumnal Tints, Wild Apples, Night and Moonlight, Aulus Persius Flaccus, Herald of Freedom, Life Without Principle, Paradise (to be) Regained, A Plea for John Brown, The Last Days of John Brown, After the Death of John Brown, The Service, Slavery in Massachusetts, and Wendell Phillips Before Concord Lyceum.
Let's Bring Back: An Encyclopedia of Forgotten-Yet-Delightful, Chic, Useful, Curious, and Otherwise Commendable Things from Times Gone By
Lesley M.M. Blume - 2010
M. Blume, invites you to consider whatever happened to cuckoo clocks? Or bed curtains? Why do we have so many "friends" but have done away with the much more useful word "acquaintance"? All of these things, plus hot toddies, riddles, proverbs, corsets, calling cards, and many more, are due for a revival. Throughout this whimsical, beautifully illustrated encyclopedia of nostalgia, Blume breathes new life into the elegant, mysterious, and delightful trappings of bygone eras, honoring the timeless tradition of artful living along the way. Inspired by her much loved column of the same name and featuring entries from famous icons of style and culture, Let's Bring Back leads readers to rediscover the things that entertained, awed, beautified, satiated, and fascinated in eras past.
How to Read and Why
Harold Bloom - 2000
For more than forty years, Bloom has transformed college students into lifelong readers with his unrivaled love for literature. Now, at a time when faster and easier electronic media threatens to eclipse the practice of reading, Bloom draws on his experience as critic, teacher, and prolific reader to plumb the great books for their sustaining wisdom. Shedding all polemic, Bloom addresses the solitary reader, who, he urges, should read for the purest of all reasons: to discover and augment the self. His ultimate faith in the restorative power of literature resonates on every page of this infinitely rewarding and important book.