A Psalm for the Wild-Built – Becky Chambers
Humanity has built up robots so completely that it has become clear that they are sentient and deserving of legal personhood, and their foundational role in our chain of production is one that robs them of their freedom
Antisemitism Viewed from the Left: A Reading List
A reading list of essays and articles (and a couple videos) on antisemitism from a decidedly left-wing perspective.
The struggle to free oneself or defend one’s freedom or the freedom of those near you, is worth celebrating. But the physical act of destroying each other is complicated and messy at best.
Jemisin understands what works about superhero books and then uses it to move the readers through a narrative so subjective that they are forced to deal with some of the most profound political crises we have just lived through.
That is the way a lot of these simple anarchist texts grab a lot of people. There is a sense of a weight being lifted from your shoulders and that things don’t have to be the way they are. You don’t have to fuck people over to survive.
People Love Dead Jews – Dara Horn
The deep obsession with her book by Jewish audiences has made some cry foul: instead of great books on Judaism and Jewish history we just end up with more and more bestsellers about antisemitism.
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke – Eric LaRocca
The book is really about how brief and tenuous our own self-composure actually is. Maybe we are all about to be pushed over the edge.
The Other History of the DC Universe – John Ridley
Instead of looking at the profound inequalities expressed in superhero lore, particularly the ways in which heroes collaborate with rather than challenge power, they focus on Superman’s “white privilege” or the mansplaining of Dick Grayson.
We need to get away from the idea that any method is guaranteed for success or guaranteed for failure. The methods work, or fail, in a much more context-specific way.
Since newsrooms around the country are churning out think pieces about populism in an accelerating news cycle, we need the work of scholars like Moffitt to help establish a baseline for how to understand these phenomena.