Thread to link to articles you've enjoyed reading recently.

http://persephonemagazine.com/2010/12/listening-while-feminist-in-defense-of-baby-its-cold-outside/?fbclid=IwAR1kDMh-yfhTITA2OFZ5uXUP6KWIWgetPMLuRbRLGMzFk8gQMKNOR29_gdo

huge if true

I've read that before somewhere and agree 100%

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/how-mark-burnett-resurrected-donald-trump-as-an-icon-of-american-success

https://lithub.com/8-gilded-age-stories-that-predicted-the-future/

I'm trying to write more (again): https://medium.com/@jasperness/bay-area-bagel-bonanza-2019-edition-c2c0d08c8dba

https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/kyle-korver-utah-jazz-nba

Jasper, great article on a topic that is near and dear to my heart. Just a couple of quick factory checks: 1. I think Kenjis actually a Boston native because his dad is a Harvard professor and 2. It's a settled fact that New York water from the Croton reservoir is what makes our bagels the best and no, that cannot be replicated even with all the money and brains in Palo Alto.

This probably belongs more in “internet antics” but good lord I’m losing my shit @ this thing:
https://www.clickhole.com/5-times-gandalf-tried-to-cheer-up-a-despondent-frodo-ba-1830407538?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=SF&utm_content=Main

I've yet to find a bagel here in Italy and it is slowly ruining my life.

https://www.internazionale.it/video/2018/12/12/lezione-liberta-zadie-smith
That's a really good interview. She comes off so effortlessly insightful all the time.

PUT ASIDE YOUR PURITY POLITICS AND EMBRACE MY FECKLESS CENTRISM

Haha, that's brilliant. We need a British version for all the journalists and think tank members (literally all of these people are journalists and think tank members) who still think Blairism is an electable force.

Reminds me of this timeless classic https://www.centrism.biz/

Big thanks to Paves for sending this my way.

THE RADICAL EGALITARIAN POLITICS OF WEIRD AL’S “UHF”

You guys should read this long Jim O’Rourke interview because it’s awesome:

toneglow.substack.com/p/014-jim-orourke

https://uproxx.com/movies/jack-barth-interview-yesterday-writer-richard-curtis/

Nick wrote:You guys should read this long Jim O’Rourke interview because it’s awesome:

toneglow.substack.com/p/014-jim-orourke

Age 10: Get Spectrum, the Chicago licensee of LA’s Z Channel, where I saw Godard, Downey Sr., Roeg, Herzog, Friedkin, The Ruling Class, etc. for the first time. Definitely Performance and Greaser’s Palace.

It’s crazy to me that you were seeing all these films when you were only 10.

It was a good time! You missed the good times. Your world sucks (laughter). You’ve got, what is it called… Dooplo?

I’m not sure what that is? (pauses). Oh, you mean Diplo.

Ah I don’t know, I just see it on the Google News page

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/08/how-bad-is-britain?fbclid=IwAR1MyfS22XXfQ-lWEAZA2ERldQEo_P8WfltpyW8rtbGtQGF9vc7f1IOSpu0

Been really into stuff about how awful the UK is ever since the election in December. This is one of the best examples of the genre I've come across, five bloody stars.

Absolutely brilliant. Thanks for posting that! I just happened to buy one of Ellen Mieksin Wood's books and I have been reading a lot of old Perry Anderson essays and articles, mostly from the 1970s. The debates amongst the British New Left during that period are truly unrivaled.

Do you read The Tribune often? It was relaunched just a couple of years ago. It is the same cohort that runs Jacobin here in the States (as well as in Italy and Brazil). I am familiar with a few of the main writers and editors for the site. Grace Blakeley is an absolutely brilliant thinker who is really adept with mass media (she was a major Corbyn surrogate who used to appear quite a bit on BBC). I should probably check out the site more often but there is only so much time and I am already up to my neck in books, journals, articles, etc.

As for the article itself, Britain benefits from having a more robust social state than we do in the United States but both countries have been at the vanguard of the neoliberal market revolution since the late 1970s. Things on the other side of the pond are not so desperate as they are here (I don't think) because there is still the concept of a public good that is satisfied through collective social services. This is the legacy of the NHS, for example. It enables Labour to campaign against austerity. It is notable that Sanders never really talks about austerity, but rather inequality (and sometimes poverty). We lack any foundation to even launch a class-based politics in this country because the institutions were never really established in the 1930s when organized labor had the necessary political power to advance these institutional gains within the American state. Instead we adopted a more paternalistic welfare model, which gives employers way more power because they literally control our access to something as basic and essential as health insurance. That does not mean that the British or western European model should be uncritically fetishized, which is often done by liberals here in the States, especially since it is a model that has been effectively subverted over the last several decades.

Anyways, excellent article and thanks for sharing!

Everywhere we go, Toots gives. One afternoon during Christmas season we did the rounds in his black Lexus, distributing small bundles of cash to gas-station attendants and waiters and hotel staff, anyone he thought needed it. This is normal practice. “Sometimes my work, when I drive him, is just to give. We drive around and give money, or food, or medicine,” says Courtney. “Every day! Every time! Oh, my God! When the phone rings, it’s always somebody that wants something. He always help them. That’s Fireball,” he says, with a snap of his fingers. “He give it all away.” Toots has always been motivated by generosity. At the May Pen Primary School, he gave away his lunch to kids who had nothing to eat. “The first time I did that my father beat me, because I come home hungry. He said, ‘Where’s your lunch money?’ ” Toots mimics a child crying. “ ‘I gave it away, Daddy.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because some children’s mouths wide and hungry.’ My father don’t bother to beat me again. He say, ‘OK, I’m going to give you enough you can give some away.’ ” wrote:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/toots-hibbert-interview-reggae-king-1042219/

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/sep/16/black-sabbath-paranoid-at-50-potent-anthems-of-working-class-strife

When I was a young teenager listening to these albums the social context that produced them never really mattered to me. I knew Tony Iommi chopped off the tips of two of his fingers in a welding accident as a teenager but then never really made the connection to think about the class dynamics that put a 15-year-old dropout in an industrial factory. It is really illuminating to situate a band like Black Sabbath in the post-war social history of a city like Birmingham. I love a good article like this because it is going to get me listening to these early Sabbath records with new ears tomorrow.

Don’t know that I enjoyed it:

https://onezero.medium.com/clear-conquered-u-s-airports-now-it-wants-to-own-your-entire-digital-identity-15d61076e44d

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vjeb/its-time-for-the-eternal-september-to-end

This is a fascinating article that I think most of you would enjoy.

https://novaramedia.com/2021/05/13/total-solidarity-with-palestine-is-the-only-anti-racist-position/