I was troubled by the knowledge that millions of music fans were freeloading music from these artists without a second thought, and more so that I was one of them, hypocritically claiming to “love” music all the while. Once I realised that the great majority of artists and musicians actually needed their legal rights enforced under copyright just to have the chance to break even, the usual excuses for digital piracy started to look like sophomoric drivel.

It’s true that some of the classic excuses for piracy had their brief moments of seeming credibility. In 2000, when the debate over digital piracy sprung to life, we didn’t have content providers like Spotify or Netflix, much less iTunes. The fact that there were so few legal options for consuming digital content was one of the main rationalisations for taking a soft stance toward piracy. The legitimate digital market was either too inconvenient or nonexistent, and piracy filled in these gaps in the developing web.

Read the full article on the New Statesman.

In his new book Technocreep, Keenan goes into great detail covering the many varieties of creepiness related to our growing and unsettling intimacy with technology. He says his “book is about the unseen ways in which technology is already changing our lives.” He provides countless startling examples from areas ranging from sensor creep to biological creep to intelligence creep to bolster his thesis that humans are quickly reaching a point –the so-called Singularity – wherein humans and machines will no longer function side-by-side but merge finally, with unknown consequences for our species.

His basic premise here is, to simplify, that computing power has grown so exponentially that no one human can any longer understand its processes and that in the near-future the only way to keep up with machines is by partially merging with them – i.e., voluntarily cyborging ourselves.

Read the full article on the Prague Post.

THERE IS life after a cancer diagnosis. It’s not all pleasant, but as Mike Marqusee shows us in The Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer, it is not necessary, or even healthy, to accept the enforced isolation of most treatment regimens.

Marqusee, who has already exceeded the prognosis for his multiple myeloma by several years, widens our understanding of what such a diagnosis means for the patient caught up in the complex world of the cancer industry. This is not a confessional cancer story, but a provocative examination of what having cancer in the 21st century can tell us about social relationships, and what an encounter with mortality might achieve.

Read the full review at Socialist Worker.

It is widely thought that the flare-up in Israel and the Occupied Territories began with the kidnapping of three Israeli teens in the West Bank just more than a month ago. But our guests — author Norman Finkelstein and Palestinian political analyst Mouin Rabbani — argue that such a narrative ignores the broader context of decades of occupation, and recent events highlighting the expansionist goals of the Israeli government in the Palestinian land under its control. “Whenever the Palestinians seem like they are trying to reach a settlement of the conflict — which the [Fatah-Hamas] unity government was — at that point Israel does everything it can to provoke a violent reaction, in this case from Hamas, break up the unity government, and then Israel has its pretext,” Finkelstein says. Rabbani and Finkelstein are co-authors of the forthcoming book, “How to Solve the Israel-Palestine Conflict.”

Watch the full interview at Democracy Now!

As Israel appears to be preparing for yet another assault on the Gaza Strip, what does it want to achieve? Is the goal to completely destroy Hamas? And should we expect Washington to stand by and watch the killing of civilians?

CrossTalking with Dan Arbell, Norman Finkelstein and Mouin Rabbani.

Watch the full segment at Russia Today.

On July 2nd, a sixteen-year-old boy named Mohamed Abu Khdeir was sitting outside a mosque near his home in East Jerusalem when he was pulled into a car and kidnapped by Israeli Jews. His body was found in the Jerusalem Forest; he had been battered in the head and then, according to autopsy reports, burned alive. (There was soot in his lungs, and burns on ninety per cent of his body.) Six Israeli Jews, some of whom are minors, were arrested; three have confessed to the crime, according to Israeli reports.

Abu Khdeir’s murder came in the wake of the kidnapping of three Israeli teens—Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrach—who were murdered and buried by their Palestinian abductors in shallow graves. After their abduction, Prime Minister Netanyahu declared that Israel’s working assumption was that they were alive, even though the evidence, including a desperate cell-phone call from one of the boys, suggested otherwise. The search for the boys took the form of a brutal, sweeping search and arrest operation conducted by the Israeli Army throughout the West Bank, and helped to aggravate the climate of hatred and revenge. Two months after the nine-month U.S.-sponsored peace negotiations folded, Israel is now mobilizing its forces for a possible ground attack on the Gaza Strip, and Hamas is firing rockets. War, not peace, is the agenda of the day.

To read the full piece, visit the New Yorker.

Artist Kevin Thomas likes to review books in comic strip form. The following nine reviews are excerpted from Thomas’s new book, HORN! THE COLLECTED REVIEWS.

See the full listicle at Buzzfeed.

IN a remarkable book, political activist and writer Mike Marqusee, who is suffering from cancer, makes an unusual appeal from “one grateful patient” to the hard-working NHS staff who are providing his excellent care.

“The government takes advantage of your sense of commitment to your patients,” he writes in The Price of Experience. “But by letting them do so you are doing no favours for those patients.”

Read the full review at West End Extra.

Americans are understandably eager to explore Cuba, a country long off-limits to them. The music, the architecture, the sea, and the liveliness of the Cuban people charm almost all who visit. But for many Cubans, daily life is dirty and difficult. These short stories, by Cuban writers who work on the thin edge of official disapproval, recall the authenticity of Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller and vividly portray the grittiness of the Cuban experience.

– Tom Gjelten, NPR

See the full list at PBS.

The government may try to put a positive spin on the economy and claim that economic growth is increasing but James Meadway has shown this is a flawed assessment. In any case, growth since 2008 has continued to be debt-driven, producing a false prosperity and a financial bubble which will only get worse.While bankers continue to pay themselves million-pound bonuses, working people are still working harder for less and falling back on credit to make ends meet.

This debt fuelled economy, or ‘Creditocracy’ is the subject of Andrew Ross’s book. Ross is an academic and activist in the USA who has been involved in debt resistance initiatives arising out of the Occupy Wall Street movement. In Ross’s view the USA is currently a ‘full blown creditocracy’ (p.11), which is his definition of liberal democracy coupled with a heavily financialised economy, where the costs of social goods such as education, health and social care are debt financed.As more responsibility for welfare is privatized and falls to individuals, private debt financing becomes more significant.He also points out that debt, and the austerity measures associated with it, is not only part of the re-structuring of neoliberal capitalism but also exists as form of social control where people are afraid to risk their jobs or are ashamed to ask for help in repaying debt.

Read the full review at Counterfire.

In recent months, I’ve been taking a medication called Revlimid, given as a “late therapy” for multiple myeloma. Since it looks like I may be Revlimid-dependent for a while, I decided to educate myself about the drug. As the chemistry is beyond me, I focused my attention elsewhere.

The first thing I discovered was that Revlimid is phenomenally expensive.

A single twenty-one-day cycle of treatment at the lowest dose of 5 mg daily costs the NHS £3,570. As the dose rises, so does the price: for a single twenty-one-day cycle at the high dose of 25 mg, it’s £4,318. The increment is small because the costs of actually manufacturing the drug are minimal. But whatever it is that we’re paying for, we’re paying for it through the nose: between £42,000 and £51,000 per patient for a year’s treatment. This is a treatment we need, and to which we have a right. That does not, however, mean that its cost should be taken for granted.

Read the full extract at openDemocracy.

I’ve just paid for my ticket on New Jersey Transit using the app MyTix, saving me from the tense rush at the ticket machines outside the station. I join the throng of people waiting on the platform and–by sheer luck–the train stops in front of me. I manage to find a seat, grateful to be so fortunate, because little else has changed. Commuters still fight for parking spaces and seats just as we did when I first started working in the city seven years ago, and we’re still wondering if things could be a little bit better. Couldn’t there be more trains? Couldn’t the train open its doors in the same spot every time? How about a queuing system like they have in Taipei to make things more orderly, and more fair? Don’t get me wrong, I love the app, but it didn’t change the basic misery of riding a train during rush hour on an overcrowded commuter line.

Has the internet made our lives better? Your inclination might be to say yes—you may have recently reconnected with a long lost friend on Facebook, paid a bill online, or, like me, avoided some inconvenience through a new app. But what about the fundamental structures that affect your well being, such as improving your work-life balance, bettering your child’s school, or choosing a more effective elected representative? Would you still say yes?

In Micah Sifry’s new book, The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet), the answer is a resounding no.

Read the full review at AlterNet.

Not so long ago, people gave a wide berth to anyone walking down the street talking to themselves. They looked crazy. They might lash out or do something weird or dangerous. They were…creepy. Now, no one notices. They’re probably talking on their mobile phone.

What happened is that the widespread adoption of a single technology changed our perception of ‘normal’. We now have a reasonable explanation of what formerly seemed to be weird — even creepy — behaviour. As computer security expert Thomas P. Keenan says in Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and the Capitalization of Intimacy, many factors come together to make up ‘creepy’. One of them is uncertainty or, as he calls it ‘mystery’: the inability to form a mental model that accurately predicts how something mechanical behaves, coupled with a lack of control.

Read the full review at ZDNet.

In this wild and disruptive age of digital monopolies, mass surveillance, whistleblowers, and Internet Freedom Hipsters, admitting you’re not well versed in the United States v. Manning trial might as well be blasphemy. Clark Stoeckley’s graphic novel of the courtroom drama, The United States vs. Pvt. Chelsea Manning, then, is practically a godsend.

Whether or not you agree with Manning’s actions, there is no denying her historic importance. As the first whistleblower (years before Snowden) known to digital natives, Manning set off the United States government’s persecution of WikiLeaks and changed the public conversation about the wars in the Middle East, the importance of digital rights and the rights of whistleblowers, and even how to properly cover a trans woman in the press. Wading through Alexa O’Brien’s extensive database of the Manning trial or the transcripts from the Freedom of the Press stenographers, however, is a dry and boring chore that no one but the most dedicated Internet Freedom Hipster has time for.

Read the full review at Vice.

Gordon Lish is a traveler from a country no longer extant, a country where editors were princes and writers kings. A country where the publishing fiefdoms of Manhattan were proud castles in the sky, where the desperate flailings of The Real Housewives of Pittsburgh never made the gossip pages, but the seating arrangements at Elaine’s always did.

In the 1970s, at Esquire, Lish was “Captain Fiction.” He then spent almost two decades at Knopf, publishing the likes of Don DeLillo, Cynthia Ozick and Barry Hannah. With his risen cheekbones, flowing hair and linear mouth, Lish resembled one of the patrician squires he encountered at Andover, not a Jewish milliner’s son from Long Island. He drank with the best of them and, when drunk, said things that were often cruel and sometimes true. Today, his refrigerator is full of Beck’s.

Read the full article at Newsweek.

Kevin Thomas has been doing illustrated reviews of contemporary books for The Rumpus for a few years now. Now, the good people of OR Books have published the reviews in one volume—HORN! The Collected Reviews.

I’d read a few of Thomas’s reviews in the past and always been a bit jealous at his control of his medium—of his ability to go past or through or beyond the language under discussion to provoke with a sequence of images. Reviews is maybe not the right term—commentaries seems more fitting. Take his review of George Saunders’s Tenth of December for example, which manages to condense an overview of the collection’s themes along with a viewpoint on those themes into nine small panels. (I needed over 2000 words for my own review of the Saunders book).

Read the full review at Biblioklept.

Read the review at Guernica.

Subtitled “Notes on the Life of Nat Hentoff,” this profile offers an extraordinary, intimate portrait of the writer who championed jazz as an art and who helped pioneer alternative journalism. Delving into Hentoff’s controversial positions as a civil libertarian and free speech advocate, the film features interviews with Amiri Baraka, Stanley Crouch and Floyd Abrams, with music by the jazz greats.

See the full post on the IFC Center website.

Welcome Clark Stoeckley (CStoeckley.com) (Twitter) and Host Kevin Gosztola (The Dissenter) (Twitter)

The United States vs Pvt. Chelsea Manning: A Graphic Account From Inside The Courtroom

Each day of Chelsea Manning’s trial, I would pull my rental car into the lot where media waited to be escorted into Fort Meade by the military. Just about every day Clark Stoeckley would be there with his WikiLeaks Truck daring the military to tell him he could not drive his truck on base. His truck would then sit parked by the media center all day as he drew his sketches—sometimes from the media center, sometimes from inside the courtroom.

Stoeckley’s book, The US vs. Private Chelsea Manning is the first book that gives the world an accessible account of what unfolded at Manning’s court martial.

Read the full post at Firedoglake.

On Thursday, June 19 in New York, join OR Books and Chelsea Manning’s supporters to mark one year since she went on trial for leaking the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs to WikiLeaks. At TheaterLab (357 W 36th St, 3rd Floor, NYC) journalists, activists and artists who attended the trial will read from a new graphic book published this month, The United States vs Private Chelsea Manning: A Graphic Account From Inside the Courtroom.

RSVP to events@wp.orbooks.com, or let us know you are coming on Facebook.

“Hi, my name is Kevin Thomas. What I’m best at is reading.”

Watch the full YouTube video here.

“This is a powerful and important set of essays; vital reading for anyone wanting to understand what is happening to our beloved NHS, and for anyone wanting a reason to fight those changes. It’s also very funny.”

Read the whole review at Peace News.

In the foreword to his newest book, PDF co-founder Micah Sifry warns that the Internet “is in danger of being destroyed by a combination of greed (on the part of big tech companies who are walling it off), laziness (on the part of users who are choosing free and convenient services over a more decentralized and personally secure architecture), and nationalism (on the part of some countries that fear the freedom that the Internet makes possible…).” It was this last piece of the trifecta that received the most scorn at this year’s conference.

Read the full coverage at PBS.

One year ago this month, the military trial against Private Chelsea Manning began in Fort Meade, Maryland. After leaking classified documents related to US military abuses in Afghanistan, she was convicted in 2013 of crimes including violating the Espionage Act, and sentenced to 35 years in prison. Glenn Greenwald has called Manning the most important whistleblower since Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg.

In a new graphic novel, The United States vs. Private Chelsea Manning, available now from O/R Books, Clark Stoeckley documents the complex arguments that led to Manning’s conviction. In this excerpt, the defense argues that Chelsea Manning sent her leaks to WikiLeaks with the reasonable understanding that WikiLeaks was a journalistic outfit, and not a political force aligned with America’s enemies. With digital media expert Yochai Benkler on the stand, a fascinating debate ensues over the meaning of journalism and the pursuit of transparency in the digital age. Click the image below to open the excerpt.

Read the excerpt at the Nation.

Chelsea Manning’s name is a staple of American headlines, but much of her trial and imprisonment was cloaked in secrecy. A new graphic novel–based on court documents and Manning’s first-person account, and illustrated by Clark Stoeckley–provides an accessible but unsurprisingly disturbing glimpse into her treatment in prison and the courtroom. Check out an excerpt after the jump and then buy the book here.

Read the excerpt at Feministing.