Hilarious, tragic, stirring – this fly-on-the-wall look at several weeks in an Iranian divorce court provides a unique window into the intimate circumstances of Iranian women’s lives. Following Jamileh, whose husband beats her, Ziba, a 16-year-old trying to divorce her 38-year-old husband, and Maryam, who is desperately fighting to gain custody of her daughters, this deadpan chronicle showcases the strength, ingenuity, and guile with which they confront biased laws, a Kafaka-esque administrative system, and their husbands’ and families’ rage to gain divorces.

Visit the Spectacle Theater website for tickets and more information

Back in September, the U.S. Department Education announced its two-year and three-year federal student loan default rates. The rates were 10 percent and 14.7 percent respectively, both record highs. At the time the report was released, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called these numbers “troubling.”

NYU professor of social and cultural analysis and Occupy activist Andrew Ross would likely call these figures extortionist. Also, not at all unexpected.

“Creditors have their foot on the throat of the global economy,” said Ross on a panel last month at The Brecht Forum in New York. The panel—which included writers, professors, and activists—was there to discuss debt resistance, and Ross’s new book Creditocracy And The Case For Debt Refusal. Resisting one’s debts is a tactic rarely if ever discussed by the American media’s talking heads. Ross’s book humanizes the cryptic problem of a society funded on credit, offering a political voice to those whose economic power has been throttled.

Read the full post at Salon.

Making loans that clearly can never be repaid in full is a more delinquent act than being unable to pay. Making a killing off vital common goods like education and healthcare and public infrastructure is venal, anti-social conduct, to be condemned and not indemnified. The money we borrowed from banks was not theirs to begin with—it was created as interest-bearing debt, only when we signed the loan agreement. The long record of fraud and deceit on the part of bankers disqualifies their right to be made whole—it is more moral to deny them than to pay them back. The banks, and their beneficiaries, awash in bonuses, profits, and dividends, have already been paid enough. Since the creditor class produces phony wealth, fake growth, and thus no lasting prosperity to society as a whole, it deserves nothing from us in return. Loading debt onto the citizenry inflicts grievous damage on any democracy, no matter how durable it appears to be. When a government cannot—or will not—respond, then taking debt relief for ourselves, by any means necessary, may be the most indispensable act of civil disobedience. Asserting the moral right to repudiate debt may be the only way of rebuilding popular democracy.

Read the full excerpt at Utne.com.

Listen to the full broadcast on KPFA.

From an author who keeps reminding us that he’s almost eighty, these stories are fresh and vibrant, playful and accessibly avant-garde…longtime Lish fans and anyone who loves exciting fiction and appreciates the art of writing will find much to love in Goings.

Read the full review exclusively in the print edition of Rain Taxi.

The Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to join us for a discussion with Andrew Ross and Randy Martin on Ross’s new book Creditocracy: And The Case For Debt Refusal.

Ross contends that we are in the cruel grip of a creditocracy – where the finance industry commandeers our elected governments and where the citizenry have to take out loans to meet their basic needs. The implications of mass indebtedness for any democracy are profound, and history shows that whenever a creditor class becomes as powerful as Wall Street, the result has been debt bondage for the bulk of the population.

Following in the ancient tradition of the jubilee, activists have had some success in repudiating the debts of developing countries. The time is ripe, Ross argues, for a debtors’ movement to use the same kinds of moral and legal arguments to bring relief to household debtors in the North. After examining the varieties of lending that have contributed to the crisis, Ross suggests ways of lifting the burden of illegitimate debts from our backs. Creditocracy outlines the kind of alternative economy we need to replace a predatory debt-money system that only benefits the 1%.

Learn more about this event at the Institute for Public Knowledge.

Mind Reading: Brain Awareness Week Presents

From empathy to epilepsy, from cognitive disorders to the mystery of memory, an evening of writing that draws on—and deviates from—what we know about the brain. With fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by Stefan Merrill Block, Meehan Crist, Timothy Donnelly, Leslie Jamison, Miles Klee, Elissa Schappell, and Lynn Schmeidler. A Brain Awareness Week event, sponsored by Neuwrite.

Learn more about this event at Housing Works.

Debt slavery: just a scary metaphor, or something real that’s gradually capturing us? Can a political system so highly leveraged through personal debt really function? What’s the long term narrative arc here? To talk about debt and what kinds of things people might do — and are doing — to refuse payment on unfair debt I turned to Dr. Andrew Ross, author most recently of Creditocracy (OR Books, 2014). These are broadly cross-cutting, critical issues. Andrew’s one of the good guys. Total runtime forty four minutes. Male parta, male dīlābuntur.

Listen to the full podcast at Electric Politics.

A refuge for renegades, OR Books was founded by John Oakes and Colin Robinson (the O and the R), who together have published an impressive roster of authors in their careers, including Tariq Ali, Andrei Codrescu, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, R. Crumb, Cory Doctorow, Andrea Dworkin, Eric Hobsbawm, Abbie Hoffman, Lewis Lapham, Gordon Lish, Rigoberta Menchú, Harvey Pekar, Matt Taibbi, John Waters, Jann Wenner, and Edmund White. They describe OR as “a new type of publishing company [that] embraces progressive change in politics, culture, and the way we do business.” They go into more detail about their past (and plans for the future) on their website.

Read the full Small Press Shout-Out.

An Obie Award winning performer and advocate for all those who are oppressed by greed and consumerism, the Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir spread the gospel of community activism, sharing resources, and freedom.

Read the full event details at revbilly.com.

“Out of respect for the artist, we ask that you not make video recordings of the performances you are about to witness.” These are difficult instructions to follow when David Byrne is on stage in overalls singing Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend.” And apparently some may not have heeded the request.

At the Artists’ Pay for Radio Play Rally at Le Poisson Rouge in New York on Tuesday night (Feb. 25), Byrne joined hosts musician Marc Ribot and “Freeloading” author Chris Ruen as well as a slew of other artists, including Tift Merritt, REM’s Mike Mills and Rosanne Cash (via video) as well as the Future Music Coalition’s Kevin Erickson to perform and/or rally for performance royalties for terrestrial radio airplay.

Read the full post at Billboard.

Jason Schwartz’s John the Posthumous (OR Books, 2013) is a luscious work of fiction. I am not sure if I can call it a novel. I am sure that I do not care whether it is or is not. The book is the product of a uniquely intelligent, elegant writer.

It is full of possible stories. None of them are developed. We are granted no more than hints of the narrator’s life and relations to others. Perhaps the narrator murdered his mother, his father, or both. Perhaps he merely witnessed their deaths. His brother, or perhaps his son, seems to have died, either by neglect or premeditation. Now the narrator appears to have returned to the family home after a long time away. Over the next year, or perhaps years, he learns how to maintain this rural property. Sometimes he offers advice on the folding of sheets or the trapping of mice. He describes the rooms and the land, recounts local history, catalogs the native ants, and indulges in etymology. His phrasings convey menace: “bedsheets, according to that old saying, are the knives of the bed.” The exact nature of the menace is never quite specified. Someone betrayed someone else. Someone, perhaps several people, are dead. But we never learn who did what to whom or even what the narrator’s position in the family really was. Different details point us in different directions.

Read the full review at Green Mountains Review.

Last month, the Federal Reserve confirmed the ominous news. The decline in US household debt from sky-high 2008 levels has halted, and the figures are on the rise again – up by $241bn (or 2.1%) in the fourth quarter of 2013, following a smaller increase in the third quarter. Unlike auto loans, mortgages, and credit card balances, student debt never fell at all, and is fast approaching $1.2 tn. Economists seem to have decided that the “debt overhang” from the crash has now been resolved; not only is it safe to start borrowing again, it’s a must if we are to get back on track with GDP-driven growth. With aggregate debt still at a staggering $11.5tn, this is bad analysis and bad advice. As for reviving GDP business as usual, all the evidence suggests this kind of growth is a recipe for eco-collapse.

Confronted with these exorbitant numbers, it’s natural to gripe that debts of such magnitude will never be paid off in our lifetimes. But that’s to miss the point. In a creditocracy – the kind of society we now live in – debts are not supposed to be paid down entirely, for the same reason that credit card issuers don’t want us to clear our credit card balance every month. Those who diligently pay up are derided in industry circles as “deadbeats”. The preferred customers are “revolvers,” who can’t quite make ends meet but who pay the monthly minimum along with penalties or late fees, ensuring a steady flow of revenue to banks. Creditors’ profits depend on keeping us in debt for as long as we live, and even beyond the grave in the case of parental co-signers for student debtors who die before they have performed less than an average lifetime of debt service.

Read the full op-ed at the Guardian.

No matter what you think of his work, his persona, his gusto in making or breaking literary comers when he was in a position to make or break them, no matter what you think of the writer, you have to admire the man Gordon Lish. He just turned eighty, but there he was last night at McNally Jackson Bookstore, holding forth at a reading for his new book Goings with more enthusiasm and earnest intent to entertain those of us who had come out to see him, than I’ve witnessed at readings by those younger and haler, which is to say readings by anyone else.

Read the full piece at Ad Broad.

Few journalists have impacted the international dialogue as much as Glenn Greenwald has over the last year. Greenwald’s reporting on Edward Snowden and the NSA has dramatically changed the way the world understands the power of the Internet as a means of government surveillance.

Greenwald has served as a columnist for The Guardian US and for Salon. He has authored four books including “With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful” and “How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok.” His newest volume “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State” is scheduled for release in April 2014. Greenwald has received awards including the first Izzy Award for Independent Journalism, in 2009, and the 2010 Online Journalism Award for Best Commentary. Recently he was the first non-Brazilian to win the Prêmio Esso for reporting–Brazil’s highest honor in journalism.

See the full event listing at SXSW.

How can you take the stuff of life and make it into something worth writing and worth reading? As a successful journalist and much-awarded writer, Raja Shehadeh understands the process of writing for publication as well as the personal benefits it brings. In part, his Occupation Diaries and Palestinian Walks were written to help him process some of the challenges of his own experience. We all have a story to tell and this session might be a chance for you to turn your own personal story into written material.

Read the full event listing at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

Watch the full panel discussion on Youtube.

In August 1961, Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon and Che Guevara faced off at an Interamerican conference in Punto del Este, Uruguay. Dillon, scion of the founder of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Company, outlined the Kennedy Administration’s Alliance for Progress to a meeting of Latin American finance ministers. Dillon called it a blueprint for “a decade of democratic progress.” He noted that Latin American countries would have to reform their semi-feudal agricultural policies and backward tax systems in order to participate in the Alianza para el Progreso.

Dillon, elegantly attired in a dark pinstripe suit, promised that the United States would provide $1 billion in economic aid within six months, and another $20 billion in private and public capital over the next ten years. The infusion of aid and capital would spur economic growth. Economic growth would create jobs and money for housing, education, and public health, and lift Latin America out of poverty.

The Latin American finance ministers endorsed the Alliance for Progress in the Declaration of Punta del Este, but with little enthusiasm. White House aide Richard Goodwin recalls, “There was … no outpouring of pledges to specific measures of social reform.”

Read the full excerpt at the History News Network.

The event on Tuesday will feature staples like “Respect,” which, when played on the radio, make money for their writers (in this case, Otis Redding) but not their most famous performers (like Aretha Franklin). Others scheduled to appear include the singers Tift Merritt and Jennifer Charles; the bassist Melvin Gibbs; and Chris Ruen, the author of the book “Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Hunger for Free Content Starves Creativity.” Laws passed in the 1990s guarantee royalties to performers from online streams, but the United States remains almost alone in the world for not paying this “performance right,” as it is known, on terrestrial radio.

Read the full piece at The New York Times.

Gordon Lish’s 1983 novel, Dear Mr Capote, begins: “This is the twelfth start of the letter I am writing. Here is the reason it’s the twelfth start. The reason is to try out voices!” This gag – the narrator is, or is pretending to be, a serial killer boasting to Capote about his crimes and inviting him to help monetise them – is not only an oblique gag about the writing process itself, it’s a gag about the teaching process.

Lish’s chief fame resides in being the man who, as an editor at the publishing house Alfred A Knopf, cut out up to 70% of Raymond Carver’s short stories – if anyone should have been called “carver”, it was him. He is also known for his punishing but remarkably successful creative writing course (no one allowed to go to the loo, but a potty in the corner for those in extremis, according to one account). Last year the Guardian website published a piece about him listing, in the piece itself and readers comments, about 50 writers whom he has helped; and if it is true that he licked Ben Marcus into that strange shape, then that alone is testament to his talent, influence and worth.

But Lish is also a prose writer. After all, at some point, you have to get up and show that you can walk the walk. He took his time, though. Dear Mr Capote was his first novel, published when he was nearly 50. And although there have been more novels since then, he has become known mainly for short, fragmentary fiction, reminiscent in tone of the more strangled meta-fictions of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard, which wrestle with the problems of language and narrative.

Read the full review at the Guardian.

Read the excerpt at The Guardian.