The artist and WikiLeaks activist Clark Stoeckley is creating a comic based on the Bradley Manning trial.

Read the full article at The New Yorker.

A comic of the Bradley Manning trial, produced live from the courtroom, is being created by artist and WikiLeaks activist Clark Stoeckley and will be published in the autumn.

Stoeckley, who drives a truck covered with the WikiLeaks logo to the court in Fort Meade each day, said: “It [the truck] definitely turns heads. My feeling is that if they allow the Fox News truck on base they have to allow me here too, right?” He is meticulously recording every detail of Manning’s trial from inside the courtroom, drawing and writing down events as they happen.

Read the full article at the Guardian.

Leftie publisher O/R Books is covering the Bradley Manning trial for a book slated to appear in October, “The United States vs. PFC Bradley Manning: A Graphic Account From Inside the Courtroom.” The chronicler is Clark Stoeckley — he’s a WikiLeaks supporter, not an impartial observer, and his courtroom artist-style drawings have an undertone of sympathy for Manning.

Manning’s court-martial began Monday in Fort Meade, Md. Three years ago, Manning was arrested on suspicion of leaking more than 700,000 Iraq and Afghanistan battlefield reports and State Department cables when he was a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst.

Readers who pre-order the book will get weekly updates via email from the trial that will include drawings, notes and stories from inside the courtroom. Some of this material, but not all, will later be found in “The United States vs. PFC Bradley Manning.”

Read the full article at the Los Angeles Times.

We recently focused on E-riginals in translation and the profit-sharing model, two increasingly popular business models in the rapidly changing book market.

This article is dedicated to a third model, which takes on one of the cornerstones of current-day publishing by selling books directly to consumers instead of making them available via bookstores or online retailers (read: Amazon).

One of our clients, New-York publisher OR Books has applied this business model since its launch in 2009. Founded by veteran indie publishers John Oakes (Avalon, Nation Books, PEN America) and Colin Robinson (Scribner, Verso, The New Press), OR Books clearly profiles itself as a different publisher.

Read the full article at the 2 Seas Agency website.

Courtroom action is adjourned until next Monday, June 10, giving us a chance to pause and take a good look at what this court-martial is really all about: the leaks themselves. Too often, the content of the leaks—thousands of stories of individual lives destroyed or damaged by war—gets subsumed in the drama surrounding the leaks—Manning, Assange, Wikileaks and their travails. Michael Arria at Vice Motherboard has an excellent analysis of this tendency to overlook the leaks’ content, including a good brisk run-down of some of the major leaks, lest we forget.

Read the full post at the Nation.

Hacking Politics is a newly released book that chronicles the extraordinary fight against SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act), which culminated in the unprecedented Internet Blackout of January 18th, 2012.

Edited by David Segal and David Moon of Demand Progress, and Patrick Ruffini of Engage and Don’t Censor the Net, the book features essays from those who were on the frontlines of the battle against these draconian pieces of legislation that threatened not only online liberty but the very fabric of the web.

Read the full post at SuicideGirls.

OR Books has a new eBook available called Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet and appropriately, the publisher is selling the eBook through a name-your-price model.

Read the full post at Mediabistro.

Throughout history, some forms of war and weaponry have been viewed with greater horror than others. Even ancient civilisations tried to codify the rules of war – jus in bello. Homer’s Greeks disapproved of archery; real men fought hand-to-hand, not at a distance. Shakespeare’s Henry V roared with anger when, at Agincourt, the French cavalry killed his camp followers. At the beginning of the last century, dum-dum bullets, a British invention, were outlawed following an appeal by Germany. Revulsion against the widespread use of gas in the first world war led in the 1920s to an international convention prohibiting the use of chemical and biological weapons – not that the ban stopped the British using chemicals in Iraq, or the Italians in Ethiopia in the 1930s. A landmine convention was agreed in 1997, though not signed by the US, China or Russia. Today, China, India, and perhaps surprisingly North Korea are among nuclear‑armed states that have pledged no first use, though Nato, Israel and the US have not.

Other, equally horrific weapons go unchallenged. Napalm (invented on the playing fields of Harvard University), incendiaries, “daisy cutters”, depleted uranium, defoliants … the list goes on and on. And the nature of war has changed. Warfare has become asymmetric; hi-tech states fight not each other, but shadowy insurgents, terrorists and freedom fighters. Where once the ratio of soldier to civilian war deaths was 9:1, now it has reversed. Today’s hi-tech warfighters are at less risk than the civilians in whose territories they fight. The lives of each of these warfighters is precious: the US and UK mourn each of their few dead in Iraq or Afghanistan almost more intensely than they did the tens of thousands who died in 1939-45. To minimise such deaths, and to exploit developing computer and information technologies, the Vietnam war ushered in something called “the automated battlefield”.

Read the full review at the Guardian.

Hacking Politics is a new book recounting the history of the fight against SOPA, when geeks, hackers and activists turned Washington politics upside-down and changed how Congress thinks about the Internet. It collects essays by many people (including me): Aaron Swartz, Larry Lessig, Zoe Lofgren, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Nicole Powers, Tiffiny Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, and many others. It’s a name-your-price ebook download.

Read the full story at BoingBoing.

Radical journalist Colhoun’s nearly 20 years of research reveal how Castro’s rise to power made unlikely allies of the United States government and the Mafia casino owners he sought to expel from Cuba. He takes us through the CIA’s covert methods of undermining Castro, notably organizing, arming, and funding Cuban counterrevolutionary groups in the United States which culminated in the Cuban missile crisis. Examples include the botched Bay of Pigs attack and Operation Mongoose, a failed attempt to “organize a popular uprising on the island…as a pretext for U.S military intervention in Cuba.” The CIA worked directly with the Mafia on several attempts to assassinate Castro, and Cuba-based gangsters like Meyer Lansky and Frank Fiorini provided the CIA and FBI with information from inside the country. Colhoun also follows the escalation of Cold War relations from negotiations in Vienna and the construction of the Berlin Wall, to the agreement to remove missiles from Cuba. The situation fizzled out after Kennedy’s assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald, a supposed “pro-Castro Marxist”, and Krushchev’s removal from power. Interestingly, Jack Ruby, the man who shot Oswald, was a known associate of the Cuban Mafia. Colhoun’s commendable research results in a detailed, nuanced picture of Cold War-era politics and personalities. (May)

Read more at Publishers Weekly.

he thesis of Mangano’s book is that the era of nuclear power, in the US at least, is nearly over. The US nuclear power programme, he argues, ‘has been a failure, and will fade into obscurity with time … Building a single new reactor will either take years to complete or never occur’ (pp.280-1). For Mangano, this is a victory for the anti-nuclear campaigners like him who have fought for decades against official denials that nuclear power plants were dangerous or could cause health problems. It is, he says, ‘a triumph for truth over non-truth’.

This might be the expected position from any environmentalist – on the side of campaigners against government and big business – but recently this has changed. For some prominent environmentalists now, an end to nuclear power would be a catastrophe. Both Mark Lynas and George Monbiot, for example, argue that the only attainable way to phase out fossil fuels is to replace them with a combination of renewable and nuclear power. Mangano does not address what sort of power generation would take nuclear power’s place, and this is an omission, considering how the question is implicit in any consideration of this most controversial way of generating power. Nonetheless, Mad Science adds important research and argument to the case against nuclear power.

Read the full article at Counterfire.

LONDON — A tiny tip of the vast subterranean network of governmental and intelligence agencies from around the world dedicated to destroying WikiLeaks and arresting its founder, Julian Assange, appears outside the red-brick building on Hans Crescent Street that houses the Ecuadorean Embassy. Assange, the world’s best-known political refugee, has been in the embassy since he was offered sanctuary there last June. British police in black Kevlar vests are perched night and day on the steps leading up to the building, and others wait in the lobby directly in front of the embassy door. An officer stands on the corner of a side street facing the iconic department store Harrods, half a block away on Brompton Road. Another officer peers out the window of a neighboring building a few feet from Assange’s bedroom at the back of the embassy. Police sit round-the-clock in a communications van topped with an array of antennas that presumably captures all electronic forms of communication from Assange’s ground-floor suite.

Read the full article at Truthdig.

That storm, of course, is the internet, which most accounts hold responsible for the music industry’s decline. Though Taylor’s book makes surprisingly little reference to file sharing or other technological developments of the past few decades, other writers have not been shy about opening fire on the elephant in the room. Chris Ruen’s recital of the litany, at the opening of his new book FreeLoading: How Our Insatiable Hunger for Free Content Starves Creativity, is familiarly bleak:

After only ten years, US music industry revenues shriveled from over $14 billion a year to less than $7 billion. From 2000 to 2009, total US album sales (physical and digital) plummeted by fifty-two percent, from 785 million to 374 million units . . . Per capita, Americans in 2009 spent just one third of the amount of money they devoted to recorded music in 2000, from an all-time high of $71 per consumer to a modern-era low of $26 . . . The total number of people employed as professional musicians in the United States fell by seventeen percent from 1999 to 2009 as piracy migrated from the margins and into the mainstream.

As Ruen’s reference to “piracy” suggests, blame for the collapse of the music industry is often placed on peer-to-peer networking and file sharing. This is a considerable oversimplification; Taylor points out, for instance, that many of artists’ current financial woes can be traced back to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which deregulated the radio industry, paving the way for the rise of the Clear Channel empire and a consolidation of playlists that disproportionately affected mid-level artists on independent labels (another force behind the easement of the advertising taboo).

Read the full article at n+1.

Need a creative way to fight fears of our planetary demise? A new book by Billy Talen prophetically titled, The End of the World (OR Books), may be just the trick. Talen, also known as Reverend Billy, and his Church of Stop Shopping, exposes the socio-political structure of consumerism and the commoditization of the earth with songs, impassioned preaching and theater events. Talen has been arrested 70 times along with members of the Church for their acts of civil disobedience in banks and other places of corporate mediation. Their decade-long collaboration, under the direction of Savitri D, has brought them to communities throughout the U.S. and internationally where they have built a performance institution of communities of action with songs and uplifting protest spectacle on the streets and in concert halls. Talen and the Church’s inspiring and engaging performances ask us to take action on behalf of our home on our rapidly dying planet.

Read the full interview at AlterNet.

The poet Wallace Stevens once punched Ernest Hemingway in the face and, so the story goes, broke his hand on Hem’s mighty jaw. If that’s not a case for ‘Why reading Ernest Hemingway matters today’ then I really don’t know what is, but Sigal’s book has a few other reasons if you still need them. This one’s a must have for fans of shagging, fighting and literature. And fans of shagging, fighting literature.

Read more at Dazed Digital.

Reverend Billy Talen and his Church of Stop Shopping — which evolved from anti-consumerism street theater in San Francisco in the 1990s into a venerable New York City protest/performance institution — is bringing its creative environmentalist prayers and ploys back to the Bay Area next week.

Talen is a talented talker and writer whose most recent book, The End of the World, is a poetic plea for people to finally get serious about climate change, loss of biodiversity, and other environmental indicators that are passing irreversible global tipping points, all of them fed by the relentless growth of global capitalism.

Read the full article at the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

A few weeks ago I emailed James Bradley, whom I interviewed for “Freeloading,” about carrying the book at Sound Fix. Turns out it didn’t make a whole lot of sense, he said, as the store would soon be closing. Bradley requested that we sit down to talk; that he had some things to get off his chest. Anyone interested in the future for record stores (specifically those that sell new music) or wonder about the viability of vinyl should read the interview below. As you might imagine, it isn’t a particularly rosy picture. Bradley also reflects on the changes he’s seen in Williamsburg over the years and the role Sound Fix played in the local music culture.

Read the full interview on Billboard.

It is often the smallest details of daily life that tell us the most. And so it is under occupation in Palestine. What most of us take for granted has to be carefully thought about and planned for: When will the post be allowed to get through? Will there be enough water for the bath tonight? How shall I get rid of the rubbish collecting outside? How much time should I allow for the journey to visit my cousin, going through checkpoints? And big questions too: Is working with left-wing Israelis collaborating or not? What affect will the Arab Spring have on the future of Palestine? What can anyone do to bring about change? Are any of life’s pleasures untouched by politics?

Read more details and the full shortlist on the Orwell Prize website.