One of Britain’s leading sporting activists has called on the International Olympic Committee to give ordinary fans the opportunity to see superstars such as Usain Bolt at affordable prices.

Mark Perryman, who helped transform the image and culture of the England Football Supporters Club, said British sports fans had missed out on seeing their sporting heroes live at the London Games because of “the ongoing IOC vanity project” and the organisers’ policy of high prices for blue riband events such as the 100m.

With less than two weeks to go until the Games begin, Locog, the organising committee, still has tickets available for some of the best athletics and cycling events such as the men’s 4x100m relay and the individual pursuits. However, with the cheapest seats priced at around £700 each and packages costing thousands, many remain unsold. Tickets to the opening ceremony are also available for up to £2,012 each.

Read the full article in The Observer.

What was troubling Julian Assange when he made a dash for friendly extra-territorial space? His detractors argue that it’s the usual story, to do with his propensity to see himself as the centre of the universe, and the target of an improbable plot to lock him up in the US and throw away the key. That last honour has already been bestowed on Bradley Manning. In the leaker, surely, the Americans have their man: why bother with his celebrity publisher? Outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in Hans Crescent, round the back of Harrods, a thin but emblematic presence is maintained by his supporters. While I was there earlier this month a French woman was squatting on the pavement, hunched over a placard, shading in the letters of a message that she later tied to one of the crowd barriers. It read, very roughly: Thank you, Assange, for giving us a history of the vanquished. She was thinking of something by Brecht, she said, or possibly Walter Benjamin. An older, more eccentric figure assured me that Assange had sneaked away from the embassy the week before through a tunnel under Harrods: the store’s security guards had just let her in on the secret. A third insisted there was only one way out of Hans Crescent for the man who’d already left by al-Fayed’s drains: first Rafael Correa’s government grants asylum, then Assange is set on a rapid path to Ecuadorian citizenship and finally awarded a minor consular position, which gets him from the steps of the embassy to a boarding gate at Heathrow under diplomatic immunity.

Read the full review in the London Review of Books

If the unemployment rate dips by a decimal or two in the upcoming employment report, it’ll be seen as an indicator that the economy is improving. But millions of Americans will remain without work.

Journalist and documentary maker DW Gibson set off from Orange County, California to New York City last summer on a sort of unemployment oral history project. He interviewed dozens of Americans who have found themselves out of work in the past five years.

They included a human resources director who was laid off herself after dismissing hundreds of her colleagues, a real estate agent who arrived at work one morning to find his office empty, and a college graduate who was fired one week into her first job. DW Gibson’s project has resulted in a book called “Not Working,” and an upcoming documentary of the same name.

Listen to the interview on The Takeaway

Mark Perryman loves sports. As a child he awaited the Olympic Games with eager anticipation, urging his parents to purchase Esso petrol so he could more speedily collect the firm’s collectible Olympics stickers. Now he laces up his running shoes for a daily run in the South Downs of East Sussex, sometimes racking up a ten-miler (in 75 minutes, no less). Perryman is no crotchety intellectual railing on about sports as a waste of time and money. This is someone who believes in the power of sport, and wishes to democratise and decentralise it so more people can experience it in a meaningful way. With Why the Olympics Aren’t Good for Us, and How They Can Be, he has written an engaging, visionary book for fellow-traveller sports aficionados, and others open to criticism about the Olympics yet keen to figure out ways to improve the five-ring juggernaut.

In the first half of the book, Perryman lays out his “Why-the-Olympics-Aren’t-Good-for-Us” argument. In Chapter 1, he busily chisels his way through the façade that the Olympics are apolitical—a façade buffeted with dogged verve by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and its allies. Along the way he points out that the Olympic torch relay was first invented by the Nazis to drum up support for the 1936 Berlin Olympics; that the Games were a handy proxy for Cold War realpolitik; and that the IOC has historically engaged in gender discrimination—for instance, women were boxed out of many events including the marathon, which the IOC finally allowed them to run in 1984. He writes convincingly that in the modern era, the Games have become a jamboree of gigantism riding on the rails of commercialism and professionalism.

Read the full review on OpenDemocracy

No sporting event is as immersed in mythology as the Olympics, which come to London in a few weeks’ time.

Long trumpeted as a panacea for society’s ills, the Games have been heralded for their ability to affect all manner of social and economic problems.

The creation of jobs, the regeneration of impoverished areas, increasing participation in sport, attracting more tourists to the host city – these are just some of the issues that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) suggests its Games can solve.

It is a line mimicked by politicians hoping to attract the competition to their country.

Read the full review in the Morning Star

Not Working: People Talk About Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today’s Changing Economy by DW Gibson (Penguin, $17 paperback original, non-fiction, on sale July 3)

What it’s about: Gibson, a magazine writer who’s also worked on TV documentaries, drove across the country last summer and fall, interviewing a wide range of people who’ve lost their jobs.

The buzz: Inspired by Studs Terkel’s Working and James Agee and Walker Evan’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, it’s been praised by Ken Burns, the master documentarian, as “a powerful and heart-wrenching story.”

View the full list in USA Today

Medea Benjamin’s book comes at a time when drones are increasingly in the headlines. The last few months have seen revelations about Obama’s ‘Kill List’, the list of targeted killings signed off directly by the president, as well as a high profile case in the British High Court against the UK government’s role in assisting drone strikes in Pakistan.

The book is a useful collection of key facts, and for anyone who had doubts about the benevolence of drones, the moral arguments are convincing. While arms companies and defence departments laud the technology for its precision, the picture on the ground tells a different story, with each strike almost inevitably causing scores of civilian casualties. The buzz of propellers as ‘predators’ and ‘reapers’ circle overhead has become a ubiquitous source of terror in North West Pakistan, among other places. Moreover, as Benjamin points out, the very notion of drones as an efficient or cost-free mode of warfare only serves to reinforce the brutal instrumentality, and ultimately the moral irresponsibility, of those wielding the technology. At this level the book is effective, but it misses the opportunity to analyse the full political implications.

Read the full review on Counterfire

How else to introduce a new book of oral history than with a long quotation?

“The town is different, especially after that date. It’s quiet. There’s no hum from the factory. There’s no noise from the presses going up and down. I grew up with that. Being three blocks away, at night, hearing the presses forging, forging. Clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk. Window open, you know, it’s a cool evening; you can hear it. That’s probably one of the things that everybody talked about. There’s no sound. It’s gone. It’s quiet.”

The book is DW Gibson’s “Not Working,” the speaker, Randy Badman of Dewitt, Neb., and together they show how powerful the genre of oral history can be. Like most of Dewitt’s 572 residents, Badman used to work at a local factory making Vise-Grip pliers, and his description of the factory’s departure reveals the familiarity and comfort of a steady job. (Clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk.) “Not Working” collects more than 60 such interviews with men and women who lost their jobs between 2007 and 2011. It’s a great idea with some very good moments – but also one that, thanks to a few rather predictable elements, fails to satisfy completely.

Read the full review in The San Francisco Chronicle

Work defines us. Especially in a recession, jobs and the workplace are an integral part of American identity, even as they disappear. DW Gibson’s Not Working (OR Books) is both travelogue and intense human dialog, traversing the United States to collect the stories of Americans who have lost their jobs. Inspired by the great oral historian Studs Terkel’s Working, Gibson’s tome is a touching and all-too-necessary text for 2012. From the East Coast through the middle of our country, and on out West, Gibson, armed with a recorder, van, and tremendous pathos, recorded people whose stories contain both tragedy and humor, a stubborn will to survive despite their desperate circumstances. From sharing food with their dogs to taking long walks to starting new careers they never thought they would fall into, Gibson draws candid stories from these Americans. Interviewer on interviewer, we spoke with Gibson about why work defines us, water coolers, aspiring, what we do when we lose work, and how we can change this loss into something transformative and beautiful.

Read the full interview in Interview magazine

One can become unemployed through no fault of one’s own, due to circumstances beyond one’s control. That’s an exact but twisty sentence designed to avoid all of these words and phrases: laid off, excessed, downsized, surplused, separated, sacked, terminated, reorganized, released, reallocated, managed out, fired, let go, discontinued, displaced, discharged, dissolved, RIF’d, canned, hosed, and blown out. This is the language used by the people who endured it, and none of the verbs fully serve the experience of having your work, identity, livelihood, and dignity swept out from underneath you. As one human resources manager put it, “There is no way to say it so that anyone can hear anything but ‘you don’t want me here anymore.”

Layoff seems to be the most commonly used word despite—or maybe because of—a passivity that cheats the impact of the experience. As recently as 1989, the Oxford English Dictionary defined layoff as “a spell of relaxation; a period during which a workman is temporarily dismissed or allowed to leave his work.” But to my understanding losing work does not contain spells of relaxation, and not one person I talked to characterizes the event as something he or she was allowed to do. It is something new, the layoff, and something ubiquitous; as the writer Louis Uchitelle puts it, it has become “a mass phenomenon of American life.”

Read the full excerpt in The Daily Beast

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK, presents a readable, enlightening and alarming account which spells out the many reasons why drones are such an abomination. She explains the history of drones; the vast sums expended in lobbying by the arms corporations, and returned in lucrative government contracts; the secrecy in which the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conduct the undeclared wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; the crucial role of private contractors such as Academi (formerly Xe, and before that Blackwater) in operating the drone wars; and the moral dimension by which Obama and his henchmen flatter themselves with the words of Thomas Aquinas in pursuing what they present as “just war”.

The book returns again and again to the stories of the victims – both the “targets”, denied due process, and the thousands of innocent civilians who are being killed, maimed or their lives shattered under the shadow of the killer drones. People like Malik Gulistan Khan, a member of a local pro-government peace committee in Pakistan, killed, along with four members of his family in the first drone strike of the Obama presidency, on 23 January 2009. Or Roya, a 13-year old Afghan girl who became the family breadwinner after US missiles killed her mother and brothers following the 2001 invasion.

Read the full review on the New Left Project

New York, NY (June 4, 2012) – OR Books, the progressive fiction and non-fiction publisher, and On Demand Books, the company behind the Espresso Book Machine® (EBM), have entered into an agreement to make OR Books’ list available from the EBM’s “digital-to-print at retail (DPR)” sales channel. This agreement will enable OR Books to deliver their content to readers all over the world, through On Demand Books’ global network of sixty-eight EBM locations.

“OR Books are known for the high quality of their titles, and for their innovative, forward-thinking approach to publishing,” said Dane Neller, CEO of On Demand Books. “We look forward to working with them to fulfill the potential of the EBM’s digital-to-print-at-retail sales channel to bring their content to book-buyers worldwide.”

“We at OR make a practice of exploring new ways of selling books, and On Demand Books provides a way for us to quickly reach some of the best retail outlets and libraries out there,” said John Oakes, co- founder of OR Books. “Stores can carry our books with no on-hand inventory, consumers get what they want, and authors and publisher benefit. We’re delighted to be a part of the ongoing retail revolution!”

OR Books sells its books worldwide, direct to readers. To avoid the waste of unsold copies, OR produces its books only when they are wanted, either through print-on-demand or as platform-agnostic e-books. This approach jettisons the inefficiencies of conventional publishing to better serve readers, writers and the environment.

The EBM is the only digital-to-print at-retail solution on the market today. With the push of a button, a title can be printed with a full-color cover, bound, and trimmed to any standard size. In a matter of minutes, it emerges from the EBM as a bookstore-quality paperback book, which the customer can pay for and walk out the store with right there and then.

Content from publishers, now including OR Books, is fed to the EBM via EspressNet, On Demand Books’ growing digital network of titles (currently numbering over seven million). Much like an iTunes for books, EspressNet retrieves, encrypts, transmits, and catalogues books from a multitude of English and foreign language content providers, including public domain, in-copyright, and self-published titles. Through the SelfServe software, writers can format, design, edit, and upload their books for printing through the EBM, and for inclusion in EspressNet. SelfServe will soon also be able to convert print files to the ePub format suitable for e-readers.

The EBM provides a new sales channel for publishers, and vastly increases the availability of titles for physical bookstores, significantly reducing loss of sales due to books being out-of-stock. In addition, the EBM technology offers libraries and bricks-and-mortar retailers the opportunity to become community self-publishing centers, providing a new distribution platform for self-published authors. And of course the EBM improves overall efficiency and environmental sustainability by eliminating shipping and the return and pulping of unwanted books.

About On Demand Books

On Demand Books was cofounded in 2003 by Jason Epstein, former Editorial Director of Random House; Dane Neller, former CEO of Dean & DeLuca; and Thor Sigvaldason, former technology consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Espresso Book Machines have been placed in bookstores, libraries, universities, and other locations in the USA, Canada, the UK, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and the Caribbean. In September 2010, On Demand Books and Xerox announced a partnership whereby Xerox will market, sell or lease and service the Espresso Book Machine worldwide. Made in the USA, Espresso Book Machines are environmentally efficient, reducing production, shipping, and waste. For more information, go to www.ondemandbooks.com.

About OR Books

OR Books is a new type of publishing company. It embraces progressive change in politics, culture and the way we do business. It was founded in 2010 by two longtime veterans of the book publishing industry, John Oakes and Colin Robinson. Robinson had been a senior editor at Scribner, publisher of The New Press and managing director of Verso; Oakes publisher of Four Walls Eight Windows, vice president of the Avalon Publishing Group, and publisher of such imprints as Thunder’s Mouth Press and Nation Books.

Editor’s note: This week, Reuters Opinion is publishing five excerpts – one each day – from D.W. Gibson’s new book, Not Working, an oral history of the recession. Gibson spent months traveling across America talking to people who had been laid off.

Today’s entry is Jessica Smith’s. Jessica, 32, was born and raised in Alabama. After stints in other states (New York and Virginia) and another country (Sweden), she moved back to Alabama in 2010 with her fiancé, Nick, and this is where they’ve made a home with their newborn.

Jessica has two master’s degrees. She has written for several years, mostly poetry, with some significant publications, but she’s on hiatus these days: “I have a job and a kid, and it’s just not going to happen.” Recently she was hired as a librarian at a nearby private boarding school.

It’s in Buffalo where her story of unemployment – and underemployment – begins. That’s where she and Nick were both working at a high-profile classical music organization. She was also an adjunct professor at the state university.

Read the excerpt in Reuters

Veteran book editor John Oakes was at BookExpo only briefly Monday to be on a panel –but I caught up with him later to find out how his publishing venture has been doing–and to discuss his recent column for Publisher’s Weekly bemoaning the industry’s failure to break free from the consignment model.

Oakes started OR Books in 2009 with Colin Robinson, a former managing director of Verso Books and senior editor at Simon & Schuster.

“I was at Grove Press before starting my own company, Four Walls Eight Windows,” said Oakes. “And then my years at Avalon and Atlas.” *

“Colin and I had never worked together before, because we’ve had parallel experiences in very different, overlapping circles. What we both saw is that conventional publishing just doesn’t work at all. The system of returns, huge discounts, consignment.”

So they started talking and came up with their current venture.

“Editorially we’re progressive, culturally, socially, and that can encompass a lot. Edgy stuff–as well as the usual political analyses. We don’t accept returns and all customers prepay. This should be self-evident in any other industry, but as you know–this is something of a revolutionary development in book publishing. It’s just not done. And that’s not to say we were the first or we are the only–but we are one of the few.”

“And we’ve found it to be a good experience.”

Read the full article in Forbes

OR Books has created a vibrant direct sales channel that distinguishes them from most publishers

Hear the interview on Tools of Change

Last summer, writer DW Gibson hit the road for four months, interviewing 200 of the estimated 8 million Americans who have lost their jobs in the Great Recession, in an attempt to gain a granular understanding of unemployment.

The resulting book, Not Working: People Talk About Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today’s Changing Economy, is in the tradition of America’s foremost oral historian Studs Terkel, who chronicled the American experience of employment (Working, 1974) and unemployment (Hard Times, 1970).

In the coming weeks, in readings across the country, Gibson will be accompanied by people featured in the book who will read out their own story. A documentary film is to follow in fall. A website where Americans can contribute their own experiences of unemployment aims to grow into a public archive of the period.

Read the full article on the Guardian

Amazon is the world’s largest bookseller, offering more than 2 million titles. In an effort to lower prices, the company has demanded additional discounts from distributors—which, as Colin Robinson points out, is illegal under anti-trust law that prevents companies from selling a product at different prices to different customers. The company has been accused of having a “monopolistic grip on the publishing industry.”

See the full slide show on The Nation

About halfway through “Not Working,” DW Gibson’s painful, wrenching collection of interviews with Americans that have lost their jobs in the wake of the ongoing recession, the voices of the subjects all start to run together. The effect is disorienting: you realize you’ve been reading for about 200 pages, and you can’t tell which story is which, who lost which job, which part of the country has been the most ravaged, which industries have been stripped bare and left for dead and what, for the love of God, what is anyone supposed to do about it.

The stories are familiar and wide-ranging: executives, teachers, journalists, factory workers all speak with eloquence about the various ways in which they were let go. No doubt you know plenty of people who’ve had their livelihoods so abruptly evaporate, perhaps you yourself have suffered a similar fate – and yet, presented with such an onslaught of tragedy, it becomes hard for you, the reader, to process everything. The author, Gibson, presents you with no expert analysis, no comment, no stupid jokes to lighten the mood: at first glance, you don’t even really get a sense of who these people are so much as who they were before they lost it all.

Read the full review in the Daily News

Last week’s Anxiety post, “Control,” featured an interview with Dominick Brocato, conducted and transcribed by DW Gibson, the author of the forthcoming book and documentary film, “Not Working.” Many readers who commented wanted to know how Mr. Brocato was managing his various challenges — unemployment, illness and a lack of medical insurance among them — since the interview, which took place in July 2011. To provide that update to readers, Mr. Gibson contacted Mr. Brocato by e-mail and phone earlier this week.

DW Gibson writes: “When I contacted Dominick, I learned that he’d had surgery on his right knee (unrelated to his cancer) just the day before. I immediately suggested we talk later but he ignored the offer. True to my memory of him, he was at attention, instantly composed and engaged. His own words — “I am still a vital and vibrant person” — still echo in my head. The update below is composed of Dominick’s words from our e-mail correspondence this week and a follow-up conversation over the phone. ”

— The Editors

Read the excerpt on the New York Times‘ Opinionator

Tweets from Tahrir is a document that could not have existed before the digital age. Even if you went to all of those people in the aftermath of Tahrir Square and asked them to write down what they thought at the time, they would write down something different, because recollection always colours events differently. This is a genuine live stream of what took place.

We talked about Nicholas Carr, and the idea that deep reading is fading away. The theory is that you are distracted by hypertext links and no longer read in the conventional way – and that that alters your whole mood of reading, so your engagement level suffers. You’re not reading properly, you’re becoming lost in a maze of online distractions. The reality, I think, is rather different. When you look at a stream of tweets with the TV on in the background, you are synthesising the story. Your perception of events will be different from anyone else’s in the world, because you will light on different things. That is invaluable in not accepting the authority of a single news source or information source, but assembling your own understanding out of individual perspectives.

In the digital age one of the most overused phrases is: “This is a Gutenberg moment.” That was the moment when the printing press took away the Church’s monopoly on information, and suddenly anyone who had an idea or opinion could be distributed. The only Gutenberg moment that I have come across today is this one. Here you have a situation where the same kind of distribution is possible. It’s no longer the case that if you want to know what happened you have to go check the BBC. Because the BBC could be wrong, as could the individual who is telling you what they saw. But if you are following 300 or 400 people in Tahrir Square who are tweeting about what they are seeing in front of their eyes, and at the same time watching the BBC or Al Jazeera, you can weave together a picture of the situation for yourself.

Read the full article on The Browser

Norman Finkelstein’s new book on the American Jewish community has been both widely praised and criticized by influential writers. So is the American-Jewish romance with Israel coming to an end? Are the American Jews known for their liberal views distancing themselves from Israel? Or is it simply an overstatement? Do they support the current Israeli policies? Does the Israeli lobby represent their views? And do they have a strong connection to the Holy Land? CT-ing with Norman Finkelstein, Daniel Pollak and Mouin Rabbani on May 16.

See the interview on CrossTalk