”Former leaders of the Labour Party and Unite the Union, Jeremy Corbyn and Len McCluskey, are allies who share a love of poetry.”
Read the full review here.
”Former leaders of the Labour Party and Unite the Union, Jeremy Corbyn and Len McCluskey, are allies who share a love of poetry.”
Read the full review here.
Listen to the full discussion on The Burley Fisher Podcast here.
“The volume, titled Poetry for the Many, contains more than 50 poems selected and introduced by Mr Corbyn and his friend and comrade, the trade unionist Len McCluskey. The poems span a range of themes and movements and offer an insight into the long and distinctive poetic tradition to which socialism has given rise.”
Read the full article here.
“There is a poet in all of us and nobody should ever be afraid of sharing their poetry.”
Read the full article here.
IN APRIL 2020, the world is in lockdown as the coronavirus pandemic rages on. But in the foothills at the south end of Oregon’s Coast Range mountains, resource extraction is going full speed ahead. On Kenyon Mountain in eastern Coos County, about 50 miles from the Pacific Ocean, a crew of loggers is chopping down 51 acres of old-growth and mature trees. Some of these trees have been alive since George Washington was president, based on a count of rings on the stump. Maps say the closest town is the aptly named Remote, Oregon, a town so small it’s no longer mentioned in US census counts, yet long ago was important enough to merit a profile in the New York Times.
Read the full interview here.
Wildfires are a yearly threat to anyone living near a forest, grassland, or chaparral, which includes about half of all U.S. addresses. President Joe Biden’s administration has introduced an ambitious 10-year, $50 billion plan it claims will protect those homes, to be funded partly with taxpayer dollars and other sources yet to be determined. The administration’s plan focuses on a massive increase in logging across the country in order to reduce fuels in bone-dry forests. Very little will likely be spent on making homes near forests more fire resilient. But the fires in Paradise and Maui show that the administration is on the wrong course.
Read the full article here.
“The construction of the Starmer leadership, both strategically and financially, was an altogether shadowy, even shady, affair. Secret money flowed through an organisation that at the time presented itself as neutral regarding the party leadership but – as its website now openly acknowledges – was actually seeking to lever Starmer into power.
According to the Sunday Times account, between 2017 and 2020 McSweeney failed to declare £730,000 in donations from a slew of millionaire businessmen, misreported and underreported other payments, and falsely assured supportive MPs that electoral law was being followed.”
Read the full article here.
“Over the weekend, the United Kingdom’s paper of record, the Sunday Times, reported on how an influential organization called “Labour Together” failed to declare its funding, as required by law. The Times exclusive, “The secretive guru who plotted Keir Starmer’s path to power with undeclared cash,” has significance in the U.K. primarily because “Labour Together” is the organization that created and incubated the leadership campaign of Sir Keir Starmer, a favorite to oust current PM Rishi Sunak and become Britain’s next Prime Minister. The Times said he “appears destined for Downing Street.”
But that’s only part of the story.”
Read the full article here.
Read the full article here.
The Islington North MP and co-author Len McCluskey will read extracts from their new selection Poetry for The Many at Park Theatre, alongside comics Alexei Sayle and Francesca Martinez, and film makers Ken Loach and Morag Livingstone.
Corbyn and McCluskey – former General Secretary of UNITE Union – share a love of poetry and a passionate belief in a fairer Britain, summed up in Labour’s 2017 election slogan “For the many, not the few.”
Read the full article here.
“It’s fun, it’s interesting, it’s readable for people who are not academics, but also it pushes back so hard against the complaint of “trans people are a fad” that it shoves the whole tired mess right off a cliff to die in a ravine, as it should. Whatever you love about drag, it’s in here, along with so many new things to love in this global, time-travelling survey course with the syllabus in sequins.”
Read the full article here.
“All the fascination of Desert Island Discs.”
“Another testimony to the closeness between [Corbyn and McCluskey’s] private and public principles that they have displayed consistently for decades.”
“[A volume] that all poetry readers and writers can learn something from/.
“Highly valuable for both budding readers and budding writers.”
Read the full review here.
Watch the full episode here.
Some years ago I had the privilege of reading on the air a selection from author Luke O’Neil’s terrific collection of essays called Welcome to Hell World. Now Luke has come out with a new collection of short fiction pieces called A Creature Wanting Form, published by OR Press. This new collection is a kind of perfect companion for the current ashes in the air. I thought the best way for you to get the flavor of the book was for me to read one of the stories from the book, a piece called “Thy Kingdom Come.”
Listen to the reading here.
“Nights are the worst. That is when the bombing escalates. Nowhere is safe. Not a mosque. Not a church. Not a school, or even a hospital. All are potential targets.
On Monday, the Israeli military fired artillery rounds at Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, claiming to target a cache of anti- tank missiles. Dr. Khalil Khattab, a surgeon, was operating on a patient when the first shell struck. He ran to the floors below to discover at least four dead and dozens of colleagues—doctors, nurses, orderlies and administrators—injured. The medical staff had become patients.
The Gaza Strip—a little less than half the size of New York City—is home to 1.8 million people, mainly Muslims, with a small Christian minority. Its population is cut off from the world, living under the blockade imposed by Egypt and Israel in 2007. For anyone over the age of seven, this is the third time they’ve lived through a sustained attack.”
Read the full excerpt here.
“I commend this book highly as an essential source for anyone trying to understand the Corbyn phenomenon, one of the most radical movements ever to attempt to disrupt the British establishment in modern times.
It provides rich material for evaluating its defeat.”
See full review here.
In Canopy of Titans: The Life and Times of the Great North American Temperate Rainforest, we are offered a timely, welcome and provocative biography of our corner of the world’s greatest assets, our life-affirming forests. We are also served up a gut-wrenching chronicle of how recklessly we have laid, and continue to lay, waste to the richest forest ecosystem on Earth.
Read the full interview here.
If you live in the Pacific Northwest, one of the biggest keys to holding back the destructive momentum of global climate change lies in your backyard.
This, anyway, is the conclusion of an absorbing and important new book, Canopy of Titans: The Life and Times of the Great North American Temperate Rainforest.
Early in their book, Portland authors Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate lay out their case. The vast, unnamed temperate rainforest that stretches some 2,500 miles from northern California through Southeast Alaska and the Gulf of Alaska plays “a crucial role in mitigating human-caused climate change, and no forest is more valuable to the climate than this one.”
Read the full article here.
“Journalist Asa Winstanley, the author of Weaponising Anti-Semitism – the forensic analysis of the ‘Labour antisemitism’ con and the Labour purge it has been used to justify – will meet chair (and terror of Keir Starmer) Audrey White, who was one of a number of left activists repeatedly libelled during the smear and successfully sued the Jewish Chronicle for substantial damages, and Declassified UK investigative journalist and author Matt Kennard on Tuesday evening next week to discuss right-wing ‘Labour’ ‘leader’ Keir Starmer’s purge of the Labour left on the pretence of antisemitism.”
Read the full article here.
Listen to the episode here.
“This came out as an idea because I receive a lot of poems from young people. One day, Len McCluskey [former general secretary of Unite the Union] and I were in my office one day talking about economic policies and strategies and he asked me: “Why do you have those poetry books in your office?” I was quite offended, and I replied “Why not?,” to which he then replied, “I haven’t got that one, can I borrow it?” So we decided to publish this book.”
Read the full interview here.
Listen to the full conversation here.
“Drawing on research and interviews with more than a hundred scientists and other experts, Koberstein and Applegate, who run the environmental outlet Cascadia Times, make a persuasive case that the region deserves an elevated profile and that logging and pollution are threatening the rainforest’s ability to stabilize rising greenhouse gases. And the solution to prevent further degradation, they maintain, is not to plant more trees — or “carbon-capturing machines” — but rather to protect the oldest among them and prevent unsustainable logging.
To bolster their argument, the authors journey throughout the Pacific coastal region, building a detailed portrait of the forest and its constituent parts, its environmental value, and the various threats it faces. There are vivid accounts of California’s redwoods, Oregon’s wetlands, Washington’s colossal Douglas firs, British Columbia’s salmon runs, and Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest, which abuts Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. We learn, for example, that the Pacific rainforest houses three of the world’s seven species of trees that grow over 300 feet tall and that the roots of one of these, the coast redwood, may only reach 10 feet deep while its first branches can be 250 feet above them.”
Read the full article here.
“From Shakespeare to RuPaul, we all love a performance. But what exactly is it? What are its boundaries, its powers, its potential, its stakes? Kareem Khubchandani, who also performs as LaWhore Vagistan – “everyone’s favourite desi drag queen aunty” – joins Uncommon Sense to unpack the latest thinking on refusal, repetition and more. And to discuss “Ishtyle”, Kareem’s ethnography of gay Indian nightlife in Chicago and Bangalore, which attends to desire and fun in the lives of global Indian workers too often stereotyped as cogs in the wheels of globalisation.
Listen to the full conversation here.
“If you’re going to transform society, you’re not going to do it by bureaucratic manoeuvres; you’re going to do it by popular action and popular culture, which is why, through the Peace and Justice Project, we’re doing everything we can: ‘Music for the Many’, the union membership campaigns, and above all on culture: we’re doing a book on Poetry for the Many. It’s about mobilising popular culture for justice and equality and not allowing arrogant elitism to take over and run our movement.”
Read the full interview here.
“When most people think of rainforests, they conjure up images of the Amazon, the Congo, and Southeast Asia — vast verdant expanses of densely packed forests, dripping with moisture and rich with tropical life. But in fact, there’s a huge rainforest in North America, unheralded and underappreciated: the sprawling forested region that stretches some 2,500 miles along the Pacific Coast, from just north of San Francisco to Kodiak Island, Alaska.
Part of the problem, according to Oregon journalists Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate, is that the area has no popular name. As a result, we’re missing the forest for the trees, and U.S. and Canadian policymakers and scientists are neglecting a valuable opportunity to marshal resources in their backyard to hit wider climate change targets and improve conservation.”
Read the full article here.
“Gary Younge, the award-winning former columnist for The Guardian, talks about Black writing and Black writers—and his own writing about Mandela, Obama, Travon Martin, and Claudette Colvin.
Listen to the interview here.
“For over a century, the automobile has served as an icon of American prosperity and individual liberty. But for a large portion of drivers, the car opens into worlds of unfreedom: into the gaping maw of America’s courts, jails, and prisons on the one hand and into the arms of predatory creditors on the other. That, at least, is the thesis of Cars and Jails, a new book by NYU professors Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross. Cars, once America’s most important industrial commodity, are now, for so many, a vehicle of debt-driven extraction. They are also the setting of the most common interaction between citizens and police—one that plays out on streets and highways more than 20 million times annually, often as a humiliating ritual of domination and submission. How did this happen?
Read the full review here.
“Surely we wouldn’t erect borders and checkpoints that force migrants to take precarious routes across oceans, seas, jungles, and narco-controlled territories? Surely we would not turn a blind eye to the assault, rape, kidnapping, slavery, and death to which this bordering policy directly leads?
That we learned nothing—and are willingly and knowingly doing all of the above, arguably with more sophisticated methods of containment than before—is shown, indisputably, by the 2022 book Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico’s Largest Immigration Detention Center. However, the novelty of Inside Siglo XXI is its recounting of another story, one that often goes unquestioned and is thus naturalized. It is the story of the author herself: US-born, Mexico-based Al Jazeera columnist Belén Fernández; a self-described globe-trotting, passport-privileged, and (to borrow her own words) nomadic “imperial emissary.”
Read the full article here.
“I once met a former Scientologist at a backyard barbecue who explained to me how L. Ron Hubbard, the mediocre science fiction author who founded the Church of Scientology in the 1950s, got his retro-pulp novel “Battlefield Earth” on the bestseller lists in 1982. According to this fellow, the church compelled all its members to rush out and buy multiple copies for friends, family members and even non-Scientologists (sometimes derogatorily known as “wogs”). How many copies of that 1,050-page doorstop actually got read? There’s no way to know, but “Battlefield Earth” spent eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Something similar happened earlier this summer with Alejandro Gómez Monteverde’s film “Sound of Freedom,” which occupied the No. 1 spot at the box office until it was mercifully overtaken by Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.” Whatever the original intentions of the filmmakers may have been, “Sound of Freedom” arrived in theaters as a thinly disguised QAnon recruitment film whose star, Jim Caviezel, is an evangelical Christian who has said he believes in the central myth of that conspiracy theory: that innocent children are being kidnapped by Satanists, dragged into underground dungeons and tortured to manufacture a chemical called “Adrenochrome,” whose consumption keeps the privileged elite forever youthful. This fantastical concept is ripped off from various sources, including Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” as well as an array of grade-B horror movies.
”
Read the full article here.