Shift Change: Scenes from a Post-industrial Revolution Stephen Dale Between the Lines, 2021 How do you write a city? The lives, the languages, the million tangled paths. The strip malls, the mosques, the tents in parks, the queer bars. Exploitative bosses, helpful strangers, sexual violence, racist police. Tattered posters for
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A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: Review: We Can Do Better
[David Camfield. We Can Do Better: Ideas for Changing Society. Halifax & Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2017.] A short, accessible, measured, and methodical book that lays out what the author describes as a “reconstructed historical materialism” – that is, a way of understanding the world and of orienting our struggles to
Continue readingA Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: Review: The Lost History of Liberalism
[Helena Rosenblatt. The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.] This is an academic history of liberalism, in the form of what it calls a “conceptual history” – that is, it explores what its proponents (and to a certain extent
Continue readingA Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: The novelty and fragility of liberal-democracy
I’ve been reading a scholarly history of liberalism. It isn’t directly about this, but as it reminds me of things that I already knew in broad strokes and fills in some details, it is making me think morbid thoughts about the relative historical novelty and consequent fragility of the institutions
Continue readingA Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: Review: Age of Anger
[Pankaj Mishra. Age of Anger: A History of the Present. New York: Picador, 2017.] A far-ranging and clever book that convinced me of its core thesis but left me with some questions and considerable ambivalence about some of the things surrounding that. The book sets out to understand some key
Continue readingA Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: Review: Bored and Brilliant
[Manoush Zomorodi. Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self. New York: Picador, 2017.] Some time last year, the realization crystallized for me that I don’t experience much direct loss of explicitly designated work time due to social media or other online activity, but
Continue readingA Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: Review: Turning to One Another
[Margaret J. Wheatley. Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2009.] This is a peculiar book with a powerful idea at its core but presumptions about how the social world works that take it in directions that I think are
Continue readingA Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: Thinking about listening and seeing
For more than five years, now, my central project has been a radio show and podcast. And my main book project recently morphed into something that aims to talk about listening in a thoughtful, political, grassroots way. Despite this, and despite being the son and brother of musicians, my way
Continue readingA Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: The increasing fragility of our ability to know and communicate about the world
I’ve been thinking a lot this past week about the fragility of human communication and of our ability to know the world. That is, I’ve been thinking about how easy it is, how many ways there are, for human communication and human knowing to fail. This is hardly a new
Continue readingA Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: Review — Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation
[Liza Featherstone. Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation. New York: OR Books, 2017.] This is a fascinating history of the focus group and related technologies of consultation written by journalist Liza Featherstone. Since its inception, the form of listening made possible by the focus group has been
Continue readingA Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: What violence do you fail to perceive?
What violence do you fail to perceive? What violence do I fail to perceive? What violence escapes your notice, is invisible, inaudible, imperceptible, floats by like normal or nothing in your world? Those are hard questions to answer. After all, if you don’t notice it as it happens, why and
Continue readingA Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: It’s Talking Radical Radio’s Five-Year Anniversary!
Today marks five years since the first episode of Talking Radical Radio appeared. For all of that time, it has been my biggest ongoing project. On a weekly basis, almost every week, the show has brought grassroots voices from across Canada to radio stations and various online venues. It has
Continue readingA Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: WIP: Double radio, extra reading, hold the writing
In my first post of the year, back on January 1, I declared an intent to try writing blog posts that were more frequent and casual, often starting from Twitter threads. I have been very pleased with that new practice. I’ve kept it up, mostly. I’m not as good at
Continue readingA Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: Review: As We Have Always Done
[Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.] How to read from somewhere – and from where I am in particular – is an ongoing preoccupation in the reviews on this site. It’s always a relevant question, but
Continue readingA Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: Limits of Listening
A big chunk of the reading and thinking and writing that I’m doing at the moment is focused on working out how to expansively and radically think about listening as we work to understand the world and to build movements (including making movement media) to change it. The plan is
Continue readingA Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: WIP: A very short post about introductions and about complexity…
One of my tasks for today is finishing writing the introduction for next week’s episode of Talking Radical Radio. And that has me thinking about the challenge of representing complexity in writing. After almost five years of doing the show, I have a pretty solidly established routine for each week,
Continue readingA Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: Perceiving the world as an embodied capacity…and movement-building
Being able to perceive complex elements of the world immediately around us isn’t something we’re just automatically able to do – it’s a capacity, or really many different capacities, that we must develop. That may sound like a pretty abstract thing to say, but I wonder if there might be
Continue readingA Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: Social movement victories in 2018
Today, I want to write about social movement victories. I want to reflect on what that means a little, and then this thread will be one I come back to throughout the year to add movement victories from North America and maybe elsewhere in 2018. I think those of us
Continue readingA Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: Pushing back against the claim that ending harassment will end romance
I’ve been thinking, over the last few days, about this piece – “Ending Harassment Won’t End Romance” by Sarah Jaffe. It challenges the absurd claim that keeps popping up in the mainstream that #MeToo and the current wave of challenge to sexual harassment and sexual abuse “will, somehow, end flirting,
Continue readingA Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: Eduardo Galeano and the telling of resistant stories
At the moment, I’m in the middle of reading Hunter of Stories by Eduardo Galeano (translated by Mark Fried). Galeano, who died in 2015, was an Uruguayan writer and public intellectual of global renown. I haven’t read his early classics Open Veins of Latin America or the Memory of Fire
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