It’s impossible to create activist spaces where everyone is equally powerful. Instead, we can acknowledge and encourage different paths to power.
2015
The Power of Service
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Leadership doesn’t have to be patriarchal. Remembering that leadership is service will help social movements resist the tyranny of structurelessness.
Politics & Society
“The Ploughshare Without Fear”: Remembering Martin Buber (1878-1965)
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Carol Ascher on Martin Buber’s legacy and how we can honor and incorporate his vision for Jews and Israelis living “together with”.
2015
“I Still Can’t Breathe”: Artists Decry Racism from the Watts Rebellion to the Present
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A new exhibit speaks to America’s enduring legacy of state violence against African Americans and the revolutionary power of visual art.
2015
Left-Wing Follies: The Self-Defeating Ideas That Hold Activists Back
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To access the tools we need to transform our society, we must overcome anti-intellectualism on the left. Let’s reforge the link between head and heart.
Books
The Tale-less Hoffmann
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Moods is time well spent, all the more so for not letting you forget that you were going to spend it anyway.
Fiction & Poetry Articles
Across the Border
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Ruins
Peter Kuper
SelfMadeHero Books, 2015. The artist most well known for his Mad Magazine “Spy vs. Spy” pages has had quite a career, artistic and political. Much of it began when he abandoned his hometown Cleveland, back in 1977, for Manhattan. The creation of World War 3 Illustrated, the now long-lasting comics annual, encompassed but did not exhaust his views of his adopted location, summed up artistically in the gorgeous Drawn to New York, published in 2013.
Poetry
In Memory of C.K. Williams (1936-2015)
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Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C.K. Williams reads “Tar” and “The Day Continues Lovely.”
Culture
A Time for Literary Diplomacy
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Now that recent Senate votes have guaranteed that the agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear program will go into effect, what more can America do, beyond the strictest vigilance, to build on this historic breakthrough for peace? Perhaps it is time for the citizens of the United States to experience a breakthrough of their own, to go beyond past prejudices against their enemy and use the occasion to gently plunge into the deepest wells of Persian identity that originate in a civilization preceding ours by many centuries. We can do so by connecting with Rumi, a Sufi master born in 1207, whose luminous, salacious, mystical verses written in Farsi are carried by all Iranians in their hearts, as we do the words of Shakespeare. To read even a small selection of Rumi’s witty poems to his beloved can help shatter the blinding stereotypes that separate us from ordinary men and women in Tehran today, the very clichés of mistrust that the negotiators in Geneva had to overcome in order to reach a solution to what seemed an intractable problem. Indeed, those negotiators may have been listening to Rumi when their positions seemed most conflicting and conflictive.
Culture
The Rich Take Over “Burning Man”
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Why the Rich Love Burning Man
Burning Man became a festival that rich libertarians love because it never had a radical critique at its core.
by Keith A. Spencer
Trey Ratcliff / Flickr
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In principle the annual Burning Man festival sounds a bit like a socialist utopia: bring thousands of people to an empty desert to create an alternative society. Ban money and advertisements and make it a gift economy. Encourage members to bring the necessary ingredients of this new world with them, according to their ability. Introduce “radical inclusion,” “radical self-expression,” and “decommodification” as tenets, and designate the alternative society as a free space, where sex and gender boundaries are fluid and meant to be transgressed.
About Tikkun
New Poetry by Philip Terman
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Walking to Jerusalem
Pedometer attached to her belt, your mother, spry and strong
at eighty, joins the other Methodist Church members
in calculating the 5,915 miles, no matter the weather, to add up
all the way from Linesville, Pennsylvania to Jerusalem. They need not worry about miracles or pausing
at the signs of the cross. They need not stop for security
to check their purses for weapons. They need no visa
nor baggage, no money to exchange for shekels, no guide-
book, no guide. They need no ancient tongue or prophecies.
About Tikkun
Journey
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by Admiel Kosman
We fastened ourselves to the holy texts
and witnessed wonders,
great was the city that lay before us
lights stretched like ornamental carpets
at night when we entered this cartoon city
within the holy texts
we saw this exquisite place,
spires, towers, gates, niches, stairways. On the stairs the people of the city,
caricatures on parchment, emerged,
received us in friendship
with welcoming faces,
their disasters
very much like ours. Happily in their dream
they also dressed us fed us bread
and were so glad
to serve us, free, the living
waters from the stream.
From Ma ani yakhol/What I Can, 1995
Adapted from the Hebrew by the author with Lisa Katz. Translator Lisa Katz is editor of the Israeli pages of the Rotterdam-based Poetry International Web.
Culture
The Short Crappy Life of Walter J. Palmer, or, The Oddities of American Wealth
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Anyone who has followed the demise of Cecil, the African lion, and Walter J. Palmer, his American slayer, can’t help but be struck by the parallels with Hemingway’s classic story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” where a wealthy but timid American bumbles around the African savannah under the protection of a guide, procures a few hides, and ultimately meets his demise.
Culture
From the Ruins of Europe: Lyacos’s Debt-Riddled Greece
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If the postmodernists celebrated a departure from objective truths, Lyacos offers a vision of subjective return. Though his view is more pragmatic than ideal, Lyacos argues for a new interpretation of God, the Bible, and their roles in contemporary society.
Culture
Time Between Trains
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Now in a gusty April…she sat in the place where roads cross, the lonely four corners where, with nothing stopping it, the wind sweeps along without regard for anything.