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Secret Agent

Philip St. Clair Pedestal Magazine
With its surreal twist on death, birth, and reincarnation, the poet Philip St. Clair reminds us that some memories we don’t ever want to hear again.

Labor’s Legitimacy Crisis Under Trump

Barry Eidlin Jacobin
Isolated examples exist of union resistance and victory. Important as these are, they do not yet approach the scale needed to respond to the challenges that labor faces in the coming years. But they show that it is still possible to strike, and it is still possible to win. In each case, building workplace union culture and organization was key. Broadening this model outwards could provide ways of reversing labor’s fortunes.

Red Dawn: On China Miéville’s Urgent Retelling of the Russian Revolution

Alci Rengifo Los Angeles Review of Books
China Miéville looks at the Revolution as a hopeful flashpoint that briefly showed the promise of socialist transformation, before descending first into an authoritarian nightmare and then today's corrupt capitalism. Written with an urgency designed for our era of struggle absent clear political ideologies or unified mass socialist organizations, Mieville focuses on the revolutionary moment, using his skill as a story teller to see the participants in real time.

Union Group Led by Eisendrath Outduels Trib Owner to Acquire Sun-Times

Mitchell Armentrout Chicago Sun-Times
The Eisendrath group’s deal preserves two independent newspaper voices in Chicago, one of the last two-newspaper towns in America. Tronc had vowed to operate the Tribune and Sun-Times as independent titles, though media observers had expressed skepticism over how long that might last.

The Spy Who Funded Me

Patrick Iber Los Angeles Review of Books
The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was a well-known Cold War era CIA-sponsored organization whose role was to promote an international anti-communist, pro-US cultural policy. This latest study examines the well-funded and influential intellectual periodicals the CCF bankrolled all over the world.

U.A.W. Says Nissan Workers Seek a Union Vote in Mississippi

NOAM SCHEIBER and BILL VLASIC The New York Times
"On Tuesday, the U.A.W. said a petition for a union election had been filed by employees at a Nissan plant in Mississippi with more than 6,000 workers. They asked for a vote within a month."

Science Fiction’s Under-Appreciated Feminist Icon

Gabrielle Bellot The Atlantic
The French comic series Valérian and Laureline, newly adapted into a summer blockbuster, gave the genre one of its first protagonists to powerfully own her womanhood.

Locol is a Righteous Answer to the Wrong Question

Tunde Wey San Francisco Chronicle
Locol is a response to the challenge of food access in underserved communities in which issues of poverty, hunger and access to nutritious food are exclusively about race. But it is an imagined solution, designed to overcome the wrong threat. It is based on a dangerous minimization of the facts, lacking a larger racial analysis and the admission that racism, not some aberrant market failure, is the culprit in the deprivation of communities of color.

Women Hold the Keys to New Working-Class Prosperity

Lane Windham Working-Class Perspectives
A newly-mobilized working class could reshape the nation’s economic and political landscape. Women are the core of today's working-class, and that’s why women’s leadership – – especially among women of color — will be critical for that new working-class movement tp take shape.