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poetry

Abecedarian Yellow

Dan Vera The Quarry
Poet Dan Vera adds fine-tuned anti-imperial politics to everything you need to know about bananas—and banana republics—from A to Z.

poetry

Dispatches from Barbed Wire

Abigail Carl-Klassen Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature
The Wall goes on, but as the El Paso poet Abigail Carl-Klassen announces: “We’re still here. In protest. In Pachanga. Fists raised.”

books

Marxism as ‘Organized Sarcasm’

Richard Seymour Salvage
Saying Marxism is a science is preface. Add organized sarcasm and we come closer to mocking not so much intimate feelings associated with worldly illusions but their form in a particular perishable world. It aims to give new form to certain aspirations, the better to regenerate them. Yet if Marxist movements are to be effective, they must create new tastes and a new language for struggles to be born. Sarcasm then is about what outrages our sense of what should be.

books

Audre Lorde’s ‘Your Silence Will Not Protect You’

Bridget Minamore The White Review
Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was one of the most significant U.S. writers of the last quarter of the 20th Century. She described herself as "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet." This new collection of her poetry and prose allows readers to remind themselves of her thought and its significance.

food

Seven Foundational Cookbooks That Shaped American Cooking

Ali Slagle Saveur Magazine
America: The Cookbook author Gabrielle Langholtz shares the texts that helped craft the United States’ regional culinary traditions For her book, America: The Cookbook, Gabrielle Langholtz looked at cookbooks as well as narrative and anthropological books to fully explore America’s culinary history—Little House on the Prairie and the Sterns’ many varied books among them.

tv

‘Babylon Berlin’ Is A Big-Budget Cautionary Tale Against Bigotry and Excess

Tess Cagle Daily Dot
Aside from the sheer entertainment of the series, Babylon Berlin offers its new American audience the warning it needs in 2018. As the plot progresses, Rath must choose between his morals and nationalism—something Americans struggle with often in the 21st century. But Babylon Berlin shows us how a progressive nation can crumble when it allows bigotry and intolerance to fester.

books

Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans

Henry Farrell Boston Review
We’re not living in the dystopias of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, the author insists, but in the shifty algorithmic universe of Philip K. Dick, where the world that the Internet and social media shape is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. In this view, it’s a world in which technology is developing in ways that fudge the difference between the human and the artificial.

books

The Captive Aliens Who Remain Our Shame

Annette Gordon-Reed The New York Review of Books
This "very important" book offers a new examination of the role of African Americans in the American Revolution and of how racism was used in the service of creating the United States in the late 18th Century.
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