big reads this week
art
Protean Magazine, a great indie source for new writing. Read their About Us page on literature and the left.
labor
In the LA Times: IATSE’s vote to strike indicates wider discontent among American workers.
indie media
Catch up on the nuclear landscape.
Any writer, anyone who cares about free speech, and anyone who claimed to worry about fascism under Trump should be following the Donziger story. Now there’s a precedent for imprisoning lawyers who successfully sue corporations that commit crimes too massive and ugly to wrap your head around. The corporate stranglehold on American politics and courts is nearly total.
One of many reasons I started this digest was to raise awareness about the political realities that writers and artists are disincentivized, economically, from confronting in their work. As I heard someone say on a podcast recently, Americans don’t like to think about the empire. We prefer to forget about the military and prison industrial complexes, the fact that we work increasingly hard for a decreasing quality of life, and the fact that our tax dollars go to war profiteers rather than our own (impoverished, addicted, increasingly homeless) population.
We’d rather jail a human rights lawyer than protect the environment and ourselves from the likes of Chevron.
Still, in our more awake moments, we have the power to follow these developments in independent media, deal with them in our work, and talk about them in our everyday lives.
There’s no saving ourselves or the planet without creating alternatives to corporatism.
photograph of Steven Donziger by Annie Tritt for The Intercept