By Levi Van Zyl (readershark) via YouTube

‘A lot of the books I see going around, and the lists I see going around, are literally like all James Baldwin, which is totally fine, it is important to read an author who paved such a path in the black – and especially the black queer – community but it’s been awhile. It’s been awhile since then. Also, black people are more than their pain. You can’t just push pain, pain, pain, because at that point you’re almost fetishizing the pain.’

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Posted on June 10, 2020

By Phillip Crawford Jr.

In celebrating LGBTQ Pride this June, when so much of the world has embraced equality, it’s difficult to imagine that illicit bars run by the Mafia once were one of the few gathering places for gays and lesbians.
In The Mafia and the Gays, author Phillip Crawford Jr. meticulously documents how the mob once had a near-monopoly on gay bars for decades in New York and Chicago, relying upon an extensive collection of primary sources including FBI files, many of which were not publicly available until acquired by the author through the Freedom of Information Act.

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Posted on June 9, 2020

By Isaac Arnsdorf/ProPublica

Two-and-a-half years ago, top officials from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs rang the closing bell of the New York Stock Exchange. Standing on the podium with them was a cheering, flexing Captain America. Spider-Man waved from the trading floor below.
The event had been billed as a suicide prevention awareness campaign. No one could figure out what the Marvel characters were doing there. David Shulkin, the VA secretary at the time, said in a memoir about his tenure that he was as surprised as anyone.
The answer, it turns out, lies with the sweeping influence over the VA that President Donald Trump gave to one of his biggest donors, Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter.

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Posted on June 5, 2020

By Amy Werbel/The Conversation

Americans overwhelmingly support a federal bailout for the cash-starved United States Postal Service. They view the USPS as a vital civic institution – one that despite a crisis brought on by massive debts and falling revenue continues to reliably deliver medicine, communications and absentee ballots that allow Americans to vote safely during the coronavirus pandemic.
Equally important, the postal service delivers a common bond that has helped shape American society for more than 250 years. Research for my recent book on the postal inspector Anthony Comstock introduced me to the prominent role the postal service played in enabling Americans to conceive of themselves as a singular nation.

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Posted on June 2, 2020

By SIU Press

“Organizing Freedom is a riveting and significant social history of black emancipation activism in Indiana and Illinois during the Civil War era,” SIU Press says.
“By enlarging the definition of emancipation to include black activism, author Jennifer R. Harbour details the aggressive, tenacious defiance through which Midwestern African Americans – particularly black women – made freedom tangible for themselves.

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Posted on May 30, 2020

By Andy Soth/WisContext

Many people have heard of Typhoid Mary, but far fewer know the name Mary Mallon. For those familiar with the story of the actual person who would become known as an infamous spreader of disease, though, the name Judith Walzer Leavitt might also ring a bell.
Leavitt’s 1995 book, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public Health, tells the story of Mallon, an Irish immigrant cook in New York and asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever who was involuntarily quarantined and spent years in isolation during the early 20th century. The questions raised through Leavitt’s examination of the media, the legal system and public health officials’ reactions to a woman charged with being a “Menace to the Community” remain to this day.

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Posted on May 28, 2020

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

As part of EFF’s response to the COVID-19 crisis, we’ve edited and compiled our critical thoughts on digital rights and the pandemic into an e-book: EFF’s Guide to Digital Rights and the Pandemic.
To get the e-book, you can make an optional contribution to support EFF’s work, or you can download it at no cost. We released the e-book under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits sharing among users.
No matter who you are, this collection will likely be relevant to your understanding of the pandemic and society’s response to it.

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Posted on May 26, 2020

By Elizabeth Svoboda/Undark

To hear some experts tell it, science denial is mostly a contemporary phenomenon, with climate change deniers and vaccine skeptics at the vanguard. Yet the story of Galileo Galilei reveals just how far back denial’s lineage stretches.
Years of astronomical sightings and calculations had convinced Galileo that the Earth, rather than sitting at the center of things, revolved around a larger body, the sun. But when he laid out his findings in widely shared texts, as astrophysicist Mario Livio writes in Galileo and the Science Deniers, the ossified Catholic Church leadership – heavily invested in older Earth-centric theories – aimed its ire in his direction.

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Posted on May 25, 2020

By The U.S. Postal Service

With a nod to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, the U.S. Postal Service today is issuing new postage stamps honoring the lives and legacies of four of the movement’s greatest voices: novelist Nella Larsen; writer, philosopher, educator and arts advocate Alain Locke; bibliophile and historian Arturo Alfonso Schomburg; and poet Anne Spencer. These stamps will be available for sale at Post Offices nationwide and online.

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Posted on May 21, 2020

By PEN America

PEN America on Tuesday released the inaugural PEN America Freedom to Write Index, its first annual global count of writers and public intellectuals unjustly detained or imprisoned worldwide.
Covering calendar year 2019, the inaugural Freedom to Write Index shows that at least 238 writers, academics and public intellectuals were imprisoned or held in detention in 2019, facing often brutal treatment and baseless charges. The Index includes novelists, poets, playwrights, songwriters, biographers, memoirists, essayists, bloggers, and other genre writers. Nearly 60 percent were being held by just three countries: China, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

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Posted on May 20, 2020