Must-Read Articles, Books and a Zine

Your weekly curated list of must-reads is here. From imprisoned people working to revive parole in Illinois to anarchists making DIY, pirated medicine, here are some of the most important stories I’ve read this week.

• Illinois Doesn’t Have Parole. A Group of Incarcerated Men is Working to Change That by Brandis Friedman. “‘All of us who formed this nonprofit, we all either had a life without parole sentence or we had a de facto life sentence, or virtual life, which means you have so much time, you can’t outlive your sentence,’ [Raúl Dorado] said.”
• ‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine by Jason Koebler. “Laufer is the chief spokesperson of Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, an anarchist collective that has spent the last few years teaching people how to make DIY versions of expensive pharmaceuticals at a tiny fraction of the cost. Four Thieves Vinegar Collective call what they do ‘right to repair for your body.’”
• At Last, Election Deniers Have an App of Their Own by David Gilbert. “VoteAlert is designed to be a one-stop shop for all your election conspiracy needs, featuring a scrollable feed of the latest voting-related alerts, the ability to report your own claims, and even, apparently, a 24/7 hotline.”
• UN Expert Warns Israel on Track to Exterminate Nearly Entire Gaza Population by Sharon Zhang. “Israel is on track to wipe out nearly the entire population of Gaza if global powers don’t intervene to stop its genocide, a UN expert has warned, based on estimates of the true death toll in Gaza from the first 11 months of the slaughter.”
• Study: Colleges With Fossil Fuel Funding Can Become 'Vehicle of Climate Obstruction' by Miranda Green. “There are dozens of programs and even entire schools across the country funded by the fossil fuel industry. They include Louisiana State University, which has a simulated oil well on its Baton Rouge campus; its Institute for Innovation in Energy is sponsored by Shell. Some universities built on shale oil and gas reserves even lease their land to fracking companies.”
• Student Activists Vow to Continue Pro-Palestine Protests Despite University Crackdowns by Sarah Prager. “After the swell of protests for Palestine on more than 100 college campuses in April and May, many students are returning to campus resolved to continue their activism despite their schools’ threats of disciplinary and legal consequences. Many groups’ plans are flexible in responding to changing university repression tactics.”
• As Immigration Policy Shifts Rightward, Families Like Mine Are Being Torn Apart by Liseth Bermude. “My first thought when I wake up in the morning and my last thought every night is how to keep my dad here.”
• Trump Says Elon Musk Would Become Government Auditor If He’s Elected President by Chris Walker. “During a speech on Thursday at the Economic Club of New York, former President Donald Trump suggested that he would enlist multi-billionaire Elon Musk to work in his administration and help him make cuts to government spending.”
• In Vermont, Abolitionists Are Fighting a Prison-Building Boom by Ashley Smith. “‘To be effective, we cannot just rely on spontaneous uprisings or think that we can win with one demonstration or series of demonstrations. We need to build organization around winnable demands and put forward a long-term vision of abolition to guide the struggle and guard against co-optation,’ [said Jayna Ahsaf].”
• Pavel Durov and Elon Musk Are Not Free Speech Champions by Paris Marx. “As the era of US dominance of the internet wanes, more countries will take firmer action to rein in the harms that dominant tech platforms have created and to make the internet in their jurisdictions better align with their laws and social norms.”

Books

I encourage everyone to preorder We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, a collection of essays edited by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson. With contributors like Beth Richie, Harsha Walia, Dorothy Roberts and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, this book explores an under-appreciated topic: what abolitionists have to learn from the work of birthing, raising, caring for, and loving future generations. I wrote a blurb for this book that reads, “This is a book that a lot of people have been waiting for, whether they know it or not. Our movements are always stronger when we take the complex needs of parents and caregivers into account, and We Grow the World Together is a fine example of that principle. This book will enrich our movements and our relationships. Bringing our change-making values into our familial relationships is essential if we truly hope to cultivate new ways of living and being together. Loving relationships are one of the contexts in which prefiguring the world we want makes the most sense, and yet, many of us are still unprepared to do so. We need books like this one that help us contemplate such personal work. To love with an eye toward transformation in a hostile world is a brave pursuit. This book offers some accompaniment in that journey.” 

I meant every word, and I hope you’ll check out this gem of a book.

I also want to encourage people to get a copy of From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire by Sarah Jaffe. This beautifully written book explores the role of grief in our movements as Sarah weaves her own journey with loss into a broader exploration of the ways we fall apart and remake our worlds together. This is a topic we all need to spend some time with, so I hope you’ll check out Sarah’s book. If you missed my conversation with Sarah and Eman Abdelhadi about grief that was published yesterday, I hope you’ll check that out, too.

A New Zine

In the fall of 2023, Mariame Kaba and I facilitated an eight-week series of workshops with a cohort of young organizers. The training covered a number of topics, including relationship-building, book club organizing, mapping our movement ecosystems, fundraising, and narrative work. After participating in this effort, a few members of the cohort generously shared letters to other new and young organizers. Those letters became the basis for a new zine, Letters to Young Organizers, which was designed by andrea kszystyniak. The offerings these young people contributed are worth reading, regardless of how experienced you may be in this work.To give you a sense of what this zine has to offer, I am going to close this week with some words written by a young organizer named Renata: 

“I am often so angry that so many of us organizing against death-makers are not allowed nor given the space to grieve and be angry and shout and yell and cry and sob without it being weaponized against us. Too often we are discredited for grieving and being publicly and visibly angry. We are often so tired. We deserve to be weak. We deserve to be held. My new comrades, I hope you’ll allow yourself to be weak. I’ll hold you closely. I hope you’ll hold me. I hope we hold each other as tightly as we can. We’ll make spaces to be weak together. And we’ll be alive together. And our aliveness will build new worlds. We will affirm life together.”

“We will affirm life together.” May we all answer that call. Until next time, please take care of yourselves, friends. Make space for what you need to feel, and then do what you need to do. 

Much love,

Kelly