Must-Reads and My Favorite Books of 2024

Must-Reads

From the fall of Assad’s regime to the war on trans people, here are some of the most important articles I’ve read this week.

• As Assad Regime Falls, Syrians Celebrate — and Brace for an Uncertain Future by Shireen Akram-Boshar. “If Syrians continue to be able to return home they might have a chance of renewing the popular, progressive struggle from 2011 and building an alternative that represents society more than the current rebel and opposition forces.”
  
• The Next War Against Trans People Is Already Being Waged in Texas by Zane McNeil. “A newly reelected Trump administration is poised to take a more aggressive stance on regulating health care for transgender youth, signaling a nationwide shift in how gender-affirming care is treated.”
  
• ‘If We Don’t Cook, We Don’t Eat’ by Jaya Saxena. “‘Mahmoud, and people like him, were doing God’s work. And that was good enough to put a target on his back,’ Almadhoun told CNN. ‘He was punished because he was helping people fight the famine,’ echoing Amnesty International’s conclusions that Israel is using famine as a tool of war.”
  
• The Rage Transcends by Brian Merchant. “The tech execs are cosplaying an apocalypse scenario in which social upheaval is consuming the nation—again in no small part because of trends they have themselves helped accelerate, but I digress—and debating whether or not they would need to murder the person that just personally helped them escape.”
  
• The Past and Present of Immigration Detention: Your Questions Answered (Ask Bolts). “Jails, and the sheriffs who oversaw them, gave the immigration service a detention footprint in virtually every American community. When things went wrong at privately-run and federal facilities, jails served as the safety valve—a place where the immigration service could transfer migrants to deter protests, respond to legal interventions, and counter criticism.”
  
• Broward Co. to Vacate Convictions for People Who Bought Crack Made by the Sheriff's Office by Nick Viviani. “For three years, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office produced its own crack cocaine, so it could sell it to people that deputies would then arrest for buying crack cocaine.”
  
• A Man in My Prison Said He Killed Himself to End His Chronic Pain by L.E.T. Jr. “This is now the second suicide I know of related to sciatic pain in this prison in a year.”
  
• Trump Says He’ll Fast-Track Any Permit Request If Treasury Is Paid $1 Billion by Chris Walker. “The details of Trump’s plan to allow people and companies to bribe the government, including whether any limits would exist at all, were not made immediately clear.”
  
• Hospitals Gave Patients Meds During Childbirth, Then Reported Them For Positive Drug Tests by Shoshana Walter. “Across the country, hospitals are dispensing medications to patients in labor, only to report them to child welfare authorities when they or their newborns test positive for those very same substances on subsequent drug tests.”
  
• Daniel Penny’s Trial Underscores the Need for Real Systems of Accountability by Alex S. Vitale. “If, instead of accepting the naive fantasy that the criminal legal system exists to protect us, we acknowledge that its primary mission is the maintenance of a system of economic inequality and political disempowerment, then its seeming failures make more sense.”
  
• Donald Trump and His Allies Don’t Really Care What Kind of Leftist You Are by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. "Keep in mind, though, that when you are recruited by people and projects to Be a Thing and others that want you to Do a Thing, join the doers. It will not always be easy, at the outset, to tell which team is recruiting you."

Back to Basics

I was recently interviewed alongside my good friend Maya Schenwar about the post-election moment and where activists and organizers can go from here.

ICYMI

This week, I wrote about the public response to the assassination of a health insurance CEO, and why this stirring of class consciousness matters.

Books: My Top Reads of 2024

The end of the year is an important time for authors and bookshops. Most bookstores earn a significant portion of their annual revenue in the last two months of the year due to holiday gift-giving, best-of-the-year lists, increased retail traffic, and other factors. As a book lover, I am also a big fan of independent bookstores, and I want to encourage folks who exchange material gifts to consider shopping at their local indy bookstore. (If you order online, please consider using Bookshop instead of Amazon.) If you need some suggestions, here are some of the most important books I’ve read this year. They are all extremely timely and would make great gifts for politically minded friends and loved ones.

1. Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis. In a moment of stirring class consciousness, Abolish Rent stands out as an essential read. This deeply researched and passionately argued book exposes the United States' 'unhousing system' while calling for transformative action. Drawing on a decade of organizing experience, Abolish Rent challenges us to fight for land, life, and dignity. The book’s urgent and rousing message is desperately needed.
   
2. Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America by Talia Lavin. Wild Faith offers an essential and timely exploration of the Evangelical movement and Christian Nationalism. From unraveling moral panics to dissecting the decades-long plot to remake the United States as an Evangelical state, Lavin offers a rich educational journey. I also deeply appreciated Lavin’s sensitive discussion of child abuse within the Evangelical movement and its broader societal impact. The trust abuse survivors clearly felt for the author, as they recounted their experiences and explained how they either broke the cycle of abuse, or repeated it, is a testament to Lavin’s integrity as a messenger. This is, without question, one of the most essential books of the year.(You can find my conversation with Lavin about the book here.)
   
3. We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition (edited by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson). In this book, abolitionists and organizers Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson present a beautiful collection of family-focused essays from contributors like Shira Hassan, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Dorothy Roberts, and Harsha Walia. The essays discuss how abolitionist politics are expressed in parenting and care-giving, and how parenting and caregiving can inform abolitionist politics. Some of the essays are deeply personal, while some are more policy focused. My favorite essays in the book reinforce an essential truth: that prefiguration starts at home. If you are looking for something heartening to share with a loved one this holiday season, I strongly recommend this book.
   
4. By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land by Rebecca Nagle. Rebecca Nagle’s new book chronicles a generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma, weaving together a contemporary legal battle—an imprisoned Native man’s fight to avoid the death penalty—with historic wrongs committed against the Muscogee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Cherokee nations. This book is an essential historical resource and an important reminder that injustice has always been contested. As Nagle pointed out, when she and I discussed the book last month, we are often told that we cannot judge people from other historical periods by today’s moral standards. In reality, genocidal policies against Native people were fiercely contested. That moral opposition has simply been written out of history by those seeking to absolve the United States of its sins. Putting the truth of that opposition on the historical record is essential work, and so is reading and understanding that history.
   
5. From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire by Sarah Jaffe. Unprocessed grief can tear people, communities, and movements apart. In her latest book, From the Ashes, Jaffe shares her personal journey with grief, in the years following her father’s death, while also highlighting the experiences of interviewees mourning loved ones lost to COVID and police violence, or who are grieving a lost way of life. More than reckoning with our need to grieve, this book locates the insurrectionary power of mourning and calls forth a rebellion.

Of course, as an author, I also hope you’ll consider sharing my book with Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You, as a holiday gift. I recently had the privilege of discussing the book with a queer book club in Texas, and I was moved by how much hope and energy people seemed to draw from the text during these frightening times. The book was written for moments like this one to help organizers get their bearings and chart their course. I hope change-minded people continue to find it, and continue to find each other, during these difficult times.

Much love,

Kelly