Journalism

In his history of the FBI as a secret intelligence organization, Tim Weiner didn’t need to take up the question of whether J. Edgar Hoover was gay. But he did: on his very first page he condemns what he calls the “caricature” of Hoover as “a tyrant in a tutu, a cross-dressing crank.” When a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist takes this line of argument, whatever you think of it, it’s news.. . .
. . . continued at the L.A. Review of Books HERE

A May Day warning has been issued to the ten-campus University of California system by office of the president, Mark G. Yudoff: “Avoid all protests.”
. . . continued at TheNation.com HERE

Today we have street art, but we don’t have people fighting in the streets about art.  In 1966, the anti-war Artists’ Tower of Protest on Sunset Strip provoked nightly battles for three months, as pro-war young men attacked the tower, and artists organized a defense squad.  Now it has been re-created as part of Pacific Standard Time. . . .
. . .  continued at the LA Times op-ed page HERE.

The United Farm Workers was once a mighty force on the California landscape, with 50,000 members at the end of the 1970s; today the membership is around 6,000.   What happened? And to what extent was the UFW responsible for its own demise? Frank Bardacke has been thinking about that for a long time. . .  . continued at TheNation.com HERE

Starting with Bill Clinton’s Back to Work: Clinton’s argument about “why we need smart government for a strong economy” begins at the end of his presidency in 2000, when employment was booming. But to understand what has happened since then, you need to understand what Clinton did.
Then comes Chris Matthews’s Jack Kennedy, Elusive Hero — and at the end of the list, Dick Cheney’s In My Time.
… full story at TheNation.com, HERE.

Jon Wiener: You show in your book God Is Not Great how many horrible things men have done because of religion. In Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade and Baghdad, men kill other men, and say God told them to do it.  But why blame God for the bad things that men do?
Christopher Hitchens: I don’t blame God.  I blame religion.  I don’t believe there is such a thing as God. Religion makes people do wicked things they wouldn’t ordinarily do. . .
. . . continued at Truthdig.com, HERE

A personal list, starting with Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State . . .
. . . and then To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918, by Adam Hochschild. . .
. . . and Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, by Manning Marable.

Posted at TheNation.com, HERE.

David Montgomery, one of the founders of the “New Labor History” in the United States, who inspired a generation of activists and historians, died December 2. He was 84. David lived a remarkable life: blacklisted as a union organizer in the 1950s, twenty years later he was named Farnam Professor of History at Yale. Even as Farnam Professor he remained a deeply political animal, working with local labor activists, black and white, in New Haven and elsewhere.
I’ll never forget David’s story about how he became an academic.
. . . continued at TheNation.com HERE

The Berkeley Academic Senate voted 336 to 34 on Monday afternoon to “condemn” Chancellor Robert Birgeneau for his administration’s “authorization of violent responses to nonviolent protests over the past two years,” culminating in the police attack on nonviolent Occupy Cal demonstrators on November 9. . . .
. . . . continued at TheNation.com HERE.

On Monday, the Berkeley Academic Senate will vote on a resolution expressing “no confidence” in their chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, because of police violence against Occupy Cal campus activists there on November 9. The chancellor’s defense of police conduct was particularly outrageous: “It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms,” he declared the day after the police confrontation. “This is not non-violent civil disobedience.”. . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com HERE