Hannah Black discusses why rent strikes are so difficult to organize on a large scale, and looks to the possibilities of current efforts in cities across the country for Dissent. Tenant organizing, Black writes, “is part of a long tradition of situating politics in concrete everyday survival rather than focusing on abstract categories of law and labor, an orientation toward struggle familiar in black and indigenous contexts but often hard for mass movements to come to grips with.”
At the Paris Review Daily, Aracelis Girmay revisits the work of former Maryland poet laureate Lucille Clifton, which “reveals an archive of, among other things, some of what African America does to English and some of what English does to African America.”
A group of Pakistani women journalists have released a joint statement calling attention to the gender-based slurs and attacks they have been subject to on social media, and which they say “are instigated by government supporters.”
The New Republic’s Josephine Livingstone recommends the new season of Fiasco, Leon Neyfakh’s podcast, which examines “ostensibly well-known but actually little understood episodes of American twentieth-century history.” The latest episodes focus on “the so-called Boston busing crisis”—the term is a misnomer—of the 1970s and ’80s.
Tonight at 6 PM PST, the Elliott Bay Book Company and the Seattle Public Library are hosting Akwaeke Emezi and Esmé Weijun Wang for a virtual author event. Emezi’s new novel, The Death of Vivek Oji, was published earlier this month.
