Morbid Curiosity: Reviewing Jarrod Shanahanโ€™s Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help

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Iโ€™ve been a fan of Jarrod Shanahanโ€™s work, but only with his new essay collection Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help: A Decade of Rebellion, Reaction, and Morbid Symptoms, published by PM Press, did it occur to me just how long Iโ€™ve been reading him. Well, I guess it’s been a decade. I …

Refinery Reflections

One night in March of 1983, I had dinner on the stove and was building a fire when the phone rang. It was the foreman Charlie from the ARCO Refinery at Cherry Point, Washington. I was living in Bellingham then, about thirty miles away, and supporting myself by painting houses and working the occasional shutdown …

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They Picked Up Each Otherโ€™s Children: Chicagoโ€™s Spontaneous Resistance

An interview with Kingsley Clarke on resistance against Trumpโ€™s War in Chicago. Hard Crackers: Earlier this week theย National Guard and ICE were deployed to San Francisco, followed by a flurry of messages, alerts, and coordination as people tried to figure out whatโ€™s coming. As we know, the Trump administration has already called off the operation. …

At the Bus Stop

Itโ€™s a quiet afternoon at work, but Iโ€™m worn out from not sleeping well and decide to head home early. The regional rail is all messed up right now, so I take two subways and then walk a few blocks to wait for the bus. As I get to the stop, a woman asks if …

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An amazing meeting of miners and environmentalists from across โ€œYugoslaviaโ€

We came together on a playing field beside a derelict Olympic size open air swimming pool built by the local miners. We are in the small mining town of Breza, about half an hour’s drive from the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. The swimming pool, its construction by miners after WW2, and its present decay is a …

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Interview with Palmira Figueroa of National Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDLON)

Hard Crackers reached out to NDLON after we had read, in a New York Times article, about the organizationโ€™s involvement in the protests after the death of Roberto Carlos Montoya, a day laborer who had been waiting for work outside a Home Depot in Los Angeles. We interviewed Palmira Figueroa who is NDLONโ€™s Communications Director. …

From the Archives


Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory – Two Short Essays

More Confusion โ€“ No Wonder! By Mike Morgan If there was a board game in which the winner would reveal the official historic and current U.S. position towards most of the Far East peoples and their various nation states, what would it be called: Duplicity; Carrots and Sticks; Topsy Turvy; or Leapfrog?ย  Perhaps War or …

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Clinic Defense in the Era of Operation Rescue

In the early โ€™90s, anarchists and other feminists defended clinics with our bodies and taught each other how to do abortion techniques such as menstrual extraction safely. As the Christian Right bombed hundreds of clinics, killed health care providers and patients, and mobilized its base to swarm clinics and shut them down, grassroots reproductive freedom …

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