by Zhandarka Kurti Around this time last year, I met Mike, a black man in his mid 40s, in the offices of a non-profit organization working with formerly incarcerated people. Its offices are located in a four story building tucked under the elevated trains running through the South Bronx, two stores down from a MetroPCS […]
Archives for 2017
Date Night in Astoria, Queens
I get out of the cab and find myself in front of a large stone building resembling a foreign embassy, not unlike the ones you find in the upper east side of Manhattan. The words “Casa de Galicia” are etched on the top. I am confused. Is this the Spanish restaurant where I am supposed […]
Why He Did It
by John Garvey The authorities and the media sometimes seem more annoyed and frustrated at Stephen Paddock because they can’t figure out why he did it than they are about him killing 58 people and wounding hundreds. More precisely, they are annoyed and frustrated because they can’t come up with a story about why he […]
BOTH KINDS
By Kingsley Clarke Adel, Iowa 1986 Frankly, I cannot recall whether or not I have actually had a Bud Light. In 1986 I went back to Adel, Iowa, for my twenty-fifth high school class reunion. Adel was what they call a farm industry town of about 2,000. My mother was anxious to please me and my Chicago […]
Time for a global anthem
by Julia Ward Howe and the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment (forwarded by Noel Ignatiev) In Counterpunch of Oct. 3, Ishmael Reed suggests it is time for a new national anthem, perhaps one written by Stevie Wonder. I am sure the result would be better than the slaveholder’s anthem (which millions now honor by going for a beer […]
The Revolutionary Moment
by Noel Ignatiev What brings the revolutionary moment? I am not referring to the political struggle that takes place within every mass movement—unions or workers’ councils, soviets or provisional government, abolition or free-soil, black power or civil rights, etc.—but the moment when subordinated individuals whom no exhortation, not even free beer, can lure out of […]