by Noel Ignatiev A 1983 film, WarGames, opens with an American pilot in the cockpit getting an order to launch a missile strike in retaliation for a Soviet attack on the U.S. Instead of carrying out the order, he refuses. We soon learn that there has been no Soviet missile attack, and that the report […]
Uncategorized
The Autonomous Unemployed in the Netherlands
by Curtis Price In the late 1980s, the Netherlands, like many European countries, was faced with long-term unemployment. Concern arose among Dutch policy makers that changing conditions were creating a U.S. style “underclass”: a mass of permanently unemployed dependent on state benefits, no longer able to re-integrate into the labor market, and forming pockets […]
Something Lost? Something Gained?
by John Garvey The New York Times recently published a profile of Saul Chandler, a seventy-year old man who now spends most of his time on a boat docked at City Island, a small sliver of land off the east coast of the Bronx. Apparently, he’s a bit of a local legend on an island […]
An excerpt from ‘If He Hollers Let Him Go,’ by Chester Himes, 1945
posted by James Murray “…but as far as the problem of the Negro industrial worker is concerned, I feel that it is not so much racial as it is the problem of the masses. As soon as the masses, including all our minority groups have achieved economic security, racial problems will reach a solution […]
Book Review: The Unknown World of the Mobile Home
“Crowded Rookeries of itinerant Flophouses”: A Review of “The Unknown World of the Mobile Home “by John Fraser Hurt, Michelle J. Rhodes and John T. Morgan (2002, Johns Hopkins University Press). by Curtis Price Here in the Deep South, trailer parks are everywhere, yet surprisingly little has been written about them. At best, trailer parks […]
Report from Boston event
We held our first Hard Crackers convening in Boston on March 4. Including a one-year-old, seventeen new and old friends of Hard Crackers attended. A Boston old-timer talked about his friends recovering from opioid addictions. A 7th and 8th grade teacher discussed her students preparing to walk out for gun control in the wake of the […]