Russ Kick is coming to you! Join him as he talks about editing the three-part anthology The Graphic Canon at Left Bank Books on June 13 at 7:00pm.

Left Bank Books is located at:

399 N. Euclid Ave

St. Louis, MO 63108

Click here to learn more!

Don’t think Durham’s the only town with great Graphic Canon events–Russ Kick is coming to you! He will be at Malaprop’s Bookstore on June 6 at 7:00pm in order to speak about his editing of the three-part anthology The Graphic Canon.

Malaprop’s is located at:

55 Haywood Street

Ashville, NC 28801

Click here to learn more!

Russ Kick, editor of the upcoming, three-part anthology The Graphic Canon, will be speaking about this innovative survey and adaptation about the world’s greatest literature on Tuesday, June 5, at 7:00pm at The Regulator Bookshop.

The Regulator is located at:

720 Ninth St
Durham, NC 27705

Click here to learn more!

World-renown author Barry Gifford will be reading from his new poetry volume Imagining Paradise at Moe’s Books on June 4th at 7:30pm.

Moe’s is located at:

2476 Telegraph Ave.
Berkeley CA 94704

Click here to learn more!

Barry Gifford, author of over 40 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry–including Wild at Heart, will be reading from his forthcoming poetry book Imagining Paradise (April 2012) at City Lights Books on May 31, at 7:00pm. He’ll be joined in song by the writer and singer Willy Vlautin.

Click here to learn more!

City Lights Books is located at:

261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway

San Francisco, CA 94133

phone: (415) 362-8193

Political cartoonist Ted Rall will be speaking about and signing copies of his latest book The Book of O(bama) at Powell’s Books on Thursday, May 31, at 7:30pm. Come to the event and hear this insightful, biting voice speak about his take on Obama’s first term.

Powell’s is located at:

3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, Oregon

Click here to learn more!

Eva Gabrielsson will be coming to YOU on Thursday, May 31, at 7:30pm. She will be talking about her best-selling book “There Are Things I Want You to Know” About Stieg Larsson and Me,” and copies will be available for purchase. She will be in conversation with John Timpane of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The event will be at the Central Library, located at:

1901 Vine Street

Philadelphia, PA 19103

Click here to learn more!

Want to get more of Eva Gabrielsson? Then come to her event at the Enoch Pratt Library on Wednesday, May 30, at 6:30pm. She will be reading from her best-selling book “There Are Things I Want You to Know” About Stieg Larsson and Me and discussing the time she spent as Stieg Larsson’s partner and their fight for social justice. Copies of the book will be available for purchase.

The event will be in Wheeler Auditorium of the Central Library, located at:

400 Cathedral Street

Baltimore, MD 21201

Click here to learn more!

Want MORE Graphic Canon events? Then you’re in luck! Russ Kick, editor of the forthcoming three-part anthology The Graphic Canon, will be speaking about the books at the Enoch Pratt Free Library on Wednesday, March 30, at 6:00pm. Come to hear his expertise on the interpretation of classic works of literature, both new and old.

The event will be at the Reisterstown Road branch, located at:

6310 Reisterstown Road

Baltimore, MD 21215

Click here to learn more!

Russ Kick will be at Moonstone Arts Center where he will be speaking about editing the three-part anthology The Graphic Canon on Tuesday, May 29th at 7:00pm.

The event will be held at:

110A S. 13th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107

Click here for more information.

Join them at BookCourt in Brooklyn on Tuesday, May 29th, at 7:00pm. Book signings to follow.

Click here to learn more!

Eva Gabrielsson, author of “There Are Things I Want You to Know” About Stieg Larsson and Me” will be talking about her life with Stieg Larsson and signing copies of her book at the Scandinavia House on Tuesday, May 29, at 6:30pm. Don’t forget to check out the paperback edition of the book, released in January 2012.

The Scandinavia House is located at:

58 Park Avenue at 38th Street, New York City

Click here to learn more!

J.R. Helton will be doing a reading and signing centered around his new book Drugs at Book Soup in West Hollywood on May 23 at 7:00pm. Come out and be taken through the roller-coaster that is recreational drug use!

Book Soup is located at:

8818 Sunset Blvd

West Hollywood, CA 90069

Click here to learn more!

5pm-7pm: Himalayan Happy Hour in the café
6:00pm: Pre-program book signing with Graphic Canon contributors
6:15pm: Pre-program tour of the comics exhibition Hero, Villain, Yeti: Tibet in Comics
7:00pm: Book Launch in the theater
8:30pm: Book signing with artists and editor.

Come early for Himalayan Happy Hour and join Graphic Canon contributors Peter Kuper, Valerie Schrag, Shawn Cheng, Fred van Lent, Rebecca Migdal, Sandy Jimenez, and Brendan Leach for a pre-program book signing in the café followed by a presentation and discussion of The Graphic Canon in the theater with artists Molly Crabapple, Sanya Glisic and Gareth Hinds and editor Russ Kick.

The Rubin Museum of Art is located at 150 W.17th Street

The Boston Public Library is hosting Brita Belli, author of The Autism Puzzle: Connecting the Dots Between Environmental Toxins and Rising Autism Rates in May.

The event will be on Tuesday, May 22 at 6 p.m. in the Boston Room of the Central Library, 700 Boylston Street. For more information, click here.

Russ Kick will be at Odyssey Bookshop, where he will be speaking about editing the three-part anthology The Graphic Canon on Monday, May 21st at 7:00pm.

The event will be held at:

9 College St.

South Hadley, MA

01075

Click here for more information.

J.R. Helton, author of Drugs, will be giving a reading and signing copies of his soon-to-be-released novel-memoir. That’s a lot of hyphens. The event will take place at The Twig on Saturday, May 19, from 5pm to 7pm.

The Twig is located at:

200 E. Grayson Street, Suite 124

San Antonio, TX 78215

Click here to learn more.

Greg Sumner, author of Unstuck in Time, will be discussing Kurt Vonnegut’s life and how it has influenced some of Vonnegut’s most cherished novels on Friday, May 18, 2012 from 7:30-8:30pm.

The event is free and will be held at:

Barnes & Nobels Booksellers

3235 Washtenaw Ave

Ann Arbor, MI 48104

Click here for more information.

Texan author J.R. Helton will be reading from and signing copies of his forthcoming novel-memoir Drugs at Brazos Bookstore on May 18 at 7:00pm.

Brazos is located at:

2421 Bissonnet Street

Houston, Texas 77005

Click here to learn more!

Read the full review here.

“Rise of the Zinesters is about education. It is a how-to, indie history lesson, design theory 101, a manifesto, and, surprisingly, as memoir. It serves as an entry into the importance of games and how to make them. But it also is about why making them for ourselves is important.

Before even starting Anthropy excuses the reader. “Your first game will be rough and derivative.” Quality is not the aim here: Anthropy wants more games by more people. What she offers here isn’t the normal racket that artist-targeted how-to books tend to peddle. This is not How to be a Successful Game Developer in 5 Easy Steps or Make a Blockbuster Videogame! “Nor is she writing for the designer who is hoping to hone their skills. Zinesters sets itself apart from excellent game design tomes like Steve Swink’s Game Feel and Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun and Game Design, by not assuming a familiarity with game design.”

Read the full review here.

“Planned to be complete in three volumes, The Graphic Canon is startlingly brilliant: the limits of titles collected are not Western; the art styles collected are neither monotone nor interpretatively repetitive; the packaging of long works into a few pages has not been undertaken either by those deaf to linguistic music nor those eager to turn the simple into the simplistic.”

http://blog.schoollibraryjournal.com/adult4teen/2012/05/16/all-diamond-no-rough/

On May 22, the first volume will be released of “The Graphic Canon,” a three-volume anthology of classic literature adapted into graphic and visual form. The books are edited by Russ Kick and published by Seven Stories, and include everything from the epic of Gilgamesh to Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” to David Foster Wallace.

There will be a launch event for the book at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York on May 23, with editor Kick and contributors Molly Crabapple, Sanya Glisic and Gareth Hinds.

Here’s how her story starts:

“I had written a feature story on the topic for E-The Environmental Magazine and discovered in the course of writing that piece that there was a lot of research beginning to connect exposure to certain heavy metals, chemicals, pollutants and drugs during pregnancy to increased likelihood for autism,” she says. “The focus of autism research had largely been looking at genetics until recent years, with a few notable exceptions. In the mid-nineties it was discovered that some women who took thalidomide, used during the ‘60s to treat morning sickness, had children with autism as a result of that exposure. Other drugs were similarly tied to autism, including valproic acid and misoprostol. Those were the first clues, but it has taken years of autism rates continuing to climb (1 in 88 children in the U.S. now has autism according to the latest numbers) for research to really look seriously at how other chemicals to which we are all exposed may be acting together with genetic predisposition to drive up autism rates.”

How does your book answer some of the myths parents have about Autism and does it explain the reality, that is to say, is your work also about raising awareness?

One of the most important myths countered in the book is the idea that rising autism numbers are somehow just the result of over-zealous diagnosing on the part of doctors and specialists. There is a lot of argument that autism rates are related to expanded definition and increased diagnosis, but as I write in the book, if this were the case there would be many more adults with autism stepping forward who had been misdiagnosed in the past. As one psychiatrist—Dr. Suruchi Chandra—who treats children with autism, is quoted in the book as saying “We’re seeing an increase in the rates of ASDs [autism spectrum disorders] in children. Really only children.” What’s more, I raise issues about under-diagnosis and misdiagnosis in poor and minority communities, where there is less access to autism services and less parental knowledge. The book is absolutely about raising awareness—in particular that this rise is real, it is widespread, and likely greater than the current numbers suggest. What’s more, it is increasingly clear that the rise in autism is directly tied to common exposures in concert with genetic susceptibility.

What research or evidence if any, are your findings based on?

The book is full of research tracing connections between exposures during pregnancy and autism. Some of these reports are fairly shocking. For example, a 2004 study in Texas found that for every 1,000 pounds of environmentally released mercury, there was a 43% increase in the rate of special education services and a 61% increase in the rate of autism. Another study in San Francisco, found that where exposure to air pollutants was highest, the risk factor for autism increased by 5o%.  Studies using baby hair and baby teeth have found that children with autism have difficulty getting rid of toxic metals like mercury (which, like lead, is known to cause neurological damage), and that increased antibiotics given to these children further inhibits this process.

And there is a growing body of research connecting autism to the many widespread hormone-altering chemicals such as flame retardants, pesticides and chemicals found in plastics like phthalates and bisphenol A. Pitocin, a drug administered during labor and delivery, is also suspect for its hormone-mimicking properties. Specifically, pitocin acts as synthetic oxytocin in the body. Oxytocin is the social hormone needed for bonding and trusting—and autistic children have difficulty producing and/or processing oxytocin, contributing to their social difficulties. None of these exposures alone are thought to be the sole cause of increased autism rates—rather it is the combination of these exposures acting together with genetics that is the biggest concern.

4. Since your book sidesteps the heated mercury-in-vaccines debate and its link with Autism, does that mean there is no correlation between the vaccines and Autism threat?

I address this topic in the introduction. Andrew Wakefield, whose research made the vaccine-autism connection, was discredited. No other research has found any connection between vaccines and autism and still, as a precaution, mercury-containing thimerosal was removed or reduced in all vaccinations for children (except for the flu vaccine) in 2001. Mercury is a major concern in relation to autism rates, but not from vaccines. The largest source of mercury today is from our seafood, thanks to emissions from coal burning power plants that settle across the nation’s waters and accumulate in fish—particularly big fish like tuna.

Dental fillings are the next largest source of exposure. Other places where mercury exposure can happen, as mentioned in the book, include schools and day care centers built on former factory sites and gym floors which have been found, in some cases, to include a mercury-containing top coat that can off-gas, providing a particularly worrisome path of exposure.

You mention that Autism triggers include flame retardants, pesticides, some pregnancy medications, and plastic (including food containers and shrink-wrap). What is a parent to do? Eliminate all of these from their lives?

Parents can and should take reasonable steps to limit their chemical exposures, particularly during pregnancy, and I provide some steps they can take, from minimizing plastics used for storing and especially heating food, to choosing organic fresh fruits and vegetables where possible, to checking cosmetic and baby care ingredients by using the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep Cosmetics Database.

But the problem of chemical exposure is not one parents can solve. It requires comprehensive reform of our chemical policies as has been introduced multiple times in the Safe Chemicals Act. The current legislation—the Toxic Substances Control Act—was passed in 1976 and grandfathered in some 61,000 chemicals. Since then, our understanding of what impacts these chemicals can have even in minute amounts during vulnerable windows of development, and the dangers they pose when acting together, give us ample reason to overhaul this outdated legislation and require that all chemicals be safety tested before being approved—including for their impacts on pregnant women and children.

I hope readers will take this as a call to action and support the efforts of organizations such as Healthy Child Healthy World, Environmental Working Group, Safer Chemicals Healthy Families and others at the forefront of reforming the nation’s chemical laws.

What advice do you have for parents who have an autistic child?

I learned so much from the parents I interviewed for this book—all of them are tireless advocates for their children and have devoted their lives to improving their children’s potential. It is difficult work raising children with autism and it easy to become overwhelmed. I would encourage all parents with autistic children to find support groups, both in their community and online, where they can turn to others who understand them, who will not judge them and who can share strategies for helping their children succeed.

His event will be located:

CUMMINGS ART BUILDING, ART4
(LOWER LEVEL)

Click here to learn more.

The 500-page first volume of the three-volume anthology is set for release May 22 by Seven Stories Press. Volumes two and three will be out later this year. The series spans literature from the epic “Gilgamesh” to David Foster Wallace’s zany 1996 novel “Infinite Jest,” with everything from “Pride and Prejudice” to “Alice in Wonderland” in between.

“It’s a huge project for any publisher, and it’s almost overwhelming for us,” said Ruth Weiner, the publicity and marketing director of Seven Stories Press, which has a staff of 10.

The three volumes contain mostly original, commissioned work from about 130 artists as well as some excerpts from earlier books, which Seven Stories paid for permissions to use. Each volume will retail for $34.95, and a three-volume box set for $90 will be available when the third volume is released in October.

“We have an in-house editor and art director who devoted virtually a year to this project,” said Dan Simon, publisher of Seven Stories. Also adding to the expense was the art and printing. The oversized books are being published in full color and on heavy stock paper.

Seven Stories has set aside a five-figure marketing budget for the three volumes, Ms. Weiner said. “For John Grisham, that’s a drop in the bucket, but…this is getting more marketing push than most books will see,” she said. The publisher is spending at least four figures for ads on Facebook., which will feature art from the series and will be promoted on the pages of Facebook users who have an interest in graphic novels or a cartoonist like Robert Crumb, or a specific work of literature included in “The Graphic Canon.”

The project started as a single-volume idea that came to Russ Kick, who became the book’s editor, in 2008, when he was in the graphic-novel section of a bookstore in Tucson, Ariz. “I had the Shakespeare adaptations, but I saw an adaptation of ‘The Trial’ by Kafka. That was the moment it came together, and I realized someone needs to do an anthology here,” he said.

Mr. Kick proposed the idea to several agents, but there were no takers. “They told me that it was a really interesting idea, but they had no idea how to sell it to publishers,” he said. He then decided to create a prototype by scanning pages from existing comic-book adaptations, and using print on demand to create bound copies to send directly to publishers.

Through a contact, he met Mr. Simon at Seven Stories Press, who took on the single-volume project Over time, as they discussed the growing number of artists and works of literature to be included, he suggested taking the book to two volumes. The conversation continued until the project became 1,500 pages over three volumes, with 75% of the work commissioned.

“This became a kind of ‘Moby Dick’ for us,” Mr. Simon said.

Before I read Birth Matters, I had barely heard a single positive birth story. Most were horror filled accounts of women stuck in labour for over 24 hours, screaming for epidurals, enduring a series of complications, interventions and agonising after-effects. As a result, the prospect of birth filled me with fear and dread.

Birth Matters is therefore an empowering read. It’s about women gaining control over one of the most fundamental processes of life by learning to trust their body and tune into a kind of primal, ‘inner ape’ instinct.

Gaskin has four decades of experience as a midwife at The Farm Midwifery Centre, based on an eco-commune in Tennessee. The Farm has handled over 2,800 births with an astonishingly low C-section rate of just 1.7 per cent. (In the US, the C-section rate is 34 per cent and in the UK 28 per cent.) Her knowledge on birth is grounded witnessing hundreds of natural, unmedicated births and observing what both helps and hinders the process. Fear, for instance, can slow down labour: ‘sudden fear or even the wrong person entering the room can cause the cervix to close in many women,’ she writes.

The first section of the book reveals Gaskin’s keys to a safe, natural birth. These include the ability to move around and change position, emotional and loving support and a stress free, undisturbed environment. She explains the role of natural hormones in labour - for instance, when women are spoken to with words of love they secrete a natural form of oxytocin which causes uterine contractions and keeps labour moving. She says women giving birth need to access the ‘wild women’ or ‘inner ape’ within, rather than a logical, thinking state. The overall ethos seems to be: trust the natural process. To inspire, there are first hand birth stories interspersed throughout the book of women who either gave birth at The Farm or at home.

Much of the second half of the book is focused on the birth model in the America, where the situation for women seeking a midwife-led, natural, drug-free birth is more tricky. With one in three babies born via cesarean, the US also has a maternal death rate higher than in any other developed country. Gaskin says the nation’s rising maternal death rate is down to the increase in C-sections and the drugs sometimes used to induce labour.

She makes a compelling case for the need for more American midwifes - currently there is a ‘national lack’ after the profession was essentially eliminated for several decades in the mid-twentieth century. Armed with research, she shows how midwife skills were replaced by a medical model that embraced new technologies and drugs in the first half of the 20th century. She examines the ‘vast gulf’ between the basic knowledge base of midwives and that of most obstetricians, distinguishing the midwives’ ‘wellbeing’ model of care from the medical ‘illness’ model of care. For example, ‘whereas medical men’s solutions to birth complications have tended to focus on the creation and use of tools to solve the problems, a midwife might ask a woman to move her body in such a way as to change the baby’s position.’ The book concludes with Gaskin’s vision for the future of ‘women centred maternity care’ in America.

Read this review on The Ecologist website.

Game designer Anna Anthropy’s debut book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, is a nonfiction manifesto, a rallying call in which she encourages everyone to create and make and, perhaps most important, disseminate videogames. It’s also a work of critical theory, all while moonlighting as a DIY how-to handbook. At times it becomes an autobiography.

It is unquantifiable.

What is this book, even?

And what’s a “zine,” anyway?

You’re right to wonder. Here, let me explain.

“Zines” were those little photocopied works of indie literature I wasn’t allowed to read when I was a teenaged girl.

I’d look up their titles in a magazine called Factsheet Five and choose the ones that most appealed to – or more likely, appalled – my polite Southern Baptist sensibilities. Then I’d send a handwritten letter and a couple of bucks to each fanzine’s author. Zines began arriving in the mail, and the whole thing was magical. My favorite was Artaud-Mania, an entire collated Xerox of hiss and spit, all stapled together, written by a college art student called Johanna Fateman.

These were no monetary transactions; they were social ones. The world, I soon discovered, is so small.

I got away with reading them, for a while.

Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, Chapter One.

Anthropy’s real mission is only this: a more perfect world, one in which everyone can build a videogame. Maybe these games will be unedited and jejune and a little bit broken, as zines themselves often are, but that’s supposed to be the allure. The games will be authentic, these experiential snapshots, the works of diarists instead of artists and computer programmers.

Maybe an alienated teen in south-coastal Texas could finally discover something to which she can relate – or better yet, she might find something to which she cannot relate at all. Maybe she will eventually make a videogame of her own.

Ought a videogame become the equivalent of a Livejournal entry? Can we really all be memoirists?

Or! What if videogames together comprised a continuous, gapless fabric that documents the sum of human experience? The idea itself is poetry.

Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, Chapter Two.

Suppose it were ridiculously easy to make a game, using an accessible human grammar instead of impenetrable, gnostic programming languages. Suppose it were hilariously easy to distribute those games.

Wouldn’t you want to?

Miss Anthropy is correct when she asserts the technological barrier of entry to gamemaking is so much lower than it once was. Case in point: I’m currently typing to you from a Wal-Mart laptop that cost under $300. I am in a position to become a guerilla filmmaker or self-published novelist if I want to, and in kind, I could make an object-based text adventure from right here in the local coffee shop.

Incidentally, that’s where I’m sitting now. I am struggling, in broad daylight and in public, to review Anthropy’s book. People keep walking past, picking up the book without asking, frowning at it and setting it back down.

“It’s pretty good,” I manage. I am extremely nervous when I say this. I don’t know why.

Read the rest of this fantastic review of Anna Anthropy’s Rise of the Videogame Zinesters at the Unwinnable website.

Wojciech Jagielski, author of the recently released The Night Wanderers about child soldiers in Uganda, will be at Busboys and Poets (5th & K location) from 6:30-8pm on Monday, May 7th.

This event is cosponsored by the Polish Cultural Institute. Book available for purchase on-site at the Global Exchange store. Free and open to all!

Busboys and Poets is located at:

Click here to learn more!

Wojciech Jagielski, author of The Night Wanderers about child soldiers in Uganda, will be on a panel discussing the rights of children with moderator Janne Teller on May 5, 2012 from 5:30–7 pm.

The event is free and open to the public, and is made possible by The Cooper Union, PEN Children’s Book Committee, and Polish Cultural Institute.

The event will be held at:

Cooper Union, Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, 41 Cooper Sq., New York City

Click here for more information.

Wojciech Jagielski, author of The Night Wanderers, will be giving a reading as a featured author, along with Giannina Braschi, Etgar Keret, Colson Whitehead, and many others on Friday, May 4 from 6:30-9:00pm. Readings from 7-9:00pm.

Co-Sponsored by Austrian Cultural Forum, Deutsches Haus at NYU, Consulate General of Denmark in New York, Graywolf Press, Institut Ramon Llull, Instituto Cervantes New York, Instituto Cultural de México en Nueva York, Office of Cultural Affairs, Consulate General of Israel, Polish Cultural Institute, Pro Helvetia, Royal Danish Consulate, Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, Royal Norwegian Consulate General, Spain Culture New York, and Westbeth Artists Residents Council; all proceeds benefit Westbeth Artists Residents Council.

The event will be held at:

Westbeth Center for the Arts, Westbeth Gallery, 57 Bethune or 155 Bank, New York City

Click here for more information.

A History of Marriage discusses just about all notions of marriage and is a general description of many traditions and aspects of marriage. Among the topics discussed are race and marriage, marriage and money, child care, divorce, gay marriage and divorce, incest, polygamy, monogamy, social class, bridal endowments and laws and policies that control and influence marriage. It also discusses sex in marriage, contraception, abortion, men and marriage, women and marriage, sexual abuse, violence, and childhood.

A common theme throughout the book is the inequality of marriage between men and women. The historical perspective clearly communicates this idea. Throughout history marriage has been a measure of individual success and appeal. Men and women, but especially so women, who did not marry were largely considered abnormal. Many men and women married at a young age, often dependent on parental consent and bridal endowments. Expectations of what it meant to be a man/husband and a woman/wife were heavily enforced and different roles for women and men were expected and rarely questioned. Women were to be the “angel in the house”, soft, caring and motherly. Men, on the other hand, were to engage in work outside the home in order to provide for the family.

The unequal nature of marriage did not only mean that women had fewer rights in general but it also had dangerous consequences for women. Spousal abuse, marital rape and constant pregnancies were not uncommon and often even encouraged as men controlled women’s sexuality and were expected to correct inappropriate behavior through physical corrections. Thereby, violence in the home was allowed, even encouraged, as long as it did not escalate as to cripple or seriously injure the woman.     

There are many different notions and aspects concerning marriage discussed in this book, together with historical ideas and ideals that reflected the state of marriage. Therefore, it is not possible to describe them all in this review. Instead, I will mention that there are many positive aspects of this book and Abbott is thorough in covering marriage as a whole. Abbott also incorporates gender, race, sexual orientation and social class into her discussion which provides different perspectives and acknowledges the fact that marriage has been, and still in many ways is, different depending on these above factors. Abbott is not afraid of spelling out inequalities concerning marriage and how these have affected women in general, women of color, men of color, individuals with disabilities, and women’s health, rights and choices. Abbott often mentions the notion of white privilege and white supremacy in reflection to marriage, especially during the time of slavery in America.

On the downside, since Abbott does cover so much ground in regards to the tradition of marriage, the book does not provide a whole lot of detail. It is instead more of a snapshot or an introduction to different aspects of marriage. Understandably, it is impossible to discuss such a historical approach in detail. However, a person that might want more in depth information might have to seek this information else where. Despite this, Abbott manages to keep the readers interest throughout the full 400 pages of information.

This book is most certainly of use to individuals interested in practices, traditions and policies concerning marriage. A History of Marriage would be of special interest to individuals concerned with women’s and men’s roles, societal expectations and assumptions concerning gender and gender roles. This book provides a vast amount of information and is easy to read.

Read the entire review on Metapsychology.com.

Wojciech Jagielski, author of The Night Wanderers, will discuss his journalism career with Joel Whitney, one of the founding editors of Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics on Wednesday, May 2 from 7-8:30pm.

The event is cosponsored by the Brooklyn Public Library and Polish Cultural Institute

The discussion will be held at:

Brooklyn Public Library
Dweck Center at Central Library
10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn

Click here for more information

In this new book, Italian journalist and historian Paola Caridi sets herself an ambitious goal. She seeks to get under the skin of the most notorious of the offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood: Palestine’s Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, in an effort to explain why it came to be choice of the majority of Palestinians in the elections of 2006, as well as the impasse that led to the split between Gaza Strip under Hamas and the West Bank under Fatah.

In doing so, she methodically traces all the major milestones in the life of the movement, including an interesting genealogy of the movement: its birth, the different currents of Islamist activists in it, and how the First Intifada and internecine Palestinian politics catalyzed its creation in 1987. Caridi describes the creation of a refugee society in the Gaza Strip, Hamas’ traditional stronghold, the incubating role played by the Palestinian universities (and some others elsewhere in the Arab world) after 1967, and the conflict amongst the students who would become future leaders.

Later, Hamas begins to take shape in the social service network run by the Muslim Brotherhood amongst the Palestinian refugees. Eventually, a younger generation of activists forced their elders to accept the creation of a militant resistance movement, Hamas, amidst the violence of the first intifada and the corresponding tumult in Palestinian politics.

The central focus, however, is the evolution of the movement as it moves steadily into mainstream Palestinian politics and begins to contest elections.  Caridi gives an exhaustive account of the political debates and maneuverings behind the scenes, as the different currents of thought and activism within the movement work out their differences, strategize, and react to events shaping the Israel-Palestinian conflict.  She also offers the reader a valuable insight into the movement’s decision-making structures and the interplay between its different constituencies.

The flaws of this work are the flipside of its strengths: Caridi’s narrow focus on the internal affairs and evolution of Hamas mean that the wider context is sometimes obscured. In particular, the West Bank is given comparatively short shrift, thanks to Gaza’s role as Hamas’ spiritual and political home.

If the book has an overarching theme—aside from tracing the trajectory of Hamas’ movement from violence towards politics, and indeed government—it is to illuminate the ‘true’ nature of the organization as a complex and nuanced example of the phenomenon of Islamic political movements. In particular, Caridi shines a spotlight on several developments that undercut the stereotypical view of Hamas as an organization composed of fanatical religious extremists dedicated exclusively to destroying Israel.

In particular, she describes the decision to use suicide bombings after the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre of 1994 and subsequent decisions to suspend them when they were judged to be counterproductive, as part of truces with Israel and Fatah. She also details Hamas’ willingness to extend an implicit recognition of the Jewish state and the acceptance of a ‘two state’ solution.  Ultimately, Caridi reaches a simple conclusion, but one made much more convincing by her methodical and comprehensive study of the organization and its recent history: Hamas is “a movement that has used terrorism, but that cannot be thought of simply as a terrorist organization.”

The picture that emerges is of an organization that is simultaneously ruthless and careful, pragmatic and calculating, despite its roots in the Islamic revival in the Arab world that began in the late 1960s and its original intention to restore Palestinian statehood by reforming the moral and spiritual character of its people. Both its decision to adopt the tactics of terrorism (unlike virtually all other movements descended from the Muslim Brotherhood, as a Hamas leader tells Caridi at one point), as well as its decision to become a player in Palestinian politics, are therefore the products of careful calculation and deliberation amongst its members and leaders.

Ultimately, the conclusions Caridi draws about the future of Hamas are pessimistic ones. Like its rivals in Fatah, she argues, Hamas has failed to come up with a formula for sharing power, with both parties abetted in this by Western governments. The movement also faces a choice between moving further towards mainstream, peaceful, politics and continuing armed struggle; she argues that given the international isolation faced by Gaza after the Palestinians elected Hamas in 2006, the latter is more likely.

Admittedly, Caridi does not offer a way forwards that may help resolve the tensions that have grown up between the different Palestinian factions, but this is not her goal. Overall, this is a valuable work that sheds light on an important player in Palestinian politics, and provides a sober and judicious account of a movement that is all too often misunderstood.

If horror is your genre, environmental writer Brita Belli’s The Autism Puzzle, is the book for you. Her terrifying look at the chemicals we eat, drink and breathe is guaranteed to make your hair stand on end.

We should thank her for it.

Statistics released earlier this spring by the Centers for Disease Control revealed that one in 88 U.S. born toddlers has an autism spectral disorder—from the less severe Asperger’s Syndrome to the so-called classical form of the ailment. Worse, it’s not just a North American phenomenon; Belli also reports a 57 percent spike in Asia and Europe.

The question is why. Perhaps, some posit, medical professionals have simply become better diagnosticians and people previously labeled eccentric or developmentally disabled were in fact, autistic. Or, perhaps there’s a genetic culprit since ASD typically runs in families. Belli gives credence to both theories, but ultimately concludes that there is more to the puzzle. “If the rise in autism numbers were only due to improved diagnosis and awareness of autism among the medical community—or if the roots of the epidemic were primarily genetic—professionals would have seen an increase in adult or adolescent patients who had not been diagnosed or who had been misdiagnosed in the past,” she writes.

But they haven’t. This realization piqued Belli’s curiosity and her investigation into the relationship between environmental poisons and human health is riveting. “The idea that a toxin can cause autism is neither controversial nor speculative,” she begins. In fact, thalidomide, a medication used in the 1960s to control morning sickness in pregnant women, was tied to autism almost 20 years ago. Likewise valproic acid, used to treat bipolar disorder, misoprostol, an ulcer drug, and chlorpyrifos, an insecticide.

And that’s just the tip of the chemical iceberg. “Many other chemicals distributed far and wide across the natural world by power plant smokestacks, leaking waste sites, improper storage facilities, and outdated manufacturing processes have been proven to cause injury to developing brains,” Belli continues. More specifically, mercury, lead and polychlorinated biphenyls—also known as PCBs—along with the chemicals used to make insulation, flame retardants, electronic equipment, and plastic pose known health risks to fetal life and newborns.

Belli cites recent studies by the Environmental Working Group that discovered an average of 200 pollutants in the umbilical cord blood of infants. Among them: pesticides, perflourinated compounds, antibiotics, and polybrominated diphenyl ethers.

Belli is particularly interested in “autism clusters,” geographic areas with higher than average rates of the disorder. One such place is Brick Township, New Jersey, where 63 million gallons of septic waste were dumped into a nearby landfill between 1969 and 1979. By the time the community learned that heavy metals and volatile organic compounds had leaked from storage containers, it was too late–soil and groundwater had already become contaminated by bromoform, chloroform and chloroethylene.

Researcher Carol Reinisch tested the impact of each of these substances on clam embryos—a precursor to human trials—and found that the “chemical cocktail”–the combined impact of the three substances acting together–was far more destructive to the body than each of the chemicals acting alone. Reinisch’s research, Belli writes, “made a solid case for the fact that toxins in combination can have a unique impact on the way brains develop. It is likely not one bodily insult that’s driving up [autism] cases, but a number of contaminants and exposures acting in concert.”

That there are approximately 1,300 Superfund sites on the National Priorities List—200 of them in New Jersey, the state with the highest autism rates—should both give us pause and make us furious since we know who is responsible for fouling the air, water and soil—unscrupulous businesses. In fact, Belli reports that the corporations responsible for the lion’s share of pollution often avoid taking responsibility for their misdeeds, sometimes declaring bankruptcy to avoid paying necessary cleanup costs, at other times disappearing altogether. Many companies simply continue polluting without consequence.

Take Fairfax County, Virginia. “The EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory for the country notes that BP Products North America releases 2822 pounds of toxins per year,” Belli writes. Joining BP are the Newington Concrete Plant (171 pounds); the Sipca Securink Corporation, which makes security inks for bank notes (250 pounds); the Virginia Concrete Edsall Road Plant (154 pounds) and several petroleum and concrete operations for which pollution data were unavailable.

Unfortunately, Fairfax County is not an anomaly. In fact, Belli presents a startling statistic: 25 percent of us live within four miles of a hazardous waste site.

Are you scared yet? Me too.

Belli offers readers a few common sense—albeit limited—suggestions: Eat fresh fruit and vegetables or choose frozen over canned; avoid washing plastic in the dish washer or putting it in the microwave because chemicals like biphenyl A (BPA) can leach and contaminate food; use a French-press coffeemaker instead of one with phthalate-containing tubing; avoid Teflon, Gore-Tex and stain, grease and water-resistant materials; and steer clear of cosmetics containing triclosan, formaldehyde, toluene, dibutyl phthalate, and lead. She also suggests cleaning with white vinegar and baking soda rather than harsh chemical cleansers.

Regardless of where scientific research goes in the next few years in its conclusions on the environmental connections to autism, we are undoubtedly in an environmental crisis.

And that current environmental crisis will take more than individual action, which is why Belli believes the government needs to enforce and strengthen environmental protections. The Toxic Substances Control Act was first passed in 1976 and has remained essentially unchanged—that is, toothless–for 36 years. When the Act passed Congress it grandfathered in 62,000 chemicals, in essence giving a free pass to known toxins such as trichloroethylene and BPA. To remedy this, Senator Frank Lautenberg has introduced the Safe Chemicals Act (S. 847), which would, for the first time, require industry to provide information on the health and safety of chemicals in order for them to be introduced or remain on the market. It would further allow the EPA to take immediate action on hazardous chemicals including lead, mercury and flame retardants.

Whether passage would roll back autism levels to what they were 20 or 30 years ago is impossible to know. What is certain is this: The number of autism diagnoses is spiraling and is cause for immediate concern and immediate action. One child in 88 will soon be one adult in 88. And then?

Slavoj Žižek, everyone’s favorite Slovenian cultural theorist and philosopher, is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Ljubljana, as well as an international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London. He has described himself as a Hegelian philosopher, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, a Christian atheist, and a Communist political activist, which he sees as four parts of the same cause. His books include First as Tragedy, Then as Farce; Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle; In Defense of Lost Causes; Living in the End Times; Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism; and God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse (co-authored with Boris Gunjevic). Žižek has appeared LIVE from the NYPL three times before: to debate Bernard Henry Lévy, deliver a presentation on “Hollywood as an Ideological Machine,” and lecture on the topic of “God Without the Sacred.” He has been the subject of several documentaries, including The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, perhaps the only film to analyze both The Matrix and Freudian penis envy.

There is an admission charge for this event: $25 General Admission, $15 FRIENDS, Seniors and Students with valid ID.

What to do in the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street movement, when the protests that started far away – in the Middle East, Greece, Spain, UK – reached the centre, and are now reinforced and rolling out all around the world?

In a San Francisco echo of the OWS movement on 16 October 2011, a guy addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate in it as if it were a happening in the hippy style of the 1960s:

“They are asking us what is our program. We have no program. We are here to have a good time.”

Such statements display one of the great dangers the protesters are facing: the danger that they will fall in love with themselves, with the nice time they are having in the “occupied” places. Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called “class struggle essentialism” for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist etc struggles, “capitalism” is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem.

The first two things one should prohibit are therefore the critique of corruption and the critique of financial capitalism. First, let us not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is neither Main Street nor Wall Street, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street. Public figures from the pope downward bombard us with injunctions to fight the culture of excessive greed and consummation – this disgusting spectacle of cheap moralization is an ideological operation, if there ever was one: the compulsion (to expand) inscribed into the system itself is translated into personal sin, into a private psychological propensity, or, as one of the theologians close to the pope put it:

“The present crisis is not crisis of capitalism but the crisis of morality.”

Let us recall the famous joke from Ernst Lubitch’s Ninotchka: the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream; the waiter replies:

“Sorry, but we have run out of cream, we only have milk. Can I bring you coffee without milk?”

Was not a similar trick at work in the dissolution of the eastern european Communist regimes in 1990? The people who protested wanted freedom and democracy without corruption and exploitation, and what they got was freedom and democracy without solidarity and justice. Likewise, the Catholic theologian close to pope is carefully emphasizing that the protesters should target moral injustice, greed, consumerism etc, without capitalism. The self-propelling circulation of Capital remains more than ever the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by definition cannot be controlled.

One should avoid the temptation of the narcissism of the lost cause, of admiring the sublime beauty of uprisings doomed to fail. What new positive order should replace the old one the day after, when the sublime enthusiasm of the uprising is over? It is at this crucial point that we encounter the fatal weakness of the protests: they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a minimal positive program of socio-political change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution.

Reacting to the Paris protests of 1968, Lacan said:

“What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one.”

It seems that Lacan’s remark found its target (not only) in the indignados of Spain. Insofar as their protest remains at the level of a hysterical provocation of the master, without a positive program for the new order to replace the old one, it effectively functions as a call for a new master, albeit disavowed.

We got the first glimpse of this new master in Greece and Italy, and Spain will probably follow. As if ironically answering the lack of expert programs of the protesters, the trend is now to replace politicians in the government with a “neutral” government of depoliticized technocrats (mostly bankers, as in Greece and Italy). Colorful “politicians” are out, grey experts are in. This trend is clearly moving towards a permanent emergency state and the suspension of political democracy.

So we should see in this development also a challenge: it is not enough to reject the depoliticized expert rule as the most ruthless form of ideology; one should also begin to think seriously about what to propose instead of the predominant economic organization, to imagine and experiment with alternate forms of organization, to search for the germs of the New. Communism is not just or predominantly the carnival of the mass protest when the system is brought to a halt; Communism is also, above all, a new form of organization, discipline, hard work.

The protesters should beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support them, but are already working hard to dilute the protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make the protests into a harmless moralistic gesture. In boxing, to “clinch” means to hold the opponent’s body with one or both arms in order to prevent or hinder punches. Bill Clinton’s reaction to the Wall Street protests is a perfect case of political clinching; Clinton thinks that the protests are “on balance … a positive thing”, but he is worried about the nebulousness of the cause. Clinton suggested the protesters get behind President Obama’s jobs plan, which he claimed would create “a couple million jobs in the next year and a half”. What one should resist at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of the energy of the protest into a set of “concrete” pragmatic demands. Yes, the protests did create a vacuum – a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to fill this vacuum in in a proper way, since it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly New. The reason protesters went out is that they had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the third world troubles is enough to make them feel good.

Economic globalization is gradually but inexorably undermining the legitimacy of western democracies. Due to their international character, large economic processes cannot be controlled by democratic mechanisms which are, by definition, limited to nation states. In this way, people more and more experience institutional democratic forms as unable to capture their vital interests.

It is here that Marx’s key insight remains valid, today perhaps more than ever: for Marx, the question of freedom should not be located primarily into the political sphere proper. The key to actual freedom rather resides in the “apolitical” network of social relations, from the market to the family, where the change needed if we want an actual improvement is not a political reform, but a change in the “apolitical” social relations of production. We do not vote about who owns what, about relations in a factory, etc – all this is left to processes outside the sphere of the political. It is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things by “extending” democracy into this sphere, say, by organizing “democratic” banks under people’s control. In such “democratic” procedures (which, of course, can have a positive role to play), no matter how radical our anti-capitalism is, the solution is sought in applying the democratic mechanisms – which, one should never forget, are part of the state apparatuses of the “bourgeois” state that guarantees undisturbed functioning of the capitalist reproduction.

The emergence of an international protest movement without a coherent program is therefore not an accident: it reflects a deeper crisis, one without an obvious solution. The situation is like that of psychoanalysis, where the patient knows the answer (his symptoms are such answers) but doesn’t know to what they are answers, and the analyst has to formulate a question. Only through such a patient work a program will emerge.

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia. Aaware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends:

“Let’s establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.”

After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink:

“Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the west, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair – the only thing unavailable is red ink.”

And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants – the only thing missing is the “red ink”: we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict – “war on terror”, “democracy and freedom”, “human rights”, etc – are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it.

Slavoj Zizek and Boris Gunjevic–co-authors of the forthcoming God in Pain–are going to be coming your way at the LA Public Library on April 24, from 7-9pm. They will be in conversation with Jack Miles, Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies, U.C. Irvine.

For more information, click here.

The event will be held at:

Central Library
630 W. 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071
(213) 228-7000

Slavoj Zizek, author of the upcoming God in Pain, will be talking about this new book with Roy Eisenhardt on April 23 at 8pm at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco. The event is being run by City Arts & Lectures, and you can click here to learn more or buy tickets (cost is $22-$27).

The Palace of Fine Arts Theater is located at: 3301 Lyon Street San Francisco, CA 94123

Click here to learn more and donate to their Kickstarter campaign. Donations close on April 23rd, and they need to reach their goal of $8000 to receive any money at all.

And check out their informational video to learn about the project.

Greg Sumner, author of the truly fantastic Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels, will be giving a discussion of his book at the Baldwin Public Library in the Rotary Tribute and Donor Rooms on April 11 at 7:00pm. Make sure to come and check out his analysis on how Vonnegut’s life affected his world-renowned ouevre!

Click here to learn more!

Baldwin Public Library is located at:

300 W Merrill Street

Birmingham, MI 48009

248.647.1700

On the five-year anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut’s passing, Housing Works is holding a celebration of Vonnegut’s life and works. Come on at 7pm on April 11th to a truly special event, where Lee Stringer and others will be giving readings.

Hosted by Brendan Jay Sullivan (author of Texts, Drugs & Rocknroll, forthcoming from Harper Perennial) and featuring readings by:

• Joe Garden (The Onion)
• David Goodwillie (American Subversive)
• Dave Hill (Comedian, Author of Tasteful Nudes: and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation)
• Cat Marnell (XOJane.com)
• Songs inspired by Vonnegut from the Bushwick Book Club
• PLUS More Special Guests TBA!

And a special silent auction including a watercolor donated by Mark Vonnegut.

Click here to learn more.

This event will take place at the Housing Works Cafe:

126 Crosby Street New York, NY 10012

Philosopher and author of God in Pain, Slavoj Zizek will be at Labyrinth Books in Princeton, NJ on Tuesday April 10 at 6pm.

Click here for more info

Ken Roth, executive director of the Human Rights Watch, will be speaking at a breakfast event for World Report 2012 at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

The event is on Tuesday, April 10 from 8-9:15am. For more information, click here.

April 5, 2012

Rise of the Videogame Zinesters author Anna Anthropy will be at Dorkbot Chicago on Thursday, April 5 from 7-10pm

Click here for more info

Why You Should Read ‘Rise of the Videogame Zinesters’

By Chris Priestman

Anna Anthropy’s new book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, has undoubtedly touched many people since its release just a few weeks ago. It’s a seminal book and one that offers a peek into the future of video games if those who read it were to act in the present, right now, and make their own game. While I see the book as one that takes an important and critical look at the video game industry, it seems more valuable as a source of inspiration and motivation to encourage a more explored culture within the medium.

While I have become more and more interested in indie games myself over the years, upon reading Rise of the Videogame Zinesters I am reminded why it is that I have turned away from what I refer to as the commercial gaming industry and sought warmth within this friendly bustle of ideas and creation. It’s surprising actually, that it has taken this long for such an important artefact to arrive; one that exposes the gaming industry for the commercial bubble it has so comfortably become and incites a change through a more democratic form of game development. Yet, saying that, the book is very much relevant to the present, adequately placing words atop the shift in power in the gaming industry brought about by digital technologies and internet culture.

The essence of the book is well surmised with the following quote:

“I like the idea of games as zines: as transmissions of ideas and culture from person to person, as personal artifacts instead of impersonal creations by teams of forty-five artists and fifteen programmers, in the case of Gears of War 2.”

It is sentences like this that incite within you, even in the first few pages, a desire to start making your own games. Why haven’t you already?! Halfway through the first chapter I had already bought Game Maker with the intent of making my own game – it didn’t matter if no one would play the game, only that I was able to ‘voice’ myself through a game that I had made. The significance of this, as Anna rightly points out, is that the present technology allows for anyone to make their own game, even distribute it. That in itself is a significant breakthrough of recent years – to allow just about anyone to make a game with no knowledge of programming or coding, art skills or a sense of game design. The tools are out there and there are free ones too, neither do you need schooling to use them or to make ‘good’ games – they just need to be your games and your education will come through experimentation.

My education comes from Film Studies so forgive me while I step back into that information hole drilled into my brain. This technological revelation reminds me so much of the similar breakthrough caused by mobile cameras early in the last century. There was no need for a huge film studio, a camera crew or anything so extravagent for someone to record something of their own creation. Nowadays we have YouTube which really hones that freedom through technology by allowing anyone to distribute their recording to an audience.

In the video game industry the same thing has happened in that for a game to be made and distributed, you no longer require any of that knowledge or the piles of money that would mean only a privileged few could develop games. It’s a remarkable thing really and the fact that anyone can make a game now (provided they have a computer of course) really is the essence of indie games – those things that cause me so much pleasure.

Indie games cater to diversity, subversion and allow for personal creations to exist. It is the process of how we got to this stage today that Anna carves out so effectively and in a way that enthuses you to contribute to human culture by adding your own piece of you. We live in a reality in which a publisher is not a necessity for a game to be made, nor any other controlling or restrictive body and it is this that we are starting to slowly realise. Look at the rise of crowdfunding for instance – games are being made by the creative people and without the need to obey a master, so to speak.

Like Anna says though, this is not where the true excitement of gaming in 2012 lies – it is with the hobbyist developers who do not ask anyone of anything in order to make their game, they just do so. While this process is bound to create many mediocre titles, it is their existence which is important, the fact that they have made a game. Occasionally though, we do get works such as Anna’s very own Dys4ia. This is a game that outlines a very personal tale and does so in a very creative and interesting way. You should play it, everyone should play it but that doesn’t mean they have to like it. It’s good if they don’t in fact, that’s what makes the world go around – people having their own tastes, views and creations and sharing all of this with each other.

So let’s bring this back around for a moment – why should you read Rise of the Videogame Zinesters? Quite simply because I and many other people want to play your game or experience that you have created. The book is a great motivator for that very reason and a great teacher as to how you may want to go about making a game that is your own. Let yourself be heard through game development and in doing so you’ll be contributing to the whole medium, helping it advance in a way that those huge commercial games never will, nor will its masters understand. Really, you’re left with two choices, go and make a game right now or read Rise of the Videogame Zinesters and then make a game. Either is preferable, but I consider Anna’s book a great gateway into the world of indie development and how you can so easily become a part of it.

You can purchase Rise of the Videogame Zinesters from a number of places but for convenience, here is a link to Seven Stories Press.

Don’t Start Making a Band: Why everyone should be making video games

By Joshua Kopstein

Hunger Hits Home will have its first airing on April 14 at 8pm, and it looks at childhood hunger in the United States. Click here to learn more.

About All You Can Eat:

With the biting wit of Supersize Me and the passion of a lifelong activist, Joel Berg has his eye on the growing number of people who are forced to wait on lines at food pantries across the nation—the modern breadline. All You Can Eat reveals that hunger is a problem as American as apple pie, and shows what it is like when your income is not enough to cover rising housing and living costs and put food on the table.

Berg takes to task politicians who remain inactive; the media, which ignores hunger except during holidays and hurricanes; and the food industry, which makes fattening, artery-clogging fast food more accessible to the nation’s poor than healthy fare. He challenges the new president to confront the most unthinkable result of US poverty—hunger—and offers a simple and affordable plan to end it for good.

A spirited call to action, All You Can Eat shows how practical solutions for hungry Americans will ultimately benefit America’s economy and all of its citizens.

JOEL BERG is Executive Director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger (NYCCAH). He served for eight years under the Clinton Administration in Senior Executive Service positions in the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), creating a number of high-profile initiatives that fought hunger and implemented national service projects across the country.

Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth

Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin is on many must-read lists for most pregnant women.  This book is a comprehensive guide to both natural childbirth, and also the interventions to expect during a hospital style childbirth.  This book is based on the female centric midwife style of care, and seeks to use history to educate the reader about the history of natural childbirth, and how this model can be healthy and useful for women today.

The first section of the book is filled with birth stories.  They go on for pages, and pages demonstrating the uniqueness of each woman’s experience bringing her baby into the world.  As an expecting parent I enjoyed reading this batch of positive birth stories.  I was inspired by the emotions, and informed by the details which added to my knowledge base about birthing naturally.

The pain in childbirth is not denied, but it is portrayed as a productive pain along with the techniques that have been used throughout history and in the modern age to cope with the pain, and produce a positive end result.  By taking the fear out of childbirth it becomes possible for women to give birth naturally without unnecessary medical interventions.

The book does not only focus on natural childbirth techniques.  It also has a detailed chapter on what kinds of interventions to expect in a hospital.  The descriptions are thorough, and brought up some side effects that I was not yet aware of even though I have been researching natural childbirth for some time now.  For me it is important to know a slice of everything involved in both the natural and hospital realm so I can be prepared for any unexpected events that may ensue.

The book provides information for achieving a natural childbirth in a home, birth center or hospital setting.  The description of what really happens during labor, and tips for maximizing chances of a natural child birth were of particualar interest to me.  Other topics include orgasmic birth, episiotomy, methods of inducing labor (the safe, and not so safe!), postpartum care, and how to work with your doctor to achieve the birth experience you desire.

A practical book, but also an enjoyable read, I agree that this book should be a must-read for expecting parents.

Women’s Rights, a Revolution Worth Completing

By Helen Alves

The aftermath of an Arab Spring was initially a time of joy for the role many women played during those days of revolution. However, from West to East, there is still much to be accomplished. The Unfinished Revolution speaks of an enduring global fight for Women’s rights.

From the Human Rights Watch (HRW) book series, The Unfinished Revolution presents us with the views of a collection of women who deal with women’s issues across the globe. They talk of their experiences through the opinions, ideas and stories of the struggle of women and young girls. Some of them are journalists – the foreword is by Correspondent Christianne Amanpour from ABC News – but most of them are current or former Human Rights workers, longtime activists and advocates committed to women’s causes.

“Women’s rights are human rights” became a powerful and recognized slogan. These are the words of Charlotte Bunch, an advocate and leader in United Nations (UN) conferences speaking up for women. This was a landmark in the fight for women’s rights, or a “revolution in thinking” as the book states. The book takes the reader through the entire concept of Human Rights, focusing on the role of Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the first UN Commission on the status of women and who was a key element in establishing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Eleanor Roosevelt had a special role but she was part of a global movement that fought and still fights to make a better world for other women. The problems are still there, challenging the global society. From domestic violence in Europe to female genital mutilation (FGM) in Iraq, women continue to pursue equality and independence in the social, political and cultural arena.

“Arab Spring, a Women’s Winter?”

“Will the women who supported and participated in the 2011 revolutions be pushed aside by military, Islamists, or other leaders, or will they be allowed to take part in governing, in the judiciary, and in making autonomous decisions about their own lives?”

The book raises many questions about whether a revolution by itself is a guarantee of freedom. In the introduction, Minky Worden speaks about revolutions and rights. It should be an obvious part of the equation, but sometimes it is not that simple.

The second part of the book, Revolutions and Transitions, focuses on how some revolutions did not mean equal rights for man and women – from the Iranian revolution, to recent years in Iraq and the recent revolution in Egypt, as well as the ongoing struggle of Saudi Women.

“These revolutions alone will not be enough to secure rights for women and might even lead to the weakening of key rights protections.”

Violence against women is one of the main topics covered in the book. Across cultures, countries and continents, violence affects women and girls through its many forms. It may be rape used as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo during armed conflict, or Female Genital mutilation (FGM) in Iraq and Egypt – a practice that provokes lasting physical and psychological wounds in girls as young as 6 years-old. A road map for rolling back the practice of FGM is described, focusing on Human Rights Watch’s work with a religious fatwa to fight the practice in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Child marriage in Afghanistan affects ten million girls a year – as many as 100 million girls over the next decade if nothing is done to prevent it. The book shows us how a global coalition – the Elders a group of former heads of state and international rights advocates led by Graça Machel and Mary Robinson and founded by Nelson Mandela – is trying to eradicate this practice. The causes for this enduring practice are social and cultural. Poverty forces families to marry young girls early on, to settle their debts and to protect their honor, forcing them among other things, to give up the right to an education, which in turn compromises their future.

Marrying young can lead to a number of health problems, another issue covered in the book. Furthermore, violence affects women throughout the world and in different ways. Such as, women who are being denied contraception and abortion in Latin America or the ban of burkas and other forms of religious dress in some European countries. According to the author, this represents a clear violation of women’s rights to freedom from discrimination, religious expression and personal autonomy. “Yet many support this ban because they mistakenly believe that such garments always represent a type of forced veiling, even when it is voluntary.”

From East to West, domestic violence is still a serious issue in many European countries. In the western world, the way rape victims are treated in the United States is the big story. Because rape kits go untested and unused within the justice system, the victims’ suffering endures and those guilty are never brought to account for their crime.

The book covers other complex issues such as the trafficking of Asian women and the exploitation of domestic migrant workers. The problems are there and they are as many as diverse, but so are the challenges. As the editor says:

“No measure will be more important than whether the unfinished revolution for women’s rights in the region is permitted to take hold and flower.”

Click here to see a full list of winners!

If anyone knows how dangerous Kony is, it’s Jagielski. In 2009, Jagielski published “The Night Wanderers”, which chronicled the story of Joseph Kony and the child warriors in the Lord’s Resistance Army. Originally available in Poland and Germany, “The Night Wanderers” was published in the United States in February of this year (Seven Stories Press). But it wasn’t until last week, through a 30-minute short viral film entitled, “Kony 2012” that the rest of the world was keyed into what Jagielski knew all along.

The San Diego-based nonprofit Invisible Children uploaded the film to YouTube last Monday. So far the clip has attracted more than 78 million views, many of them because of celebrities who shared the video with their followers via Twitter. Invisible Children accomplished what they set out to do: They made Kony famous.

In an interview with Speakeasy, Jagielski talked about his take on the real issues plaguing Uganda, whether “Kony 2012″ was misguided, and why Kony’s reign of terror never registered on the international radar until well after the damage was done.

Does it frustrate you to see all the attention given to Joseph Kony now, considering you wrote about him three years ago?

Ignorance is the first thing that frustrates me. We are not interested enough and we are not open enough. This is the reason for our problems not only with Africa but Afghanistan, Middle East, with India, maybe with China.

Well, now people are interested in Joseph Kony and Northern Uganda. From what you’ve seen, what are the issues there now?

Northern Uganda, the main issue is poverty. The other problem is how to deal with those guerrillas. The problem with them is, these guerrillas, they are the children. They are children who didn’t join the guerrilla army by their will, they were captured, and forced to be a guerrilla, so what to do with them? Punish them? Reconcile with them? Forgive them? Those are the problems.

And the LRA?

I’m still collecting information about them, different information in regards to Kony, whether they are back in Southern Sudan. If he came to Southern Sudan with his guerrilla army, I doubt maybe they came to start another civil war in Southern Sudan because the government from Sudan always supported Kony to fight Uganda and Southern Sudanese guerillas. But if he had a small guerilla army now, I don’t know how many people follow Kony now but I wouldn’t be surprised if it 100, 200, very small, but he can make this group bigger very quickly.

How so?

He just has to capture children from villages, and he will have 1,000, 2,000 soldiers. But to exist, he needs supporters, people who are in the government, so he needs money to operate. If he gets this money, the army could be bigger and it will be very dangerous. If it’s not big, he has to stay in the bush, and staying in the bush doesn’t mean more than 50, 100 soldiers mostly for his own security. I think he’s somewhere in Southern Sudan, at the border of the Congo. I also heard he was seen from time to time even in Darfur.

One of the reasons people seemed to rally around this cause was the children, and the way Kony allegedly forced them to fight for him and even kill other children. Is that still an issue?

It’s not on the same scale as it used to be but he’s committed other crimes. Two or three years ago he was attacking villages in Congo during Christmas Eve just to punish villagers that they were not helping him enough. So he killed hundreds of people locked in the churches, people who came for the Holy Mass. They were burned alive by Kony, so he’s a very cruel person and for him there is no other choice. He could be guerrilla or he could be dead, there’s no alternative for him.

So given that he still has the ability to kill and terrorize innocent people in and around the places where he’s hiding, wouldn’t you say the attention to him might be good?

It is very difficult to know and it’s a more philosophical question. All the new media, social networking, it’s very good but on the other hand we must remember it’s easy now to start a campaign. It’s easy to make an issue of something, but it’s even easier to compromise this case.

How would it be compromised?

If you start talking about Kony and you demand for the international community to intervene on Uganda. There’s no war in Uganda so there’s no reason to intervene. It was the same thing in Darfur. The campaign started in the west when the conflict in Darfur was almost over, but you had all the celebrities. There are people who you can trust, but Justin Bieber who is now demanding justice for Joseph Kony? For me, it’s not that serious. I don’t know what should be done. It is very good to make people aware but we have to think also if it’s something serious, it should be done seriously, professionally.

Anna Anthropy is a prolific game creator, long a member of the design underground online. Her games often act as personal statements about identity and otherness, rally flags for outsider culture in an industry and an art form that tends to favor its traditions.

She’s also a devoted writer; for years she has written and blogged online (her earlier writings appear under the names “Dessgeega” and “Auntie Pixelante”, for example). Her vocal and opinionated writings often advocate that the game community must acknowledge a wider variety of voices and individual experiences — and when she was approached by Seven Stories Press to write a book, Anthropy reasoned it might be a valuable effort toward that goal.

The result is Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, released a little over a week ago. It’s partly an essay on Anthropy’s view of the games industry and how it developed what she sees as a prohibitive homogeny among creators and players, and partly a manifesto for the idea that anyone and everyone should try making video games as a way to communicate their experiences to the rest of the world, the way independent artists and writers popularized zine-style, homespun publications.

On tour in support of Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, Anthropy has been lecturing and giving readings in New York City. At one Gamasutra-attended reading, she told a small but diverse audience who came to hear her in a SoHo bookstore that her games have been in part a way to show the game community that she exists.

Many of her best-known titles, like Calamity Annie and Mighty Jill Off, intentionally address themes and issues personal to Anthropy that aren’t commonly expressed within video games, like sexuality, gender and the kink community. As a trans woman, Anthropy has encountered ignorance and even hostility throughout her life in video games, which are often perceived to suffer from a predominance of male power fantasies.

Through her games Anthropy has hoped to confront and challenge exclusivity and prejudices, even if it creates confusion or discomfort with people who haven’t been confronted with identity issues. For example, her Mighty Jill Off casts the player as a sexual submissive climbing a ruthless tower to reach her beloved queen.

The persistence and speed required to successfully complete the game have an analogue to the mutual contract inherent in BDSM relationships; one thing Anthropy has said she likes about games is that players feel “topped” by a game challenge, and that “submitting” to play requires trust on the part of players that the game will educate them, create clear expectations without misleading, and be satisfying.

Alongside the release of her book, though, Anthropy has also released a new game, Dys4ia. It’s a series of thick-pixeled minigames in four acts of sorts that aim to communicate the often challenging, emotional process Anthropy has endured since making the decision to begin hormone therapy.

Rather than focus on challenge per se or on complexity, Dys4ia’s different activities, arranged throughout Anthropy’s personal narrative, are illustrative, employing familiar and even simplistic design forms that are intuitive to any player but not necessarily immediately solvable — intuitive but not immediately solvable, perhaps an analogue for Anthropy’s own search for comfort in her body.

It feels like something of a tonal departure from the work for which she’s most commonly known; the sadist queen of game design confiding in players on Newgrounds about the deep vulnerability she has experienced at times during the hormone therapy process, which has physical and emotional side effects.

Having followed Anthropy’s work and writing for some years — full disclosure, I consider her a friend and contributed a jacket quote for Rise of the Videogame Zinesters — I asked her about Dys4ia following her New York reading, and why it feels somewhat different in both tone and approach to things she’s done in the past. I told her it seems like a step back from what even Anthropy herself identifies as “[her] veneer of tough chick.”

“I wanted to make something that could communicate with other women and other trans people who were going through a similar experience,” she tells me. Although it has hardly been an easy road, and some of the challenges may continue indefinitely, Anthropy says that the hormone therapy process becomes easier with time and signs of hope begin to emerge, something she hoped to share with others who might be in a challenging stage of their own process.

Surprisingly, though, there’s been a wider audience for Dys4ia’s simple but poignant experience than Anthropy expected. “I put it on Newgrounds because I thought, ‘here is something people will never encounter otherwise, and will never be aware of,’” she says. “There were so many people [who said], ‘maybe I didn’t get it entirely, but now this makes sense to me; your story really resonated with me.’”

One challenge in Anthropy’s process, as she depicts in the game, involved a physician who declined to support her continuing the hormone therapy until she addressed her high blood pressure; many players of the game even left comments or sent messages in concern about that issue.

“That was super special,” Anthropy said of receiving concern from so many strangers about her health. “It meant that the game connected with them on a deeper level than what I expected.”

There was the anticipated misinterpretation and hostility that one might expect toward someone whose identity falls outside historically-enforced prejudices, but Anthropy is inspired by how many responses indicated that even those who couldn’t relate to her experience respected her honesty about something so personal.

“It was a game about my experience being frustrated and feeling vulnerable, and not being able to have a conversation with my girlfriend without bursting into tears afterwards,” Anthropy says. “And people keep telling me that they cried playing the game, they played the game more than once and cried every time. Absolutely that was the experience that I wanted to create.”

Dys4ia is in some ways stylistically different from Anthropy’s previous work; for example, “I tried to paint with a much broader range of color, because identity comes in a broad range,” she says.

But like much of the work Anthropy herself admires and enjoys, Dys4ia draws on the “established vocabulary” of games: “A lot of scenes look like games that people have played before… the mechanics or the rules are all really familiar ones,” she explains.

“The game is about the experience of having a really clear goal, and having to struggle to meet it, or not really being able to meet it… it’s done by framing these different scenes as variations on things people have already seen,” she adds.

Anthropy has made the decision to share something deeply personal and painful about herself in the hopes of inspiring others — and as a way of living her own philosophy that such profound self-expression is part of games’ calling and purpose. She does this even at the expense of her own privacy, and at the risk of inviting ignorance and even hostility.

But even that’s something to which she’s acclimated: “My hope had been that after going through all this shit [with the hormones], I would eventually reach a place where I was more confident, and comfortable with myself and my body, and I’m getting there,” Anthropy says. “I kind of no longer believe in privacy.”

“I don’t even view it as a sacrifice anymore,” she says, crediting her longtime girlfriend Daphny (vivid character; frenetic Twitterer) with transforming her ideas about privacy. “I feel a lot more liberated now putting everything out there than I would trying to maintain some idea of privacy,” Anthropy says.

“I think it’s better if I live a transparent life. People in the same situation as I am might see me and be like, ‘oh, it does get better. It is okay.’ I want to put it all out there… so that people can see there’s a light ahead,” she adds.

“I’m as connected to my work as I have ever been; my work comes from me as much as it ever has. I cry a little more now. It’s pretty good most of the time.”

Crankocracy in America: Who really benefited from Citizens United?

By Timothy Noah

In 2009, Ralph Nader published a fantasia titled Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!, in which he imagined a group of maverick billionaires banding together to defeat corporate power in America. Declaring themselves “the Meliorists,” these enlightened oligarchs force Walmart to unionize, elect Warren Beatty governor of California, establish single-payer health insurance, raise the minimum wage to a livable salary, and in general breathe life back into liberalism.

In 2012, something like Nader’s utopian scenario has begun to take shape, but with a radically different ideology. Super-rich, hard-right tycoons like Foster Friess (mutual funds), Harold Simmons (chemicals and metals), Bob Perry (home-building), and Sheldon Adelson (casinos) are, through the new vehicle called the super PAC, leveraging their fortunes to seize hold of the political process. Super PACs have made it so easy for millionaires and billionaires to spend unlimited sums on behalf of a particular candidate that these groups are now routinely outspending Republican presidential primary campaigns. Indeed, to a remarkable extent, these oligarch-controlled super PACs are the primary campaign. And, while both parties can create super PACs, so far GOP super PACs are burying their Democratic counterparts. Of the top ten individuals funding super PACs, only one—Jeffrey Katzenberg—is a Democrat.

The very rich funders of Republican super PACs, while hardly unanimous in their views (they support opposing candidates, after all), are reliably anti-Meliorist. Their favored causes tend toward things like repealing health care reform, making abortion illegal, restricting access to contraception, blocking climate change legislation, cutting taxes for the 1 percent, and in general halting America’s moral decay—excepting greed or gambling—and its steady march toward socialism. (Simmons and Adelson have both used the “s” word to describe either President Obama or his policies.)

It’s enough to make you nostalgic for an America in thrall to corporate power. Corporations, after all—the publicly held ones, anyway—must answer to their stockholders. Super-rich crankocrats do not. (Neither do the billionaire altruists inOnly The Super-Rich Can Save Us!, but Nader avoids the issue by assuming his semi-fictional billionaires to be wholly benign.)

A corporate takeover of U.S. politics was precisely what many predicted after the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision inCitizens United. But, although the Roberts court recklessly invited corporations to make so-called “independent expenditures” on behalf of individual candidates, most corporations have been reluctant to do so. The Washington Post reports that less than one-quarter of the money given to super PACs in this election cycle came from corporations, and most of these were private. According to Politico, less than 0.5 percent given to “the most active Super PACs” came from publicly traded corporations.

Instead, it’s rich crackpots who opened the floodgates after a lower-court ruling loosened the rules a bit further. Journalist Brooks Jackson, author of Honest Graft: Big Money and the American Political Process, suggests crankocrats may also have been guided inadvertently to super PACs by the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law’s ban on unlimited “soft-money” contributions to national political parties, which survived Citizens United. “A lot of these cranks previously funneled their money through the RNC and DNC, … which at least had the sense to know that they needed to win majorities,” Jackson e-mailed me. “Now the crank money flows through independent groups instead.” Applying some Occupy-Wall-Street-style math, CNN’s Charles Riley calculates that for 2011–2012 the 100 biggest individual donors to super PACs make up only 3.7 percent of the contributors but supply more than 80 percent of the cash. If you give to a super PAC and don’t own a private jet, paint yourself a sign that reads, “WE ARE THE 96.3 PERCENT!”

Why did corporations mostly shun electioneering? Because openly supporting the election of one person over another (as opposed to the quieter and more predictable business of lobbying) is just the sort of risky activity that corporations like to avoid. In 2010, Target had to apologize after a $150,000 corporate contribution to a pro-business political group prompted protests and a boycott because the group’s favored Minnesota gubernatorial candidate turned out to be anti-gay. After Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) late last year gave $10,000 to a super PAC supporting Democratic representative Howard Berman of California, Berman’s opponent sent out a mailer accusing PG&E of skimping on pipeline maintenance. Not a lot of public corporations have much stomach for this type of conflict.

Unlike Nader’s Meliorists, the crankocrats usually keep a low public profile. When they do speak to the press, they’re at serious risk of creating grief for their candidates. Friess lit up the phones at MSNBC when, asked whether health insurance should be required to cover contraception, he joked: “Back in my day, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.” Simmons recently told The Wall Street Journal, with some regret, “We could have killed Obama” in 2004. Memo to the Secret Service: Simmons meant the candidacy, not the candidate.

To be sure, rich people hadn’t exactly stopped giving large sums to influence politics after post-Watergate election reforms were passed in 1974. They contributed soft money to political parties. After the Supreme Court struck down parts of the 1974 law, they made independent expenditures that followed relatively strict rules about not coordinating with the candidates or political parties. After McCain-Feingold banned soft money, they gave to 527s, which could not advocate openly for a particular candidate. In 2004, the leading 527s bent the rules too far and ended up paying fines. They also gave to 501(c)(4)s, which could promote candidates but only secondarily to promoting “social welfare.” But super PACs eliminated all restrictions on electioneering and, practically speaking, nearly all restrictions on coordinating with campaigns.

Just about the only thing super PACs can’t easily do is organize supporters at the grassroots, because that usually can’t be done without extremely close coordination with the campaign. But the crankocrats likely wouldn’t have patience for that anyway. It’s too social, and you can’t be much of a crank if you have to listen to other people.

Timothy Noah is a Senior Editor at The New Republic. This article appeared in the April 19, 2012 issue of the magazine.

The economy added another 227,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department
reported Friday. That’s good news, sort of. It means that the recovery
is slowly progressing. At this rate, we will be back to pre-recession
employment levels sometime around 2018.

However, this growth in jobs was not enough for wages to keep place with
inflation; nor did the unemployment rate drop, but stayed stuck at 8.3
percent. Why? Because folks who had given up have started entering the
labor force again, but the percentage of people in the labor force is
still two points lower than it was before the recession began. A new
study by the Economic Policy Institute reports that earnings declined
over the past decade even for college graduates — so much for the
education cure.

In short, the recession made a bad problem worse, but the economy on the
eve of the recession was nothing to be proud of. Throughout the first
decade of the new century, before the recession hit, wages lagged behind
living costs for the vast majority of Americans — because those in the
top one percent were capturing such a large share of the economy’s total
productivity gains.

Some of this trend was the result of globalization undercutting the
bargaining power of U.S. workers; some of it resulted from weakened
trade unions and minimum wage laws lagging behind inflation.

Flat or declining wages did not result from declining average
productivity. So when we finally climb out of this jobs recession,
perhaps we can belatedly confront these deeper trends.

I have been writing about the hotel workers union in New York City.

Thanks to an extraordinarily effective union, Local 6 of the hotel and
restaurant workers union, nearly every large hotel in Manhattan is
unionized, and everyone who works in these hotels, from dishwashers to
room cleaners to doormen to banquet waiters earns a middle class wage.
The union recently signed a seven year contract giving workers a 27
percent wage.

Local 6 is an exceptionally effective union, and New York is a unique
tourist destination. But since the vast majority of jobs in America will
soon be service sector jobs, not vulnerable to global competition, there
is no good economic reason why they can’t all be middle class jobs. The
challenge is political. We as a society simply need to decide, as
President Obama famously told “Joe the Plumber,” that we want to “spread
the wealth around” rather than having it concentrate at the very top.
All service jobs could pay a living wage. How to do that? Unions, wage
regulation, progressive taxation, and government using existing powers
over contractors that it seldom exercises.

But what about manufacturing? This brings me to the other Jobs of my
title, the late Steve Jobs.

The New York Times, in a two part series earlier this year on Apple’s
Chinese contractor, Foxconn, finally made front page news and added some
telling detail to what was already fairly well known. The cool,
must-have iPads, iPhones, and iPods to which we are increasingly
addicted are manufactured with brutal sweatshop labor in Shenzhen,
China, where 230,000 employees are making an average of less than $2 an
hour work in a single factory complex. Foxconn’s dormitories now have
nets outside to prevent suicides.

I recently saw a one-man show, Mike Daisey’s amazing “The Agony and the
Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” in which Daisey, a spellbinding monologue
artist, recounts his own conversations with the workers of Foxconn in
Shenzhen.

Daisey was on to Foxconn long before the Times. If you get a chance to
see this show, which runs for one more week at New York’s Public Theater
and which will be on tour in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere later this
year, don’t miss it. Two weeks ago, Daisey made the stunning decision to
put his script in the public domain, so that other performances could go
viral.

Daisey wonders out loud: what if everyone who buys these products began
upping the pressure on Apple to do right by its workers?

I would add: What if Apple made a decision to bring this work home, and
to pay decent wages for it, say $20 an hour. Right now, this is
literally impossible, because the production facilities to make such
products no longer exist in the United States. But the Pentagon has
insisted that America hang on to production capacity for certain other
sensitive micro-electronics products. And if hostilities escalated
between the U.S. and Beijing, you can bet that we would see a crash
program to restore more micro-electronics output at home.

Apple earns about $600,000 per year per employee. It can well afford to
share a little more of that with its workers.

The New York Times calculated that it would add only about $65 to the
cost of an iPad or iPhone to produce it at home at good wages. And over
time, it would tend to cost less, since higher-paid workers lead the
company to redouble its investment in automation.

Apple can certainly afford this transition. It is now the richest
company in the world, sitting on a pile of nearly a hundred billion
dollars in cash. If Apple led, it would become bad form for America’s
other prestigious companies to manufacture for U.S. markets in foreign
sweatshops.

Ralph Nader recently published the most improbable of books, a novel
titled Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us. Nader, looking at the grotesque
economic and political power imbalance in the U.S., imagined that a
cabal of billionaires led by Warren Buffet and Ted Turner have an
outbreak of conscience and become crusaders for progressive reform. It’s
Nader’s way of both laying out a reform agenda and spotlighting where
the real power lies.

It’s a lovely fantasy, but it’s not going to happen — any more than
Apple, out of the goodness of its corporate heart, is about to decide to
phase out its high-tech Asian sweatshops in favor of decently
compensated production jobs in the United States.

But what could perhaps happen is a mass movement of Apple consumers,
declaring that it’s not cool to treat the people who build these
products like beasts of burden or like expendable non-human parts.

Alternatively, as incomes keep falling further behind the cost of living
for most Americans, we can comfort ourselves with the thought that we
enjoy the coolest of gadgets and that others are even poorer than we are.

Anna Anthropy, author of Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, will be at the NYU Game Center on March 29th from 7-9:oopm for her book release and lecture.

Click here to learn more!

Author of Rise of the Videogame Zinesters Anna Anthropy will be at Bluestockings on March 28 at 7 p.m.

Bluestockings is located at 172 Allen Street between Stanton and Rivington.

What If the Next Generation Thinks Video Games are Stupid?

Maybe video games are stupid. Maybe they’re junk or trash or action movies, at best. Perhaps they are not at all making the world a better place.

And maybe it’s not an old person—some out of touch politician who once bumped into aPong machine—who will declare this.

Maybe it will be someone young, someone who Occupied Wall Street or someone who is in the exact target market for big-budget video games—they’ll be over 17 and under 35 years of age; male; with money. Maybe that person will declare that video games are not worth their time. And maybe there will be people who agree with them.

Jade Raymond doesn’t want a new, younger generation to be the next generation to sneer at them. She loves video games. But Raymond, whose 210-person studio at Ubisoft Toronto is making the next huge-budget Tom Clancy Splinter Cell action game, understands why games could start turning off the very people who are supposed to like them. She’s not the only one

A couple of weeks ago, Raymond and I chatted in the lobby of a hotel in San Francisco a few hours before she would deliver a rant at the Game Developers’ Conference. Our talk turned out to be a rant preview, one that dovetailed with a new book by the game designer and writer Anna Anthropy, who charges, for somewhat different reasons, that are are big problems with who games are for and who they alienate.

And now I can’t shake the thought: what if it’s becoming cool to hate video games now? What if the next generation of our culture thinks games are so out of touch that they dismiss them as the wasteful rich pastimes of a more self-indulgent generation?

Raymond surprised me in San Francisco by telling me a story about a 21-year old employee who no longer wanted to make video games. Young. Bright. Thought he had his dream job at Ubisoft Toronto. But he became uncomfortable about what his career amounted to, about what games stood for. So he quit.

“He’s like, ‘I really wanted to do this, but now I realize we’re stuck in this place.”

Raymond has heard this from other younger game designers.

“I’ve had a lot of people come, in serious one-on-ones, to talk to me about: ‘I’m thinking of leaving the game industry.’

“They don’t like the messages. They don’t like the idea that every game is a war game, that we’re reinforcing this. A lot of these guys are really spiritual. They spend time thinking, trying to find meaning in the world, and it bothers them.”

In her new book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, game designer Anna Anthropy delivers a similar disappointed assessment of gaming’s fixation on the same tired tropes. “Mostly videogames are about men shooting men in the face,” she writes. “Sometimes hey are about women shooting men in the face. Sometimes the men who are shot in the face are orcs, zombies or monsters.” The few games Anthropy finds that star women tend to render them as waitresses or shop-owners.

“This is not to say that games about head shots are without value,” Anthropy writes, “but if one looked solely at videogames, one would think the whole of human experience is shooting men and taking their dinner orders. Surely an artistic form that has as much weight in popular culture as the video game does now has more to offer than such a narrow view of what it is to be human.”

No one needs to tell Raymond or Anthropy that all video games aren’t war games (orDiner Dash). They know that. But they see the patterns and they are alarmed by the narrow range of topics in games.

“I’ve always been really excited about games,” Raymond says. “I got into the industry because I saw the potential. But we continue to be stuck in this sort of teenage narrow-band of themes that are action games. I kind of wish we were talking about some bigger topics and other issues.”

At her rant later that day, Raymond would talk about a hypothetical war game. It would be a shooter, as most of them are. In a twist, you’d be a woman. You’d fight somewhere hot. You’d be able to layer down, but if you did you might hear a snicker or get a catcall from a soldier nearby. That wouldn’t be the game. It’d just be part of it. It would make the game… real.

Both Raymond and Anthropy believe that the big money in games is one of the big problems. Budgets swell. Profit margins narrow. A willingness to take risks diminishes, and so the same kind of games are made again again. “The problem with video games is that they’re created by a small, insula group of people,” Anthropy writes. She compares game-making now to book-making in the era before the printing press, when every book in Western culture was the Bible or a book that supported it. Mainstream games are that narrowly-pressed today, she writes. “The population who creates games becomes more and more insular and homogeneous: it’s the same small group of people who are crating the same games for themselves.”

In Anthropy’s persuasive book the problem is a lack of plurality of voices. She rattles off the names of lesbian comic book creators and then opines, “Why are there no dykes in video games?” Behind every major video game she sees a man, and if she’s oversimplifying, she is just barely. And if she’s neglecting to mention the improved diversity among indie game creators, that’s just her point. The games of the underground are more diverse and interesting. The games of the mainstream, she argues, are not, which brings us back to Jade Raymond, who works on some of the most mainstream games around for one of the biggest big-money publishers in the business. If even Jade Raymond is restless, this is no niche problem.

Raymond makes blockbusters. She admits she can still enjoy some mindless entertainment. “I’m a huge fan of action movies,” she says, “I love to just go watch and turn off my brain and watch big explosions. But there are other types of things we should be doing, too. I just wonder why there are not so many efforts to go outside of that box.”

In theory, Raymond is an insider. She may not be a man, but she’s an establishment figure, a manufacturer of the big-budget stuff for which Anthropy holds little hope. Anthropy assumes outsiders, non-professionals and indie creators are fed up with big gaming’s homogeneity, but Raymond’s dissatisfaction—and what she says she hears from some of her younger designers—is an outcry from within. Through people like her, maybe even big-budget games will change, or at least budge.

What’s the problem? It’s not just what games are about. It’s what they’re not about.

Raymond believes blockbuster games miss a whole lot, and risk losing a generation’s interest because of it. Look at everything gaming is missing, she told me the morning when we spoke. She just rattled them off, topic after topic, barely touched by big-budget games:

“All the stuff that happened with the Arab Spring, internet freedom and just generally what’s going on with people’s privacy and all of those kinds of things as tech moves along… the growing class divide, all the Occupy Wall Street stuff. That’s the kind of thing that’s been brewing for a while. These are really big stories. They are being dealt with in other media. You can see films that are already out addressing these things. Books. Documentaries. But for some reason games don’t touch those things.”

These social issues and current events captivate a newer generation that Raymond believes are more prepared to dismiss the video games that ignore them. “I think it’s a mistake to think that target audience doesn’t care about meaning.” It would be a mistake, she believes, for the people making games to think players wouldn’t appreciate some of heat and texture of the real world. She knows this because she’s had some of that target audience that works in her studio quit the business.

For Anthropy, the answer is in the video game version of the printing press, in the democratization of tools that empowers anyone to make a video game about anything. That kind of thing happens outside of Raymond’s Ubisoft or other Bible-printers such as EA, Activision and the rest of the big companies that primarily create killing-games with teams that wouldn’t fit in an elevator.

For Raymond, change can happen within the mega-companies, but it’s only going to work if people are brave enough to try and—here’s the twist—if more diverse content can be fun. The two-year turnaround for making a game only slightly excuses the lack of timeliness of most video games, the lack of connection to modern problems in the economy or the Middle East. The bigger issue is that putting protest movements or an experience of victimized sexism in your game doesn’t necessarily up the fun factor.

“When you’re making a game, fun wins out,” Raymond says. “And if you’re thinking you will try to do this intellectual thing, you might go back to what you know is more fun—or it’s the first thing to cut. There are so many games out there that just aren’t even trying.”

Raymond has tried to make her games carry some weight, to make them matter. She was one of the top people at the Ubisoft team behind Assassin’s Creed. They tried to make an action game with some intellectual heft, pulling together a conspiracy story inspired by real history and immersed in mid-millennial cultures usually ignored by video games.

She’s trying again. “We’re trying with the next Splinter Cell that we’re developing at Ubisoft to try to have some statements about certain things built in there,” she said, though the game is so secret now that she declined to elaborate.

Raymond didn’t leave me with the impression that her big-budget action-spy-thriller was suddenly going to be a game about picketing the power elite. She did give me the impression that, with Ubisoft’s blessing, this new Splinter Cellmight have ideas in it that someone who thinks about today’s news would find stimulating.

“I think we need to push a bit harder,” she said. “I think it’s possible to have something that’s entertainment and full of wow and explosions and has a bit more depth for those who care to pay more attention to that. I think we can deliver those things in a way that the people who don’t care won’t notice.”

Jade Raymond’s message is this: young people, the very target audience that video games are blitzed to, are not looking for a brainless escape every time they put a controller in their hand. They care about the world. They care about life. She wants games to still be relevant to them. She knows it’s not easy. In fact, it might be harder for her than for the freer Anthropy, who, as an indie creator is more beholden to her muse than to a company’s money.

Raymond knows it is hard to make serious issues fun. She knows that making a game more of an activist thing could make gaming less of a pleasure. But she’s also had people who get paid to make video games walk up to her and say they want nothing to do with modern video games anymore.

Look at how she describes the leeriness she sees in some of her younger team members, and let her choice of words sink in: “A lot of the younger people who are in the industry, one of the things that really matters to them, is they don’t want to feel like they’re making games…”

She catches herself.

“They’re kind of sick of the games being…”

She catches herself again.

Who wants to insult the thing they love? She doesn’t want to go there. She can’t go there. She’s making a Splinter Cell, for god’s sake, a Splinter Cell that she hopes will be as fun and as interesting as she could ever hope it to be.

The people who were supposed to think games are out of touch were supposed to be old. That theory’s fallen apart. Jade Raymond wants big-budget video games to stop risking losing the young. Some, like Anna Anthropy, would say big-budget video games have already lost an even bigger group of people than that.

Interview with Ina May Gaskin for the book, Birth Matters

Recently I had the great pleasure of interviewing the legendary midwife, Ina May Gaskin after she wrote the new and very well-received, Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta. The book is published by Seven Stories Press and is available here.

I have given birth twice in my life and I will come clean and admit that I am not one of nature’s ‘birth lovers’. My first baby was born in a birth centre and my second was born in a mainstream hospital. Both babies were vaginal births, the first a ‘no intervention style birth’ (but a long, painful, posterior labour) and the second birth an epidural birth. They were pretty successful births, all things considered – my babies were alive and well and I recovered quite quickly, but in both cases I had a lot of fear to overcome and I did not quite make it in my quest to put that fear aside. However, to this day I remain awestruck by the process of birth and my own incredible encounters with that.

Birth Matters is a profoundly encouraging book arguing a way forward for reconciling our modern lives with the act of birth. At its core, Birth Mattersrecognises that birthing is a feminist issue. In interviewing Ina May Gaskin I asked her all the difficult questions that had been bubbling around in my head since my own birth experiences and I am delighted to say that she was very generous, and not unexpectedly, quite fearless in taking my questions on…

blue milk: I saw your interview on a big feminist site recently and the discussion was quickly bogged down in the comments section by a very heated discussion along old lines around the debate about the obstetrics versus midwifery models of birth. Although many of us, as feminists, are natural allies to you, do you feel like feminism still doesn’t understand what you’re trying to do in some ways?

Ina May Gaskin: I feel this very strongly and have since the mid-1970s, when it became clear to me that becoming a mother was viewed by most prominent feminists as an “anti-feminist” course to take. Those who did become mothers were told that they could do it all, but their true needs were seen as detrimental to the branch of the women’s movement that was emphasizing the need for women to get out of the house and into the workplace.

I found it odd that the one creative act that no man could ever do, was put down and written about in disgusting terms by feminist writers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone (who gained far more attention from other feminists than those writers such as Barbara Katz Rothman and Gena Corea, who wrote cogently and intelligently about birth issues). I think this led de Beauvoir and Firestone, among others, into philosophical nonsense that led to a great deal of confusion and poor policy. This is probably one big reason that we have ‘one-size-fits-all’ birth care policy and virtually no regulation of assisted reproductive technologies in the US (no laws, no rules against the implantation of multiple embryos even though these involve great risks to the health of the mother).

blue milk: A big part of the modern birth experience for women is fear, it is the way we portray birth in film and on TV, it is the way we pitch public health messages to women about pregnancy, and it was certainly a big part of my experience of birth (both times) in spite of efforts on my part to overcome that by going to a birth centre instead of a mainstream hospital. Your philosophy, in many ways, is trying to redress that isn’t it? To overcome ‘fear’ as the dominant message for women about birth?

Ina May Gaskin: You’re right. The women I selected to be work as midwives with me and I were able to establish a birth culture in our small community that minimized fear and was, for at least a decade, isolated from the fear that could have been imported via television, films, and the worries coming from anxious relatives. We were successful enough in the beginning years of our practice that the evidence then spoke for itself.

This is why I like to send women to watch other mammals give birth—to see what it’s like when a female moves freely and feels what is happening, without being afraid. YouTube is good for this, especially for: “the dramatic struggle for life” (an elephant giving birth and reviving her baby who isn’t breathing in an animal park) and “chimp birth Attica zoo” for a creative way to save the perineum during crowning and birth.

blue milk: Many women my age are sceptical of anything seen as ‘spiritual’ – I think I was among them, and we were shocked to discover that we were capable of strong feelings about low intervention birth once we became pregnant because we were so certain that we were not hippies and that low intervention births are ‘hippy stuff’. Is the birth movement doing enough to reach women like me – Birth Mattersis certainly impressively broad in its pitch – or should women like me ‘get over’ this aversion to spirituality (an aversion, which at its core is surely a little misogynist)?

Ina May Gaskin: I’ve long been aware of your generation’s aversion to ‘hippy stuff’, which is why I chose the bland-looking cover of Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth. That was one of my ways of reaching out, and I tried to do that with language, too. I agree with you that a reflexive aversion to spirituality is misogynist. I was amazed that women who wanted to be strong were willing to so blindly trust a medical profession that had so thoroughly destroyed, discredited or marginalized midwives for no reason (in the US) other than to claim that field of activity for itself. US obstetricians in the early 20th century realized that they didn’t know much, because women preferred midwives. Because they wanted to know what midwives knew, they decided to discredit midwives and make them illegal so they could use poor women as teaching material.

We should also recognize the reality of how mysterious birth is and how many different ways it may be perceived. We need to understand the main historical developments of midwifery and medicine if we want to grasp how important it is to find some balance between midwifery and medicine as we go forward.

blue milk: It is difficult for any movement to be both the activists and the advocates – sometimes these goals will be in conflict. For instance, I think it is a problem for the pro-choice movement in feminism to properly acknowledge the feelings of the small minority of women for whom abortion is a traumatic or regretful decision, and I wonder if you think there has been a similar problem for midwives, as well?

Ina May Gaskin: I agree with your take on how the pro-choice movement carried on in a way that allowed a backlash to develop, and I have to say that I saw that coming. When it comes to midwives, though, I think our problems in understanding what has destroyed or weakened women’s confidence in their ability to give birth go much deeper than the pro-choice movement’s lack of acknowledgement that some women regret abortions they’ve had.

Dutch obstetrics from 18th century forward found a way to exist in balance with Dutch midwifery through the 20th century in a way that was an example to the world. It’s a shame that the US model of maternity care was the one that the rest of the industrialized world imitated instead of the Dutch model.

From my perspective, it’s pretty easy to see how much the rest of the world has imitated US obstetrics, apparently unaware of the ignorance of women’s bodies upon which this model of obstetric care was constructed. Australia, for instance, imitated the UK during the early 20th century, by keeping midwifery (but a midwifery that accepted the dominance of medicine). Midwives had a certain amount of autonomy until the move came to make every birth take place in hospital. When a few women rebelled during the 1970s against the lack of choice this meant for them and started Australia’s home birth movement, organized medicine’s attack on home birth practitioners was swift and savage, with the de-registration of Dr. John Stevenson, the family physician who stood behind some of those first home birth midwives. According to what I’ve been told by countless Australian moms and midwives is that it has gone pretty much downhill since then.

I don’t know enough about the history of birth in Australia to know if there was anything close to a 67% forceps rate during the 1950s or 1960s, as there was in the US. This was a product of how ignorant US obstetrics got after half a century of there being no midwives. That 67% forceps rate went with a c-section rate of 5%, by the way, but when the late 1970s brought along a new generation of women demanding midwives, and along with that, the electronic fetal monitor and the epidural, forceps were quickly outmoded and replaced by a suddenly increased tolerance for cesarean section.

What further confused the picture was that during this period, the US reported maternal death rates that were not very different from the levels reported by other countries. The trouble was that the US figures were and still are much less accurate, because the US has never had a real health care system with consistent methods of reporting and reviewing maternal deaths—something I wasn’t able to unearth until 1999.

When medicine rules or obliterates midwifery, it becomes difficult for women to understand the power that midwifery could have if it were once again a profession whose power equaled that of the obstetric profession.

blue milk: But in an individual birth experience, sometimes the politics of the birth debate, which is such high stakes now, means that a woman’s desires are potentially in competition with both the obstetrician’s and the midwife’s interests, would you agree or not?

Ina May Gaskin: To begin with, women may easily desire the impossible—that every baby can survive if we apply enough technology and expensive medication. Too many have been seduced into thinking this is true. Women have been infantilized to a great degree, another factor that hasn’t helped. We can’t count how many women fell for the line that their sex lives would be enhanced by having a cesarean instead of a vaginal birth on the grounds that the vagina through which a baby has passed has been stretched out and ruined. I just spoke this morning with an Israeli woman who had a c-section for her full gestation twins 9 years ago and still grieves about the loss of the body she once had. Her figure is beautiful—that’s not the problem. But lovemaking has been painful for her ever since the surgery, and no surgeon can tell her why or fix her. And she knows that her surgery wasn’t an emergency but more a product of her doctor’s discomfort with the possibility that her second twin might be breech.

It would be good if we could get women, midwives, and obstetricians all to agree that it is not good for midwives or obstetricians to lack the knowledge and skills that were once considered essential to both professions. Skills that are being lost already at a rapid rate include: the ability to diagnose a false pregnancy before a cesarean is performed, the ability to safely assist vaginal birth of breech babies or multiple gestation babies, and manual palpitation and pelvimetry. I could go on, but you get the idea.

blue milk: I love that you see fathers as the great untapped resource in the movement towards kinder, gentler births. Can you expand upon your thinking here?

Ina May Gaskin: Fathers really have a strong instinct to protect their partners during pregnancy and especially during labor. Lots of men have told me that my chapter on ‘sphincter law’ in the Guide to Childbirth is what helped them understand what helps and doesn’t help their partners during labor. It also helps them to know that women’s genitals have the spectacular ability to swell and expand temporarily during the birth process and then to go back to their formerly small size without being ruined, in similar fashion to what happens during a male erection. Knowing that it is the blood flow to the appropriate organs that is needed and that this can happen only when the laboring mother is not kept from getting into the good birth trance empowers her partner to help create the conditions that help her get there.

blue milk: For people who don’t understand why birth continues to be such a hot button issue, can you explain to them, in a nutshell, why it is important that women have choice about the way they birth and why so many people want to control that decision?

Ina May Gaskin: It was an enterprising US obstetrician in the early 19th century who got the idea that medical men could entirely take over maternity care from women if they just became fear merchants instead of caring physicians or scientists. Never mind producing any evidence, he said in many more words than I just used in paraphrasing him—just scare them. That’s easier and very effective. That was Dr. Hugh Hodge, and he was right. Now we have to recognize how much harm has come and spread globally from his selfish advice, and we can then start a world-wide movement to dispel this fear and reverse the damage that has been done. I’m excited about what we can do with this now that it has become possible to piece together the long story of how fear came to dominate birth in our species.

Once fear becomes the norm, it becomes possible for a lot of profit to be made from the materials, medicines, delivery systems, advertising, conferences, and so on that pertain to high-tech maternity care as the norm. More profit is made when the number of people involved in care is diminished (especially in the US, where health insurance is so expensive). This means that fear, ignorance, and greed are interwoven and tend to cycle to ever higher levels that have already reached madness in countries where caesarean rates exceed 50% (China, for instance). Midwifery knowledge can disappear in a remarkably short time (10-20 years), to the point that women can no longer imagine what it might be like to have a midwife. (I know this, because I was that woman when I was pregnant and giving birth to my first). This is how you get a mass of infantilized women who may put up with dangerous and uncomfortable practices for a couple of generations before they get enough gumption to put things right. This is what a growing number of us are working on now in the US!

Many thanks for this opportunity.

blue milk: Thank you for the very thought-provoking responses.

As a young girl I often heard my mom whispering about “woman problems.” The barely audible phrase sounded mysterious, and the fact that she would not explain what it meant made it all the more alluring.

Years later, I was disappointed to learn that this all-purpose euphemism covered everything from breast cancer to stillbirths. But thankfully, the women’s health movement was in full flower by then and I had Our Bodies, Ourselves and other resources at my disposal.

Voices of the Women’s Health Movement trumpets the 40-year history of that movement. Although editor Barbara Seaman died in 2008, Laura Eldridge and Seven Stories Press are to be commended for pulling together a nearly 900 page celebration of feminist activism and advocacy. Eldridge calls the books “gloriously disorganized,” and they are. Entries are repetitive, seem arbitrarily placed, and sometimes contradict one another. What’s more, hard as it is to imagine anything being left out of tomes of this size, the volumes pay scant attention to numerous themes: The impact of environmental contamination; anti-abortion violence; transgender health; the spike in Caesarian sections; and the link between poverty and illness, among them.

That said, the 200 entries—perfect for a lecture-driven introductory women’s studies class—not only reflect on the history of U.S. feminism, but also zero in on the challenge of eradicating sexism within the medical community. Most of the essays were previously published and the book includes work by such luminaries as Charon Asetoyer, Phyllis Chesler, Angela Davis, Betty Dodson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Germaine Greer, Shere Hite, Susie Orbach, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and Alix Kates Shulman. In addition, numerous interviews with women’s health pioneers introduce women, and a handful of men, who have taken incredible risks to push for better access to healthcare both domestically and throughout the world.

The now-classic Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, first published in 1973, opens the collection. In it, authors Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English slam the misogynist church-state collusion that began in the 15th century and took aim at female medics. “The present system was born in and shaped by the competition between male and female healers,” they conclude. “The witch was an empiricist: She relied on her senses rather than on faith or doctrine, she believed in trial and error, cause and effect. Her attitude was not religiously passive, but actively inquiring. She trusted her ability to find ways to deal with disease, pregnancy, and childbirth—whether through medications or charms. In short, her magic was the science of the times.”

Flash forward to the early 1900s when 15,000 women a year were dying from septic abortions and activists like Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger were risking imprisonment for promoting birth control. Seaman and coauthor Susan F. Wood credit “advances in public health, increases in scientific and clinical knowledge, and improved access to care” for distinct “waves” of advocacy. The first, they write, was spearheaded by wealthy progressives, the second by feminist activists; the latter receives the lion’s share of attention in Voices.

Book One chronicles Senate hearings on the birth control pill, held in 1970, that set the movement into motion. Much like hearings convened by Darrell Issa in February 2012—they included no women. Activist Alive Wolfson, who went on to create the National Women’s Health Network in 1975, found this enraging and disrupted the hearing, demanding to know why no women were testifying. As TV cameras rolled, Wolfson’s dissent got onto the nightly news and seemingly overnight, the feminist women’s health movement was launched. By 1971 self-help gynecology was prompting women to study their anatomy and grassroots movements were clamoring for better access to birth control and the legalization of abortion. The first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, published as a pamphlet in 1973, was quickly expanded and by 1979 had become a widely relied upon medical reference.

The accounts of this time are exhilarating and readers will feel the heady optimism of the era. Accounts from the late Dr. Helen Rodrigues-Trias, founder of the now-defunct Committee to End Sterilization Abuse, and Bylle Avery, founder of the National Black Women’s Health Project, offer insight into the ways race, class, and gender collided in the 1960s and 70s— and beyond.

Avery’s account about founding the NBWHP is instructive. “If you just say ‘women’ the assumption is white women,” she told interviewer Tania Ketenjian. “I understood that Black women needed to come together to decide what our health issues were. We could look at health statistics and see what we were dying from, but more important to me was what we were living with.” This focus has propelled the Project to address diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension—as well as reproduction–since its founding in 1980.

But while history is a central component of Voices, personal accounts tie the personal to the political.

Audrey Flack’s The Madonna’s Tears for a Crack in My Heart recounts what it was like to raise an autistic child in the 1970s. The hauntingly beautiful essay channels rage at mother-blaming theories that treated middle-and-upper-class women as negligent if they were employed after a child’s birth. Her love for Melissa, and her fury at the few options she had to choose from, makes this one of the volumes’ standouts.

Likewise, Laura Yaeger’s Having Anne. In this searing entry, Yaeger writes about going off lithium when she became pregnant. Her husband, terrified that she’d have a manic episode while he was at work, hired a “nanny” to watch Laura during his absence. As the three adults navigate this uncharted terrain, Yaeger chronicles, with humor and pathos, their nine-month journey.

Other essays look at everything from eating disorders, to rape, to the use of the now-discredited drug, Diethylstilbestrol, DES, for women at risk of miscarriage, to violence against women, plastic surgery, and end-of-life concerns. Debates over contentious issues—for example, whether it is ever okay for feminist groups to accept money from pharmaceutical companies or corporations—are aired, but remain unresolved.

In addition, the volumes highlight how much is left undone. “In the United States, our crumbling health system has created a world where very few, regardless of sex or gender, can receive adequate healthcare and drug companies have worked hard to see that those who do are full of dubious, long-term drugs,” Eldridge concludes. “Hysterectomies are still performed too frequently, despite strong evidence that unnecessary gynecological surgery shortens the lifespan. The right to a safe abortion, of course, continues to suffer constant assault. The rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people continue to be abused and curtailed.”

Reading Eldridge’s words, it is hard not to become depressed, for despite 40-plus years of grassroots activism, there are still a huge number of frontline battles waiting to be fought. So let’s stew for a bit, and then turn our dejection into a fierce, well-thought-out struggle to win the world we want. For as the World Social Forums continue to remind us: Another world is possible.

Click here to learn more!

Hamas: From Resistance to Government author Paola Caridi is going to The Middle East Institute of Columbia University. Come see her there on March 22 at 12:30 p.m.

Fatal Consequences: Women, Abortion, and Power in Latin America

Marianne Mollmann, Guest Contributor

The Supreme Court in Argentina ruled unanimously today thatabortion will be decriminalized in cases of rape and when a woman’s life is in jeopardy. The ruling also states that doctors who perform abortions will be protected from punishment. In honor of this landmark ruling, we are excerpting a chapter from a newly published book, The Unfinished Revolution: Voices from the Global Fight for Women’s Rights, that explains why it is crucial for women in Latin America to be able to access to safe abortion services.

Lucila was twenty-two when I spoke with her in 2004 in the mud-floored office of a women’s group on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, while conducting research for a report on reproductive rights in Argentina. During her first pregnancy two years earlier, the doctors at the local public hospital had diagnosed her with a rare heart condition, which converted her otherwise healthy pregnancy into a potentially lethal situation. Lucila was told, in no uncertain terms, that another pregnancy could kill her.

Nevertheless, when Lucila begged these same doctors to sterilize her, they refused the operation, telling her that she was “too young” to stop procreating. Lucila suffered regular beatings and rape at the hands of her husband and was unable to prevent another pregnancy—when I talked to her, she was already showing. And though she qualified for a legal abortion, even under the very strict Argentina law, she was barred from having one due to lack of proper regulation and the extreme stigma attached to abortion.

I later learned Lucila had managed to terminate her life-threatening pregnancy illegally. I did not hear under what conditions, though chances are they were not good. The Argentine health ministry admits that illegal abortions account for approximately one-third of maternal deaths in the country.

While Lucila’s situation probably is extreme, it is by no means exceptional. Latin America is home to some of the world’s most restrictive abortion laws. Three countries criminalize abortion in all circumstances, even when the pregnant woman’s life can only be saved through terminating her pregnancy: Chile, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.

Across Latin America, most countries apply an “exceptions” model where abortion generally is outlawed but penalties are waived in specific circumstances, such as if the pregnancy threatens the life or health of the woman, if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, or if the fetus is so seriously damaged it is unlikely to survive birth. Only in Mexico City and Cuba is abortion freely available to all women and girls who need the intervention, as long as they seek an early termination.

The restrictions placed on access to legal abortion have not made the practice scarce. In Argentina, an estimated 40 percent of all pregnancies terminate in induced abortions. In Peru, that proportion is 37 percent, and in Chile 35 percent. Most other countries in the region, including Mexico but also the United States, maintain a 20 percent ratio—one induced abortion for every 4 live births.

In fact, if you look at criminal law as only one of many potential policy instruments to affect the social phenomenon that is abortion, it would appear to be a very ineffectual choice: where abortion is illegal, it is equally—if not more—prevalent than in jurisdictions where it is legal. Also where abortion is illegal, it is much more likely to be unsafe. “You get overwhelmed by desperation,” a thirty-five-year-old mother of ten children told me in Argentina. “You seek all the ways out, pills, anything. But if there is no way out, then you take a knife or a knitting needle.”

Despite these facts, there are harsh criminal consequences for abortion in most Latin American countries. When it comes up in political or legislative debate, the criminalization of abortion is justified with reference to a need to protect the right to life of the unborn, and to a reluctance to “promote” abortion, which is considered a moral evil. In Peru, a prominent member of congress reportedly said it is better for a pregnant woman to die—and for her unborn child to die with her—than for her to have an abortion. This same argument was aired in Nicaragua when the parliament in 2007 decided to criminalize so-called therapeutic abortion (to save a woman’s life and health), which had been legal since 1893.

Complex Notions of “Right” and “Wrong”

It is of course true that any government has a vested interest in promoting a civic sense of right and wrong. As human rights activists we routinely expect governments to promote laws that dictate certain morals, such as equality between men and women, the inappropriateness of corporal punishment, and the need to abolish the death penalty. The difference between these issues and abortion is not that abortion is too complicated. There is actually quite broad agreement in most Latin American countries that while abortion is “wrong,” so are blanket bans of the practice.

The difference is that laws that promote equality and ban violence are generally effective in doing just that. Constitutional protections of equality, for example, have led to guarantees of equal pay for equal work. And the effective prosecution of domestic violence and even jaywalking has been proven to deter those practices, at least in part.

By contrast, the morals expressed through the stigmatization and criminalization of abortion are routinely set aside by women and girls who feel they need to terminate their pregnancies. In fact, of the hundreds of women I have interviewed over the years about pregnancy and choice, many have only a rudimentary or confused understanding of the law, but they have a clear sense of what is right. I have spoken to many women from various countries in Latin America who have expressed beliefs about the moral acceptability of abortion in specific circumstances, depending on the financial, marital, or emotional situation of the pregnant woman, and her ability to love the child if he or she were ever born.

“I don’t think [abortion] is really all that criminal during the first month,” Marienela, a thirty-seven-year-old mother of six, confided in me, as we were huddling in the corner of a dark old stable that functioned as a social hall in a slum quarter outside of Santa Fe, Argentina. “But if you already are seven months pregnant, then you have to have it.”

“Sometimes abortion is the best option,” a staunch pro-life activist said to me in 2006. The same woman declared not to believe in the need for modern contraception, but readily conceded the untenable nature of the current setup in her neighborhood, a muddy slum on the outskirts of Tucumán, Argentina: “The most usual form of contraception here is nothing: people either have children or badly done abortion…It’s still something I am thinking through, but I know we have to work on making sure that no one needs to get to that point.” She then looked at me and said quietly, “You cannot even imagine what women end up putting in their uterus.”

The sentiment that abortion is not a moral evil if you didn’t want to be pregnant in the first place is both prevalent and pragmatic in the many women I have spoken to, and also surprisingly clear. “Abortion is necessary,” said one woman in Nicaragua in 2007. “You can’t just bring an undesired child into this world, especially when you didn’t try to have one.” In fact, women and girls already know what they need in order not to need abortions. The vectors that influence real choice are neither fetal rights nor physical autonomy in the abstract. It’s a very concrete sense of what is possible and what makes for a better life—mostly for the child.

Time and time again, women articulate concern about economic stability and the need to feed an existing family. They talk about apprehension with regard to bringing a child into an abusive relationship, often only commenting in passing on their own suffering and pain. They talk at length about difficulties in accessing affordable, easy-to-use, safe, and effective contraception of their choice.

And they always describe variations on a theme that sounds ideologically motivated but happens to be empirically true: that while women in Latin America are socially dependent on men, men are not held responsible for the reproductive disasters that ensue from the unprotected sex they often pressure women into having. “She got herself pregnant” is invariably the response I get from public officials to questions about why a particular woman should suffer through an unwanted pregnancy or unsafe birth. At times it is delivered with a dismissive shrug: “She is responsible for herself.”

Why Legalize Abortion?

These very real experiences should make for excellent public policy: tackling the three issues of violence against women, access to contraception, and gender-based discrimination is what will make abortion less needed. The legalization of abortion will make the practice safe. Most of these facts are undisputed. The real question is why none are adequately addressed in Latin America today.

The short answer is power. Everywhere in the region, proposals to legally limit access to abortion, and even absurd moves to extend the right to child support for all ova fertilized through rape, are used as political chips.

In Nicaragua, a 2006 vote to eliminate access to abortion for women whose lives were threatened by their pregnancy was scheduled a mere ten days before the presidential elections, and most accounts suggest that this was no accident. The fact is that in all of Latin America, churches are powerful players in national politics—in particular the Catholic church—and few candidates want to be seen as “pro-abortion” and thereby lose the support of the church and other politically influential conservative groups. In this particular election, parliamentarians from the Sandinista party were reportedly ordered to vote for the penal code reform so that their candidate, Daniel Ortega, would win, but with an oral promise from the Sandinista party leadership that the issue would be “solved” after the elections. Meanwhile, Ortega went on record saying that “abortion is murder.” More than five years after the blanket ban on abortion went into effect in Nicaragua, it is still in force with disastrous effects on women’s health and lives.

In Mexico, after the Supreme Court in August 2008 upheld a Mexico City law to legalize abortion in the first trimester, several federal states in the country moved to amend their state constitutions to ban it.

Most of these constitutional changes have little effect on women’s real access to legal abortion in those states: it was nearly impossible before and obviously not much better after. However, the fact that state legislatures were willing to spend time and energy on laws that are likely to have little effect on their stated objective is testament to how politically viable anti-choice arguments are, and how little power can be gained by raising the fact that women and girls continue to have abortions—some safe and most unsafe—regardless the legislative framework. And during the presidential campaign in Brazil in 2010, the ruling left-wing party dropped the support of sexual and reproductive rights from its draft human rights plan, perhaps in the hopes that this would ensure the support of the Catholic church which had started publicly referring to then-President Lula as “Herod,” an allusion to the king who, according to biblical accounts, ordered baby boys to be killed. During the Pope’s 2007 visit to Brazil, Lula had already publicly pledged that his government would never propose the legalization of abortion, but this further step was thought necessary to appease the church.

The point is not that morality-based arguments for the criminalization of abortion are always a cheap veneer on actions that are motivated by political gain. In fact, my interaction with activists on both sides of the apparent abortion divide suggests to me that most people who profess to be either staunchly pro-life or staunchly pro-choice in fact are deeply attached to their beliefs and the morality on which they base them. With civility and mutual respect, these beliefs should be aired in public debate.

The point is that the morality of public policy depends on both its intention and its effect. The effect of abortion bans—in particular in the Latin American context of gender inequality and limited access to contraception—is death and suffering for the women who need abortions, with no discernable effect on lowering the number of abortions. As such, abortion bans are both ineffective and immoral.

Unfortunately, the bans continue. Six years after I talked with Lucila, I interviewed another woman in the same impossible situation. Silvia, who suffers from a serious kidney disease that could make another pregnancy near fatal for her, told me she received no help or even sympathy from the doctors who would tell her almost in the same breath, on the one hand, that she couldn’t be pregnant and, on the other, that she had to carry the pregnancy to term: “I said, ‘But you told me that I shouldn’t have it! . . . I am close to needing dialysis as it is.’ . . . I said, ‘Are you going to guarantee that nothing will happen to my health?’ . . . She said, ‘I can’t guarantee that.’”

Winds of Change

Despite this grim state of affairs, there are indications that things are slowly starting to change for the better. In April 2007, abortion was decriminalized in Mexico City, and this law was later upheld as constitutional by Mexico’s Supreme Court. In 2008, Uruguay’s congress approved a law to legalize abortion in the first trimester of the pregnancy. At the time, the law was immediately vetoed by the president, but a similar proposal is currently under consideration with much better prospects. In November 2010, the Argentine Congress also started a series of hearings on the legalization of abortion.

All of these developments are fueled by a growing empathy for the plight of poorer women, in particular. Most people know someone who has had an abortion, and it is increasingly an open secret that the criminalization of abortion mostly affects women who can’t afford to go to the United States or to a private clinic for an illegal but safe intervention. The general rhetoric of the Latin America media on abortion has changed radically, even just over the past five years: questions and comments are now more about why women need abortions, not how to punish them for it.

Indeed, surveys confirm that most people in the region have a much more nuanced understanding of abortion than their elected officers: it must be legal, accessible, and rare. It is only a matter of time before policymakers catch on.

Marianne Mollmann is a senior policy adviser with Amnesty International’s International Secretariat, having previously served as the advocacy director for the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. Her fields of expertise include reproductive rights and women’s economic rights. She is the author of the 2005 Human Rights Watch report Decisions Denied: Women’s Access to Contraceptives and Abortion in Argentina. Before joining Human Rights Watch, she served as co-coordinator of the Women’s Working Group of the International Network for Economic Social and Cultural Rights and as the executive director of the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala. She holds a degree in International Human Rights Law from Essex University.

Excerpt: Rise of the Videogame Zinesters

By Anna Anthropy

Anna Anthropy’s forthcoming book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters is about the personal potential of games — how simple tools allow all kinds of people to tell their own stories interactively. But it’s also a clever, thoughtful examination on game design, and why the medium is important and interesting. In this excerpt from chapter three, “What is it Good For?,” Anthropy examines games as “performances” and discusses the advantages computerized chance gives.

THE WORLD’S A STAGE AND WE ARE PLAYERS

Often, games — particularly digital games, with their use of video and audio — are compared to film, probably because the videogame publishing industry strongly resembles the Hollywood studio system. But I don think this comparison is particularly constructive, in that it gives us little insight into what the game, as a form, is capable of. Film tells a static story; what exciting about the game is that it allows the audience to interact with a set of rules. This doesn’t mean the game can’t tell a story: in the role-playing genre, the players aren’t merely watching a story but playing the roles of the characters within the story.

A better comparison than film is theater, which is where a lot of our game vocabulary (”the player,” “stages,” “set pieces,” “scripting”) comes from. A play defines the roles, events, and scenes of a story. An individual performance of those roles and scenes will always be different: different actors will perform the same role in different ways. Every performance and interpretation of a particular play is different — sometimes in minute ways, sometimes in radical ways — but we consider the play itself and the scene itself to be the same.
Compare this to a game story, particularly a videogame story. Every player will perform the story called Super Mario Bros. differently (and the same player will perform the story differently each play), but the role of Mario and the actions Mario is capable of taking remain the same. There is always a scene called “World 1-2,” although each performance of “World 1-2″ will be different. In a more contemporary videogame such as Half-Life 2, a very clearly cinema-inspired game, each player will always pass through the events the designers have scripted in the order in which they are presented, but each player (and each play’s) performance of Gordon Freeman, the game protagonist, will be at least subtly different. The player will always get chased across the rooftops by cops, but in one performance she might hesitate, unsure of where to go, in one she might head straight for the escape route, in one she might panic, almost getting Gordon Freeman killed, and in another she might walk a little too close to the edge of the roof, fall, and have to start the scene over.

There is always a scene called “World 1-2,” although each performance of “World 1-2″ will be different.

As game storytellers, we are not directing static stories take-by-take but rather arranging the scenes that will comprise the shape of our story. We can begin to think of the player as someone performing a role we’ve written rather than as an audience who experiences our story without any input as to its outcome. We allow room for improvisation, room for the player to make a role her own. The audience of a game can be more usefully compared to the audience for a play than the audience in the movie theater. In videogames, the audience is there, live, with the actors — or as the actors — experiencing a single performance that is unique, despite the story having been performed and continuing to be performed many times.

Some players record videos of their performances, either for documentation or for the purpose of
recording a specific achievement, such as reaching the game conclusion as quickly as possible — what is usually called a “speed run” (YouTube has given lots of these videos a means of reaching an audience). That there an incentive to capture individual performances of a game testifies to the amount of variance there is within a game depending on who’s playing it.

GAMES AND CHANCE

The board and card game traditions have also given a lot to digital games. What I think digital games have taken the most from board games and card games is the way they manage chance. Both contemporary designed games and older folk games have invented many systems for managing chance. The six-sided die, for example, allows for the random selection of six equally likely outcomes (and can then be further used to access other percentages and ratios; for example, three outcomes, each represented by two sides of the die, or eleven outcomes with different likelihoods represented by two rolls of the die, and so on.)

Card games themselves are designed as a system for managing chance and gradually revealing information. When all cards are in the deck, every card in the game has (as far as the player knows) an equal chance of being in any position. Once a card has come into play and been seen by the players, though, the players then know where it is and can use that information to make guesses about the remaining cards. Cards also allow players to manage the pace at which they reveal information: a player might have a hand of seven cards hidden from the other players, who don’t know whether those cards have come into the game yet or not. Poker is a classic game of using limited knowledge of the cards in play to predict the positions of cards not yet in play. This is what makes Poker an elaborate game of bluffing. One player tries to see through the other “Poker face” because the decisions she’ll make are based on what she can predict about the information the other player is concealing. Contemporary game designers have contrived even more rules to control the reveal of information.

Aside from hiding information, chance is frequently used to break symmetry. Having different starting conditions between players prevents both players from having the same set of ideal moves, and thus having the game become a stalemate. Having different, randomly selected values between one play and another, or having different game events happen at different, impossible-to-predict times (or not at all), means that each game will demand a different strategy, keeping play from becoming stagnant.

Franz-Benno Delonge and Thomas Ewert’s board game Container, for example — a game where players trade and transport commodities — uses chance to ensure that all players do not value the commodities identically. At the start of the game, a number of cards are shuffled and randomly distributed, one to a player. These cards describe how valuable the different commodities are to the players who hold them, and each card values the commodities differently. The cards are also kept hidden until the end of the game, each card seen only by the player that holds it. Because each player is aware of the entire possible set of values on the cards he knows which cards are in the game, and which card she, and therefore not the others, possesses he can watch the other players decisions and make deductions about which players have which cards, and therefore which commodities are valuable to which players.

Computers have an innate capacity for manipulating chance. Though true randomness doesn’t exist, computers handle numbers easily and are capable of generating reasonably unpredictable probabilities of any size on the fly. Every computer has access to an infinite number of monkeys rolling an infinite number of dice.

Why is this useful? Because, as we’ve discussed, games have a unique capacity for improvisation! Though each scene has the same shape — Link battles a gang of Moblins — each performance is different. So what if, in one performance, one of the Moblins comes from the left instead of the right? Digital games have the capacity to create variations on many subtle details in every play, keeping the experience from becoming stagnant.

The differences don have to be subtle, either. In Chris Klimas and Joel Haddock’s online game, Where We Remain, for example, the player is a boy searching for a girl on an island patrolled by monsters that are intended to evoke characters from Greek mythology. The layout of the island — what tools are hidden in which caves, what areas which monsters patrol, and in which cave the girl is hidden — is different every time, decided by a random number generator. In effect, this randomness makes the characters and events of the game more archetypal because the emphasis is on the shape of the game — the boy’s search for the girl while monsters pursue him — rather than on the details like what treasure is hidden where. Games have lots of room for improvisation, for every play of a game or scene to be unique, and digital games in particular have easy access to a great degree of chance.

Seaman, Barbara with Laura Eldridge. Voices of the Women’s Health Movement.Vol. 2. 384p. ISBN 9781609804466. $19.95. ea. vol: Seven Stories. 2012.photogs. index. pap. MED

Seaman (1935–2008), a pioneer in women’s health advocacy and an accomplished science writer, and Eldridge (coauthors, The No-Nonsense Guide to Menopause) have gathered over 200 articles documenting the history of the women’s health movement. The contributors include both historical (e.g., Sojourner Truth, Fanny Burney) and contemporary authors who represent a wide variety of disciplines. Phyllis Chesler, Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis, and the National Women’s Health Network are featured. The many entries discuss medical, sociological, psychological, and political issues related to women’s health. Classic essays such as Betty Dodson’s “Bridal Shower” from her 2002 bookOrgasms for Two: The Joy of Partnersex and Gloria Steinem’s 1978 article from Ms. Magazine “If Men Could Menstruate” appear along with discussions of parenthood, domestic violence, and harmful drugs. ­VERDICTA valuable work for anyone interested in the women’s health movement and an essential resource for all collections.—­Barbara M. Bibel, Oakland P.L.

Women Speak Up and Take Control of Their Health

By Barbara Seaman

WeNews guest author

Sunday, February 19, 2012

The Night Wanderers: Uganda’s Children and the Lord’s Resistance Army

Uganda has been ravaged by civil war, and Joseph Kony’s militant Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) continues to perpetrate one of the gravest humanitarian crises of our time–this is the context for this brave, devastating work of war reportage. Perhaps one of the most horrifying aspects of the LRA is that it kidnaps children and uses them as soldiers, forcing them to kill, or, in the case of female children, to become “wives.” Renowned Polish journalist Jagielski begins his story in Gulu, in northern Uganda, where he has access to a center devoted to rehabilitating the children who have escaped. In one eerie scene, the children at the center play a “war game” wherein some are cast as “guerillas,” some as “soldiers,” and others as “the people living in the village under attack.” The game is boisterous and innocent enough, but, as Jagielski points out, it is easy to forget that all but the youngest children have killed people. Individual narratives are lent structure by passages detailing the history of Uganda, including an illuminating look at current president Yoweri Museveni. The facts are chilling, and Jagielski handles them with integrity and a minimum of stylistic flourish, treating the subject with the dignity it deserves. Map. (Jan.)

Click here to learn more.

Sankofa is located at:

2714 Georgia Ave. N.W.
Washington, DC 20001
Store: 202-234-4755
Cafe:  202-332-1084

When we typically think of video games we often envision a few teenage boys screaming at the TV amid a cloud of testosterone and the scent of recently reheated pizza, but when Anna Anthropy thinks of video games, she sees the potential to transform a genre.

Anthropy’s latest book for Seven Stories Press, “Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form” is a guide to reclaiming video games from the multi-million dollar game studios and using them as a means of artistic expression.

Video games used to be an outlet for the next-level artist (before they started selling more than movies, that is). Anthropy is calling for a return to the medium’s wacky heyday. Not content with letting video games fall by the wayside of artistic potential, Anthropy creates games that touch upon larger issues than just the destruction of some cliched alien race. In “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter” Tom Bissell writes, “I routinely tolerate in games crudities that I would never tolerate in any other form of art or entertainment.” Why does this have to be the case?

Games like “Realistic Female First-Person Shooter” and “Police Bear,” all of which are playable on her website, tap into the potential of the video game as a tool for larger discussion about power structures and our own cultural priorities through a subversively playful medium.

At the moment, it seems that the forgotten didactic power of video games is experiencing a renaissance. With the recent exhibition at the Smithsonian and PBS Arts’ declaration that Super Mario Bros. is the greatest example of surrealist art the profile has been raised, but Anthropy goes beyond this to show us how the medium can be used for a greater good.

Anna Anthropy’s “Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form” is available through Seven Stories Press.

Dys4ia is a game that feels like an interactive page from someone’s diary. I’m not going to say what it’s about, and I urge you to go play it before you read the rest of the story. It won’t take more than a few minutes, and the less you know about what you’re going to see, play, and do in the game the better. Don’t worry, we’ll be here when you get back.

The first question is the most obvious: Why tell this story with a video game? Why not write about it? “Games have this capacity for exploring dynamics and systems that no other form does,” Anna Anthropy, the game’s creator, told the Penny Arcade Report. “This was a story about frustration - in what other form do people complain as much about being frustrated? A video game lets you set up goals for the player and make her fail to achieve them. A reader can’t fail a book. It’s an entirely different level of empathy.”

That’s why Dys4ia is such an interesting game; it deals with subject matter that most of us aren’t familiar with, and asks us to interact with it on a personal level. Do I know how going through the problems described in the game feels? Not in the slightest. I’m a straight, white, male. It’s hard for me to relate when I read books or articles about these issues, but there is something special that happens when the mechanics of games are used to get the point across. Suddenly things click into place, and it feels immediate. The struggles of the game’s protagonist became real.

But is it a game?

There is a common criticism these days that “experiences” like Dear Esther, Journey, and Dys4iaaren’t games. It’s a distinction that Anthropy finds tiresome. “It’s really absurd to me because all ofDys4ia’s screens are very traditional games in a lot of ways,” she said. “They’re all about interacting with rules, the limitations of which are always pretty clear. I think a lot of the ‘is it a game?’ talk comes from, well, the fact that gamers are afraid of anything that looks different than what they’re familiar with, first of all. And second, that the game isn’t challenging. The player is allowed to, or set up to, fail in many scenes, but the game continues to the next scene regardless.”

In a traditional game, the player may be asked to guide the nipples through the spikes over and over until they clear that particular section. “But how does that help tell the story? What does snagging a nipple on a spike a second or third time tell us that we didn’t already know?” Anthropy asked. “A lot of games, I think, force the player to repeat scenes because they’re afraid of being seen as skill-less, even when the repetition doesn’t serve the story the game is telling. But it’s engaging with a set of rules that defines a game, not having one’s time wasted.”

Dys4ia uses the vocabulary of video games in order to share emotions that may not have been as easily described in words. It’s one thing to say you don’t feel comfortable in your own skin. It’s quite another to show someone how that feels with a short game. The moment where you try to fit the character through the slot in the wall is particularly telling. There’s no reason that someone couldn’t fit through there, but it clearly wasn’t designed for you. That scene suggests that the structure isn’t wrong, you are wrong. It’s an elegant way to communicate the idea of being upset at your body, or feeling different and unwelcome.

Abstraction went a long way when Anthropy decided to share these very intimate details about her life. “The scene about my girlfriend making me cry - my girl who transformed my ideas of privacy and made me realize how liberating and empowering it is to have so much of my private life public - actually encompasses a big cluster of insecurities relating to our relationship,” she said. Their sex life suffered during the events of the game. “I spent a lot of sleepless nights worrying our relationship had become sterile and she was going to leave or reject me as a result, the truth is she supported me tirelessly throughout the entire experience.”

These are complex issues about sexual and gender identity, and it seems odd to find this sort of thing on Newgrounds, but that’s by design. “I wanted to put the game on Newgrounds because I wanted to take people out of their comfort zones, to confront them with the other they’re so often afraid of,” she explained. “But I was surprised that so many people, on Newgrounds and in other communities, connected with the game, even if they don’t 100 percent get it.” People began leaving personal stories in the comment threads, or e-mailing Anthropy directly. “This is a game that people related to, many more people than I was expecting. and that means the game is an overwhelming success.”

Dys4ia shows that games can be used just as effectively as the written word or film to convey subtle emotions and situations, as long the hand creating the game is skillful. The game also exposes a wider audience to a reality many people face when dealing with their bodies and sexuality. They may not want to read a magazine article about these issues, but play a game? It’s possible.

Power and politics are always fodder for conversation in America, and that’s especially true in the current presidential election year. But Raoul Peck hopes his filmmaking can help inspire Americans to look beyond their own politics and cultivate a more global perspective.

Peck is the director of “Moloch Tropical,’’ a visually arresting 2009 film about a democratically elected president in Haiti who wakes up one day to find his country in turmoil. That film will get its Boston premiere this week when Peck is spotlighted in a two-day event titled “Visionary Filmmaker: Raoul Peck’’ at the Paramount Center. The event is sponsored by Emerson College in collaboration with the Cultural Service of the French Consulate in Boston and Gallery Basquiat, a Boston artists collective.

“ ‘Moloch Tropical’ is a metaphor bigger than Haitian politics. It’s a satirical view of power,’’ says Peck over the telephone from his native Port au Prince, Haiti, where he is currently shooting a documentary. “The film has screened around the world - Italy, Sweden, Australia - and each time it’s brought about a discussion of local politics. Haiti has molded my own politics, but I felt totally at ease to take on the larger subject of power and how it functions. [The Boston screening] will give the audience an opportunity to see what’s happening elsewhere and to not see [the United States] as the center of the world.’’

To travel to Boston, Peck, 58, will interrupt the filming of his documentary, which has the working title “Billions for Restoration,’’ about the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Peck, who served as the minister of culture of the Republic of Haiti between 1996 and 1997, examines Haiti’s failure to rebuild completely, despite billions of dollars in humanitarian aid. He says he’s looking forward to discussing this work-in-progress at the Emerson event, which is expected to include many members of Boston’s Haitian community. The new documentary, he says, “is a critical observation of the reconstruction process from the inside. It’s a political roller coaster. The drama has been a good thing for the film but bad for the country.’’

Peck’s personal and professional journey has taken him from his native Haiti to Berlin University. He then worked as a taxi driver, journalist, and photographer in New York before earning a film degree in 1988 from the German Film and Television Academy in West Berlin. Currently living in Paris, Peck is also known for another contribution to world cinema: the 2005 HBO feature “Sometimes in April,’’ about the Rwandan genocide. “It was the first time HBO did a foreign production. It was a tremendous risk they took with me to do a film about the genocide and to shoot it in Rwanda,’’ he says.

Peck’s friend and fellow filmmaker Claire Andrade-Watkins, associate professor of visual and media arts at Emerson College, was instrumental in organizing Peck’s visit to Boston, which boasts the third largest Haitian population in the country after New York and Miami.

Andrade-Watkins says she shares Peck’s commitment to global cinema as a way to connect disenfranchised cultures and create “a sustainable legacy of memory-history of the Africana diaspora.’’ Andrade-Watkins’s SPIA Media handled the 2001 opening of “Lumumba’’ at the Kendall Square Cinema.

“I care about the people whose story this is,’’ she says of Peck’s work. “It’s not a red carpet event. This is about a community that needs us.’’

Peck says he hopes his visit promotes an “international discussion.’’

“Haiti is just one and a half hours from Miami,’’ he notes. “There are 10 million people in Haiti; that’s like a big city. But it still has not been able to solve the problems of a big city.’’

Ina May Gaskin, midwife and author of Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta, will discuss the state of modern childbirth practices with reporter and author Jennifer Block at 92nd St Y on Monday, March 19 at 8:15pm.

The event, sponsored by the 92 Y  will be held in Buttenweiser Hall on Lexington at 92 St.

Click here to learn more.

From Democracy Now!:

As the controversy over women’s access to contraception continues, we look at women’s access to safe, affordable and comfortable birthing options. Pioneering midwife Ina May Gaskin is the founder and director of the Farm Midwifery Center in Tennessee. Last year, she won a Right Livelihood Award “for her whole-life’s work teaching and advocating safe, woman-centered childbirth methods that best promote the physical and mental health of mother and child.” She is the author of “Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth,” and most recently, “Birth Matters, a Midwife’s Manifesta.” “Insurance has incredible power … that it did not have 70 years ago. It is the reason that doctors are not learning the reason to do breech deliveries any more. Its one of the huge reasons that we have very few midwives in this country,” Gaskin says. “Midwives are at the bottom of the pile, basically, on getting coverage.” Gaskin is also the founder of the Safe Motherhood Quilt Project, which seeks to draw public attention to the high maternal mortality rate in the United States.

March 17, 2012

In celebration of his collection of screenplays, Stolen Images, filmmaker Raoul Peck will present a film screening and talk at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on March 17 at  7pm.

This event, sponsored by the New York Public Library, will be held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture:

515 Malcom X Blvd, 10037

Click here for more info

Internationally-renowned director and author of the forthcoming Stolen Images, Raoul Peck, will be at two events at Emerson College.

The first will be a screening of his film Moloch Tropical at 7:30pm on March 15th at the Bright Family Screening Room in the Paramount Center. A Q&A with Mr. Peck will follow.

The second event is an author talk and book signing about his book Stolen Images on March 16th from 2-4pm. The event will again be held in the Bright Family Screening Room in the Paramount Center.

Both are free and open to the public. Click here to learn more!

Wine and Cheese Reception 6:00-7:00 PM: Event 7:00-9:00 PM
Arlene Francis Center for Spirit Art and Politics
99 6th St. Santa Rosa, CA

Donation $10.00 at the Door

Join us for reports and dialogue on this part year’s top censored stories and media analysis by Media Freedom Foundaton President Peter Phillips, Project Censored Director Mickey Huff, Associate Director Andy Roth, Abby Martin of Media Roots, Michale Levitin of the Occupy Wall Street Journal, Dennis Bernstein (poet and KPFA Flashpoint producer) Nora Barrows-Friedman (Electronic Intifada) and many more.

Celebrate Project Censored’s latest book
Censored 2012: Sourcebook for the Media Revolution

Censored 2012 involved over 100 professors and 250 students from 19 colleges and universities all over the world. Books can be purchased online at www.projectcensored.org or by coming to the event March 15th
The event will be streamed live online at http://NoLiesRadio.org/

Paola Caridi, author of Hamas: From Resistance to Government, will hold a book talk and discussion at Georgetown University on March 15 at 12:30pm.

This event, sponsored by Georgetown University, will be held at Edward B. Bunn S.J. Intercultural Center.

Click here for more info

Click here to RSVP

Anna Anthropy has just released her latest game online, Dys4ia. There is little doubt that it is her most personal work to date, and likely to remain so. The game design agent provacateur here offers an autobiographical account of her experience with hormonal replacement treatment, beginning with her general discomfort with her body, proceeding through her grappling with the medical establishment and social mores, and finally ending with her new found sense of possibility in her life and body.

Anthropy, known for her pointed and insightful criticisms into games and game culture, as well as frequently typing in ALL CAPS, is uncharacteristically earnest in Dys4ia; while three of the four chapters are titled “_____ Bullshit,” there is surprisingly little irony throughout – just palpable frustration with the people and social structures that made transition difficult. This is, as far as I can recall, the only time I’ve seen where Anthropy has characterized herself as vulnerable without giving as good as she got.

As a game, Dys4ia most resembles the “micro games” of the Warioware series, offering brief scenarios which the player has to figure out on the fly. It strikes me that this is a conscious choice, tied to the very concept of dysphoria: a sense of general anxiety and unease that is associated with the experience of being uncomfortable with the gender one is assigned at birth. Presumably, the constantly shifting scenario is meant to suggest panic and discomfort, providing a structural metaphor for the experience.

It can’t be said to actually draw the player into this panic, however; curiously, Anthropy does not apply her typical design philosophy of sadism towards the player. There are no fail states, nothing to impede the player from making her way to the end. It’s a straight shot, from start to finish. This has raised the question in some quarters as to whether or not Dys4ia is “really” a game. Certainly, it is a great departure from the game design Anthropy has pursued to this point.

And it is here, in the context of its release, that one understands why Dys4ia was designed the way it was. For one, there is nothing other than the player’s own prejudices to prevent one from finishing. Dys4ia is not a challenge, it is an invitation. Rather than hiding her experiences behind a gate, Anthropy makes them accessible, open to anyone.

Released on Newgrounds days after the GDC Pirate Kart, Dys4ia speaks to the same ethos informing that project: a desire for inclusion, and for games as a platform for self expression. Anthropy, an outspoken advocate for the Kart as well as its implicit message that anyone can, and should, make games, puts her money where her mouth is with Dys4ia, offering an example of how to use games as an articulation of personal experiences. In other words, Dys4ia is an expression, an attempt at communication, using the palette of the “game” as its medium.

Ultimately, Dys4ia presents two parallel statements: one is the content of the game, a plea for understanding and acceptance for transgendered persons; the second is the form of the game, an expression of what games can potentially be. In order to present both these ideas, Anthropy returns to the design of a game that she called, in 2007, the “aleph” of video games: Warioware. In the eighth volume of The Gamer’s Quarter, Anthropy suggests that the concept of the “micro game,” in forcefully boiling games down to their barest essentials, reveals them as consisting of two things: “that is ultimately why we play Warioware, and why we play any games: abstract gameplay plus meaningful context creates compelling experience.”

Anthropy’s definition of what constitutes a “game,” then, is ultimately just that: abstract gameplay plus meaningful context. Dys4ia, in addressing two parallel issues, offers both. Based on those terms, it’s up to the player to decide whether or not her math checks out.

Paola Caridi, author of Hamas: From Resistance to Government, will be speaking and signing copies of her new book at The Palestine Center in Washington, D.C., on 14 March from 12:30-2pm. Come out and hear the insightful remarks on what Palestine was, is, and where it will be in the future!

The Palestine Center is located at:

The Palestine Center
2425 Virginia Ave, NW
Washington, DC  20037
202.338.1290

Click here for more info!

When I recently blogged about how gay and lesbian sex scenes in Mass Effect 3 were causing a stir, I mentioned how the gaming industry had made some attempts to be more inclusive.

One experimental effort was A Closed World, a role-playing prototype offering a game from a gay or lesbian perspective.

A new game offers players the chance to see things from one trans person’s perspective.

Dys4ia is an autobiographical flash game created by Anna Anthropy, a freelance scratchware game creator, based on her experiences with hormone replacement therapy and changing gender. (Anthropy is also the author of Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form.)

The game riffs off 1980s 8-bit video games with little exercises, ranging from Pong to mazes. It’s all done in chunky Atari-style pixels.

But it feels more like experiential art than playing a game. Anthopy uses the game to simulate some of the frustrations she experienced. She often makes the various exercises difficult, sometimes even apparently unsolvable.

The first three levels are divided into gender, medical, and hormonal bullshit. Her experiences range from social awkwardness to the side effects of medication.

Check it out here. It doesn’t take too long to play it, and let us know what you think.

Anyone can make games!

I have followed the blog of the videogame developer and, I dare to say, videogame activist Anna Anthropy a while ago, and I have a great affinity with her speech (I like her games a lot too). Now she is fundraising for a tour around North America. Would be difficult to see her speaking in the brazilian Campus Party (where we heard the most goofy things about videogame), but always is good propagate a good initiative, even though we can’t be there. Beyond that, Anna is someone who every player or developer should know.

My first book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, is coming out in march! it’s about how everyone - not just corporations and programmers - can make videogames, and why it’s so important that everyone is allowed to make videogames. it’s also a guide to getting started and making your first game.

Even without having read her book, I recommend it. The central point of her speech is: everyone can make games. And it is actually everyone, not only the nerds in your building. And one detail that makes me think a lot, was the use of the word “zinester”. We are accostumed with fanzines (or simply zines) about literature, comics, illustration, informatives, music, films, but we are not accostumed to think videogames in this same sphere of underground culture that the fanzines propose. The dynamics of fanzine consists in free creation and exchange of content without the involvement of corporations, without the obligatoriness of prices (or the obligatoriness of the absence of prices), all moved by the passion that a group of people have about the same subject.

This dynamics has been extended over the internet, and most of the blogs we read would be printed in photocopies if the internet did not exist. In the same way, the internet facilitated the distribution of videogames, whose fruition depends of computers and that, before the web, needed to be recorded in tapes, chips and discs to be shared. Then the videogames always had the disadvantage of physic medias, in comparation with the acessibility of photocopied fanzines. The videogame industry, that from its inception was a risky and courageous ploy (imagine that!), had the means to record and distribute videogames in a large scale. Today it is unnecessary, because we have the internet. We can photocopy our games!

Here in These Violent Games, I have questioned the role of industry in the development of videogame as a language and culture, and I feel the lack of this thinking between brazilian players (who are much more “consumers” than “players”). I see some independent initiatives between developers (or indies, like the people prefers call), but most of these initiatives consists in seek a gap in the industry, fitting yourself in a niche market and thus become the newest “indie developer” revelation - it is the myth of fame, fortune, yachts and women - a goal that theorethically can be achieved by anyone, just by good ideas and lots of sweat.

The good ideas, in this case, are those formats that the industry will chose to hammer on the consumers’ heads. The videogame crytics, as is commonly, will buy these formats and put any game that appears in this same funnel. Peculiar characteristics become “design errors” and the pleasure of make a game in accord with your own ideas become the obligatoriness of please your consumers. Note the difference between this situation and the simple “I like it, I don’t like it, I understand it, I don’t understand it”. Doesn’t exists wrong preferences, and different people prefer different stuff. Let the videogame grows up naturally and the creative freedom of the game makers defines new genres, subgenres and ramifications that go beyond known videogame aesthetics and mechanics, or take them to their extremes - or do the same stuff as ever without fear to be old-fashioned.

It means we need to like everything? No, myself dislike a lot of things, and hate a lot of others. But we need to remember that we are people with opinions, personal preferences, roots, experiences and different contexts, and not a bunch of consumers with our hands on the telephone ready to call PROCON (brazilian government organ what protects consumers’ rights) because we don’t like a game on the internet.

Laurie Rubin’s rich, toffee-thick tones conveyed not just the sense of touch of puffy rosy lips but also their exceptional redness.

It would hardly occur to a listener that Rodrigo had been blind. Nor might someone hearing Rubin’s new recording of the Rodrigo songs, say on the radio, suspect the mezzo is without sight. In recital, of course, that is obvious. Whether this makes her a different sort of singer than one who sees was the question posed by this short recital and equally short colloquium, which was organized by the noted USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and presented by the university at the theater inside the AT&T Center highrise in downtown L.A.

Rubin — who grew up in Encino and who, as a high school senior, won a Music Center Spotlight Award in 1997 –- has allowed herself to mature slowly. Her first major solo recital CD (on Bridge) is out this month. Her memoir will be published in the fall, and a recital tour will follow next year.

Following on the heels of her release party at Modern Times in San Francisco for her forthcoming book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, and the popularity of Dys4ia, are home page features on both TIGSource and IndieGames.com.

What TIGSource had to say: “Each of the little games is well done, easy to understand, and a creative use of combining the topic and videogames, I enjoyed playing it just to see all the different ones. If you’re a game dev who wants to see art games done right, where the mechanics actually tie in to the theme, this is a great example.”

What IndieGames had to say: “Told through a series of mini-games, dys4ia is intimate and thought-provoking.”

The event is on March 8 at 7 p.m.

Modern Times Bookstore is located at 2919 24th Street, San Francisco, CA 94110.

How “Drill, Baby, Drill” and “Yes We Can” Got Married

By Subhankar Banerjee

American military prefers to make preemptive strikes. We know this. In America, corporations have enormous influence over the government—these days they essentially run the government. We know this too. And now a giant corporation has made a preemptive strike against nonprofit organizations. “Arctic Ocean drilling: Shell launches preemptive legal strike” is the title of a recent Los Angeles Times article. Shell’s legal attack is against REDOIL—a small indigenous human rights organization in Alaska and 12 environmental organizations fighting to stop dangerous drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas in Arctic Alaska—Alaska Wilderness League, Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, Greenpeace, National Audubon Society, Natural Resources Defense Council, Northern Alaska Environmental Center, Ocean Conservancy, Oceana, Pacific Environment, Sierra Club, and The Wilderness Society. This is historic.

On Thursday, I requested Cindy Shogan, Executive Director of Alaska Wilderness League in Washington, D.C. about how she would respond. Following is the email statement I received from her:

“In a true–life David vs. Goliath parable, Royal Dutch Shell, a foreign company that makes millions of dollars in profits per hour, is forcing Alaska Wilderness League, a grassroots–based nonprofit with the sole purpose of advocating for Alaska’s lands, waters and native people, into court—and seeking fees and costs against us. I suppose if you’re like Shell, and you have billions of dollars to throw around, you can engage in this desperate ploy, instead of proving on the ground that you can actually clean up an oil spill in Arctic conditions.

My response to Shell is this: Alaska Wilderness League will not be bullied. We will take the time we need to evaluate whether Shell’s oil spill response plan, for the most aggressive course of Arctic Ocean drilling ever proposed in history, meets the letter of the law. We owe that much to the Iñupiat people who have thrived on Alaska’s Arctic coast for thousands of years, and the extraordinary Arctic ecosystem that is among the most vital in the world.”

How did we get here? I’d suggest through a cruel marriage of two phrases. You perhaps never thought that two phrases could marry, right? And, that they can even produce babies, right? In America, anything is possible.

Once upon a time vice–presidential hopeful Sarah Palin uttered the now (in)famous phrase “Drill, Baby, Drill.” Also, once upon a time presidential hopeful Barack Obama uttered the now (in)famous phrase “Yes We Can.” These two phrases got married along the way, and will now produce their baby “Kill, Baby, Kill.”

Recently I was at a panel with Robert (Bob) Emmet Hernan, former New York State assistant attorney general. Bob pointed out that something remarkable has happened in the US during the past decade—it is stealing of the meaning of a phrase: “We must reduce our dependence on foreign oil.” Both Big Oil and the environmental activists seized upon that phrase. The activists wanted to reduce dependence on foreign oil and move America toward clean, sustainable energy, and create jobs, lot of jobs, along the way. Big Oil on the other hand wanted to reduce dependence on foreign oil by drilling every place in North America—not easy oil, but what resource expert Michael Klare has called extreme energy—dirty tar sands oil; oil in the deep ocean in the Gulf of Mexico; and perhaps most dangerous of all, oil in the harsh environment of the Arctic Ocean. Bob pointed out, “Big Oil has successfully stolen the phrase reduce our dependence on foreign oil.” That is “Drill, Baby, Drill” everywhere in North America. And, the Obama administration is going along with all those projects (and there is fracking also). That is “Yes We Can” drill everywhere.

That is how those two phrases got married.

But why?

Penny at the Pump Returns

In January the Obama administration rejected the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The republicans complained about high gas prices and made the argument that the tar sands crude would indeed bring down price at the pump. So, recently the White House did a 180–flip. In a recent op–ed Jim Hightower writes that the republicans’ use of “gas price pain as a whip for lashing out at Obama’s January decision to reject the infamous Keystone XL pipeline” is a “cynical political stunt.” He continues on to say correctly, “The pipeline and the toxic crude it’ll carry across six states would do absolutely nothing to shave even a penny off of the price we pay at the pump.”

Each time Big Oil wants approval on a dirty oil project, they and their cronies in Congress and Cabinet creatively use “price at the pump” as the most powerful argument to fool the American public. In 2005, when the Bush administration was pushing hard to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska—the most biodiverse conservation area in the entire Arctic, to oil and gas development, they had used that same argument—we had high gas prices then too. At that time, activist Carol Hoover and I co–designed an ad in collaboration with Alaska Wilderness League, Gwich’in Steering Committee and The Wilderness Society that came to be known as the Penny ad. The text of the ad began with these words: “According to the latest data from the Department of Energy, if Congress lets the oil companies into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, you’ll save a whopping penny a gallon at the pump. And of course you wouldn’t even see that penny until 2025.” We used one of my photos of pregnant female caribou from the Porcupine River herd migrating over frozen Coleen River as the backdrop. It was printed full page in the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today on November 14, 2005. You can see the Penny ad here. Because of the hard work of the activist community, we prevailed and defeated all of Bush’s attempts to sell off the Arctic Refuge to Big Oil.

Hightower is correct in saying that if we allow the Keystone XL pipeline today, it “would do absolutely nothing to shave even a penny off of the price we pay at the pump.”

McClatchy Newspapers reported, “energy experts say that the Keystone XL pipeline wouldn’t do much to lower gasoline prices. The recent price spike stems largely from speculators bidding up prices at a time of growing fear of future oil–supply disruptions if a war with Iran develops over its nuclear program.”

So why did Obama make the 180–flip? The obvious reason is that he wants to get reelected, and so he is going where the money is flowing (read: Wall Street, Big Oil, Big Coal). But it’s more than that—US has decided to stay firm on the coaley–oily–gassy path when it comes to energy, rather than make the hard choice of taking the path of clean energy and create real jobs.

Shell’s Dangerous Game

On February 17 the Obama administration approved Shell’s spill response plan in the Chukchi Sea. But why is Obama giving Shell the key to destroy the Arctic?

Unlike Hightower’s assessment of the Keystone XL pipeline issue—the usual Republicans pushing the Democrats argument isn’t true in this case. Despite tremendous opposition from environmental and indigenous human rights organizations, in 2009 when Obama was still riding the wave of popularity, his administration had approved Shell’s plan to drill five exploratory wells—two in the Beaufort and three in the Chukchi Seas. Then, on March 31, 2010 standing in front of an “environmentally friendly” F–18 Green Hornet fighter jet the President had announced a new energy proposal, which would open up vast expanses of America’s coastlines, including the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, to oil and gas development. BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster that spilled more than 200 million gallons of crude oil and extremely large amount of methane in the Gulf of Mexico put a damper, and the President did a temporary 180–flip. But slowly and surely his administration has been rubber–stampingpermits after permits—for Shell. The government has not done a thorough Environmental Impact Statement; and knows full well that Shell does not have the technology or the preparedness to respond to a spill in the frozen Arctic Ocean, and yet, in approving these permits the administration is essentially saying, “Yes We Can” drill in the Arctic Ocean.

So the story goes, “Drill, Baby, Drill,” marries “Yes We Can.”

If you take a bit of distance from “price at the pump” and other bogus arguments, you’ll realize that North America is determined to stay on course with fossil fuel driven energy for this century, and avoid any significant direction toward clean, sustainable energy, and deal with the devastating issue of climate change—the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. That is a major crime against all species of this earth. In 2010, I wrote a piece, “STOP: Another One Hundred Years of Fossil–Digging in North America?” that you can read here. That nightmare is becoming reality now—Shell’s Arctic Ocean drilling; Keystone XL pipeline and consequently massive expansion of tar sands extraction in Alberta; and major expansion of the deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico—are all moving forward.

What can you do?

Right now I’d urge you to sign the Alaska Wilderness League petition, Tell the President: “Shell No” to Arctic Drilling.

And, fight, yes, fight we must against all those who like to steal phrases, and along the way steal the meaning of survival for all species on earth. It is possible to defeat destructive projects when a community fights and keeps on fighting. Just in the last two weeks we have had two good news—the New Mexico anti–nuclear campaign stopped after an eight–year long battle a Plutonium Bomb Factory; and the anti–coal campaign in Chicago after a decade–long battle shut down two Model–T–era coal fired power plants in a historic victory. I recently edited an anthology “Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point” that will be published by Seven Stories Press in June. In the book we offer many stories and ideas of resistance–against–destruction. You can also check out the ClimateStoryTellers special series on Shell’s Arctic drilling here.

The US government continues to ignore what the Iñupiat people and the environmental organizations have to say about Shell’s Arctic Ocean drilling, so it is no surprise that we are at this historic moment when an Oil Giant has made a preemptive legal strike against these nonprofit organizations. Only two centuries ago the US government supported a policy that exterminated nearly 50 million buffalo in less than one hundred years and destroyed the way of life of the Native American communities. Will the US government repeat that today by sending Shell to the harsh Arctic Ocean and along the way destroy the rich marine habitat and the way of life of the Iñupiat communities?

Let us thank our colleagues at Alaska Wilderness League and other organizations who have been sued by Shell. Instead of backing down they’re speaking truth to power, as Cindy has articulated so well, “Alaska Wilderness League will not be bullied.”

Further Resources: United for America’s Arctic

Note for readers: I’d like to thank Cindy Shogan, Leah Donnahey and Gwen Dobbs of the Akaska Wilderness League for their help with our ongoing series on Shell’s Arctic Ocean drilling.

“There are Things I Want You To Know” About Stieg Larsson and Me
By Eva Gabrielsson with Marie-Françoise Colombani. Translated from the French by Linda Coverdale. Seven Stories Press, 205 pages, $26.95

One of the most gripping back-stories of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.) was the tale of the author’s 32-year relationship with architect and activist Eva Gabrielsson, and the fact that, because they were never officially married, she was cut out of any say in, or profit from, Larsson’s literary estate. Here she tells the story of that relationship, with many previously unseen pictures and including the letter Larsson left for her to be opened after his death.

Dragon Tattoo Girl Still Going Strong

By Ralph E. Stone

If you haven’t read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest – The Millennium Trilogy — by the late Swedish mystery writer Stieg Larsson, you are among the very few who haven’t.  All three books spent much time on best seller lists.  The Hornets’ Nest is still on the National Best-Seller list and has been for 78 weeks.  The Dragon Tattoo and Played With Fire are on the National Paperback Best-Seller list.  By December 2010, over 65 million copies of The Trilogy had been sold worldwide.

In addition to the three Trilogy books, I also enjoyed the movie versions of each of these mysteries.  The Swedish versions starred Michael Nyqvist as Mikael Blomkvist and Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander.  The American version of The Dragon Tattoo starred Daniel Craig as Blomkvist and Rooney Mara as Salander.  For this role, Rooney Mara received an Oscar nomination for best actress.  Sony plans movie versions of the other two books with the Played With Fire due for release late next year.  Both the Swedish versions of the three books and the American version of The Dragon Tattoo are excellent.  Although, Noomi Rapace more closely captured my imagined Lisbeth Salander.  This is not to slight Mara’s excellent portrayal.

Larsson fans  from around the world travel to Stockholm to follow the footsteps of Blomkvist and Salander.  I understand The Stockholm City Museum even offers walking tours of Sodermalm, where much of The Trilogy takes place.  Starting last month, the Museum includes stories from the shooting of the film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  My wife and I visited Stockholm in 2010 and wandered SoFo, but didn’t take the Museum tour.

The books introduce Lisbeth Salander, a unique figure in fiction.  She is Goth-like in appearance, autistic and bisexual with a distrust of authority, an amazing ability with a computer, a photographic memory, and astonishing physical courage, and while not physically attractive, is sexually appealing to both men and women.  And yes, she has a large tattoo of a dragon on her back.  She is a rare example of a feminist heroine who doesn’t hate men, just men who hate women.  Throughout The Trilogy, Larsson weaves in her background of childhood abuse and violence.

What is compelling about The Trilogy are the complex characters, the fast-paced story telling with interesting plots and sub-plots.  The books are long and very political.  With a background as an investigative reporter, Larsson brings a knowledge of the inner workings of the Swedish police, its intelligence service, and private security companies.  Larsson has been called a revolutionary socialist.

Larsson delivered the three books to his publisher, envisioning a series of books.  Supposedly, he had started on a fourth book and wrote outlines for six more. Will someone finish the fourth book?  Unfortunately, just as they were editing and translating the books, he died of an apparent heart attack in November 2004. He never knew that his Trilogy would become a worldwide publishing phenomenon.

Unfortunately, Eva Gabrielsson, his partner of 32 years, is not benefiting from the success. Because they were not married and he died without a will, Larsson’s estate was divided between Erland and Joakim Larsson, his father and brother.  Ms. Gabrielsson receives no income from the sales of Larsson’s books.  She refused an offer of $3.3 million and a seat on a board in the company that manages The Millennium Trilogy books to settle her claim.  Instead, she wants to determine which agents are used and approve how the works are used and any changes made in them.  In her memoir published last year, There Are Things I Want You to Know About Stieg Larsson and Mechronicles their life together and puts Larsson’s often chaotic life into context.

If you are a mystery buff and even if you are not, I highly recommend reading The MillenniumTrilogy.  They are terrific reads.  Scandinavian crime fiction has become enormously successful the last several years.  They are characterized by plain, direct writing, devoid of metaphor.  They expose the underside of the cradle-to-grave Scandinavian welfare system. Besides Larsson, I have enjoyed Henning Mankell (Sweden), Helene Tursten (Sweden),Hakan Nesser (Sweden), Åke Edwardson (Sweden), k.o. dahl (Norway), Jo Nesbø (Norway), Karin Fossum (Norway), Christian Jungersen (Denmark) and, of course, Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, a Swedish couple, whose ten-volume Martin Beck series (1965-1975) were a great influence on rising Scandinavian mystery writers.

And many of the Nordic mysteries have been made into movies and television series.  I’ve watched dramatizations of Varg Veum based on the series of crime novels by Norwegian mystery writer Gunnar Staalesen, and Mankell’s books.  In 2008, BBC adapted a few of Mankell’s books starring Kenneth Branagh as Kurt Wallander; a second series was shown in 2010.

See the movies, read The Millennium Trilogy and other Scandinavian mystery writers.  You won’t be disappointed.

Gregory D. Sumner, author of Unstuck in Time, A Journey through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Journals, will be speaking at the Carmel Clay Public Library at 10am on Friday, March 2.

The library is located at 55 4th Avenue S.E., Carmel, IN. Click here for more information.

February 28, 2012 by Ursula Ferreira Literary Mama Book Review: Birth Matters & Home/Birth

Three Percent Announces Fiction Longlist for the Fifth Annual Best Translated Book Awards

The 25-title fiction longlist for the 2012 Best Translated Book Awards has been chosen by Three Percent (www.rochester.edu/threepercent/)—online resource for international literature at the University of Rochester. This is the fifth year for the BTBA, which launched in 2007 as a way of highlighting the best works of international literature published in the U.S. in the previous year.

Featuring authors from 14 countries writing in 12 languages, this year’s fiction longlist illustrates the prize’s dedication to literary diversity, ranging from works by established and classic authors, such as Moacyr Scliar’s Kafka’s Leopards and Imre Kertesz’s Fiasco, to works by emerging voices, like Johan Harstad’s Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?, and Inka Parei’s The Shadow-Boxing Woman.

The longlist also includes an eclectic mix of translators, from Steve Dolph—whose translation of Juan José Saer’s Scars is his second full-length publication—to world-renowned translators Bill Johnston—who has two entries on this list, Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski and In Red by Magdalena Tulli. As in years past, the list is dominated by smaller independent publishers, such as Dedalus, Seagull Books, Melville House, and Archipelago Books, although a number of larger houses—like W.W. Norton, Knopf, and Bloomsbury—are also represented.

“We had such a difficult time culling this year’s longlist down to just twenty-five titles,” said fiction judge Gwendolyn Dawson. “Although a small percentage of books published in the U.S. each year are original translations, those books are generally excellent and unique. We are excited by this year’s strong longlist and daunted by the task of narrowing the list to a shortlist of only ten titles.”

Books eligible for this year’s award include titles published between Dec. 1, 2010 and Dec. 31, 2011 that have never before appeared in English translation in any form. Selection criteria include both the quality of the book itself and the quality of the translation, with the goal of honoring translators and authors for their joint effort in making future classics of world literature available to English readers.

This year’s set of judges consists of Monica Carter (Salonica), Gwendolyn Dawson (Literary License), Scott Esposito (Conversational Reading and Center for the Art of Translation), Susan Harris (Words Without Borders), Annie Janusch (Translation Review), Matthew Jakubowski (writer & critic), Brandon Kennedy (bookseller/cataloger), Bill Marx (PRI’s The World: World Books), Edward Nawotka (Publishing Perspectives), Michael Orthofer (Complete Review), and Jeff Waxman (Seminary Co-op and University of Chicago Press).

For the second consecutive year, Three Percent is also proud to announce that Amazon.com is supporting the awards through a $25,000 grant that will provide $5,000 cash prizes to all of the winning authors and translators, as well as $5,000 to bring the judges to New York for the awards ceremony.

The 10-title fiction shortlist will be announced on Tuesday, April 10th, concurrent with the announcement of the finalists for the poetry award. Winners in both categories will be announced in New York City, as part of the PEN World Voices Festival.

More details about the awards ceremony will be made available in coming weeks. In the meantime, Three Percent will highlight one book a day from the fiction longlist, with features written by translators, reviewers, and editors about the singular qualities of each title, and “why it should win.”

The 2012 BTBA Fiction Longlist (in alphabetical order by author):

Leeches by David Albahari. Translated from the Serbian by Ellen Elias-Bursać. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

My Two Worlds by Sergio Chejfec. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret B. Carson. (Open Letter)

Demolishing Nisard by Eric Chevillard. Translated from the French by Jordan Stump. (Dalkey Archive Press)

Private Property by Paule Constant. Translated from the French by Margot Miller and France Grenaudier-Klijn.(University of Nebraska Press)

Lightning by Jean Echenoz. Translated from the French by Linda Coverdale. (New Press)

Zone by Mathias Énard.Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell. (Open Letter)

Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? by Johan Harstad.
Translated from the Norwegian by Deborah Dawkin. (Seven Stories)

Upstaged by Jacques Jouet. Translated from the French by Leland de la Durantaye. (Dalkey Archive Press)

Fiasco by Imre Kertész. Translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson. (Melville House)

Montecore by Jonas Hassen Khemiri. Translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles.
(Knopf)

Kornél Esti by Dezső Kosztolányi. Translated from the Hungarian by Bernard Adams. (New Directions)

I Am a Japanese Writer by Dany Laferrière. Translated from the French by David Homel. (Douglas & MacIntyre)

Suicide by Edouard Levé. Translated from the French by Jan Steyn. (Dalkey Archive Press)

New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani. Translated from the Italian by Judith Landry. (Dedalus)

Purgatory by Tomás Eloy Martínez. Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne. (Bloomsbury)

Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski. Translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston. (Archipelago Books)

Scenes from Village Life by Amos Oz. Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

The Shadow-Boxing Woman by Inka Parei. Translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire. (Seagull Books)

Funeral for a Dog by Thomas Pletzinger. Translated from the German by Ross Benjamin. (W.W. Norton)

Scars by Juan José Saer. Translated from the Spanish by Steve Dolph. (Open Letter)

Kaf ka’s Leopards by Moacyr Scliar. Translated from the Portuguese by Thomas O. Beebee. (Texas Tech University Press)

Seven Years by Peter Stamm. Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann. (Other Press)

The Truth about Marie by Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Translated from the French by Matthew B. Smith. (Dalkey Archive Press)

In Red by Magdalena Tulli. Translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston. (Archipelago Books)

Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas. Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean. (New Directions)

Information about these titles, and all of the books on the fiction longlist, can be found online at Three Percent (www.rochester.edu/threepercent).

Contact: Chad W. Post
chad.post@rochester.edu
585.319.0823

In Hamas, Italian journalist Paola Caridi breaks with the tradition of sensationalist journalism about the Palestinian elections to instead tell the story of a movement, caught between the desire to resist its oppressor and the need to provide support for a refugee people, suddenly thrust into the role of the sole effective government of a war-torn region.

Here leading women’s health advocate Barbara Seaman has brought together an essential collection of essays, interviews, and commentary by leading activists, writers, doctors, and sociologists on topics ranging across reproductive rights, sex and orgasm, activism, motherhood and birth control. The more than two hundred contributors include Jennifer Baumgardner, Angela Davis, Barbara Ehrenreich, Gloria Steinem, Sojourner Truth, Naomi Wolf, and many more.

The 2011-2012 Academic Catalog is now available for viewing or download through Issuu. Please send desk copy and examination copy requests via email to academic@sevenstories.com or fax to 212-226-1411 on official school letterhead. Include your name, physical address, email address or phone number, as well as both the course name and expected enrollment for the book you are considering.