By Any Other Nerd

In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action by Vicky Osterweil My rating: 4 of 5 stars Osterweil writes a book that is likely to rattle many folks based upon the title but is definitely worth the read. Throughout the work, she makes a series of convincing arguments about the role of violence or how violence is mislabelled and misrepresented dependent upon who is doing it both in the present and through the lens of various historical movements (e.g. labor and civil rights).  For instance, when colonists seize land and take lives for their own benefit or when police seize bodies or personal property (asset forfeiture) without little or no consequence, looting is not a word that is used though it is quite evident in such work. Her strongest point is the illustrating of the questionable and blurred lines of distinction between violent and nonviolent, civil and uncivil, and how these lines are so easily manipulated by structural ...

Tell Me About Me by Marc Predka My rating: 4 of 5 stars As personal as they are powerful, Predka unleashes a torrent of emotional punches in this collection of poems.  They evoke visceral, even gut-clenching, moments of pain in a way that can make many readers feel seen by words they may have never strung together but feel deep in the bones.  That's one of the most poignant elements of Predka's work; how his poems are corporeal leaving imprints in the mind and on the body. It makes a certain amount of sense given how much of the works are about bodies--being in one's body, escaping one's body, harming one's body, witnessing changing one's body, connecting or missing another's body, and how the mind and body may connect or disconnect. On that point, many poems explore mental health in bold or nuanced ways--a theme that Predka had taken up in a recent album as the hip-hop artist, The Traemarc (Blood Meridian, 2019). Like any good c...

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha My rating: 5 of 5 stars Piepzna-Samarasinha's collection of essays is both foundation and ground-shaking. Through essays, reflections, interviews, and other written pieces, she defines much of the contours of a disability justice that is intersectional and informed and guided by the people who understand the work and navigate daily through an ableist world that constantly seems them as broken, messy, or unfixable. Beyond providing a variety of histories, accounts, and personal experiences of herself, friends, idols, and her locals, Piepzna-Samarasinha shows the reader time and again that there are vast strengths, resources, insights, and networks among queer, trans, lesbian, gay people of color communities that fight hard to keep them alive and have value and insight in ways that the larger culture largely ignores, disregards, and never chooses to ask. Further, she ...

Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi My rating: 5 of 5 stars Taibbi aims to provide an updated version of Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman's Manufacturing Consent adapted to integrate the last thirty years of mass media practice coupled with Taibbi's own insider views and criticism about how media across all divides is failing the US in profound ways. His argument is not new (media is failing us) but his take that all mainstream popular news outlets (TV, radio, print-based, digitally based) are complicit in this destruction because they're all playing to specific audiences is rather important. Taibbi explores and explains how news entities continue to focus on a portion of the audience they believe they can maintain by offering a particularly biased focus and forgo trying to win over other news consumers. The result is that most people end up paying attention to the news media that fits their politi...

Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change by Eitan Hersh My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is the book that so many of us need to read, thinking about, and act upon.  Hersh's argument is that there are a lot of people who believe they are politically active because they are engaged in daily news binging and social media arguments but not actually involved in political acts that help to expand one's influence or power.  Primarily, these folks (myself included here) know a lot about the national level blow-by-blow and have deeply-held beliefs about politics but find themselves less likely to do much to build a political powerbase (or support one) to enact change.  Hersh provides different reasons for this.  Sometimes, it's the disconnect between the moral philosophy of the participants (or nonparticipants as they were) and the fact that they would have to actually compromise and navigate comp...

From "Superman" to Man by J.A. Rogers My rating: 4 of 5 stars Rogers' fictional polemic explores and deconstructs the racism that pervades the United States. The story focuses largely on a conversation between Dixon, a Black porter on a train, and the white Southern racist legislator as the legislator attempts to argue the "nature" of Black inferiority. Over the course of several days, the conversations wind and turn with him throwing up argument after argument. But whether a strawperson of sociology, biology, psychology, economics, culture, religion, etc, they all crumble against Dixon's ample intelligence and research. While Dixon is a fictional character, the research he calls upon is real, relying on scientists, philosophers, political thinkers, and many others both of the time and from centuries past. That's what is most striking about this book from 1917--the height of Jim Crow--that Rogers has such a systematic ...

Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys by Victor M. Rios My rating: 5 of 5 stars Rios's dissertation work-turned-book is a fantastic and powerful read that feels like a perfect counterpart to The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness . Over several years, Rios situates himself among a group of Latino and Black young men in Oakland, California to learn from their vantage what life is like when society deems you a problem or menace. From his observations, interviews, and analysis, Rios highlights the many ways in which young people of color are stuck between living in challenging spaces that demand one kind of conformity while a predominantly white (and racist) culture demands conformity in another. These two demands are at odds with one another, leaving youth men determining what is the rational choice to pursue based on their situation (rather than the "rational" assumptions people not in their pos...

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray My rating: 4 of 5 stars Exploring life at what is referred to as "automation's last mile", Gray and Suri discuss the human cost to supposedly seamless technology. Their study is fascinating because while it highlights the many problems that the gig economy and invisible labor represent, they also identify that despite this very precarious work, some individuals who do it find meaningful ways of engaging in.  However, the crux of their discussion exposes the ways in which companies have made huge efforts to externalize nearly every aspect of costs to people they can pay but not consider employees and have utterly no responsibility to them (including giving useful feedback or even paying them properly).  What I appreciate about Gray and Suri's work is that they don't just focus on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, the most evident examp...

What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading by Leah Price My rating: 5 of 5 stars We have all heard (and maybe preached) the refrain that "people are reading less" and with it, comes the deep dread of a zombie apocalypse worldwide, not of actual zombies but by people unable or unwilling to read or at the very least, humanity is made all the less for this great and tragic loss of reading. But Price largely shatters that perspective with an in insightful historical look at books and our fundamental misunderstanding about books and the poor public discourse we have around them. Her first focus is to dismantle the myth of people reading less coupled with a challenge that asks exactly when were people doing more reading and what did that consist of? She notes that reading is still happening in significant numbers but people are fixated on the idea that people aren't reading books. Of course, book sales tell a different story...

Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels by David A. Beronä My rating: 4 of 5 stars Beronä explores the world of wordless books from the early and mid-20th century. These wood-cut novels (and other types of wordless visual stories) were a phenomenon within storytelling that seemed to operate in parallel to art movements and the development of comics.  Beronä's effort here is to provide a preliminary history of their emergence and the most well-know creators such as Frans Masereel, Lynd Ward, Otto Nuckel, Giacomo Patri and Laurence Hyde. The book does not necessarily have a critical through the line but sits more as an introductory exploration into the creators and the works. Besides the introduction and the conclusion, each chapter explores a particular creator and some of their works. The essays are brief biographies of the authors and some detail and complexity about the nature of the works being discussed.  Much of the book is dedicated to excerpts (ind...