Isak

Detroit Future City

In my piece in Next City, I discuss the itchy question of implementation for an unprecedented urban planning effort (you've heard about it before) that looks up, down, and sideways for the next fifty years in the city of Detroit.

40 Years Roe: True Story

Lest it is difficult to read the Guttmacher infographic, it says this: By age 45 about half of American women will have an unintended pregnancy, and nearly one in three will have an abortion. It's true: and it means that it's awfully unlikely that you don't know one or many women who have had one, or a partner who supported a woman through it. (Or you, dear reader, are one of them yourself.) It's a surprising reality, though, that we just don't hear about very often from the people we know: few women, relatively, feel like they can speak about their abortion to others. "More state-level abortion restrictions were enacted in 2011 than in any prior year; 2012 brought the second-highest number of restrictions ever." The public conversation about abortion is ... well, you know how it is. Many of us argue our abortion beliefs among friends, families, and other groups in theoretical or political terms, assuming nobody in the group has a personal abortion experience. To mention that you've had one must feel like throwing yourself to the lions.

So: nearly 1 in 3 American women. Four crucial decades of abortion affirmed under our right to privacy, even as politicians use the issue as bait, throwing up every shaming and arduous obstacle possible.

There are a lot of stories there, a great many of them untold. (UPDATE: "What keeps black women from going public with our stories?" asks Dani McClain in Ebony.) They call for listeners. Reading is, I believe, a kind of intimate listening. That's why I'm reviving something I started last year on this day: sharing the most honest, brilliant, and important stories about abortion and the full scope of reproductive justice. All have been teachers to me.

And let's pause to say a prayer of gratitude. As Guttmacher puts it:

There are no women of reproductive age in the United States today who were of reproductive age prior to Roe. U.S. women of this age have never known a nation in which abortion was illegal and unsafe.

That is remarkable. Let us keep it that way. Let us listen.

Articles/Radio:

• "Birthright." Jill Lepore, The New Yorker. (See also her dispatch on the 40th anniversary of Roe.)
• Lepore's interview on NPR's "Fresh Air": "How Birth Control and Abortion Became Politicized".
• "Teaching Good Sex." Laurie Abraham, The New York Times
• "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives." Mimi Swartz, The Texas Monthly
• "The Message and the Meaning: Is Pro-Choice Passe?" Katha Pollit, The Nation.
• "Nursing Grudges." Dahlia Lithwick, Slate.
• "'We Have No Choice.'" Carolyn Jones. The Texas Observer.
• "Lucky Girl." Bridget Potter, Guernica.
• "An Abortion Battle, Fought to the Death." David Barstow. The New York Times.
• "The New Abortion Providers." Emily Bazelon. The New York Times Magazine.
• "Before (and After) Roe v. Wade: New Questions About Backlash." Linda Greenhouse & Reva B. Siegel. The Yale Law Journal.
• "Family Planning - A Special and Urgent Concern." Martin Luther King, Jr., 1965.

Visual/Multimedia:

• New Yorker slideshow: "Roe v. Wade and the Forty Years' War"
• Gorgeous art posters on reproductive rights that take a "people's history" slant
• Exhale: Pro-Voice
• The incomparable Scarleteen: an exhaustive site on "sex ed for the real world"
• Bill Moyers on Choice
• "Listening Beyond Life and Choice." Frances Kissling featured on PRI's "On Being" with Krista Tippett. Kissling is the former head of Catholics for Choice.
• MTV special: "No Easy Decision."

Supreme Court Decisions:

• Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which established the constitutional right to privacy. It struck down a Connecticut state law that prohibited birth control even for married couples.
• Roe v. Wade (1971), which was decided simultaneously with Doe v. Bolton to uphold the right to privacy under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
• "Interview: Sarah Weddington." TIME interviews the 26-year-old lawyer who argued in the Roe. v. Wade case before the Supreme Court. Martha Burk also interviews Weddington for the PRX show "Equal Time with Martha Burk."

Books:

• The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World - Michelle Goldberg. See also my interview with Goldberg here.
• Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty - Dorothy Roberts
• In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution - Susan Brownmiller
• S.E.X: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College - Heather Corinna
• Our Bodies, Ourselves - Boston Women's Health Book Collective

 

Related:

• 39 Years Roe: Read Up
• 37 Years of Roe v. Wade: Winter, Discontent
• 36 Years of Roe v. Wade: In Thanks
• Say You Want Revolution
• Abortion, Excommunication, and Kids

The Only Powerhouse Football Program That Quit It All

 

 

In the age of mega-conferences, "too big to fail" football, and the bizarre faux-narratives  that serve as fuel, it’s worth remembering the story of the University of Chicago: the only powerhouse program to opt out. And it did so at the height of its powers: Chicago, a co-founder of the Big Ten, won a national championship and seven conference titles. Jay Berwanger, a Chicago star, was the very first Heisman Trophy winner and the first-ever draft pick from the NFL.

But four years after Berwanger’s Heisman, the powerhouse football program that produced him ceased playing altogether. It took three decades before Chicago ventured on the field again. This year, the college played in Division III against Beloit and Oberlin in a middling UAA conference that itself will soon end its sponsorship of football.

What happened?

Call it the legend of Robert Hutchins. When he became president of the University of Chicago, he went so far as to liken himself to a prophet. Why? Because he understood himself as a rare voice of reason by believing that colleges were worth more than their football programs—and then acting on it.

The son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers, Hutchins found his pulpit in education. The Brooklyn native went to school at Oberlin, where his father taught after moving the family to Ohio, and, after driving ambulances in World War I, he finished at Yale. Hutchins taught a bit, completed a law degree at Yale, got married, became dean of Yale’s law school, and in 1929, he moved his family to Chicago to become president of the university. He was only 30 years old.

Uncowed by being a young leader of a vast and respected university, Hutchins gave 64 public addresses his first year, spoke on the radio, and began what would be a career of writing articles that amounted to education encyclicals: Hutchins was on a mission to restore American universities to their ideals. As he put it, “The purpose of the university is nothing less than to procure a moral, intellectual, and spiritual revolution throughout the world.”

Hutchins was a believer in the university as place of intellectual pursuit, and he understood extracurriculars—football in particular—as distractions that threatened to turn the campus into a mere lifestyle mall. The model university for Hutchins wasn’t Harvard or Stanford: it was ancient Athens. He wanted to see the Socratic method have pride of place on campus, rather than sports strategy. He likened intellect itself as “The University of Utopia.” Hutchins was quite clear on the attractions of football: namely, profit. All the more reason, according to Hutchins, to separate football from education.

And, after a few humiliating seasons in a row and with a whole lot of charisma, Hutchens actually mustered the will to see this through by eliminating football and, later, all varsity sports. He saw Chicago as a groundbreaking example for other colleges that might have similar ideals, but not yet the ability to enact them. As he wrote in Sports Illustrated in 1954, not long after he left campus:

Other institutions in the Midwest may have wanted to develop programs similar to Chicago’s perhaps even drop football, but they were not as free to act as the university was. They all had limitations of governmental or denominational control; they had a different kind of alumni or a different relationship with them; or they were without the financial resources that the University of Chicago commanded. … The university hoped to prove that "normal" young Americans could get excited about the life of the mind. ….

Literary & Media Indulgences - 1/6/2013

 

-- A manual on sex and pregnancy from 1680 (above) has been banned from sale for more than 200 years in the United Kingdom. But Aristotle's Compleat Master-Piece will be in bookstores this month.

-- Chris Ware and "the comic-book novel" get epic treatment in the New York Review of Books. Ware also spoke with the wonderful Michael Silverblatt of KCRW's Bookworm recently.

-- "George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You'll Read This Year." I'm not surprised. Also: thrilled. I can't wait for this.

-- Natasha Trethewey takes up residence in the nation's capital as our new poet laureate. "I like the idea that people might even get to sit down and have a conversation about poetry with me."

-- Sharon Olds: "I want a poem to be useful."

-- Writing is for mornings.

-- The American Reader, a new literary magazine, is getting a ton of top-tier buzz. I feel both intrigued and .. put-off by it. I'm skeptical about the literary interest of a magazine that seems to start, from Day 1, on an elite status that seems to already inspire pandering media attention, commenting on the editors' fashion sense. On the other hand, it does have lot that's unique and smart and beautiful going for it. For one, it's helmed by a 25-year-old African Catholic who just graduated from Princeton who speaks fluently about the view from the cultural margins on literary white privilege.

-- Zadie Smith writes about joy.

-- Edith Grossman on love and translation, via Words Without Borders.

-- Four Way Press is kicking it.

-- "The House Eudora Built." Visiting Ms. Welty's home in Jackson, Mississippi.

-- "Tolkien vs. Technology," via the New York Review of Books. Also: The economics of Middle Earth.

-- The Sorrows of Young Forster: E.M. Forster's journals and diaries are reviewed by Alan Hollinghurst.

-- "...at the hour when the parricide feels a cat purring against his feet..." Worldly Thornton Wilder, via Harper's.

-- Balancing literacy and oral traditions in academia.

-- Reader favorites: 12 incredible webcomics.

-- Zeno in court.

-- The woes of Blithering Heights.

-- In transit: people caught reading.

-- Edmund White offers sex tips for writers.

-- I constantly find myself arguing for the value of "objectivity" in journalism as a practice, rather than a state-of-being: a critical value in reporting that is not to be confused with the "he-said, she-said" journalism known as false balance. Margaret Sullivan, public editor of the New York Times, pens a column on just this issue: "When Reporters Get Personal."

-- An oral history of Newsweek magazine.

-- The perks of delusional optimism.

-- Here's why front-page obituaries more than doubled in the New York Times in 2012.

-- The amazing story of the woman who "at 22 almost single-handedly wrote women’s rights into the Constitution of modern Japan, and then kept silent about it for decades." She was one of the last living people who wrote Japan's postwar constitution.

-- Fact: For the first time since 1984, this past presidential election featured not one question on global warming. Four out of 10 people on earth have never heard of climate change, even if they've experienced its harsh consequences. Bill Moyers on "Moyers & Company" talks about ending the silence on climate change with Anthony Leiserowitz, who spends his life doing just that.

-- And, as federal action on climate change is seriously lacking, some cities are taking real leadership. Here are 12 cities with the best workable policies on sustainability.

-- Hill Valley Telegraph: The terrible newspaper from "Back to the Future." I love it all the same. For an alternative view on the journalism in "Back to the Future," see Slate.

-- "Saving his own soul first: The redemption of a Globetrotter."

-- A gorgeous black meteorite from Mars has more water than any other we've found in Earth.

-- NASA marks fifty years of space photography.

-- One Hundred Years of Solitude persuaded Francine Prose to drop out of her PhD program.

-- Christian Wiman is leaving Poetry magazine for Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

-- Jessa Crispin on materiality and the power of religious relics.

-- "I want women’s history to be legitimate, to be part of every curriculum on every level." Gerda Lerner has died. She almost singleheandedly made women's lives a legitimate subject of study for historians.

-- One of dictator Pinochet's last acts was to ban abortion in Chile in all circumstances. It had been legal since 1931. Today, there's a nervy effort to push back with an abortion hotline that walks a heated grey area.

-- Egad: 2012's deluge of "Africa is a Country" moments.

-- Arundhati Roy speaks on the misuses of democracy.

-- "Survival of the wrongest": How personal health journalism does it all wrong.

-- On the class politics of vaccination.

-- Civil Eats: The best food and agriculture books of the last year.

-- Physicists consider the rise and fall of words.

-- Why don't more girls study physics?

-- Gender in academia: men dominate philosophy and history, but aren't much of a show in education. There's a big difference in how gender participate on campus. Diversity will lead to better science. Misconceptions of the school-to-prison pipeline.

-- Abraham Lincoln as prose poet.

-- Reading aloud, fashionably.

-- "The last word is beauty."

12 Great Homes For Your End-Of-Year Donations

Offering my money to people, places, and organizations I believe in is one of my great joys, and is something of a year-round activity. But as this solstice season brings our year to a close, I know many of us are looking for what we might have missed. I offer here 12 suggestions that would be great homes for your end-of-year generosity and love. Please also check out Katha Pollitt's annual column in The Nation dedicated to wonderful causes -- I always look forward to it -- in which the clarion call is: "This year, be more generous than ever." And don't forget that in Choose Books: A Gift Guide for People Who Care About Stories, I profile several outstanding places for your gift donations, all with a distinctly bookish bent. And of course, if you value Isak, I'd be unbelievably grateful for your support for my work on this site: see the "Support Isak" box on the right.

But here are others.

 

National Center for Science Education
One of my all-time favorites. This nonprofit provides tools, resources, and advocacy to ensure that evolution and climate change are taught well in public school classrooms. It was founded in 1981 to provide support for legal and political challenges against science education, to educate the public through media outreach and journalist training, and to support educators who want to do their work well. NCSE states that, "Our 4500 members are scientists, teachers, clergy, and citizens with diverse religious and political affiliations." NCSE's good work resonates with me because it is both about the teaching of scientific fact (how our world works) and scientific process (how to make an evidence-based search for truth). Subscribe to the free "Education and Climate Education Update"  newsletter here. Donate here.

 

Medical Students for Choice
I love these folks. After years and years of hostile politics, and violence targeting abortion providers, you might not be surprised to learn that fewer medical students are choosing to go into abortion care ... or even learning how the procedure works, given that many schools are ignoring it in the curriculum. This translates into a scary dearth of people with skills to provide needed health care. (More of the story here.) MSFC, based in Philadelphia, is dedicated to creating tomorrow's abortion providers and pro-choice physicians. It is an effective and whole-hearted intervention, shaped in a participatory way by chapter organizations at medical schools in the U.S. and Canada. Here, there are resources to donate, shop online in a way that supports MSFC, and throw a house party to benefit MSFC.

 

Haley House
Okay, I'm biased. I used to live and work here. But I'll tell you from the inside that this Boston-based nonprofit and live-in community is worth your time and love. It is home to a soup kitchen that works in a radical community-based model, a food pantry (I used to run it! Say hi to Demetrius, one of the regulars, for me if you stop by), affordable housing, and a bakery that provides employment for people who have recently left incarceration or rehabilitation programs. Haley House extends its "food with purpose" model to providing cooking classes to community members and schools.

I've read that, despite their urgency, direct services are a distant third behind other, sexier, charitable giving to education and media/arts initiatives. Please don't forget people who need practical things like food and warmth. Donate here.

 

Forgotten Harvest
Picking up on the thread of providing for basic human needs: Forgotten Harvest is both food-rescue and hunger-fighting nonprofit based in Detroit. Since 1990, it has saved prepared and perishable food from waste, and distributed it, via 250 food banks and pantries, to people in need across the metropolitan region (2,000 square miles). Surplus food is culled from "grocery stores, restaurants, caterers, dairies, farmers, wholesale food distributors, and other Health Department-approved sources." Over 93% of funds go toward food programs. If you're local, here is how you can give food. Donate (the traditional way) here.

 

THAW (The Heat and Warmth) Fund
I know of several deadly fires caused by space heaters and other patchy solutions used by families who have had their heat cut off in the chilled Michigan winters. THAW provides emergency energy assistance to people who need warmth. Most of these people are elderly, unemployed, underemployed and/or disabled. Since its founding in 1985, THAW has 1985 distributed more than $110 million in assistance to more than 160,000 Michigan households. Donate here.

 

Women, Action, & the Media
This is gender justice in the media. This is about shifting the dynamics of whose stories get listened to, and how well those stories are told. WAM has been a crucial part of my journalism life: the community at WAM events and on its vibrant listserv effectively mentored me from the newbie who submitted print-letter queries addressed "to whom it may concern" into a person who can actually make a living from freelance writing. I like it so much, I carried it with me to Nairobi. Detroit, too. You can become a WAM member and get all sorts of discounts and services. Or donate straight-up here.

 

Earthjustice
"Because the earth needs a good lawyer." That's the tagline for Earthjustice, and it's a good one. This nonprofit has provided free legal representation for more than 1000 clients, ranging from big nonprofits like the National Resources Defense Council to small community groups. Headquartered in San Francisco, it builds hundreds of cases each year, defending laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act. Earthjustice helps "safeguard public lands, national forests, parks, and wilderness areas; reduce air and water pollution; prevent toxic contamination; preserve endangered species and wildlife habitat; fight the causes and effects of climate change; and defend the right of all people to a healthy environment." Donate here.

 

Natural Resources Defense Council
Considered one of the most effective environmental nonprofits in the country, particularly in fighting climate change, NRDC is a potent force. Besides sustainable energy (on a broad scale), NRDC is also focused on ocean revival, defending endangered animals and plants, ensuring a safe and abundant supply of water, and sustainable urban development. NRDC is a policy advocate and movement-builder: here are the successes it counts for 2012. Donate here.

 

Union of Concerned Scientists
Scientists and citizens unite here under the belief that rigorous scientific analysis, rather than political and corporate hype, "should guide our efforts to secure responsible changes in government policy, corporate practices, and consumer choices." UCS is also considered one of the most effective organizations in combating climate change. Its policy work and advocacy also prioritizes scientific integrity, clean vehicles, clean energy, and food and agriculture, among others. Donate here.

 

Freedom House
This is a temporary home in Detroit for survivors of violence and persecution from around the world who are seeking asylum in the United States and Canada. In thirty years, it has never turned anyone away who needed shelter here: men, women, and children are regularly living here, where they have access to food, shelter, legal support, social services, education, job training, and support in finding transitional housing. Freedom House also works to educate the public on refugees and the human impact of international political crises. Learn ways to volunteer or partner with Freedom House, and donate here.

 

RAINN (The Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network)
This is the largest and maybe the most effective national organization dedicated to ending sexual violence. It provides services to victims, including a very effective National Sexual Assault Hotline (free and confidential), and it spearheads numerous education and prevention efforts. It also is an advocate for sane public policies, and it provides technical assistance to over 1,100 crisis centers nationwide. It's been a major force in getting untested DNA from a backlog of rape kits examined. Donate here. If you give by December 31, your gift will be matched.

 

Center for the Art of Translation
Because international literature matters. Being able to share our stories across borders is both urgent and joyful. CAT publishes and champions extraordinary literature in translation. It publishes the wonderful Two Lines journal, runs a bilingual reading series in San Francisco, and facilitates poetry translation workshops with children. Donate here.

Why Is It Illegal To Send Braille Books Across Borders?

That's the question that Jina Moore explores in an interesting piece for Foreign Policy -- particularly pertinent because at a conference beginning tomorrow, the World Intellectual Property Organization will decide if it will proceed with a treaty that would dismantle a nonsensical ban on sharing accessible texts from one country to another. The American publishing industry opposes the treaty (because of its "current language"), and the Obama administration has not taken a stance one way or another; official statements amount to equivocations. Because WIPO has a consensus-based decision-making process (a fact that amazes me), the U.S. needs to back the treaty, or it's toast.

One of the issues here is a copyright exception (or lack thereof) that would allow organizations "to copy, in a variety of accessible formats, a copyrighted work without getting permission from or paying a fee to the copyright holder." Moore explains.

"Accessible books" includes Braille print copies, but the more important issue is digital files. Specially coded audio books allow the blind to navigate between chapters, bookmark their reading, and otherwise interact with a text as a sighted person might with a print volume. There are also various text-to-speech programs that can adapt a book for a visually impaired reader. All of these are based on digital files that blind resource organizations say would be easy to share with visually impaired readers, if not for the current regulations.

"Let's say the United States produces the book," says Melanie Brunson, executive director of the American Council of the Blind.  "Canada has to produce their own version; England has to produce their own version; Australia has to produce its own version, even though all of them are producing it in English Braille or an English talking book."

That's no small thing. Take Britain's most lately beloved literary export, Harry Potter. It cost the National Braille Press in Boston roughly $80,000 to set and print one volume of the series, though the work had already been done in other countries. Pescod says the resources his Royal National Institute of the Blind used to duplicate a single Harry Potter text could have paid for another four titles in Braille and another seven accessible audiobooks.

It sounds like a lot of red tape and a whole lot of money. And what's at stake here?

Current copyright regulations are contributing to a global "book famine" for blind or visually impaired readers, who number around 285 million, according to the World Blind Union (WBU). The WBU estimates that less than 1 percent of all titles are available in accessible formats in the developing world, and only 7 percent in the developed world. Only 8,517 books are accessible to the blind in Chile, Columbia, Mexico, Nicaragua and Uruguay combined, according to the WBU, yet Argentina has 63,000 accessible titles and Spain has 102,000. Spanish, of course, is a national language in each of those countries, but current copyright law doesn't permit Spain or Argentina to share its converted texts.

So, basically, a huge number of people, especially those living in developing countries, have very little to read, and those of us in wealthier countries can't legally donate materials to them. This doesn't just diminish their ability to read for fun (though I'd argue that's significant enough), but to advance in school and in the workplace. It's the systemic suffocation of the talents and skills of people who are visually impaired.

This story, incidentally, is exciting my interest in how books, especially of the literary ilk, are translated into Braille, or in audio formats specifically tailored to visually impaired people. What books are chosen for Braille conversion, and why? How does the rate of fiction books Braille-ized compare to nonfiction, and poetry? "Classic" authors and contemporary authors? Are there multiple translations of some texts available? What makes a Braille version of a book "good" or "not good," and what kind of training do the translators go through? I realize this is a tangent that assumes a certain amount of resources (and laws)  for Braille books to even exist, but ... I'm curious. If any readers can point me to stories or information about this, let me know.

"Indeterminable"

You might remember that Maria, my sweet seventeen-year-old cousin, died unexpectedly and inexplicably this past June. After six long months, the autopsy report came back yesterday. Cause of death? "Indeterminable." Manner of death? "Indeterminable." While the doctors recommended that her living relatives get tested for a particular kind of hard-to-detect heart disease, that appears to be just speculation. The point is, they have no idea why this healthy girl died one afternoon. Her family is left with the reasoning that, as they put it when sharing the news, "God wanted her ... No earthly explanation was to be found."

I'm struck that this "indeterminable" news came on the same day as the awful shooting in a Connecticut elementary school, which left 28 dead, including twenty children. That's a different kind of inexplicable death that leaves the rest of us feeling pensive, and angry, and sorrowful, and searching, and profoundly empathetic.

While each story has its own scope, and there are no equivalencies, it felt like there was a curious sort of rhyme yesterday, to reconcile ourselves with the permanent uncertainty of Maria's passing at the same moment that so many others met the unique questions that came out of the violence targeting children at school. Like a chorus, each of us with our own reasons: connected and apart, mouths open, a wail, a song. The warp and weft of it all.

Before, I offered a poem for Maria Rose and said there might be more. Here is the more.

 

Making a Fist
By Naomi Shihab Nye

    We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

                                                                  —Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,

I felt the life sliding out of me,

a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.

I was seven, I lay in the car

watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.

My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?”

I begged my mother.

We had been traveling for days.

With strange confidence she answered,

“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that journey,

the borders we must cross separately,

stamped with our unanswerable woes.

I who did not die, who am still living,

still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,

clenching and opening one small hand.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes – (372)
By Emily Dickinson

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

After Right-to-Work in Michigan, Organizers Plan Next Move

 

My article today for The American Prospect (and later picked up by Salon):

In Michigan, the birthplace of the labor movement, this week’s abrupt passage of a “right-to-work” law incited the largest protest in Lansing’s history: at least 12,500 people, wearing red, chanting, singing, drumming, committing civil disobedience, and otherwise battling to be heard as lawmakers in a lame-duck session overhauled the state’s labor laws without public input or committee meetings. State house Democrats’ attempts to pass amendments that would, for example, put right-to-work up for a public vote or eliminate the $1 million appropriation seemingly designed so that the law withstands the threat of voter referendum, all failed. That $1 million appropriation is supposed to go toward educating workers and union about life under right-to-work, and, in the budget-strained state, it’s not clear what the source of the money will be.Barely two hours after it left the House, and just days after it got on the agenda, Republican Governor Rick Snyder signed the bill. The overhaul will affect both public and private employees (police and fire excepted).

{...}

In Michigan on Tuesday, the display of public dissent prompted authorities to close the Capitol when they said it reached its 2,000-person capacity. Several Lansing streets were shut to traffic and some police wore riot gear. Two school districts closed for the day because of teachers and other workers joining in the demonstrations. Former Democratic Rep. Mark Schauer, a member of Laborers union Local 355, was among those hit with pepper spray as he led protestors outside the Capitol. Ironically, a rallying point for protesters was the Romney building—named for George Romney, the father of Mitt and the former governor who, in 1965, helped craft the very labor laws that right-to-work undercuts. The Romney building houses Snyder’s office, and stands as a reminder of legislation that Governor Romney and bipartisan lawmakers passed that provided full collective bargaining rights to public employees and improved bargaining rights for private employees.

Now that Michigan, with its symbolic power as the home of the United Auto Workers, has become a right-to-work state, what’s next for workers concerned about fair wages and fair working conditions? What is the long view of organizers here?

See the answer, more or less, here.

Choose Books: A Gift Guide for People Who Care About Stories

 

My song to you this season is a simple one: Choose books as your gifts. The gift of a great story is at best transformative and soul-opening; at basic, it is a joy.

And it so happens that to play bookish matchmaker is a delight.

I have for you the fourth edition (revised, expanded, updated, all-around wonderful) of Choose Books: A Gift Guide for People Who Care About Stories (PDF).* Here's what you can look forward to:

• This one goes to thirteen: Thirteen more pages of bookish delight in this 82-page expanded edition. 82! 
• Many hundreds of thoughtful and original book recommendations, including those featured in expansive profiles and those recommended for particular groups of readers—including history buffs, activists, people going through hard times, mystery-lovers, politicos, children, and wannabe cooks
• New listings on the book profiles for books that are “of an ilk,” in case what you see isn’t quite what you’re looking for, or you want to make a gift of two or three books, or you’re looking for another way to get a feel for the book's style
• An updated rendering of the Top Ten Eleven Magazine Gift Subscriptions 
• A new feature on the top book—yes, book!—subscriptions from extraordinary and innovative publishers and booksellers
• A much-expanded feature on the best books to pair with a cinematic experience: that is, books that should be given along with their film adaptations (which you should watch alongside the gift recipient, of course).
• A reprise of the best literary organizations to offer your gift donations—a meaningful gift on your behalf or in someone else’s name when giving donations are for many of us are a luxury. 

As always, this is more than a mere list of personal favorites. Choose Books is outward-looking, featuring outstanding books of different styles for different tastes and ages. These are both contemporary titles and classics, authored by both esteemed and emerging writers, and released by both small and large publishers.

While updated for the 2012-2013 winter season, this gift guide can also help you navigate the year’s birthdays, holidays, ceremonies, and, simply, those days when the thing to do is to give another a story they just might adore.

It's worth reiterating: Your purposeful choice of books, purchased from indie booksellers, supports a vibrant and dynamic literary culture at a time when the book world is struggling, and even literacy is horrifically low.

Choosing to give books translates into a choice of being an active and engaged participant in a thriving literary culture. And it's not as if this is something to be done out of charity: there are so many wonderful books out there, dynamic and strange and absorbing books, books suited to so many different personalities and tastes. A carefully-chosen book is more meaningful than giving someone, say, a necklace or another plastic toy with too much packaging.

Choose Books because your choices matter. Choose Books because it is joyful.

This 82-page gift guide is free and accessible, my gift to you. It's also 100% free of ads and sponsorships. If you find this guide worthwhile, however, I'd very much appreciate it if you'd pitch in a donation.

 

 

 

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* UPDATE: For a few hours on 12/2, last year's version was live at this link. All fixed now. Get your clean copy today -- sans the weird 2011 references!

About the Image: I'm reading with my niece Joan on a Sunday afternoon in April. 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Detroit

It’s impossible to talk about Detroit without talking about poverty. What relevance does elegant design have in neighborhoods lined by miles of abandoned single-family bungalows? What does urban planning mean for families just trying to navigate the patchy streetlighting and bus services so they can get their kids to school?

In the November issue of Architect Magazine, I write about the unprecedented Detroit Works Project, an unprecedented effort to redesign, reimagine, and recalibrate every part of an entire city -- a city with no less than 139 square miles, and living memory of morally bankrupt "urban renewal" that decimated the thriving neighborhoods where the Detroit's twentieth-century black community lived.

Detroit Works could be a gamechanger. Or it could sit prettily on a shelf. With the final results soon to be released, we’re about to find out which. The project’s effectiveness depends on the quality of conversations about Detroit -- its poverty, its possibility -- that its champions have with city officials, as well as with business owners, nonprofit leaders, investors, activists, and, of course, the hundreds of thousands of residents who, as one east-sider put it, have “the brilliance of lived experience.”

How calibrated Detroit Works is to that brilliance will define its future as rhetoric, or reality.

Speaking: Brené Brown

"I'm really talking about that kind of warm wash that we experience of not good enough. You know, I always say that shame drives two primary tapes: not good enough, and who do you think you are? So to me, it's a very formidable emotion. Its survival is based on us not talking about it, so it's done everything it can do to make it unspeakable.

{...}

"Creativity was on the other side and I think, before this, you know, I was one of those people who, if someone said, you know, "Hey, do you want to take this painting class with me, or do you want to scrapbook or do you want to …" you know, I was like, aw, that's really cute. You know, "You do your A-R-T, I've got a J-O-B." You know, it's so funny because as a shame researcher, my lens on this was very different. My lens was not just like, oh, OK, so we should be more creative and we should incorporate more rest and play into our lives.

"My question was like, OK, so I get rest, it's important, and play and creativity and all these things that make me super uncomfortable. But what are the shame triggers that get in the way of us doing these things? Like I wasn't satisfied with just knowing what we were supposed to do. I wanted to know what is it that the wholehearted, if they were just like us, what did they have to overcome in order to soften into some of these things? So like with creativity, the primary shame trigger around that is comparison.

{...}

"To me, vulnerability is courage. It's about the willingness to show up and be seen in our lives. And in those moments when we show up, I think those are the most powerful meaning-making moments of our lives even if they don't go well. ...

{...}

"And so I think we buy into some mythology about vulnerability being weakness and being gullibility and being frailty because it gives us permission not to do it."

 

-- Brené Brown, interviewed for PRI's "On Being with Krista Tippett"

 

Brené Brown is a professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. Her research focuses on vulnerability, shame, courage, and empathy, which she conceptually fuses together as Wholeheartedness. Brown's TEDxHouston talk went viral a few years ago, bringing her work a swift and deep amount of public attention. She also blogs and podcasts at Ordinary Courage. Brown is the author of Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (2012), The Gifts of Imperfection   (2010), and I Thought It Was Just Me (2007). She is a sixth-generation Texan, and she lives in Houston.

 

Related: 

• "Brené Brown on Vulnerability" (On Being)
• Melissa Harris-Perry (then Harris-Lacewell) speaks brilliantly on historical shame and present-day justice
• "Book Review: Melissa Harris-Perry's Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America" (Isak)
• "Speaking of Shame" (Isak)
• "Out Loud Anna" (Isak)
  

Image Credit: The PRIME Book