Maya Adachi and Kota Kimura are members of the Toronto-based Japanese Canadians for Social Justice. Scott Neigh interviews them about the group’s origins, its expansive vision of solidarity, and its involvement in struggles on the ground. In 2018, famous Japanese-Canadian poet and novelist Joy Kogawa brought together a number of people that she knew in …
YA fantasy. This author’s take on the secret British magic school and the ‘chosen one.’ Was pretty skeptical before I picked it up, but it drew me in fairly quickly. It manages a good balance of taking things seriously and poking a little bit of fun at, ahem, a certain similar series. The book enters …
Second edition from 2014 of a classic of US liberalism first released in the early George W. Bush years. The author is a cognitive scientist who has devoted much of his career to applying the findings of experimental neuroscience to politics. He has published a bunch of scholarly work along these lines too, but this …
Samantha Smith, Leslie Scott, and Robert Crooks are renters and current or former residents of the West Broadway neighbourhood in Winnipeg. They are also active members of the West Broadway Tenants Committee, a grassroots group of renters. Scott Neigh interviews them about the committee’s work organizing for tenant justice and building tenant power to oppose …
History. A reexamination of the Black civil rights movement in the US. The conventional narrative frames it as a struggle that took place from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s and that involved pushing the US nation and state to more completely live up to the supposed high principles of its founding by admitting Black people …
Contemporary fiction. A young widow in the city of Suryam in India witnesses a beautiful woman having a seizure in a park, and ends up drawn into a relationship with the woman and her husband. I picked up the book because of the unconventional relationship at its core, but it also has some things to …
Middle-grade fantasy. Book three of the Nevermoor series. Features Morrigan Crow, a serious and sensible girl growing up in an absurd and fantastical realm, along with lots of strange creatures and magic and terrible villains and hijinks. As I’ve observed before, it is enough like that famous series by She Who Must Not Be Named …
[The following is a rebroadcast of an episode of Talking Radical Radio that originally aired in June 2020.] Souheil Benslimane describes himself as a father, a partner, and an illegalized and criminalized migrant who lives on unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin territory (also known as Ottawa). Since his release from prison in 2018, he has been …
YA contemporary. Queer Black girl in a mostly white, mostly well-off town in the midwestern US doesn’t get the big scholarship she’ll need to attend the university program of her dreams, so she decides to go after an alternative source of scholarship dollars by entering the superintense prom king/queen competition for which her school is …
A lot of Serious People who do Serious Things when it comes to knowledge tend to treat stories and other kinds of experience-based narratives as inherently suspect and not terribly useful. Some do this from a sort of empiricist place, an unreconstructed Enlightment approach to knowledge in which our best approximation of accuracy and reliability, …