Intro to the Socialism 2023 Conference
Being a socialist in the United States requires walking a narrow path between admission of defeat and ideological hope.
Dispatches
Plants Warn, Defend, Scream, Remember, and Plan Ahead
Tempted as I am to lavish consciousness on everything around me, I was fascinated to learn that tobacco and tomato plants click when they are stressed.
When Your Friend Runs for Congress
Chris Bruneau, who is no naïf, understands his odds with different eventualities. He also knows that as a junior congressperson, he would be expected to toe the party line, but he is trying to present himself, at least in conversation, as something closer to what used to be a centrist.
Monk on the Run
“Monk on the Run” is shaped the way Warren Rosen has lived his life: moment to moment, choosing freedom over convention, scorning practicality, following impulses. Lots of digressions, in other words, and prose that is not always linear or logical but stays vivid, a paintbox spattered with bright personalities.“
Calamity on Fields of Green: Gettysburg
I entered the town of Gettysburg from the west, through battlefields marked with picket fences, cannon, and statues. The town was crawling with tourists.
Calamity on Fields of Green: Flight 93
Since it is not far from there, mere seconds in flight time, to the crash site, one is made conscious of how low the aircraft was at that point, of how little time was left, and of the terror of the people onboard.
Fear of Flushing
The need to flush is basic and practical, and we maybe should have taught one another better before we handed off such an intimate task. But tech addicts us, and free enterprise lives on.
African Americans and Cars
In the American South racial violence and disenfranchisement made job openings in Northern factories short on labor seem like the possibility of escape to “the promised land.” But the expense of public transport, the dangers and inconveniences of segregated waiting rooms and modes of travel, and the problems of finding food to eat when restaurants and stores often refused to serve Black travelers, made the self-guided and -paced car vital. It represented freedom.
Strange Fle$h
Joe was grieving his friend as he wrote “Strange Fle$h,” and when he finished the book, his new pseudonym was obvious. Joe West would be a stronger name—the short, plain, masculine sound of it, and the connection to Thom.As an author, though, Joe West is stronger because he is also Joe Schwartz.
Moving Along Through Time
I had been thinking about how long I had wanted to see the Connecticut coast, where my Griswold ancestors—the middle portion of an unbroken line of fathers and sons going back to the year 1200—first arrived in the Americas, but I was not planning to visit on this trip. It felt like a missed opportunity, but the drive was already long, and, besides, I knew my end of the story.