It's not complete, but I've received a list of things scheduled to run in the journal Historical Materialism in 2016 and it's impressive. Here it is: … [Read more...]

Celebrate it or hate it as you will, Wikipedia has metamorphosed from its beginnings as a gangly cultural interloper into the de facto reference work of first resort..... My column from last week on Wikipedia's 15th birthday. And in one of the Half-Baked Ideas to Save the World (is that trademarked?) offered at the Random Nerds blogazine, editor-in-chief Bryce Rudow makes the case for "A Wiki … [Read more...]

Kent Worcester's article "The Graphics Juggernaut," posted last month at the website of New Politics magazine, looks at Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg by Kate Evans (Verso) and three other recent political "titles aimed at the words-and-pictures market" -- which is probably a more serviceable description than calling them "graphic nonfiction novels," come to think of it. Among the … [Read more...]

This is, in a sense, Quick Study 2.0, since I ran a blog under the same name here in the late ’00s. It died off from the usual entropy, combined with growing dismay at the evidence that blogging encouraged some people to convert serious personality disorders into a kind of performance art. That seemed morbidly fascinating, for a while, but malice and malignant narcissism are toxic and prolonged … [Read more...]