How to figure out what the fuck is going on without social media.
- The Washington Post
- The Guardian
- ProPublica
- The New Yorker
- The Economist
- The New York Times, I guess
- Dan Brooks: Based in Missoula, funny, liberal. Went to college in Iowa with an old friend of mine.
- Daniel Larison: Paleoconservative, Eastern Orthodox, extremely skeptical of neocons, hawks, and interventionists generally. I end up agreeing with him more than most liberals when it comes to foreign policy, which is almost the only thing he covers.
- Marcy Wheeler: Civil liberties, war, politics. The last of the anti-Bush bloggers.
These are books that have proven instrumental to how I read and respond to news about Presidents, politics, international policy, and civil liberties.
- Backlash, by Susan Faludi: my introduction to feminist media literacy.
- Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein: integral to understanding the politics of resentment, and how naked white supremacy became the Southern Strategy.
- The Enigma of Japanese Power, by Karel van Wolferen: van Wolferen argues persuasively that Japan works as a system without a center, where personal connections and social norms take the place of explicit hierarchies of power. While his analysis is imperfect and applies mostly to Japan, many of the notions he discusses seem to be applicable to American power politics, especially after reading Nixonland.
- The Coming of the Third Reich, by Richard J Evans: shows how fascism took over Germany, mechanically.
- The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein: "disaster capitalism" is as good a description of Steve Bannon's modus operandi as anything else.
- The Limits of Power, by Andrew J Bacevich: the isolationist right used this to explain why the US should get out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and its arguments are hard to refute.
- Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, by James Bamford: while The Puzzle Palace is the canonical work by Bamford on the NSA, Body of Secrets does a better job of cataloging the NSA's most notable operational failures, demonstrating years before Snowden started leaking why it's a bad idea to put them in a policy formation role.
- What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism, by Joanna Russ: babby's first intersectional feminist text. Russ was the first writer I encountered who really put together socialism and radical feminism, and also called to task the failures of "white feminism". Old and hard to find, but was very bracing when I first read it many years ago.
- Discipline and Punish, by Michel Foucault: Foucault is brilliant when talking about either the "unspeakable" (which is better covered in his history of sexuality) or the "panopticon state", which happens to be the state in which we live now. The anatomy of social control.
- No Gods, No Masters, edited by Daniel Guérin: substitute Kropotkin's Mutual Aid (Project Gutenberg link) if you want, but either way, here are some of the foundations of anarchism, as far as I'm concerned.