The Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement

As an Alabamian, race and the civil rights movements are important to me. Sure, this nation’s ongoing struggle with the concept of human rights and equality ought to concern every American, but as a Southerner, I have a particular interest in the various eras of race-based grassroots struggle. And the time in which my parents [...]

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Alabama: Moral Classroom to the World

A few weeks ago, I blogged about an LA Times column about Alabama and civil rights. The column, a lazy piece of crap invoking conventional tropes, irked me on many levels. It involved no information about contemporary struggles facing people in the South. Even the headline, “Revolution Frozen in the Past,” was oblivious to people [...]

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Happy MLK Day. Make a Revolution.

The hair on my neck always prickles around MLK Day each year. Any fragment of mass media consumption usually entails a warm and fuzzy message of harmless multiculturalism and tolerance, oversimplified messages that strip Dr. King of any radicalism and fully decontextualize him from a larger, grassroots struggle or from specific techniques. This misty and [...]

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The LA Times Goes to Birmingham

“Hi, I’m Peter King, with the LA Times. No, not that Peter King. I’m Peter H. King. That’s what I use for my byline.”
“I’m here in Birmingham, Alabama. I’m hanging out in this park all day. No, I haven’t really been anywhere else in town, but here’s my pitch: I’m going to hang out in [...]

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The Sad Case of Jimmy Lee Jackson

When I woke up this morning, one of the things on my calendar was “Jimmy Lee Jackson trial.”
If you don’t know who Jimmy Lee Jackson was, you should check it out during the commercial breaks of Monday Night Football (or whatever programming consumes your evening). His Wikipedia entry is here, but a far more revealing [...]

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Section Eight and the Pygmalion Principle

This summer, The Atlantic ran a story that was shocking, well-researched, and more or less totally ignored in a number of the other publications I read. The article reports on an investigation on the causes of increasing crime in Memphis – crime in formerly peaceful neighborhoods, especially suburban neighborhoods. A pair of academics at the [...]

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Crush, crush, crush: 7-0

Ah, California. So rich, so verdant. So full of life. More so, now that the California Supreme Court has ruled that doctors can’t refuse fertility treatments to lesbians. In a unanimous decision (which you can read here – it’s North Coast etc. v. Super Ct.), the court dismissed the physician’s claim of freedom of religious [...]

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Some good news

Indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic was captured today in Serbia after twelve years on the lam. Evidently he was hanging around Belgrade for much of the time, but there was a lack of political will to bring him in to stand trial. Probably the fact that his capture (and the capture of other indicted war [...]

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Happy 4th of July

Worth reading every single time this holiday rolls around. Also keep in mind the costs of the absurd candy spectacles that you’ll likely be consuming. Their slavery for our freedom-swilling facade and immediately-forgotten spectacle. Happy holiday. Posting will resume on Monday.

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You’re Not Special

No matter what you’ve heard from Dr. Phil or Big Pharma. And now there’s astronomical evidence to confirm it. But steady wealth accumulation just might let you make it into the rarified class represented in these amazing graphics from The Nation. But maybe you don’t want to be special. Maybe you really just want to [...]

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