In attacking libraries and museums, Donald Trump is waging a war on public knowledge. Censorship and economic pressures make the core mission of libraries harder, even as their mandate grows. Yet rather than retreat, libraries can push outward, enlarging the commons through new configurations of civic and creative life.
Texas and Lebanon lie at nearly the same latitude; the same constellations travel through their night skies along kindred arcs. In both places, darkness is an ecological commons turned strategic military and scientific asset. To hold these nights together is to see how an ethos of preservation at home aids devastation abroad.
Brief reviews of recent books on fascism at home, revolution in Black bookstores, climate change in augmented reality, gentrification as metaphor, and more.
How did rhubarb, the ancient Chinese drug once worth $100,000 a pound, make its way to kitchen tables in the American Midwest? The story of the pie plant, like that of a Lumbee man who devoted his Iowa backyard to it, must be pieced together, carefully, across time.
Urban renewal and its aftermath in Oakland, California, were neither natural nor inevitable but purposeful intensifications of precarity in Black American life — a de facto murder of place. Today, a specter of Blackness haunts the city, lingering in cultural and material landscapes that have been shaped by generations of Black Oaklanders.
