Reading material from the past 4+ months:

• Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond Vietnam:  A Time to Break Silence
• Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail
• Joel Berg, It’s Policy, Stupid:  Why Progressives Need Real Solutions to Real Problems:

Stopping the other side from taking disastrous actions is necessary and empowering, but concretely improving the everyday lives of Americans is the best way to both win and govern. Progressives should aim for nothing less.

• Jack Meserve, Keep It Simple and Take Credit
• Sam Adler-Bell, A Tough-Love Letter to the Left:  A new book urges activists to avoid insularity and purism—and to focus on winning.
• George Lakoff on Trump’s moral challenge to liberals  [“To many, [Trump’s] lying doesn’t matter.”  That sounds hard to get past but I believe we can.]
• May Naomi Blank, Fights We Can Win
• Graham Vyse, How to Sell “Medicare for All” to All Americans
• Matt Bruenig, A Foundation, Not a Net
• James Kwak, The Importance of Fairness:  A New Economic Vision for the Democratic Party

Discourses on fairness from fifty years ago:

• Howard Axelrod, CEOs Have No Business Being Commencement Speakers

American Society and Human Nature

• Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, The Guns Won:  Charlottesville showed that our First Amendment jurisprudence hasn’t reckoned with our Second Amendment reality.
• Erik Loomis, The End of Softselling Treason in Defense of Slavery
• Henry Rollins, America’s Real Safety Net Is Drugs, Alcohol, Cheap Food and Free Porn
• Corinne Purtill, The five universal laws of human stupidity
• Dave, The Galileo gambit movement
• Julia Belluz, Doctors have decades of experience fighting “fake news.” Here’s how they win.
• Max Sawicky, Nazi-Punching for Beginners

More Politics

• Hamilton Nolan, “Bipartisanship” Means “I Don’t Understand What Politics Is”
• Max Sawicky, Neoliberalism is . . . (Part I)
• Max Sawicky, Neoliberalism is . . . (Part II)
• Chris Dillow, The Conservative Left
• Ryan Cooper, Why leftists don’t trust Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Deval Patrick
• Max Sawicky, Weep Not for Kamala

The [Democratic] intra-party sniping might be regarded as healthy, the way a hotly contested primary is. The problem is the extent to which some on each side do not regard their adversaries, or themselves, as legitimate contenders for leadership of a united party. The competition turns into mutual assured destruction.

• Stonekettle Station, Antipodes
• Thomas Frank, The Democrats’ Davos ideology won’t win back the midwest
• Elizabeth Warren: Obama was wrong. The system is more rigged than you know.
• Miles Howard, Single-Payer Health Care Is The Key To Democratic Victory In 2018
• Andrew O’Hehir, Wake up, liberals: There will be no 2018 “blue wave,” no Democratic majority and no impeachment  [Note:  It’s going to be a long, hard slog.  Suck it up, buttercup.  We’re going to be at this for a looong time.] 
• Steve Phillips, The Democratic Party’s Billion-Dollar Mistake
• Franklin Foer, Populism Will Save the Democrats
• Stanley Greenberg, The Democrats’ ‘Working Class’ Problem
• The American Prospect, The White Working Class
• Gabriel Winant, The New Working Class
• Robert Griffin, Jay Halpin, and Ruy Teixeira, Democrats Need to Be the Party of and for Working People—of All Races
• UK Labour Manifesto
• Center for American Progress, The 2017 Ideas Conference
• Anthony Brooks, From Boston Garden To Amherst College: Looking At President JFK’s Massachusetts Speeches
• FDR’s State of the Union Message to Congress – January 11, 1944
• Mike Konczal, Who’s truly rebuilding the Democratic Party? The activists.

War

• Catherine Rampell, The Republicans who want to legalize running over protesters
• Branko Marcetic, The Elite Consensus on Syria
• Andrew Bacevich on Taking Action in Syria (from 2013)
• Ryan Cooper, Democrats are being staggeringly reckless with Obama’s greatest diplomatic achievement
• Daniel Larison, The Delusions of Interventionists
• Damon Linker, D.C.’s war madness
• Eric Levitz, Note to Pundits:  Please Stop Training Our President to Kill
• Eric Chandler, Maybe I Should’ve Lied

Education

• Diane Ravitch, The Demolition of American Education

Economics

• William Gale, The Kansas Tax Cut Experiment
• Daniel Costa, Modern-day Braceros: The United States has 450,000 guestworkers in low-wage jobs and doesn’t need more
• Peter Waldman, Inside Alabama’s Auto Jobs Boom: Cheap Wages, Little Training, Crushed Limbs
• Jared Bernstein, I’m concerned re the lack of nominal acceleration of the blue-collar wage.
• Lynn Parramore, America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People
• David Dayen, It’s Time for the Government to Give Everyone a Job
• Joe Allen, The UPS Strike, 20 Years Later
• Economic Policy Institute, How today’s unions help working peopleGiving workers the power to improve their jobs and unrig the economy
• Center for American Progress, Toward a Marshall Plan for America
• Dean Baker, The Congressional Progressive Caucus Budget: A Different Path Forward
• Dean Baker, Economic Populism Doesn’t Have to Involve More Government
• Dean Baker, Why Is It So Hard for Intellectuals to Envision Alternative Forms of Globalization?
• Jon Schwarz, The Incredible Lost History of How “Civil Rights Plus Full Employment Equals Freedom”

Taxes

• Max Sawicky, How Would a Populist Tax?
• Barry Ritholtz, Death Tax, Paying for What You Use, Comment Foolishness
• Jared Bernstein, The Case for a Tax on Financial Transactions

Science and Environment

• Cheryl Rofer, How I Learned To Love Climate Modeling [Note:  Excellent commentary.  My views have evolved along the lines Rofer describes.  Twenty-plus years ago I worked in combustion research lab and suspect I knew a few of the unnamed people she refers to.]
• Chad Orzel, Science Communication is a Two-Way Street
• Nathanael Johnson, Heroes in the heartland are quietly protecting our land and water

Ending on a Positive Note

• Maria Popova, Chinua Achebe on How Storytelling Helps Us Survive History’s Rough Patches
• Andrew Price, Small Bets
• Dennis Overbye, Cassini’s Grand Finale: A Dive Between Saturn and Its Rings
• Tonya Mosley, Changing Your Math ‘Mindset’ Can Boost Your Math Performance
• Lisa Mullins and Lynn Jolicoeur, Beautiful And Stressful: Delicate Nasturtiums Make Annual Splash At Gardner Museum