| In today's edition: Things I read while on paternity leave. 1. Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Taken together, a prescient commentary on America's potential to succumb to and overcome fascism. "The two published Earthseed books trace the tribulations of Olamina’s early life and her efforts to find some safe space for her nascent utopian community in the desperate and increasingly fascistic America of the coming decades. But the last chapter of Talents skips ahead to the end of the story: jumping forward six decades, the epilogue sees a very aged Olamina, now world-famous, witnessing the launch of the first Earthseed ship carrying interstellar colonists off the planet as she’d dreamed. Only the name of the spaceship gives us pause: against Olamina’s wishes the ship has been named the Christopher Columbus, suggesting that perhaps the Earthseeders aren’t escaping the nightmare of history at all, but bringing it with them instead. And there Butler left it. The long-promised third book, Parable of the Trickster, never arrived." + I long thought I named my son after Octavio Paz. Changed my mind. Now he's named after Octavia Butler. 2. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Ed Baptist is a retelling of the history of slavery that transforms into a revision of all of American history. "The whipping-machine that enslavers built in the southwestern slave labor camps enabled them to reshape the world along the lines of their own fanciful calculations of people into hands, hands into bales, bales into money, money into hands again. Hard forced labor multiplied US cotton production to 130 times its 1800 level by 1860. Slave labor camps were more efficient producers of revenue than free farms in the North. Planter-entrepreneurs conquered a subcontinent in a lifetime, created from nothing the most significant staple-commodity stream in the world economy. They became the richest class of white people in the United States, and perhaps the world." 3. Alex Abramovich's excellent book Bullies on Oakland, violence, masculinity, and the East Bay Rats Motorcycle Club. "'You remember those old Seventies movies where they flush the baby crocodile down the toilet and ten years later you've got a sixty-foot man-eating crocodile rampaging down the streets?' asked Abramovich in a recent phone interview. 'Trevor's like the little boy who was flushed down the toilet, and he came out as this fearsome guy ... In a sense, he's not a bad example of what happens when you take a place and you brutalize it for decades on end, and you take services away, and you take people's houses away, and you take the schools away. You take everything away and this is sort of what you get.'" 4. When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War by John Patrick Daly works through how southern ministers made the theological case for slavery. Chilling and surreal. "Captivated by the idea of evangelical moralism, white evangelicals rarely defended slavery categorically and instead evaluated the righteousness of slaveholding by examining the character of individual slaveowners. For owners who proved the integrity of their evangelical character through worldly success, slaveholding was not sin. His explication of this particular manifestation of the proslavery argument gives conceptual unity to Daly's work by showing similar theological assumptions at work in a variety of contexts, even where it does not break new ground on proslavery theory. More innovatively, in his fifth chapter Daly shows how evangelical Southern whites responded to the ascendancy of Northern free labor advocates in the 1850s by blurring the theological differences between slavery and freedom. Slaves had as much moral agency, as much theological 'freedom' to obey or disobey God, as did wage laborers, declared proslavery evangelicals such as Presbyterian James H. Thornwell." 5. The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings by David F. Lancy. Pro-tip: don't read this while holding a baby. "In fact, the availability of adequate resources is most commonly the criterion for determining whether an apparently healthy infant will be kept alive. Among the Ayoreo foragers of Bolivia, it is customary for women to have several brief affairs, often resulting in childbirth, before settling into a stable relationship equaling marriage. “Illegitimate” offspring are often buried immediately after birth. During Bugos and McCarthy’s (1984) fieldwork, 54 of 141 births ended in infanticide." On Fusion: The future of VR in medicine, episode 10 of the Real Future TV show! 1. lareviewofbooks.org 2. amazon.com 3. eastbayexpress.com 4. jsr.fsu.edu 5. amazon.com Subscribe to The Newsletter Find Some Safe Space for Her Nascent Utopian Community | 