"These fancams are the work of what I call the the Center for Surveilling Unwitting Players via Guerrilla Investigative Reporting by Lesbians, aka SUPGIRL, for which a member requires no training. The only requirement is the ability to see in gay."
Actually have been waiting for a piece like this about Oakland’s sideshows for quite some time. Got to give it up to @oaklandreviewofbooks.org on this. www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/sideshow-his...
"Cult nonfiction presumes that a cult is an aberration, a pocket of strangeness on the margins of society that fools are lured into, into which readers are given an opportunity to peek...But is the structure of a startup so incompatible with a cult?" www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/riding-nicol...
One (anonymous) woman's account of navigating the "sexual marketplace" of Silicon Valley ca. 2015, as the rich tech dudes were beginning to get a little fashy.
We asked Alex Werth, author of “On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland,” to make a playlist of songs and sounds that he thinks are characteristic of Oakland in some way. Here’s a thread, pulled from this piece: www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/black-sonic-...
“…the most pointed lesson in the book is that art draws its power from the resistance of its medium and the traces of creative labor left behind. It’s why you would use an oscillator that can’t maintain pitch rather than a digital filter that pretends it can’t.”
@oaklandreviewofbooks.org is so good
A lot of people have asked what the Oakland Review of Books is. One good answer is that ORB is the opposite of whatever these guys have become. Give a thought to subscribing, won't you? www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org#/portal/signup
Read the article about the history of Oakland's sideshows that everyone at r/OaklandCA (that's the reactionary Oakland subreddit) absolutely hated: www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/sideshow-his...
Among the myriad benefits of being an ORB subscriber--including at the "pay nothing, get everything" level--is that we send out a "Sunday Reading" on Sundays, with links to things to read (thus the name): www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/email/0c8775...
Subscribe to ORB! It is cool and interesting and local (in the not annoying way)
if you become a member and ever run into me IRL you can be like, “hey, I subscribe to ORB and I enjoy it” and I can be like, “me too!”
"The existence of aquatic “cryptids,” creatures unrecognized by mainstream science, requires a cloudy body of water to suspend our disbelief. Without this opacity, legends of these creatures would eventually go extinct..." www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/theres-a-mon...
Our subscription drive is making progress! We added 25 new Founding Members in the last 24 hours, 1/10 of the way to our goal of 250! Only 142 to go!
It was also about the loss of Black power in Oakland, and how "Oakland" has come to represent "a place that was going to become something but didn’t."
"Freaky Tales" deserved better than to have been unwatched and forgotten. It was about Oakland in the 1980s, sort of, but it was also about the U.S. in the 2020s and the simple necessity of fucking up Nazis.
We have so many good ones! Here are ten:
'Who Made Caitlin Clark a Good White Girl?' @tcraggs22.bsky.social
flaminghydra.com/who-made-caitlin-clark-a-good-white-girl/
'Taking What Comes' @parkermolloy.com
flaminghydra.com/taking-what-comes/
1/
In the United States Court of Appeals For the Eleventh Circuit ____________________ No. 25-13969 ____________________ UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellant, versus TIMOTHY BURKE, Defendant-Appellee. ____________________ Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida D.C. Docket No. 8:24-cr-00068-KKM-TGW-1 ____________________ ORDER: The motion for an extension of time to and including April 21, 2026 to file Appellant’s initial brief is GRANTED, with the appendix due 7 days after the filing of the brief. /s/ Barbara Lagoa UNITED STATES CIRCUIT JUDGE
six months to the day after my charges were dismissed, the Department of Justice was granted yet another extension to file their appeal of that dismissal.
https://timburkelegalfund.org/
"In the end there is no response to the fact of inequality, because to a man of humanity that fact is—in the word we all most associate with Shawn—inconceivable."
On "Squad Assembles" movies in general, which are secretly about full employment, and on "Sinners" in particular, which moves the Squad Assembles movie to Jim Crow Clarksdale and does something radical with the genre in the process.
Hard agree. It also feels like a good time to re-up Aaron Bady's incisive essay on Sinners for the @oaklandreviewofbooks.org. www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/sinners-one-...
"I don’t think the NBA really cares... If the WNBA vanished, I don’t think Adam Silver would lose any sleep over that. If the NBA vanished, I think Adam Silver would crawl into a ball & cry himself to sleep."
@wagesofwins.bsky.social is the expert WNBA economist that ESPN *won't* tell you about:
Not mine! This one was by my guy @repanich.bsky.social. (At some point during the site's ongoing death spasm, all the freelancer bylines got dropped.)
People said they wanted more culture pieces on Bsky, right? For COYOTE, I interviewed the @oaklandreviewofbooks.org and @meganwachspress.bsky.social for a behind-the-scenes account of how Megan's 7,000-word feature (!) on coal in Oakland came to be—a phenomenal work of longform journalism.
"Oakland is west of Bay Area and Palo Alto,." is an instant classic in my group chats.
I just subscribed to the @oaklandreviewofbooks.org — and you can, too! It’s new(ish). It’s (a) collective. It’s place-based. And Alysa Liu would want you to subscribe, I’m sure of it. www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org
Was not counting on being moved by any "Infinite Jest"-at-30 essays. And but then @pauline2k.bsky.social performed a tour de force of reparative reading. This is so lovely! www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/infinity-plu...
Text from the above-linked story that reads: Still, it may be that the idea of “bankruptcy” contains more radical possibilities. Not in its legal form, not in the way it’s currently made available, and managed, in a capitalist system. But what is bankruptcy other than a legalized process of breaking contracts, canceling debts, and reorganizing obligations? If a bankrupt entity is dissolved, its debts are paid in an order set by law (or are not paid, to those at the bottom of that list); if it is reorganized, the debtor and creditors must renegotiate their terms, eventually producing a plan, a means of restoring itself to financial function, which a judge will, or will not, approve. You have to squint a little to see it, but bankruptcy subjugates private agreements to public values, either as expressed in bankruptcy law (the priority of claims) or in the public space of the courtroom. In practice, bankruptcy allows capital to do precisely that which the law, thus far, has not allowed Oakland to do.
More text from the above-linked story that reads: What could Oakland do if it declared bankruptcy on the coal economy, on its own terms? This would not be a municipal bankruptcy, not a courtroom proceeding in which the city shifts its obligations around, takes the bond rating hit, accepts that it will pay more for the money it needs to build schools and parks in the future, and pivots back to economic development at all costs. The city could reorganize as a place, first and foremost, where people live (and breathe), give up on the compulsion to redevelop the port, again and again, stop feeling the need to make use of its place on the Pacific circuit, and might begin, instead, with what people, here, need. Unlike Peabody, which can use bankruptcy to cut off any possibility of recompense for its past harms, Oakland might instead take the opportunity to recognize what it owes to Black residents of West Oakland for the asthma, the heart attacks, the dust, the noise, all the smells that were absorbed so that the port could run; Oakland might add that to the ledger of what must be paid to break the bonds of obligation to fossil capital.
This, from @meganwachspress.bsky.social, is so good. Starts off as an explainer picking apart a dumb NYT story about Oakland and winds up reimagining the very idea of a city in the dying days of the coal economy.
Just got in at the highest tier. They truly are doing things no one else is and it is glorious. LFG!
