On May 1, 1933, the Catholic journalist and activist Dorothy Day went to New York’s Union Square to distribute copies of the first issue of her newspaper The Catholic Worker. As she made her way through the crowd, she had a ready audience of thousands: men in coats, ties, and hats — as low-wage workers and radicals apparently used to dress — gathered around a maze of signs for labor unions, fraternal societies, and parties representing the various varieties of socialism then on offer. These groups disagreed in every way they could think to, but they shared the square regardless. For decades, in the U.S. and around the world, May Day was International Workers’ Day, commemorating protesters killed in Haymarket Square, Chicago, during the 1886 strike for an eight-hour workday. It also had earlier roots as a spring holiday of maypoles and flower baskets. Dorothy Day was only one among many at Union Square trying to suggest a way out of the economic crisis of the time. This was well into the Great Depression, when the breadlines and the legions of unemployed people posed an existential threat to American capitalism; skirmishes between fed-up workers and abusive employers were common and often bloody. Day proposed a synthesis of Christian love and communist solidarity, militant pacifism in pursuit of “a society where it is easier to be good.” The Catholic Worker quickly became the script for a new religious and political movement. Within months, circulation grew from a first run of 2,500 copies to 10 times that, and it reached 150,000 before Day’s pacifist convictions caused subscriptions to drop during the lead-up to World War II. Each May Day, New York’s Catholic Workers still celebrate the birth of their movement with a communal supper and singing.And something shorter a few days ago for Reuters on the double canonization of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII:
The Co-Cathedral of St. Joseph in Brooklyn, nearing the end of a long restoration, has a new mural over its main doors. Surrounding the Holy Spirit, in the form of an incandescent dove, is a gathering of women and men flanked by angels. Most have soft yellow halos, but three figures, including the pair closest to the dove, do not. The three are local icons. Activist and writer Dorothy Day wears a hat with the inscription “NO WAR” and holds a stack of Catholic Worker newspapers, the publication she founded. Beside her is Bernard Quinn, a priest who served Brooklyn’s African American community at a church just blocks away, and whose Long Island orphanage was twice burned down by racists. Pierre Toussaint, who looks intently toward the dove, was a slave-turned-philanthropist who, on gaining his freedom in 1807, adopted his surname from the leader of the Haitian revolution.
On May 1, 1933, the Catholic journalist and activist Dorothy Day went to New York’s Union Square to distribute copies of the first issue of her newspaper The Catholic Worker. As she made her way through the crowd, she had a ready audience of thousands: men in coats, ties, and hats — as low-wage workers and radicals apparently used to dress — gathered around a maze of signs for labor unions, fraternal societies, and parties representing the various varieties of socialism then on offer. These groups disagreed in every way they could think to, but they shared the square regardless. For decades, in the U.S. and around the world, May Day was International Workers’ Day, commemorating protesters killed in Haymarket Square, Chicago, during the 1886 strike for an eight-hour workday. It also had earlier roots as a spring holiday of maypoles and flower baskets.
Dorothy Day was only one among many at Union Square trying to suggest a way out of the economic crisis of the time. This was well into the Great Depression, when the breadlines and the legions of unemployed people posed an existential threat to American capitalism; skirmishes between fed-up workers and abusive employers were common and often bloody. Day proposed a synthesis of Christian love and communist solidarity, militant pacifism in pursuit of “a society where it is easier to be good.” The Catholic Worker quickly became the script for a new religious and political movement. Within months, circulation grew from a first run of 2,500 copies to 10 times that, and it reached 150,000 before Day’s pacifist convictions caused subscriptions to drop during the lead-up to World War II. Each May Day, New York’s Catholic Workers still celebrate the birth of their movement with a communal supper and singing.
And something shorter a few days ago for Reuters on the double canonization of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII:
The Co-Cathedral of St.?Joseph in Brooklyn, nearing the end of a long restoration, has a new mural over its main doors. Surrounding the Holy Spirit, in the form of an incandescent dove, is a gathering of women and men flanked by angels. Most have soft yellow halos, but three figures, including the pair closest to the dove, do not.
The three are local icons. Activist and writer Dorothy Day wears a hat with the inscription “NO WAR” and holds a stack of Catholic Worker newspapers, the publication she founded. Beside her is Bernard Quinn, a priest who served Brooklyn’s African American community at a church just blocks away, and whose Long Island orphanage was twice burned down by racists. Pierre Toussaint, who looks intently toward the dove, was a slave-turned-philanthropist who, on gaining his freedom in 1807, adopted his surname from the leader of the Haitian revolution.
Jantar Mantar Road, a short passageway through the administrative center of New Delhi, takes its name from a complex of gigantic red astronomical instruments at its north terminus, built by Maharaja Jai Singh II in 1724. The Jantar Mantar consists of a series of geometric jungle gyms that surround the all-important shadow of the Supreme Instrument, a four-story, right-triangular sundial surrounded by semi-circular wings. The complex reflects the style of politics practiced by its autocratic creator — one based on charting the positions of the sun and planets across the zodiac with maximum pomp and precision. The road named after the Jantar Mantar, however, better reflects the aspirations of India’s past few decades as the world’s most populous democracy. In the space of several hundred yards between two sets of hand-painted red-and-yellow police barricades, an assortment of political and religious outfits have set up tents, encampments and shrines each dedicated to some particular cause — for the prosecution of a high-placed rapist, for the rights of migrant workers, for various flavors of spiritual-social awakening. Several tents contain men on hunger strikes, each reclining on a couch and nursed by supporters, on behalf of a petition like airline employee pensions or voting rights for Indians living abroad. Despite the amplified speeches and droning chants, Jantar Mantar Road is a respite from Delhi’s non-stop hustle; people slowly mill through to listen, strike up conversations and eat deep-fried snacks.Read the rest at Waging Nonviolence or openDemocracy.]]>
Jantar Mantar Road, a short passageway through the administrative center of New Delhi, takes its name from a complex of gigantic red astronomical instruments at its north terminus, built by Maharaja Jai Singh II in 1724. The Jantar Mantar consists of a series of geometric jungle gyms that surround the all-important shadow of the Supreme Instrument, a four-story, right-triangular sundial surrounded by semi-circular wings. The complex reflects the style of politics practiced by its autocratic creator — one based on charting the positions of the sun and planets across the zodiac with maximum pomp and precision.
The road named after the Jantar Mantar, however, better reflects the aspirations of India’s past few decades as the world’s most populous democracy. In the space of several hundred yards between two sets of hand-painted red-and-yellow police barricades, an assortment of political and religious outfits have set up tents, encampments and shrines each dedicated to some particular cause — for the prosecution of a high-placed rapist, for the rights of migrant workers, for various flavors of spiritual-social awakening. Several tents contain men on hunger strikes, each reclining on a couch and nursed by supporters, on behalf of a petition like airline employee pensions or voting rights for Indians living abroad. Despite the amplified speeches and droning chants, Jantar Mantar Road is a respite from Delhi’s non-stop hustle; people slowly mill through to listen, strike up conversations and eat deep-fried snacks.
Read the rest at Waging Nonviolence or openDemocracy.
]]>The first evening of a solidarity bus tour in the West Bank, I listened as a contingent of college students from around the United States made an excellent discovery: they were all, at least kind of, anarchists. As they sat on stuffed chairs in the lobby of a lonely hotel near the refugee camp in war-ravaged Jenin, they probed one another’s political tendencies, which were reflected in their ways of dressing and their most recent tattoos. All of this, along with stories of past trauma, made their way out into the light over the course of our ten-day trip. “I think I would call myself an anarchist,” one admitted. Then another jumped into the space this created: “Yeah, totally.” Basic agreement about various ideologies and idioms ensued—ableism, gender queerness, Zapatistas, black blocs, borders. The students took their near unison as an almost incalculable coincidence, though it was no such thing.If you're in the Boston area on November 18, come hear me introduce Chomsky (and you can stay to hear him speak if you want…) at MIT at 5:30. The other bit is a retrospective review in Commonweal (the online version is behind a paywall) of Paul Goodman's 1960 sort-of classic Growing Up Absurd:
Goodman's prose sets out to dazzle us with its iconoclastic attitude and the striking phrases that clothe the author's not-always-consistent arguments. He quotes from his previous books at length. Throughout he attempts to reconcile his claim to be an anarchist with his conservative instincts, a tension borne out in his life as well as on the page; he was a married family man who was promiscuously bisexual, a Jew who opposed World War II. Among the other “mansplainers” of Goodman's time—to borrow a neologism from the feminist blogosphere—one could be forgiven for preferring Ivan Illich, who presented his similarly adventuresome anarcho-conservative proposals with considerably more rigor and coherence; or James Baldwin, who as a black man in exile came by his prophetic tone more honestly. “Allen Ginsberg and I once pointed out to Stokely Carmichael how we were niggers,” Goodman recalled in a memoir-ish essay, referring to a 1967 BBC broadcast, “but he blandly put us down by saying that we could always conceal our disposition and pass.” Carmichael was right.For more: stop by a fine newsstand or bookstore near you.]]>
One is an introduction to a new collection of Noam Chomsky’s writings on Anarchism, straightforwardly titled On Anarchism, which comes out this month from the New Press.
The first evening of a solidarity bus tour in the West Bank, I listened as a contingent of college students from around the United States made an excellent discovery: they were all, at least kind of, anarchists. As they sat on stuffed chairs in the lobby of a lonely hotel near the refugee camp in war-ravaged Jenin, they probed one another’s political tendencies, which were reflected in their ways of dressing and their most recent tattoos. All of this, along with stories of past trauma, made their way out into the light over the course of our ten-day trip.
“I think I would call myself an anarchist,” one admitted.
Then another jumped into the space this created: “Yeah, totally.”
Basic agreement about various ideologies and idioms ensued—ableism, gender queerness, Zapatistas, black blocs, borders. The students took their near unison as an almost incalculable coincidence, though it was no such thing.
If you’re in the Boston area on November 18, come hear me introduce Chomsky (and you can stay to hear him speak if you want…) at MIT at 5:30.
The other bit is a retrospective review in Commonweal (the online version is behind a paywall) of Paul Goodman’s 1960 sort-of classic Growing Up Absurd:
Goodman’s prose sets out to dazzle us with its iconoclastic attitude and the striking phrases that clothe the author’s not-always-consistent arguments. He quotes from his previous books at length. Throughout he attempts to reconcile his claim to be an anarchist with his conservative instincts, a tension borne out in his life as well as on the page; he was a married family man who was promiscuously bisexual, a Jew who opposed World War II.
Among the other “mansplainers” of Goodman’s time—to borrow a neologism from the feminist blogosphere—one could be forgiven for preferring Ivan Illich, who presented his similarly adventuresome anarcho-conservative proposals with considerably more rigor and coherence; or James Baldwin, who as a black man in exile came by his prophetic tone more honestly. “Allen Ginsberg and I once pointed out to Stokely Carmichael how we were niggers,” Goodman recalled in a memoir-ish essay, referring to a 1967 BBC broadcast, “but he blandly put us down by saying that we could always conceal our disposition and pass.” Carmichael was right.
For more: stop by a fine newsstand or bookstore near you.
]]>“Schneider does a remarkable job of conveying the euphoric sense of possibility that transformed so many people in the square, as well as the frustrations”—Nick Pinto, Al Jazeera America
“I consider this book one of the lasting benefits of Occupy”—David Swanson, WarIsACrime.org
“[A] fast-moving cinematic chronicle”—Jonah Raskin, Occupy.com
“Part history, part on-the-scene reporting, and part hope for a better future, the work is valuable and delightfully controversial.”—John Scott G, Publishers Newswire
Agree? Disagree? You can share your own reaction with a review at Goodreads and Amazon. And don’t miss the interviews with Democracy Now, HuffPost Live, and The New Inquiry.
Between now and the end of October, thanks to a special arrangement with The Nation, the folks at University of California Press are offering a 30% discount on Thank You, Anarchy if you order directly from their website using the discount code 14W3726.
You can also find it at all sorts of fine retailers—ask for it at your local bookstore. If not now, when?
The interest in Thank You, Anarchy and God in Proof have spawned an improvised book tour:
More are in the works. If you’d like to try to bring me to your hometown, please don’t hesitate to let me know how I can help.
I hope to see you somewhere along the line!
]]>You can be among the first to see this new animated book trailer! Share it with your friends on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
Join a live interactive book event this Wednesday
In conversation with Texas-based philosophical artist Alyce Santoro, I’ll be discussing God in Proof in an online event on Wednesday at 9 p.m. eastern time, “God-Proofs and Philosoprops: Illustrating the Intangible.” You can join us from anywhere that has a decent Internet connection. Register for the event here and spread the word on Facebook.
Get the ebook
God in Proof is now available as an ebook, complete with all the illustrations and charts that appear in the print edition. Get the Kindle version at Amazon and the epub or pdf versions from other fine booksellers. (See GodInProof.com for details and a discount code.) If you like it, please consider writing a review at Goodreads or Amazon.
New book coming in September: Thank You, Anarchy
My study of the first year of Occupy Wall Street, Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse, is now available for preorder in paperback and hardcover. In the foreword, Rebecca Solnit writes: “Thanks to this meticulous and elegant book, we know what one witness-participant was thinking all through the first year of Occupy, and what many of the sparks and some of the tinder were thinking, and what it was like to be warmed by that beautiful conflagration that spread across the world.” Expect more news soon!
After ten years in the making, five years in the writing, and a few days doing little drawings, my first book, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet, is now becoming available. This is a guide on how you can get it for yourself and—please, please please!—help spread the word.
There are some choices for how to do this.
The ebook version isn’t out quite yet, but it will be coming in a few weeks.
It isn’t a book release without a party!
Media is social nowadays, so I can’t do this without you.
…a word of thanks. I am so grateful for your support and your willingness to help God in Proof reach readers who might not otherwise find it. I can’t do this without you, and I’d love to hear what you think about the book.
]]>For as long as I’ve been interested in the search for proofs about the existence of God, I’ve been interested in drawing them. Words and equations just didn’t seem like enough; to wrap my head around what these constructs were expressing, and to try to communicate them to others, I had to make pictures. As I wrote my new book, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet, I was drawing every step of the way — and my publisher, University of California Press, let me stick some of my pictures in the text.
In doing, I soon discovered, I was retracing the history of proof itself. Long before the mathematical symbols and notation we generally use today, ancient proofs were drawn in diagrams and images.
Now that the book is finished, I want to share the fun I’ve been having by making these drawings with you. The press has agreed to pony up some free books for a drawing contest, and here’s how to win one: Draw a proof of something, divine or otherwise, and tweet a scan or photo of it to #GodInProof, along with any explanation you’d like to add. (You can also email them to [email protected].) Selected proofs will appear here, where they’ll be entered for a chance to win a free book. Entries with the highest number of social media shares win. Multiple submissions are allowed, but only one book is allowed per winning author.
Download the PDF version of the contest postcard here.
]]>Distance and time—as well as involvement in ongoing local struggles—have lessened many people’s attachment to the Occupy label. “I’ve been working with all the same people I worked with in Occupy,” said Kate Savage, who specialized in facilitating assemblies at Occupy Nashville, “only it’s not called ‘Occupy’ for a variety of reasons.” For many issues and on many fronts, onetime Occupiers are finding that the Occupy brand—and all the associations that come with it—can sometimes hurt more than it helps. Thus, the internally splintering movement shows signs of morphing into a productively subdivided movement of movements. One example of this has been this summer’s escalating wave of direct actions against the worst culprits of the environmental crisis. For the first time, a fracking well was blockaded and shut down in Pennsylvania, and a mountaintop-removal coal mine in West Virginia, at the request of local residents, received similar treatment. The Keystone XL oil pipeline, which inspired protests at the White House last year, now has locals and out-of-towners putting their bodies in the way of construction in Texas. In New York State, the fight is against the Spectra pipeline, which would funnel explosive fracked natural gas into parts of Manhattan. At each of these protests, Occupy veterans have brought their bravado, their experience and their networks with them. “Lots of folks are going from eco-action to eco-action,” said Longenecker. “They’re building their skill sets.” The environmental campaigns are only one such beneficiary of the movement. Some Occupiers are serving as hired guns for big unions, helping to agitate in unusually militant campaigns against corporations and austerity budgets. Others are working to draw attention to the massive influx of corporate cash into the electoral system post–Citizens United, while still more are fighting the National Defense Authorization Act and have successfully challenged its most troubling provisions in federal court. Home liberation efforts are taking place around the country—from Occupiers’ support of a high-profile rent strike led by Latino women in Brooklyn to under-the-radar house reclamations in the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago’s South Side. Partly thanks to the light that Occupy Wall Street has shined on it, the NYPD’s use of a discriminatory stop-and-frisk policy has declined dramatically. Meanwhile, the Strike Debt campaign being mounted by Occupiers in New York is developing online memes and public assemblies meant to mobilize those suffering from predatory lending into a mass movement.Read the rest at?The Nation.]]>
]]>Distance and time—as well as involvement in ongoing local struggles—have lessened many people’s attachment to the Occupy label. “I’ve been working with all the same people I worked with in Occupy,” said Kate Savage, who specialized in facilitating assemblies at Occupy Nashville, “only it’s not called ‘Occupy’ for a variety of reasons.” For many issues and on many fronts, onetime Occupiers are finding that the Occupy brand—and all the associations that come with it—can sometimes hurt more than it helps.
Thus, the internally splintering movement shows signs of morphing into a productively subdivided movement of movements. One example of this has been this summer’s escalating wave of direct actions against the worst culprits of the environmental crisis. For the first time, a fracking well was blockaded and shut down in Pennsylvania, and a mountaintop-removal coal mine in West Virginia, at the request of local residents, received similar treatment. The Keystone XL oil pipeline, which inspired protests at the White House last year, now has locals and out-of-towners putting their bodies in the way of construction in Texas. In New York State, the fight is against the Spectra pipeline, which would funnel explosive fracked natural gas into parts of Manhattan.
At each of these protests, Occupy veterans have brought their bravado, their experience and their networks with them. “Lots of folks are going from eco-action to eco-action,” said Longenecker. “They’re building their skill sets.”
The environmental campaigns are only one such beneficiary of the movement. Some Occupiers are serving as hired guns for big unions, helping to agitate in unusually militant campaigns against corporations and austerity budgets. Others are working to draw attention to the massive influx of corporate cash into the electoral system post–Citizens United, while still more are fighting the National Defense Authorization Act and have successfully challenged its most troubling provisions in federal court. Home liberation efforts are taking place around the country—from Occupiers’ support of a high-profile rent strike led by Latino women in Brooklyn to under-the-radar house reclamations in the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago’s South Side. Partly thanks to the light that Occupy Wall Street has shined on it, the NYPD’s use of a discriminatory stop-and-frisk policy has declined dramatically. Meanwhile, the Strike Debt campaign being mounted by Occupiers in New York is developing online memes and public assemblies meant to mobilize those suffering from predatory lending into a mass movement.
The May Day general strike is an experiment and one I look forward to taking part in wholeheartedly. I find the distinction between observer and participant a problematic one to uphold. A distinction I prefer, although equally imperfect, is one drawn by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1938 novel “Nausea” — the distinction between “living” and “recounting.” The protagonist notes, “a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.” Just imagine what Sartre would have made of Twitter and Facebook timelines.But, as with most projects of upbuilding self-denial, I failed, again and again. ]]>
I tried to go on strike for May Day, following the Occupy movement’s calls for a general strike, and it was harder than I thought. My decision was made official—that is, public—by Malcolm Harris’ inclusion of me in his piece, “How Does a Writer Strike?” The trouble is, of course, that I’m self-employed, and my only steady income comes from Waging Nonviolence, which I both co-run and love. My work for the past seven months has almost exclusively been about, and generally regarded as being in support of, the Occupy movement itself. One Occupier even asked me not to strike on Twitter.
The best I could figure was that I’d tell an editor she’d have to wait until the next day for my report, and that I’d keep myself from tweeting. Rather than observing at my usual slight-but-noticeable remove, I would be in;?I would be of.?Correspondence with fellow Occupy writer Natasha Lennard was helpful in thinking this through, and I resonate a lot with what she wrote at Salon:
The May Day general strike is an experiment and one I look forward to taking part in wholeheartedly. I find the distinction between observer and participant a problematic one to uphold. A distinction I prefer, although equally imperfect, is one drawn by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1938 novel “Nausea” — the distinction between “living” and “recounting.” The protagonist notes, “a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.” Just imagine what Sartre would have made of Twitter and Facebook timelines.
But, as with most projects of upbuilding self-denial, I failed, again and again. In Union Square I sat and consulted with Ingrid Burrington, May Day’s one-woman Cartography Department, whom I’d profiled in a little piece on the Harper’s?website the day before, and as we did, we were being filmed as b-roll of me “reporting” for the 99% Film. Before that, I broke ranks with my fellow Occupy Catholics (discussed in a recent polemic for n+1‘s Occupy! Gazette #4?and?Killing the Buddha) in order to run ahead and catch sight of the march taking the street. A reporter’s duty! And, after that, as night fell, an Occupy organizer up and told me a bunch of neat secrets from the tactical end of the planning process, so I got out my notebook to jot some of them down. At that moment two fellow Occupy journos—who had witnessed my agonizing over striking in an email list—noticed me and started shouting, “Scab! Scab!” They had both opted to work that day.
As 10 p.m. approached, the temptation to report got harder and harder to fight. There was just so much. Like a tourist with 10 seconds in front of a world-famous landmark, I couldn’t resist taking a picture.?The scenes were too powerful, and passing too quickly. I later wrote in my subsequent report for YES! Magazine?(and Waging Nonviolence):
As dark came, Occupiers’ plans to hold an after-party in Battery Park were foiled by police blockades. Text-message alerts guided those who wished to stay to a Vietnam veterans’ memorial tucked along the East River waterfront between buildings that house Morgan Stanley and Standard & Poor’s. The memorial includes a space that served as a perfect amphitheater for a thousand-strong “people’s assembly”—so named because OWS’ General Assembly is currently defunct—and it became one of those moments of collective effervescence and speaking-in-one-voice that won so many discursively-inclined hearts to the movement in the fall. People of other inclinations danced to the familiar sound of the drum circle on the far side of the park.
The topic of the assembly was whether to stay, to try and occupy.
So, before the clock tolled midnight, I scribbled. I wrote. May the god of the strike have mercy on my soul.
]]>As a journalist, I’ve been doing the same. Everyone with a notebook or a camera seems to be covering the movement now, so I’m letting them do the work I was doing early on, when few others were there. I’m going through my notes and through my pictures and through my memories, trying to sort out where this came from and how. In the meantime, some more publications and appearances: