Oct. 31 2022 Weekly Roundup (incl. new article & A. Locke's Bluebird, Bluebird review) (Patreon)

A blessed All Hallow's Eve, and Lula livre!

It is a great day for the international Left, and for humanity as a whole. Bolsonaro's defeat is perhaps the biggest triumph of electoral politics in my lifetime. A rare case where representative democracy chooses a noble man like Lula who works some good within that system's confines. May this be a turning point.

My own, far more meager contribution to the international Left dropped in The Statesman today, a personal piece about Battery Park and Anastazie Urban, an amazing Czech-American grocer who changed a small part of the world. She was also my second-great grandmother.

Anyone close to me can tell you this was the culmination of months of research. Please read it. It is the best article I have ever written.

Now for some reading:

Bluebird, Bluebird (Attica Locke)

An excellent gritty Southern gothic police thriller. Locke has the gravel in her gut and the spit in her eye of any great Texan writer. This is a geographically grounded book brushed in the dust of Paris and Downtown.

Locke provides an excellent, corrective look at how race shapes police fiction. Certainly having a Black Texas ranger investigate a group called the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas does a lot there. The book's politics are sensible without being didactic, exhibiting the messiness and ugliness of evil and law.

It has all the usual pleasures of detective stories: a dysfunctional sleuth, crumbling bureaucracy, rampant alcoholism, and a network of filthy politics. If you're going to write another police novel, this is how you do it.

And now...

The headlines

Tal Lavin breaks down the horrors of Kanye West's antisemitism.

Bolsonaro tried and failed to buy votes.

Florida is moving forward on its youth HRT ban.

Nilay Patel is smart and funny about Musk buying Twitter.