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I've wanted to write about these two books for a long time, but adequately summarizing them is a daunting task. I just want to say to every activist and organizer: READ THESE BOOKS . I don't want to represent the authors' ideas, I want you to read them yourself . No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAlevey and The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution by Micah White are both aimed at activists and organizers -- people who already believe in the need for social change and are trying to influence the world in a progressive direction. Both books identify pitfalls and shortcomings in the current ways we approach our activism, and they offer concrete ideas for change, along with theory and philosophy to guide our decisions. Both are beautifully written, powerful, and essential. No Shortcuts  focuses on the labour movement, but McAlevey's analysis could apply to any movement. The labour movement is an excellent lens through which to...

If you have an opinion about pitbulls, chances are good that it's based on myth, misinformation, and even disinformation. I know a good deal about dogs, and I thought  I knew a lot about pitbulls, yet I was constantly amazed and enlightened by Bronwen Dickey's Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon . Here are some of the things you will learn if you read this book. There is no agreement on what a pitbull is . No one can correctly identify a dog's breed-mix based on the dog's appearance, including experts. Many or most media stories about pitbulls are based on uncorroborated heresay and myths, and many are actually fiction. Many dog-bite incidents reported as involving pitbulls actually involved Golden Retrievers, Dalmatians, Poodles, and other breeds. Accurate statistics about dog bites, especially those that account for severity, do not exist. There is nothing special about a pitbull's jaws or the strength of its bite. In fact, no test exists to measure the str...

The year is 1917. A teenage girl from a wealthy family is pregnant, the result of rape -- by a man who her mother pushed her to pursue for marriage. Now the girl is being forced to surrender her baby to an orphanage. She has met the person who runs the orphanage, and she cannot bear the thought. The girl devises a plan, a way she can leave her infant daughter to be found by a large family who will, she hopes, raise her as their own. Ten years later, the lives of the woman who left the child and the woman who found the child intersect. But only one of them knows of their connection. Leaving Lucy Pear  by Anna Solomon begins with this tantalizing and emotionally charged premise, and as the story unfolds, it does not disappoint. Family secrets, desire, regrets, unintended consequences, and unfulfilled longing are set against a backdrop of Prohibition, labour justice, and classism. In the larger world, Sacco and Vanzetti are scheduled for execution, despite global protests.* The polit...

Many people have been discussing my recent post about cultural appropriation  on Facebook. I'm not surprised that many people disagree (that's why I wrote it, to put my countering opinion out there), but I have been surprised by how many progressive people do agree. From the negative comments, I can see that I wasn't clear on a few important points. 1. The entire post refers to white , first-world people calling out other first-worlders with accusations of cultural appropriation -- not  aboriginal people. I would not pass judgment or venture an opinion about a native person's judgment of appropriation of their own culture. I have no right to do so -- and I would not do so. I was referring what I see as a quite a large bandwagon, pointing self-righteous fingers at others -- by white people, and at white people. 2. The above might explain why I feel the words shaming  and bullying  are fair game. I wasn't suggesting that aboriginal people are bullying white people abo...

I'm increasingly dismayed by accusations of cultural appropriation that are used as weapons, rather than as a tool for raising awareness and educating. Accusations of appropriation have become a form of bullying, a weapon wielded to police and enforce a superficial obeisance to a behavioural code -- while doing nothing to address the underlying issues. Cultural appropriation is real. It's a valid issue. I'm not saying that cultural appropriation is not real. It is. I'm not saying claims of appropriation don't have merit. They do. When I was a child in the 1960s, parents might dress their children as "Indians" for Halloween, without a second thought. Kids played "Cowboys and Indians," dressing up in hats or feathers, with toy guns or tomahawks. Can you imagine if someone had played "Nazis and Jews"? It's completely inappropriate to turn a history of genocide and oppression into costumes and games. That in the 21st century, people are...

Now here's an interesting calendar of events. June 27-29: The Negotiating Committee for CUPE Local 1989, Mississauga Library Workers Union, returns to the bargaining table for three days. June 30: The Negotiating Committee presents membership with a settlement offer. If the bargaining team recommends ratification, there is a ratification vote. If we do not recommend ratification, there is a strike vote. July 2: Summer programming begins at all our libraries. Free programs for children and youth attract a huge number of customers. July 4: The City of Mississauga and CUPE Local 1989 are in a legal or lockout position. July 7-8: The director of our library system hosts an annual conference of the Ontario Library Association. We played a long game of cat-and-mouse to make this timeline happen. It took a lot of resolve and a fair bit of luck. Now that we're here, perhaps our employer will be very motivated to avoid a strike. * * * * Brampton is a neighbouring city. Mississauga, Bram...

On the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, these Revolutionary Thoughts of the Day are brought to you by the great Irish socialist, James Connolly. The day has passed for patching up the capitalist system; it must go. (1910) This speech, from 1897, is recreated in the excellent Ken Loach film "The Wind that Shakes the Barley": If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs. England would still rule you to your ruin, even while your lips offered hypocritical homage at the shrine of that freedom whose cause you had betrayed. Nationalism without Socialism –...

Last week I attended the CUPE Ontario Library Workers Conference, my second year, and my first since being elected to the organizing committee. This year's theme was precarious work , and nothing could be more relevant to library work today. All three keynote speakers were excellent, with engaging, eye-opening presentations that brought our picture into sharp and disturbing focus. Count it and name it, so we can change it Wayne Lewchuk , professor of economics and labour relations at McMaster University, is the go-to guy for research into precarious work. Michelynn Lafleche is the Director of Research, Public Policy and Evaluation at United Way Toronto. (United Way is the primary social-service provider in this region.) They developed PEPSO: Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario . Its purpose: quantify the anecdotes, demonstrate what precarious work is and the affects it has on individuals, families, and communities, and offer practical solutions to this crisis. PEP...

I've had a longstanding interest in prison libraries, and was happy to meet another librarian-friend who shares this. But I was very pleasantly surprised at the large turnout for the talk Prisons and Libraries: A Relationship Worth Incubating   at the 2016 OLA Super Conference.   A panel of three librarians who serve incarcerated people in different capacities gave the presentation. Why prison libraries? From a rehabilitation perspective, there is a high correlation between illiteracy and crime, and illiteracy and recidivism. Certainly education can only help inmates successfully re-enter society. From a social justice perspective, most people in prison are there because their life circumstances led inexorably to criminality. Access to information can help change the odds. And from a human rights perspective, access to information is a basic human right - but prisons are environments of severe information poverty. Contrary to popular belief, inmates have no access to televisio...

In library school we talked a lot about the digital divide , the ever-increasing gap between those who have access to information and communication technology, and those who do not. Public libraries are one of the very few institutions that exist to bridge that gap, however imperfectly. What does the digital divide look like on the ground? In my library, located in one of the lowest-income communities in Ontario (and in Canada), we see the digital divide in action every single day. This week a family worked on a visa application for the United States. They had to come to the library first thing in the morning, so we could special-book them a computer, as the process would take much longer than a standard computer reservation. With intermittent staff help, they worked on their application for three hours. There was no way to download and save the application, and no paper version. When they tried to save and submit the application, either the computer or the site malfunctioned (we don...

I see a lot of excitement online, in places like Common Dreams and The Nation , and in my Facebook feed, about Bernie Sanders, supposedly remaking US politics, and Pope Francis, supposedly remaking the Roman Catholic Church. About Sanders, I shake my head and wonder why long-time Democrat voters do not see him and his candidacy for what it is. About the Pope, I wonder why progressive people allow themselves to care. Sanders is the new Dean Bernie Sanders has been praised as a maverick, an independent, and a socialist. All of which may have been true at various points in his political career. Right now Sanders is running for President  as a Democrat . He is not spearheading a movement to build a new alternative. He is not refusing corporate funding and appealing to the grassroots. He is not "challenging politics as usual," as headlines in progressive news sites often say. He is seeking the Democratic nomination, which means he will play within the boundaries of that game. And...

I stumbled on this letter to the New York Times Book Review from a few weeks ago. It's in response to a review of two books about precarious work - one about technology threatening jobs of even the most educated people, and another about the rise of unpaid labour. Barbara Ehrenreich’s chilling review of Martin Ford’s “Rise of the Robots” and Craig Lambert’s “Shadow Work” ( May 17 ) is the best evidence-based response I’ve seen to all the headlines announcing that a recovery is “just around the corner.” But if it isn’t, and unemployment and part-time employment can only get worse, what can be done? Ehrenreich concludes that “the best that the feeble human mind can come up with at the moment” is a guaranteed annual wage. Actually, one human mind came up with another solution over 150 years ago, and that was to share the work among all able-bodied people, with society making sure that all the skills required to serve everyone’s needs are widely distributed. In this way, everyone wou...

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss is an excellent addition to a bookshelf that includes works by Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Marian Nestle and others who write about the health of our food and the un-health of the industrial food system. Moss lifts the curtain on the giant corporations that engineer and market convenience foods and processed foods. What he reveals is largely invisible to us on a daily basis, yet affects our society significantly - and catastrophically. Moss is a seasoned investigative reporter - he was the first to expose trans fats , and more recently " pink slime " - and this book is a tour de force of research. Moss takes you to the laboratory and the board room, where chemical engineers and marketing executives contrive to get North Americans eating more and more of everything unhealthy. (The book is written in a US context, but it is equally relevant to Canada.) Salt Sugar Fat is full of wonderful mini-histories of corpo...