Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons

Back in college, I spotted A People's History of the United States in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn's alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn's death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the Socialist Worker, pitched at "activists interested in making their own history."

Zinn's recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash's Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America ("a pioneering work of 'multiculturalism' dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period") to Vincent Harding's There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (an "excellent start on Black history") to Samuel Yellen's American Labor [...]

Google App Uses Machine Learning to Discover Your Pet’s Look Alike in 10,000 Classic Works of Art

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Does your cat fancy herself a 21st-century incarnation of Bastet, the Egyptian Goddess of the Rising Sun, protector of the household, aka The Lady of Slaughter?

If so, you should definitely permit her to download the Google Arts & Culture app on your phone to take a selfie using the Pet Portraits feature.

Remember all the fun you had back in 2018 when the Art Selfie feature mistook you for William II, Prince of Orange or the woman in "Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen Painting a Portrait of His Wife"?

Surely your pet will be just as excited to let a machine-learning algorithm trawl tens of thousands of artworks from Google Arts & Culture’s partnering museums’ collections, looking for doppelgängers.

Or maybe it'll just view it as one more example of human folly, if a far lesser evil than our predilection for pet costumes.

Should your pet wish to know more about the artworks it resembles, you can tap the results to explore them in depth.

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Ivan Reitman’s First Film “Orientation” (1968)

Last night, we sadly learned of the passing of Ivan Reitman, director of many beloved comedies--Meatballs (1979), Stripes (1981), Ghostbusters (1984), and beyond.

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1946--his mother an Auschwitz survivor and his father an underground resistance fighter--Reitman moved to Canada as a young child, where he eventually attended McMaster University. And there he "produced and directed Orientation [in 1968], the most successful student film ever made in Canada," writes Macleans. "Produced at a cost of $1,800 while Reitman was president of the McMaster University Film Board, Orientation — the story of a freshman during his first week at university — was acquired by Twentieth CenturyFox of Canada as a “featurette” to accompany John And Mary in first-run engagements across the country." "It earned $15,000 in rentals and continues to be in demand..." You can watch it above, or on McMaster's website.

For anyone interested in hearing Reitman discuss his development as a filmmaker, we'd recommend listening to his 2014 interview with Marc Maron.

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The First Illustrated Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses Gets Published, Featuring the Work of Spanish Artist Eduardo Arroyo

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At the time of Ulysses' copyright expiration, Arroyo had long since finished his own set of more than 300 illustrations for Joyce's celebrated and famously intimidating novel. Arroyo noted in a 1991 essay, writes Minder, that "imagining the illustrations kept him alive when he was hospitalized in the late 1980s for peritonitis, an inflammation of the abdominal [...]

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Women in the punk scene had a right to complain. Bands and their fans were very male, and sexual harassment was chronic at shows, leaving most women standing at the back of the crowd. Some zines even spelled it out: “Punks Are Not Girls,” says one.

Alienated from the scene but still fans at heart, Tobi Vail and Kathleen Hanna, already producing their own feminist zines, joined forces to release “Bikini Kill” a gathering of lyrics, essays, confessionals, appropriated quotes, plugs for Vail’s other zine "Jigsaw", and a sense that something was happening. Something was changing in rock culture. Kim Deal of the Pixies and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth were heroes, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex was [...]