JUST PILLS: The Extraordinary Story of a Revolution in Abortion Care,

JUST PILLS: The Extraordinary Story of a Revolution in Abortion Care
REBECCA KELLIHER
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating:

The Publisher Says: As women's rights are increasingly under attack, journalist Rebecca Kelliher dives into the gripping history of abortion pills, weaving together the many people who, across decades and continents, have sought to ensure access to these medications

Spanning more than a century and several continents, with a tenacious cast of feminist activists, scientists, politicians, doctors, and abortion seekers, Just Pills tells the fascinating history of mifepristone and misoprostol, better known as abortion pills.

Millions of women around the world for more than two decades have been using one or both of these medications to safely end their own pregnancies, within or outside the law. These pills continue to hold a promise of expanding abortion access for all. Rebecca Kelliher dives into their invention, their legalization battles, and the ongoing proliferation of care models under bans, deftly introducing people who strive for better.

As women’s rights to control their own bodies are increasingly undermined in the US, this little-known history of the many people behind these life-saving medications will educate, enrage, and inspire.

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My Review:

THE FIRST HOUSE: A Novel, when you lose your head, find Diana, and gain a billion cicadas

THE FIRST HOUSE: A Novel
AVNI DOSHI
S&S/Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: From the Booker Prize finalist author of Burnt Sugar comes a riveting novel of rupture and rebirth, of one woman’s journey to understand the fault lines in her marriage, her home, and her family.

When my husband comes into the bedroom we have shared for thirteen years and tells me he doesn’t want to be married anymore, I reach for my neck. My head is missing.

A husband announces he is leaving, that he was never happy. A woman is left behind with their two children in the house they built together, reeling at this forced recasting of the story of their marriage. Everything becomes an encounter at the grocery store, a looming cicada horde, a statue of Diana that suddenly appears in her neighbor’s yard. Or was it always there?

As she wades through the aftermath of her marriage, her complicated family resurfaces. Although close to her parents, her relationship with them is strained, and she is fully estranged from her older sister—the perfect daughter—who still lives at home and always disapproved of her husband. So when did the trouble begin? And where will she go from here?

When she was a child, an astrologer in India told her parents that the family would die in water. Ever since, they’ve avoided pools and lakes and the ocean; no one ever learned to swim. From the Booker finalist and beloved author of Burnt Sugar comes a brilliant story of betrayal, renunciation, and renewal, of a woman spiraling who swims to the other side and comes up for air.

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My Review: I have had the experience of learning, abruptly, that I was having a different relationship than my partner was, while we were still having it. It is...disorienting, to put it mildly. What did I miss? is on a loop in the broken-up-with one's head. What happened, what did I do, what can I do...unanswerable because if the answer was in you, you would've seen it, probably would've stopped it from reaching the breaking point...like the way he refuses to to discuss why her credit card keeps failing, where it is he disappears to. I don't think I really need to belabor these points since Author Doshi doesn't.

Knowing you're not in love with someone several children into a marriage isn't an unusual state of affairs...happened to my mother, my father too albeit with a different woman. It's weird, this thing we call marriage in the US, so wildly consequential to your health, wealth, and happiness and so very very few guardrails to the roads entering it while so very very many trammel your pathway out. The narrator did not have the support of her family going into this marriage, her parents and sister found her husband untrustworthy; now that he's decided to go for his own happiness and she's still in the first house dealing with the consequences, she sees the obstacles and restrictions ahead.

It's a good moment to discuss the astrology underpinning the story. A blocked novelist turned praticing astrologer, the narrator sees how wonderfully astrology assembles a narrative for the failure of her marriage in the first angular house. (Interesting she, a first-generation South Asian immigrant family member, did not choose Vedic astrology to practice. Avoiding racializing yourself in that way has first house implications.) I'll put the Wikipedia précis of the meaning of the first house here: "The angular houses of the horoscope are considered to be the most ardent, or forceful, and are considered to have the greatest impact in the chart. The influential 17th-century astrologer William Lilly states simply: 'Planets in angles do more forcibly show their effects.' Angular houses rule those critical things in our life, such as our appearance and how we behave, our family life, our married life or partnerships, and our career." Our understanding of astrology as readers is best surrendered to Author Doshi, though. Follow her lead.

What resonated with me was our narrator's use of astrology rather than her understanding of it as a practice. As raising children fully eats one's creative force in many, many people, the narrator must find both income and outlet from and for her creativity. Astrology to the rescue. It provides moments of easter-egged humor as we go though the story. On the narrator's quest to put this life-changing shift in her marriage into context, figure out how to be a functional parent and (self-)provider, find her feet with the birth-family who candidly disliked the abandoner from the start and will recolonize her every thought, feeling, and action unless she is truly vigilant, when in this mishegas does she have a minute to grieve her loss?

Never. So the human thing to do is to find a story. Her own springs being low, maybe even goddesses forfend dry, she turns to the myths that underpin astrology and culture more broadly. Have the neighbors always had a statue of Diana in their yard? Diana, huntress, virgin, changeable Diana thirty feet away? There it is though...whenever it got there, it's there...and it's the catalyst for the narrator to examine the fear, the wilful blindness of her (and her older sister's) carefully padded, packed away, crated for storage emotional lives: "What I had believed to be indestructible was gone. The way I had engaged with the world was no longer possible. The children came into the room, already in their pyjamas, and caught me talking to myself. They couldn't understand that I was meeting myself as someone new."

Child of immigrants who carry very different ideas about how to feel with the narrator's new status from her own, still muddled, ones, the narrator has to confront her adult self's precarity by resisting her family's intrusive bullying with enough panache to maintain a thread of connection. In her meeting with herself as a monad, the narrator understands mother's and sister's worlds are her world: compromise, retreat, rock no boats follow no clues to pay for Security. The narrator's bargain was reneged on by the party of the second part. Her female relatives...they have feelings, no reason to look into them like the narrator has, and estrangement makes them unwilling to listen to her.

The great power of betrayal, of destruction, is its undeniability. The ruins are there. The foundations aren't there. The situation of economic and emotional dependence on outsiders, others, is the root of her first-house troubles. In her attempts to find a self while becoming of necessity someone new in practical terms, the narrator channels all her story-stuff...research, reading, thinking...into a scaffolding to hang a new self woven intentionally in full knowledge of where the old version failed first.

There was not one person in this story I liked, would invite to my home for a day's relaxing chat and cooking and just...being. They're all determined to make their forced-from-without changes as hard and as noisily painful as possible. What I felt for them was compassion. What I could not believe was how invested I was in their irritating nonsense. I wanted each of them to figure it out, to get to the floorboards that might creak...gotta make noise...but will hold them up while they learn to support their own internality.

It is why I landed a bit above the baseline four stars this kind of capable, slightly overwound storytelling merits. Author Doshi, I will be delighted to see where you decide to lead me next.

WE WERE PROMISED: How an Appalachian Grandmother Fought a Corporate Giant, stirring citizen activism

WE WERE PROMISED: How an Appalachian Grandmother Fought a Corporate Giant
JULIA FLINT (foreword by Elizabeth Catte, Appalachian and author of What You're Getting Wrong About Appalachia)
University Press of Kentucky (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.95 all print editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Karen "Momma K" Gorrell did not consider herself to be an activist. But when those she cared about were wronged, she refused to remain silent. With the economy still reeling from the Great Recession in 2011, Karen's husband and other retirees of the Century Aluminum plant―a pillar of industry in their rural community of Ravenswood―had their healthcare benefits terminated. The United Steelworkers had negotiated for these union members to have a portion of their wages deducted to fund future benefits, and the employees worked for decades with the promise of health insurance upon retirement. When Century idled the plant and reneged on its agreement, retirees were left without affordable care at the time they needed it most.

Knowing lives were on the line, Karen vowed to do whatever she could to pressure Century to reinstate retirees' promised benefits. Within months, she became the lead organizer and spokesperson for a grassroots campaign that would capture the attention of lawmakers and Century's CEO. The campaign would also test her resolve, her relationships, and her faith in the systems that promised to protect working-class people.

We Were Promised follows Karen and a group of determined retirees on their long journey to seek justice―from staging an Occupy-inspired camp at the Ravenswood plant in West Virginia to confronting Century's corporate executives in Illinois and California. In highlighting Appalachia's role in the modern labor movement and the impact of women activists in the region, this story serves as a powerful example of everyday folks, as Karen said, "having the courage to stand up and raise hell and fight back."

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My Review: As usual, when you're looking for justice being done, or being demanded to be done, look for an older woman who's had it with patriarchy, sees through the clouds of horseshit-scented hot air stinking up the space in front of her nose where she sees reality.

Momma K, in other words.

She saw through the stinking air men were blowing at her, hoping sh'e fall down and choke on the nightmarish conditions "They" promised her would not happen to her people. Nevertheless, she persisted. "They" never see that, when the women get mad, much trembling and backpedaling is called for, and excellen truthful communication of why "They" will now change "Their" ways is de rigueur. I refer you to 3 November 2026's US election.

If we are going to use the name "Karen" to represent a class of women, I suggest we delete the pejoritive use prevailing now to me a revolting, entitled, Gross Old Pedophiles voting bleached blond intellectual midget and chang to the class-defining character as Momma K Gorrell. Author Flint has written an engaging and timely story cenering around this tough woman whose moral compass is not variable depending on the strength or volume of the shouting around her. "We were promised" meant and means something to women like Momma K. It should to all of us.

For those rolling their eyes in an access of Authority, Privilege, and Precedent rule the world arrogance, I refer you again to the US elections of 3 November 2026.

Tick-tock, bitches.

THE HOUR OF THE PREDATOR, it seems to be drawing to a close

THE HOUR OF THE PREDATOR
GIULIANO DA EMPOLI (tr. Sam Taylor)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A chilling assessment of international politics in our time, from an internationally bestselling author whose work has sparked controversy and debate across the world

Blending the author’s personal insight with startling historical comparisons to the days of Machiavelli and the Spanish conquest of Mexico, The Hour of the Predator describes the growing influence of tech billionaires, the rise of autocratic regimes and the erosion of traditional diplomacy, to paint a chilling picture of a disintegrating world order.

Giuliano Da Empoli’s The Hour of the Predator is a timely and incisive examination of the shifting power dynamics in global politics, where traditional governments find themselves increasingly outmatched by technology tycoons and autocratic geopolitical predators who shape the world through brute force, deception, and disruption.

Drawing on his experience as a political advisor to a former Italian Prime Minister, Da Empoli takes the reader on an eye-opening journey around the international political circuit—from New York to Riyadh, and from the United Nations to Mohammed bin Salman’s Ritz-Carlton— and through the looking glass to a world of ruthless power struggles, where the tech lords already seem to inhabit another world and AI is already out of control.

The Hour of the Predator is the latest book from the internationally bestselling author of The Wizard of the Kremlin, which has been translated into thirty-five languages and is now being adapted for a major movie by Olivier Assayas.

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My Review: Author da Empoli states a truth we're all familiar with succinctly: "All the guardrails of the old world—the respect for the independence of certain institutions, human and minority rights, a concern for international repercussions—have no value now that the hour of the predator is upon us." This has been true for forty-plus years, starting with the election interference that installed Ronald Reagan in office in 1981 and ushered in the most efficient, nost rapacious looting of the US national treasure by the greediest scum on the planet.

It is now a beautiful moment in our cultural history. The US Congress is, at last, returning to the control of the president's political enemies so will be able to function as Congress again. The greedy scum that's risen to the top has finally made we-the-people suffer privations bad enough to deliver "Them" a ringing rebuke: "Enough."

Author da Empoli has crystallized a large portion of the reasons why in this book. The Cold War gave the greediest capitalists and other grifters an extremely useful straw man to wave in the hoi polloi's faces as they steadily set the stage for their revolution of greed. When the straw fell out slightly before the stage directions were fully drafted, "They" were forced to share the benefits of peace "They" had not planned on ever occurring while scrambling for another way to keep accumulating more. More what? Whatever. Just MORE. Money, power, toys, MORE.

There is no satiating this greed. The story of "Golden Age" Spain in these pages is vivid proof of that. The wildly misinterpreted guidebooks for greed by Baltasar Gracián, for conquest and dominion by Machiavelli, became morally celebrated by many bad-faith actors over the centuries. Always, always ending in the practicioners steadily growing more and more incompetent at exercising the (wrong) lessons they learned from these misinterpretations.

Our present moment is seeing the collapse of kakistocracy across the globe: Hungary rejecting Orban. deeply admired by felonious yam, was the one that stunned me the most. Macron is in a lot of trouble for trying to take things away from the French that they do not want to lose; and his mistake? The only reason for this is to make the banksters richer. Our Gross Old Pedophiles did better for decades by promising they were fighting the insiders who make we-the-people poorer by loading up their wallets with taxes not dollars. The illusion popped when diesel hit $8 a gallon because the war felonious yam and his stooge Kegsbreath the TV presenter who wanted to cosplay soldiers catastrophically failed to do what their boardgame view of the world wanted.

Reading Author da Empoli's refreshingly snarky and irreverent words in this moment of unbelievable possibility is an excellent way to solidify the startling fragility of "Their" power. Elon Musk alone spent close to HALF A BILLION DOLLARS to get the Gross Old Pedophiles party's candidates elected. He lost all those races with "Them" because money = speech = influence only works on docile people.

I am neverendingly astonished at "Their" inability to see why FDR should be "Their" God: his reforms quieted the socialist revolution well underway and that would've taken a lot more from "Them" that actually, by right of conquest, was defensibly theirs. Whatever else one can say about elite education, it has signally failed to teach any one of its graduates the importance of making concessions to get long-term buy-in to an inherently unfair system. "They" are once again on the precipice of losing the war because "They" don't see the point of strategic retreat that can be sold as "Their" loss to appease, re-docilify, us.

I'm glad. We-the-people need to win the war this time.

PROGRESS: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It, food for deep thinking before you yell at the new Congress

PROGRESS: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It
SAMUEL MILLER McDONALD
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: For readers of Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, and Jared Diamond: A bold, provocative, wide-ranging argument about the human idea of progress that offers a new vision of our future

Progress is power. Narratives of progress, the stories we tell about whether a society is moving in the right or the wrong direction, are immensely potent. Progress has built cities, flattened mountains, charted the globe, delved the oceans and space, created wealth, opportunity, and remarkable innovation, and ushered in a new epoch unique in our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history.

But the modern story of progress is also a very dangerous fiction. It shapes our sense of what progress means, and justifies what we will do to achieve it—no matter the cost. We continue to subscribe to a set of myths, about dominion, growth, extraction, and expansion, that have fueled our success, but now threaten our—and all species’—existence on a planet in crisis.

In Progress, geographer Samuel Miller McDonald offers a radical new perspective on the myths upon which the modern world is built, illuminating its destructive lineage and suggesting an urgent alternative. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across anthropology, history, philosophy and geography, McDonald argues that if humanity is to thrive, then we must dismantle, reimagine, and create anew what progress means.

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My Review: Progress is like success, or victory: what exactly do you mean by that? Progress is responsible for all the good things we, the richest country in the richest civilization the planet has ever seen, have right now. I don't know that I agree with that assertion, but I know that it or its twin underpins assumptions about the way we perceive the world. What do people in the US talk about when they discuss "The Economy"? Wall Street indexes of "performance" and the pieces of that puzzle like meeting analysts' expectations, announcing restructurings of debts and offerings of shares...debts companies take on to finance progress and profits that will pay shareholders....

It's a casino, the croupiers at the roulette table of the exchange floor are analysts and brokers and other members of the casino staff who must all get paid, but only after the casino owners are given their majority of the funds. The way this money is created: Destruction. Extraction. Exploitation.

In no way does that represent "THE Economy." This book takes us through what the present systemic definitions of progress are, why they exist, what economic activity they promote and why on multiple axes. Then Author McDonald asks "...and why is it like this again?"

There is no one single model for how best to organize a society since what's best will depend on local ecologies and circumstances. The Anthropocene is likely to be an epoch of re-diversifying human cultures and societies even as coastlines shift, deserts expand and climate zones climb latitudes. What I am most concerned with is that the faulty relationship between human systems and ecological systems at the heart of the last 5,000 years. A relationship built on expansion and exploitation should be forever destroyed. Freedom from parasitism will ensure long-term survival of some sort.

Okay! Great!

How, exactly?

So no, this is not the teacher's edition with the answers in it. But considering how much time I spend thinking about this stuff and the pretty incoherent rant above is the best memory approximation I can come up with after reading and taking notes on this book, I'm going to say most all y'all could benefit mightily from the read. It will prepare us all for the intense, loud, really really rude arguments to come about that hydra in lamb's clothing that we unthinkingly call "The Economy." (Spoiler: there's more than one, and they do not follow the same rules! Oh fun!)

But y'all listen a minute. I bet anyone who reads my reviews is aware of how bad the economy is treating you and yours. The only way to know if some bloviating gasbag is lying to you to steal from you, like certain fat immigrant asswipes and some revoltingly orange pedophiles I needn't name, unless you have some information they did not give you to measure their ideas against, how will you ever be able to spot the con? No one wants to be duped. No one who knows enough to form questions to ask is sure as shootin' to fall for it.

Read before you think, think before you agree with anyone. #ReadingIsResistance

THE NUREMBERG WOMEN: The Untold Story of the Eight Women Who Brought the Nazis to Justice...chilling, informative stories

THE NUREMBERG WOMEN: The Untold Story of the Eight Women Who Brought the Nazis to Justice
NATALIE LIVINGSTONE
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The most famous trial of the twentieth century—told through the eyes of the women history forgot.

In November 1945, the world turned its gaze to Nuremberg. Inside a courtroom built by and for men, justice was being sought for crimes almost beyond comprehension. The spotlight fell on Nazi leaders, Allied prosecutors and military judges—but in the shadows, women were recording, interpreting, witnessing, painting, testifying. Yet their names were often missing from the headlines. Eighty years on, this book finally returns them to the centre of the story.

The Nuremberg Women follows eight extraordinary a young Soviet interpreter balancing political survival with truth-telling; a British painter capturing justice in oils; a French resistance fighter who survived Auschwitz to confront her persecutors; a Hungarian countess hosting both Nazis and survivors in a single house. Alongside them stand the sharpest literary minds of the day—Erika Mann, Rebecca West and others—each wielding the pen as a tool of reckoning.

Far from the official narrative, Natalie Livingstone reveals a trial that was more intimate, chaotic and human than history has allowed. It was a place of intense love affairs and political tensions, of personal reckonings and the first tremors of the Cold War. These women, often dismissed or sidelined, shaped how the trial unfolded—and how it was remembered.

This is Nuremberg as you've never seen not only a reckoning with the horrors of war, but a story of erasure, courage and transformation. The women's voices—once silenced—now ring out with clarity, offering a powerful new vision of the past, and of justice itself.

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My Review: The story of Erika Mann, the reporter and daughter of novelist Thomas Mann, was excerpted by LitHub this week. I link it here because it is a big ask to recommend a book about the Nuremberg Trials to y'all when the US readership is most likely in a celebratory mood. Erika Mann's story in this book is my lure to get you to see the

The stories of these women, eight of them, were not foregrounded at the time they were living them...kind of understandable, given what was happening in 1945 and 1946...but I'd only ever heard of two of them before, and we've had eighty years of endlessly rehashing their subjects' atrocities to be told this information about any of them. Rebecca West and Erika Mann are known to some to this day for their writing. Erika Mann, a lesbian and Red Scare victim, is much more well known in queer circles than among the cishet. Rebecca Weat, if you're reading this blog, needs no introduction. Her role in the reporting and the crafting of public opinion around the Nuremberg Trials is considerably less known or discussed at the least, even among people who fancy her writing.

The psychic toll on many of these selected women is well-represented by their fiendishly tough jobs...translating the defendants' words describing their crimes, catering to the mens' practical needs, the many and various ways they were required to treat monstrous people as ordinary when each had suffered to a greater or lesser degree from the evils they committed...it is impressive none of these women turned murderous vengeance-seeker. What is true of the defendants, that they were anti-semitic to the bone, was sadly true of most of the non-Jewish women in this story. While the main focus was on the Nazi bigwigs, there were witnesses to house and feed during the trials and they evoked different responses from these profiled women. Not all victims of crimes are saints and not a few are repulsive as people victims or no.

I enjoyed the reasonable tone Author Livingstone uses throughout the book. Where I would succumb to the inner prompting to say horrible things about the nastier cases, presenting their messy intimate lives with eagerly condemnatory insults, she is simply reporting (in more detail than I myownself wanted) the factual reality of the people unjustly ignored by history. "Warts and all" is more than just a nostrum peddled by biographers and memoirists to excuse spilling the tea on the dead. It reminds us that those who commit evil are, au fond, simply people; not good ones, but people; and so are the victims of evil.

It is important to make this information relatable, accessible to those of us living in a deeply polarized, deeply contentious world. Our comparatively recent past has great evildoers in it who worried about how their children were faring at the mercy of those who hate their parents. There were victims who hated other victims for their religion, and found sympathy for the perpetrators of crimes against those people, but not themselves of course.

Humans are complex beings with admixtures of admirable and awful traits. It will behoove all of us around the world to learn how our parents, grandparents faced the challenge of meting out justice even when they wanted revenge, and how many of those harmed were, by many people's lights, unworthhy of receiving justice because of their own turpitude.

It's also a thumping good read with lots of involving tales to tell.

OUTCLASSED: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, more important today than ever

OUTCLASSED: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back
JOAN C. WILLIAMS
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award 2025, Long list

An eye-opening, urgent call to mend the broken relationship between college and non-college grads of all races that is driving politics to the far right in the US.

Is there a single change that could simultaneously protect democracy, spur progress on climate change, enact sane gun policies, and improve our response to the next pandemic? changing the class dynamics driving American politics.

The far right manipulates class anger to undercut progressive goals and liberals often inadvertently play into their hands. In Outclassed, Joan C. Williams explains how to reverse that process by bridging the “diploma divide”, while maintaining core progressive values. She offers college-educated Americans insights into how their values reflect their lives and their lives reflect their privilege. With illuminating stories―from the Portuguese admiral who led that country’s COVID response to the lawyer who led the ACLU’s gay marriage response (and more)―Williams demonstrates how working-class values reflect working-class lives. Then she explains how the far right connects culturally with the working-class, deftly manipulating racism and masculine anxieties to deflect attention from the ways far-right policies produce the economic conditions disadvantaging the working-class. Whether you are a concerned citizen committed to saving democracy or a politician or social justice warrior in need of messaging advice, Outclassed offers concrete guidance on how liberals can forge a multi-racial cross-class coalition capable of delivering on progressive goals.

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My Review: Wonk heaven. Like data? Want the sources more than the resources? Here's us a book.

"'The reason voters don't vote based on economics is that they absolutely don't believe that either Democrats or Republicans will ever deliver for them,' pollster David Mermin remarked to me in 2023." A key insight into the absolute weirdest phenomenon I know of, one that's bewildered me my entire adult life from Reagan robbing Social Security in the 1980s to felonious yam's announced before election tariff debacle. I think I get it now. Five decades-plus of betrayal and backstabbing in the service of making the rich into obscenely rich by both sides has led to the resigned certainty that no one in power cares a bit about your problems because they started stealing and hoarding long enough ago they're immune to your problems.

Add in the emasculation of working-class men, the rendering of their traditional work and work ethic unimportant and without value, and you get people ready to do anything they can to stick it to the bastards sticking it to them.

I get it. I feel it myself.

It's a situation better explained to me now. It was not a prose delight to read, but a careful academic explication (endnoted to a fare-thee-well) of what the data we have shows that is relevant to this question of why working-class political behavior is so out of sync with their actual best interests. Back someone into a corner and then start removing the floorboards they're standing on and you get irrational behavior.

3 November 2026 was a resounding rebuke of the worst offenders against the working class. Elon Musk spent $474 million...million...on the midterms and every candidae he backed lost, every measure he backed lost. The defeat of Proposition 40 in California was a typical Californians fooling themselves moment and, well, might be the most short-lived victory of the night. But a victory it was, and not for people who need the government to step up and do its job. In "winning" this victory, the fools with money handed already angry people a real, sharp-edged weapon to use against them. And if the winners of 3 November's blowouts don't hear from we-the-people that we *want* them to use that weapon, they will leave it sheathed, because it's scary to go against someone with piles of money and hate in his heart...but a bit less so now we've seen the real power of that money's limits. Remind the winners that reality does not only obey rich scumbags/tech oligarchs.

I think it's a big ask to say "read this book" in the midst of a celebratory mood about happy results for hard work done. I also know from ugly experience what happens when we-the-people walk away from a good night at the polls and go back to bed. Turn on your lamp, pick up a book about Society's problems, and read a chapter. Every night. We *all* need to start doing the work, thinking the hard problems through, and so discover the topics to focus attention on to include our fellow citizens more broadly.