The Week in Reading, 6/1
A Few of the Articles I’ve Found Interesting and Enlightening
It is still early on a Sunday and I am in a dour mood.
Part of it is my health; part is the failure of the Knicks to push the Eastern Conference Finals to a game seven; and part of it is headlines like these from The New York Times:
Over 20 Killed Near Aid Distribution Site in Gaza, Palestinian Health Officials Say
U.S. Permanent Resident Recounts ‘Dehumanizing’ Immigration Detention
and The Washington Post:
Discrimination cases unravel as Trump scraps core civil rights tenet
Migrants criminally charged after failing to register with U.S. government
What follows are readings that I think offer a bit of hope, which has been my mantra for the last few weeks. So, these readings focus on fighting back — both through the serious and difficult work of organizing, and through finding the humor and using it to undermine the regime.
David Bacon. “How to Fight Trump's Attack on Farmworkers.” The Nation (first posted April 11, but featured in the latest issue of the print/e-magazine).
Bacon tells the story of Alfredo Juarez and Familias Unidas por la Justicia, and their struggles to protect farm workers in California against both the Trump assault and efforts by growers to maintain low wages and oppressive conditions on workers. Organizing, uniting people across job categories — this is our only hope.
Susan Zakin. “None of this is funny. But….” Journal of the Plague Years, 1 June 2025.
Susan Zakin publishes the indispensable Journal of the Plague Years, which she started during the COVID pandemic. The title refers to Daniel Defoe’s novel A Journal of the Plague Year, but what is important today about her publication is that the definition of plague has moved beyond COVID to a much broader threat — Trumpism and the growth of fascism in the United States.
Zakin’s latest — she brings together an array of writers but also writes herself — focuses on the need for humor to remind us that “Trump is just a man, not an unstoppable force.” Humor, she says, can undermine a regime, cut straight to its weaknesses and damage its credibility. Humor can remind the public how small-minded and unserious someone like Trump is and, in the process, open avenues for fighting back.
David Cortright. “A Chorus of Defiance.” Boston Review, 24 April 2025.
Cortright turns back the clock to the antiwar movement of the 1960s and finds some important lessons for the current moment. The main lesson is that mass organizing and resistance turned the tides, turned public opinion, and ultimately forced the war’s end.
“The Vietnam peace movement kept up its drumbeat for a decade before it won its final demand,” he writes, adding that “2025 is no 1967.”
Today, the breadth of the Trump administration’s depredations—and the dizzying speed at which they have come—have flung many issues onto the table all at once: cuts to essential services, the shuttering of entire government agencies, unlawful deportations of migrants and Palestinian rights activists, open defiance of the Constitution and federal courts—the list goes on.
This will make it more difficult. We have a broad “resistance movement” that “is also multisectoral and individualized, addressing many specific issues among many particular groups and constituencies.” Bringing them together in real ways is key, he says, and “there are signs that a unified opposition could bloom from out of this ground.”
It’s worth remembering that the massive Hands Off rallies took place just months after Trump took office. That a national protest featuring an array of groups—many of which are far from natural allies—could be organized at all is a sign that there is already real, widespread resistance. If sustained and enlarged, it could alter the current political landscape as profoundly as did its predecessors in 1967, but this will require channeling the energy the masses have unleashed into organized political action.
Hamilton Nolan, “Technology Does Not Solve Political Problems.” How Things Work, 1 June 2025.
Hamilton Nolan, one of the preeminent labor journalists in the United States, reminds us that, “Technology Does Not Solve Political Problems” despite what the tech bros and big tech firms argue.
Nolan’s “How Things Work” Substack has become an essential tonic these days. In this piece, he counters the claim made by “well-meaning tech industry people who possess a genuine belief that we can innovate our way out of social and political problems.”
We can’t. That’s because technology, while an extraordinarily powerful tool, does not by itself change the way that power is distributed in society. If the hand that holds the dynamite wants to use it to clear away rocks, you get great new roads. If the hand that holds the dynamite wants to use it to make bombs to drop on neighbors, you get mass death.