Crypto Cities: An Excerpt from “Proof of Stake” by Vitalik Buterin and Nathan Schneider

September 27

CRYPTO CITIES

vitalik.ca

October 31, 2021

One interesting trend of the last year has been the growth of interest in local government, and in the idea of local governments that have wider variance and do more experimentation. Over the past year, Miami mayor Francis Suarez has pursued a tech-startup-like strategy of attracting interest in the city, frequently engaging with the mainstream tech industry and crypto community on Twitter. Wyoming now has a DAO-friendly legal structure, Colorado is experimenting with quadratic voting, and we’re seeing more and more experiments making pedestrian-friendly street environments for the offline world. We’re even seeing projects with varying degrees of radicalness—Culdesac, Telosa, CityDAO, Nkwashi, Prospera, and many more—trying to create entire neighborhoods and cities from scratch.

Another interesting trend of the last year has been the rapid mainstreaming of crypto ideas such as coins, non-fungible tokens, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). So what would happen if we combine the two trends together? Does it make sense to have a city with a coin, an NFT, a DAO, some record-keeping on-chain for anti-corruption, or even all four? As it turns out, there are already people trying to do just that:

 CityCoins.co, a project that sets up coins intended to become local media of exchange, where a portion of the issuance of the coin goes to the city government. MiamiCoin already exists, and San Francisco Coin appears to be coming soon.

 Experiments with NFTs, often as a way of funding local artists. Busan is hosting a government-backed conference exploring what they could do with NFTs.

 Reno mayor Hillary Schieve’s expansive vision for blockchain-ifying the city, including NFT sales to support local art, a RenoDAO with RenoCoins issued to local residents that could get revenue from the government renting out properties, blockchain-secured lotteries, blockchain voting, and more.

 Much more ambitious projects creating crypto-oriented cities from scratch: see CityDAO, which describes itself as, well, “building a city on the Ethereum blockchain”—DAOified governance and all.

But are these projects, in their current form, good ideas? Are there any changes that could make them into better ideas? Let us find out . . .

WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT CITIES?

Many national governments around the world are showing themselves to be inefficient and slow-moving in response to long-running problems and rapid changes in people’s underlying needs. In short, many national governments are missing live players. Even worse, many of the outside-the-box political ideas that are being considered or implemented for national governance today are honestly quite terrifying. Do you want the USA to be taken over by a clone of the World War II-era Portuguese dictator António Salazar, or perhaps an “American Caesar,” to beat down the evil scourge of American leftism? For every idea that can be reasonably described as freedom-expanding or democratic, there are ten that are just different forms of centralized control and walls and universal surveillance.

Now consider local governments. Cities and states, as we’ve seen from the examples at the start of this post, are, at least in theory, capable of genuine dynamism. There are large and very real differences of culture between cities, so it’s easier to find a single city where there is public interest in adopting any particular radical idea than it is to convince an entire country to accept it. There are very real challenges and opportunities in local public goods, urban planning, transportation, and many other sectors in the governance of cities that could be addressed. Cities have tightly cohesive internal economies where things like widespread cryptocurrency adoption could realistically independently happen. Furthermore, it’s less likely that experiments within cities will lead to terrible outcomes both because cities are regulated by higher-level governments and because cities have an escape valve: people who are unhappy with what’s going on can more easily exit.

So all in all, it seems like the local level of government is a very undervalued one. And given that criticism of existing smart-city initiatives often heavily focuses on concerns around centralized governance, lack of transparency, and data privacy, blockchain and cryptographic technologies seem like a promising key ingredient for a more open and participatory way forward.

WHAT ARE CITY PROJECTS UP TO TODAY?

Quite a lot actually! Each of these experiments is still small scale and largely still trying to find its way around, but they are all at least seeds that could turn into interesting things. Many of the most advanced projects are in the United States, but there is interest across the world; over in Korea the government of Busan is running an NFT conference. Here are a few examples of what is being done today.

BLOCKCHAIN EXPERIMENTS IN RENO

Reno, Nevada, mayor Hillary Schieve is a blockchain fan, focusing primarily on the Tezos ecosystem, and she has recently been exploring blockchain-related ideas in the governance of her city:

 Selling NFTs to fund local art, starting with an NFT of the “Space Whale” sculpture in the middle of the city.

 Creating a RenoDAO, governed by Reno coins that residents would be eligible to receive via an airdrop. The RenoDAO could start to get sources of revenue; one proposed idea was for the city to rent out properties that it owns and use the revenue to fund a DAO.

 Using blockchains to secure all kinds of processes; for example, blockchain-secured random number generators for casinos, blockchain-secured voting, etc.

CITYCOINS.CO

CityCoins.co is a project built on Stacks, a blockchain run by an unusual “proof of transfer” (for some reason abbreviated PoX, not PoT) block-production algorithm that is built around the Bitcoin blockchain and ecosystem. Seventy percent of the coin’s supply is generated by an ongoing sale mechanism: anyone with STX (the Stacks native token) can send their STX to the city-coin contract to generate city coins; the STX revenues are distributed to existing city-coin holders who stake their coins. The remaining 30% is made available to the city government.

CityCoins has made the interesting decision of trying to make an economic model that does not depend on any government support. The local government does not need to be involved in creating a CityCoins.co coin; a community group can launch a coin by themselves. An FAQ-provided answer to “What can I do with CityCoins?” includes examples like “CityCoins communities will create apps that use tokens for rewards” and “local businesses can provide discounts or benefits to people who . . . stack their CityCoins.” In practice, however, the MiamiCoin community is not going at it alone; the Miami government has already de facto publicly endorsed it.

MiamiCoin hackathon winner: a site that allows coworking spaces to give preferential offers to MiamiCoin holders.

CITYDAO

CityDAO is the most radical of the experiments: Unlike Miami and Reno, which are existing cities with existing infrastructure to be upgraded and people to be convinced, CityDAO is a DAO with legal status under the Wyoming DAO law trying to create entirely new cities from scratch.

So far, the project is still in its early stages. The team is currently finalizing a purchase of their first plot of land in a far-off corner of Wyoming. The plan is to start with this plot of land, and then add other plots of land in the future, to build cities that are governed by a DAO and make heavy use of radical economic ideas like Harberger taxes to allocate the land, make collective decisions, and manage resources. Their DAO is one of the progressive few that is avoiding coin-voting governance; instead, the governance is a voting scheme based on “citizen” NFTs, and ideas have been floated to further limit votes to one per person by using Proof of Humanity verification. The NFTs are currently being sold to crowdfund the project; you can buy them on OpenSea.

WHAT DO I THINK CITIES COULD BE UP TO?

Obviously there are a lot of things that cities could do in principle. They could add more bike lanes, they could use CO2 meters and far-UVC light to more effectively reduce COVID spread without inconveniencing people, and they could even fund life-extension research. But my primary specialty is blockchains and this post is about blockchains, so . . . let’s focus on blockchains.

I would argue that there are two distinct categories of blockchain ideas that make sense:

1. Using blockchains to create more trusted, transparent, and verifiable versions of existing processes.

2. Using blockchains to implement new and experimental forms of ownership for land and other scarce assets, as well as new and experimental forms of democratic governance.

There’s a natural fit between blockchains and both of these categories. Anything happening on a blockchain is very easy to publicly verify, with lots of ready-made, freely available tools to help people do that. Any application built on a blockchain can immediately plug in to and interface with other applications in the entire global blockchain ecosystem. Blockchain-based systems are efficient in a way that paper is not, and publicly verifiable in a way that centralized computing systems are not—a necessary combination if you want to, say, make a new form of voting that allows citizens to give high-volume real-time feedback on hundreds or thousands of different issues.

So let’s get into the specifics.

WHAT ARE SOME EXISTING PROCESSES THAT BLOCKCHAINS COULD MAKE MORE TRUSTED AND TRANSPARENT?

One simple idea that plenty of people, including government officials around the world, have brought up to me on many occasions is the idea of governments creating a white-listed internal-use-only stablecoin for tracking internal government payments. Every tax payment from an individual or organization could be tied to a publicly visible on-chain record minting that number of coins (if we want individual tax payment quantities to be private, there are zero-knowledge ways to make only the total public but still convince everyone that it was computed correctly). Transfers between departments could be done “in the clear,” and the coins would be redeemed only by individual contractors or employees claiming their payments and salaries.

This system could easily be extended. For example, procurement processes for choosing which bidder wins a government contract could largely be done on-chain.

Many more processes could be made more trustworthy with blockchains:

 FAIR RANDOM NUMBER GENERATORS (E.G., FOR LOTTERIES)—VDFs, such as the one Ethereum is expected to include, could serve as a fair random number generator that could be used to make government-run lotteries more trustworthy. Fair randomness could also be used for many other use cases, such as sortition as a form of government.

 CERTIFICATES—for example, cryptographic proofs that some particular individual is a resident of the city—could be done on-chain for added verifiability and security (e.g., if such certificates are issued on-chain, it would become obvious if a large number of false certificates are issued). This can be used by all kinds of local-government-issued certificates.

 ASSET REGISTRIES, for land and other assets, as well as more complicated forms of property ownership such as development rights. Due to the need for courts to be able to make assignments in exceptional situations, these registries will likely never be fully decentralized bearer instruments in the same way that cryptocurrencies are, but putting records on-chain can still make it easier to see what happened in what order in a dispute.

Eventually, even voting could be done on-chain. Here, many complexities and dragons loom, and it’s really important to be careful; a sophisticated solution combining blockchains,

zero-knowledge proofs, and other cryptography is needed to achieve all the desired privacy and security properties. However, if humanity is ever going to move to electronic voting at all, local government seems like the perfect place to start.

WHAT ARE SOME RADICAL ECONOMIC AND GOVERNANCE EXPERIMENTS THAT COULD BE INTERESTING?

But in addition to these kinds of blockchain overlays onto things that governments already do, we can also look at blockchains as an opportunity for governments to make completely new and radical experiments in economics and governance. These are not necessarily final ideas on what I think should be done; they are initial explorations and suggestions for possible directions. Once an experiment starts, real-world feedback is often by far the most useful variable to determine how the experiment should be adjusted in the future.

EXPERIMENT #1: A MORE COMPREHENSIVE VISION OF CITY TOKENS

CityCoins.co is one vision for how city tokens could work. But it is far from the only vision. Indeed, the CityCoins.co approach has significant risks, particularly in how the economic model is heavily tilted toward early adopters. Seventy percent of the STX revenue from minting new coins is given to existing stakers of the city coin. More coins will be issued in the next five years than in the fifty years that follow. It’s a good deal for the government in 2021, but what about 2051? Once a government endorses a particular city coin, it becomes difficult for it to change directions in the future. Hence, it’s important for city governments to think carefully about these issues, and choose a path that makes sense for the long term.

Here is a different possible sketch of a narrative of how city tokens might work. It’s far from the only possible alternative to the CityCoins.co vision. In any case, city tokens are a wide design space, and there are many different options worth considering. Anyway, here goes . . .

The concept of home ownership in its current form is a notable double-edged sword, and the specific ways in which it’s actively encouraged and legally structured is considered by many to be one of the biggest economic policy mistakes that we are making today. There is an inevitable political tension between a home as a place to live and a home as an investment asset, and the pressure to satisfy communities who care about the latter often ends up severely harming the affordability of the former. Residents in a city either own a home, making them massively over-exposed to land prices and introducing perverse incentives to fight against construction of new homes, or rent a home, making them negatively exposed to the real estate market and thus putting them economically at odds with the goal of making a city a nice place to live.

But even despite all of these problems, many still find home ownership to be not just a good personal choice, but something worthy of actively subsidizing or socially encouraging. One big reason is that it nudges people to save money and build up their net worth. Another big reason is that despite its flaws, it creates economic alignment between residents and the communities they live in. But what if we could give people a way to save and create that economic alignment without the flaws? What if we could create a divisible and fungible city token, that residents could hold as many units of as they can afford or feel comfortable with, and whose value goes up as the city prospers?

First, let’s start with some possible objectives. Not all are necessary; a token that accomplishes only three of the five is already a big step forward. But we’ll try to hit as many of them as possible:

 GET SUSTAINABLE SOURCES OF REVENUE FOR THE GOVERNMENT: The city token economic model should avoid redirecting existing tax revenue; instead, it should find new sources of revenue.

 CREATE ECONOMIC ALIGNMENT BETWEEN RESIDENTS AND THE CITY: This means first of all that the coin itself should clearly become more valuable as the city becomes more attractive. But it also means that the economics should actively encourage residents to hold the coin more than faraway hedge funds.

 PROMOTE SAVING AND WEALTH-BUILDING: Home ownership does this—as home owners make mortgage payments, they build up their net worth by default. City tokens could do this too, making it attractive to accumulate coins over time, and even gamifying the experience.

 ENCOURAGE MORE PRO-SOCIAL ACTIVITY: Such as positive actions that help the city and more sustainable use of resources.

 BE EGALITARIAN: Don’t unduly favor wealthy people over poor people (as badly designed economic mechanisms often do accidentally). A token’s divisibility, avoiding a sharp binary divide between haves and have-nots, does a lot already, but we can go further—for example, by allocating a large portion of new issuance to residents as a UBI.*

*Universal basic income, in which all residents would receive an equal, unconditional income at regular intervals.

One pattern that seems to easily meet the first three objectives is providing benefits to holders: If you hold at least x coins (where x can go up over time), you get some set of services for free. MiamiCoin is trying to encourage businesses to do this, but we could go further and make government services work this way too. One simple example would be making existing public parking spaces only available for free to those who hold at least some number of coins in a locked-up form. This would serve a few goals at the same time:

 Create an incentive to hold the coin, sustaining its value.

 Create an **incentive specifically for residents to hold the coin**, as opposed to otherwise-unaligned faraway investors. Furthermore, the incentive’s usefulness is capped per person, so it encourages widely distributed holdings.

 Creates economic alignment (city becomes more attractive —> more people want to park —> coins have more value). Unlike home ownership, this creates alignment with an entire town, and not merely a very specific location in a town.

 Encourage sustainable use of resources by reducing usage of parking spots (though people without coins who really need them could still pay), supporting many local governments’ desires to open up more pedestrian-friendly space on the roads. Alternatively, restaurants could also be allowed to lock up coins through the same mechanism and claim parking spaces to use for outdoor seating.

But to avoid perverse incentives, it’s extremely important to avoid overly depending on one specific idea and instead to have a diverse array of possible revenue sources. One excellent gold mine of places to give city tokens value, and at the same time experiment with novel governance ideas, is zoning. If you hold at least y coins, then you can quadratically vote on the fee that nearby landowners have to pay to bypass zoning restrictions. This hybrid market- plus direct-democracy-based approach would be much more efficient than current overly cumbersome permitting processes, and the fee itself would be another source of government revenue. More generally, any of the ideas in the next section could be combined with city tokens to give city-token holders more places to use them.

EXPERIMENT #2: MORE RADICAL AND PARTICIPATORY FORMS OF GOVERNANCE

This is where *Radical Markets** ideas such as Harberger taxes, quadratic voting, and quadratic funding come in. I already brought up some of these ideas in the section above, but you don’t have to have a dedicated city token to do them. Some limited government use of quadratic voting and funding has already happened: see the Colorado Democratic Party and the Taiwanese presidential hackathon, as well as not-yet-government-backed experiments like Gitcoin’s Boulder Downtown Stimulus. But we could do more!

*Again, referencing the book of this name (and its family of concepts) by Eric Posner and E. Glen Weyl.

One obvious place where these ideas can have long-term value is giving developers incentives to improve the aesthetics of buildings. Harberger taxes and other mechanisms could be used to radically reform zoning rules, and blockchains could be used to administer such mechanisms in a more trustworthy and efficient way. Another idea that is more viable in the short term is subsidizing local businesses, similar to the Downtown Stimulus but on a larger and more permanent scale. Businesses produce various kinds of positive externalities in their local communities all the time, and those externalities could be more effectively rewarded. Local news could be quadratically funded, revitalizing a long-struggling industry. Pricing for advertisements could be set based on real-time votes of how much people enjoy looking at each particular ad, encouraging more originality and creativity.

More democratic feedback (and possibly even retroactive democratic feedback!) could plausibly create better incentives in all of these areas. And twenty-first-century digital democracy through real-time online quadratic voting and funding could plausibly do a much better job than twentieth-century democracy, which seems in practice to have been largely characterized by rigid building codes and obstruction at planning and permitting hearings. And of course, if you’re going to use blockchains to secure voting, starting off by doing it with fancy new kinds of votes seems far more safe and politically feasible than re-fitting existing voting systems.

Mandatory solarpunk picture intended to evoke a positive image of what might happen to our cities if real-time quadratic votes could set subsidies and prices for everything.

CONCLUSIONS

There are a lot of worthwhile ideas for cities to experiment with that could be attempted by existing cities or by new cities. New cities of course have the advantage of not having existing residents with existing expectations of how things should be done; but the concept of creating a new city itself is, in modern times, relatively untested. Perhaps the multibillion-dollar capital pools in the hands of people and projects enthusiastic to try new things could get us over the hump. But even then, existing cities will likely continue to be the place where most people live for the foreseeable future, and existing cities can use these ideas too.

Blockchains can be very useful in both the more incremental and more radical ideas that were proposed here, even despite the inherently “trusted” nature of a city government. Running any new or existing mechanism on-chain gives the public an easy ability to verify that everything is following the rules. Public chains are better: the benefits from existing infrastructure for users to independently verify what is going on far outweigh the losses from transaction fees, which are expected to quickly decrease very soon from rollups and sharding. If strong privacy is required, blockchains can be combined with zero-knowledge cryptography to give privacy and security at the same time.

The main trap that governments should avoid is too quickly sacrificing optionality. An existing city could fall into this trap by launching a bad city token instead of taking things more slowly and launching a good one. A new city could fall into this trap by selling off too much land, sacrificing the entire upside to a small group of early adopters. Starting with self-contained experiments, and taking things slowly on moves that are truly irreversible, is ideal. But at the same time, it’s also important to seize the opportunity in the first place. There’s a lot that can and should be improved with cities, and a lot of opportunities; despite the challenges, crypto cities broadly are an idea whose time has come.

Special thanks to Mr. Silly and Tina Zhen for early feedback on the post, and to a long list of people for discussion of the ideas.

VITALIK BUTERIN is a Russian-Canadian programmer and writer who co-founded Bitcoin Magazine in 2011 and launched Ethereum in 2014. In 2021, he was named as one of TIME magazine’s most influential people.

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November 13

Excerpt: Camp Jeff by Tova Reich

Out now, Tova Reich’s new novel is a raucous and biting tale of a Catskills reeducation camp for wealthy sex pests, helmed by a wealthy benefactor named Jeffrey Epstein (not that one), who just wants to clear his name.

When Manhattan's preeminent writer manqué, Gershon Gordon, receives a thick envelope containing his acceptance to someplace called Camp Jeffrey Epstein, he’s incredulous. True, his already stagnant career has recently ground to a full stop due to accusations of sexual impropriety, but the disgraced financier is dead, and besides, Gordon hasn’t even applied. Despite his reservations, during a freakish winter heatwave Gordon soon finds himself at a former Borscht Belt hotel in the Catskills, seated among the chosen ten — nine men and one woman — selected as members of the inaugural class of Camp Jeff. He hopes he might at least get a book out of the bizarre program, a luxe experimental therapeutic regimen designed to rehabilitate its campers, all of whom have been laid low by the #MeToo movement.

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CAMP JEFF BY TOVA REICH

CHAPTER ONE

They called it Camp Jeff, short for Jeffrey Epstein, named in honor of the benefactor who had endowed the famous center in the Catskills for the reeducation of #MeToo offenders caught in the hashtag. At first there was serious resistance to the project, not so much to the idea, which, in general, was deemed salutary, redemptive, but rather to calling it by the donor’s name, thrumming as it did with so much negative resonance. That, however, was the only condition on which this visionary Jeffrey Epstein— the good Jeffrey Epstein—would not budge. He had made his fortune in potions and creams drawn from original recipes passed down through the matrilineal line, into which he had poured every drop of his male energy. With such a background, when it came to women, strong and powerful was his personal preference—he wanted only to be knocked out with awe. Maybe a day would come when the name would become permanently soiled and unusable—like the name Adolf Hitler, for example— but in the meantime, statistically speaking, it was likely that there was more than one man still at large called Jeffrey Epstein. Why should he let himself be robbed of his good name, why should he collude in its defilement due to one rotten carrier? No, he would put the name—his name!—right out there to grab the attention span of the public. It would flash like a beacon cautioning all comers that they, too, could end up like the bad Jeffrey Epstein, swinging from a noose in a jail cell, a suicide or murder victim, take your pick, but at the same time, it would also send the message that not every Jeffrey Epstein has to be a pervert and a deviant. The good Jeffrey Epstein would cleanse the name, he would purify it as with one of his Hungarian bubby’s magic Magyar lotions that kept you forever unblemished. The renewal of the name would be reflected in the renewal, the rehabilitation, of the sinners. He envisioned a network of camps stretching well beyond New York State, beyond the borders of the USA, internationally: Jeffrey Epstein Worldwide—yes, JEW, unfortunately. Because, though nobody dared to utter this out loud as part of the conversation, a disproportionate number of the hashtagged were, as it happened, Jews, like the recipients of the Nobel Prize.

The camps would be situated in the rural outskirts of the great coastal cities bookending the American heartland, and it was anticipated that they would be populated largely by representatives of the fallen leading lights endemic to the particular shining metropolis in the latitude. In the flagship New York Camp Jeff, for example, you already had your respectable concentration of literary and media types, your intellectuals, your finance guys; in the prospective Boston offshoot, you could count on servicing your academics and scientists; in San Francisco, your tech boys; in Los Angeles, titans in The Industry, and so on. But as it turned out, thanks to the mordant humor of the gods, Camp Jeffrey Epstein, the branch in the heart of the Catskill Mountains, remained alone of its kind, one and unique, and consequently, with nothing to rival it, the most prestigious and sought after. The elite of the fallen, in particular its proud intelligentsia—that is, those who were not out-and-out rapists and pimps and traffickers, and who had not actually landed in jail and indeed had not even been fined but instead simply had been publicly shamed while muttering abjectly sorry-sorry-sorry, then instantly removed from whatever lofty position they had occupied, and from polite society in general, as if pincered like a louse between the tips of long steel tweezers, extracted and shunned—every one of these outcasts singled out for reprogramming wanted desperately to get into Camp Jeffrey Epstein New York. Even if it meant enduring the insult of reeducation, especially the demeaning group sessions and other moronic communal requirements, nothing but lowbrow brainwashing, bottom line, refereed by pathetically inferior nobodies no less, it remained their top choice. Competition for acceptance to Camp Jeff, the New York branch, was brutal.

It was located in the swath of the Catskills that in its heyday had been known as the Borscht Belt, in the once-gilded old Lokshin Hotel and Country Club that the good Jeffrey Epstein, patron and philanthropist, a man who prided himself on being endowed with normal domesticated sexual appetites unlike his namesake, had rescued from collapse and abandonment, and set about renovating and refurbishing to meet the highest standards suitable to a rehabilitation center. The fabled attraction of the old hotel, now on the way to a full remodeling, top of the line, was what had been called in the old days the Murray Lokshin Casino and Lounge, honoring the establishment’s visionary founder, where once, in those golden years, the best talent, singers, dancers, and especially comedians, brilliant rising jokers, had been showcased. The former Murray Lokshin Casino and Lounge, now known as the Jeffrey Epstein Social Hall, had been totally reconfigured, thanks to the generosity of the good Jeffrey Epstein, provided with all of the prescribed larger and smaller public and private spaces for the performance of serious therapeutic group dynamics as well as individual self-examination, reflection, healing. Yet in a gracious, truly a nostalgic, nod to the golden days of Jewish immigrant striving and hopefulness, the honorable Jeffrey Epstein had also arranged for a section of the Murray Lokshin Casino and Lounge to be carved out for a cutting-edge theater space called the Zuzi Epstein Playhouse, a tribute to his lost daughter, named for her formidable great-grandmother—the girl who had exited too soon, exercising her right to choose. Upon its stage, inmates, or “campers” as they were called, from the world of entertainment could get up, and as one of them, that wise guy Gershon Gordon, the world-famous literary powerhouse and public intellectual, put it, expose themselves.

Indeed, a good number of the campers were true celebrities whose sojourn at Camp Jeffrey Epstein New York was one of the primary features that made it such a desirable destination for those hashtag degenerates self-channeled to the reeducation track. The acclaimed comedian Arnie Glick, for example, a camper there, was known to venture up onto the Zuzi Epstein Playhouse stage as often as would be tolerated to unload himself of some Glick-shtick to keep in shape for his desperately fantasized comeback. The finale, which every insider breathlessly anticipated, occurred when his co-inmate Gordon would roll up in his wheelchair to the foot of the stage, dressed in his trademark blacks—black sports jacket, black turtleneck, black jeans, the entire ensemble topped by a black velvet yarmulke setting off his signature white bouffant, his hair having gone prematurely, or, better, precociously, white—as the master (who would have found Gordon’s particular head covering most disagreeable) once nailed an ambitious, albeit fictional, Bostonian, also a self-styled writer and intellectual. Thus decked out, Gershon Gordon would boom out, “Shut up already, Arnie Prick,” the entire audience of inmates chanting along in jubilant chorus.

“Oh, Arnie Sick, Arnie Very, Very Sick,” Glick would wail so desolately, so penitently, a living testament to the success of the indoctrination by the mental-health storm troopers to which he had been subjected as an element of the Camp Jeff deprogramming, and he’d go limp and deflate into a puddle right there on the floor of the stage, as if resigning himself to be wiped up and flushed into the sewers, dragged off ignominiously from the wings by a cane hooked into his collar as in the legendary Lokshin days. It was a smashing routine, classic, Gordon and Glick, Vladimir and Estragon. What were they waiting for? With full faith they awaited the day when the nightmare that had ensnared them in the hashtag would come to its inevitable end like every other fad, like every other perverse fanatical craze that had gripped society over the millennia, and real life would resume. On that day they would make their reentry into the newly enlightened world as if emerging from a leper colony, climbing out of a pit crawling with scorpions and snakes, they would go forth together, born again, welcomed and hailed as honored survivors.

At Camp Jeffrey Epstein New York, Gershon Gordon, so gifted, so charming and erudite, trapped by the legend of his own precocity and ambition into a career as eternal prodigy and potential, was acknowledged intellectual royalty; gratefully, Arnie Glick accepted the supporting role of Gordon’s personal fool. The duo were joined by the news anchor Bob Bloom and the talk show host, Bob Blatt, the Two Bobs, fallen media giants dragged out of the tube, their names and faces instantly recognizable in every household across the fruited plains, far surpassing in primetime fame whatever nod had ever been allotted to Gordon or Glick. Together, the four of them made up what Arnie Glick, scarred forever by his high school years, from which he still extracted most of his material, called the Popular Group, the coolest clique on the premises having the most fun right in your face, everyone longed to crash their party. They were the Gang of Four, as the more evolved Gordon dubbed them, the Four Amigos, the leading nutcases in the cuckoo’s nest. Brandishing the power of their quartet, they took sad satisfaction during this dark intermission in their once radiant trajectory on earth in sabotaging the staff of inferiors—the mental-health mafia, therapists of every school, all of them women by birth or choice, including the administrators and the nurses of course, sculpted and toned for those emergencies when fitness and force would be required. All four of them, Gordon and Glick, Bloom and Blatt, were enviably good talkers, that was their trade, it was how they had once earned their living, seduced their benefactors, supported their habits, but here at Camp Jeff, they all deferred to Gershon Gordon, by unspoken consensus Gershon Gordon was their voice. This was because, as Arnie Glick explained, Gershon Gordon got into Camp Jeffrey Epstein due primarily, though not exclusively, to sins he had committed with the so-called harassments that came out of his unzipped Jewish mouth, whereas they, the Two Bobs and Arnie himself, had sinned without foreplay, with the clipped Jewish weapon that suddenly, startlingly, they yanked out of their pants.

November 06

Required Reading: Seven Days of Free eBooks from Seven Stories Press

Over the next seven days, we’re offering free digital copies of some of our more relevant — perhaps even inspiring — works of radical literature. Download a copy, share it with your friends, then read it together.

"Political power," says Howard Zinn, "is controlled by the corporate elite, and the arts are the locale for a kind of guerilla warfare in the sense that guerillas look for apertures and opportunities where they can have an effect."

In Artists in Times of War, Zinn looks at the possibilities to create such apertures through art, film, activism, publishing, and through our everyday lives. In this collection of four essays—three of which are previously unpublished—the author of A People's History of the United States writes about why "to criticize the government is the highest act of patriotism."

This classic manual on repression by revolutionary activist Victor Serge offers fascinating anecdotes about the tactics of police provocateurs and an analysis of the documents of the Tsarist secret police in the aftermath of the Russian revolution.

As we approach the 100th anniversary of Victor Serge’s (1926) classic exposé of political repression, the specter of fear as a tool of political repression is chillingly familiar to us in world increasingly threatened by totalitarianism. Serge’s exposé of the surveillance methods used by the Czarist police reads like a spy thriller. An irrepressible rebel, Serge wrote this manual for political activists, describing the structures of state repression and how to dodge them—including how to avoid being followed, what to do if arrested, and tips on securing correspondence. He also explains how such repression is ultimately ineffective.

“Repression can really only live off fear. But is fear enough to remove need, thirst for justice, intelligence, reason, idealism…? Relying on intimidation, the reactionaries forget that they will cause more indignation, more hatred, more thirst for martyrdom, than real fear. They only intimidate the weak; they exasperate the best forces and temper the resolution of the strongest.” —Victor Serge

In early 2004, photographs came to light revealing extensive prisoner abuses, instances of torture, and other war crimes at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib detention center, committed by U.S. military and other government personnel. At the time, the Human Rights Watch confirmed that “the only exceptional aspect of the abuse at Abu Ghraib may have been that it was photographed." It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America's most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison.

In Abolition Democracy, Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI's "most wanted list." She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners.

Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing Bush-era disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Born in San Salvador in 1935, Roque Dalton dedicated his life to armed struggle while writing fierce, tender poems about his country and its people. In Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases / Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle, Dalton offers a road map for a liberated El Salvador, writing through the lens of five poetic personas, each with their own imagined history and distinct voice. This collection shows a country caught in the crosshairs of American imperialism, where the few rule the many and the many fight to survive—and yet there is love and humor and self-mockery to be found here on every page, in every verse, as well as an abiding faith in humanity. “I believe the world is beautiful,” Dalton writes, “and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.”

A guide to direct action for those disillusioned with the posturing of liberal “activism.”

The left is losing, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here is the radical’s guide to activist work—the manual we need at this crucial moment to organize for universal human rights, a habitable earth, and a more egalitarian society.

In Volume 1: Building Movements and Fighting to Win, McBay describes the need for resistance movements, and paints a portrait of what a thriving resistance movement might look like today.

Powerful ideas of protest and freedom of expression from the world-renowned Egyptian political prisoner and activist.

Featuring a foreword by Naomi Klein.

Alaa Abd el-Fattah is arguably the most high-profile political prisoner in Egypt, if not the Arab world, rising to international prominence during the revolution of 2011. A fiercely independent thinker who fuses politics and technology in powerful prose, an activist whose ideas represent a global generation which has only known struggle against a failing system, a public intellectual with the rare courage to offer personal, painful honesty, Alaa’s written voice came to symbolize much of what was fresh, inspiring and revolutionary about the uprisings that have defined the last decade. Collected here for the first time in English are a selection of his essays, social media posts and interviews from 2011 until the present. He has spent the majority of those years in prison, where many of these pieces were written. Together, they present not only a unique account from the frontline of a decade of global upheaval, but a catalogue of ideas about other futures those upheavals could yet reveal. From theories on technology and history to profound reflections on the meaning of prison, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated is a book about the importance of ideas, whatever their cost.

"If we are to be treated like animals with no agency, so be it. But we shall bypass cattle and livestock, ignore pets and domesticates. We shall look to the lizards, starfish and earthworms— those beings that can regenerate after any injury, no matter how grave. We shall accept that regenerated organs may not be identical to what was lost. They could appear to be mutilated, but look closer and you will see the beauty in monstrosity, for only the monstrous can hold both the history of dreams and hopes, and the reality of defeat and pain together. The monstrous need not forget their old injuries in order to lose their fear of acquiring new ones."

The complete writings of radical leftist and political revolutionary, Ulrike Meinhof, co-founder of the Red Army Faction (RAF), aka. The Baader-Mienhof Gang.

No other figure embodies revolutionary politics and radical chic quite like Ulrike Meinhof, who formed, with Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, the RAF, notorious for its bombings and kidnappings of the wealthy in the 1970s. But in the years leading up to her leap into the fray, Meinhof was known throughout Europe as a respected journalist, who informed and entertained her loyal readers with monthly magazine columns.

November 04

Election 2024 Survival Guide: A Reading List

November 01

Monica Cure on translating “Too Great a Sky” by Liliana Corobca

Too Great A Sky, a new novel from Liliana Corobca and her award-winning translator Monica Cure, tells the story of the deportation of Romanians from Bucovina. The protagonist, Ana, is eleven years old when the Soviet soldiers send her from Bucovina, Romania, to Kazakhstan. She is just one of many forced to leave behind her home and make the three week long journey via train. The trip is a harsh, humiliating one, but in spite of the cold and the closeness of death, life persists in the boxcar in the form of story-telling, riddles, and ritual. Years later, Ana recalls her childhood for her great grand-daughter, who is considering moving her to a nursing home. Her story, told with unflinching candor, is a chronicle of a life lived during a time of great political and national change, a story of an existence defined and curtailed by lines drawn on a map.

In her introductory letter, which you can read below, Monica Cure shares some insight into the process of translating the text, particularly the challenges in rendering into English a narrative interspersed with moments of prayer, folksong, and other lyrical, sometimes ecstatic, often allegorical, frequently idiomatic, sequences of verse.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
BY MONICA CURE

Translating Too Great a Sky, the third novel by Liliana Corobca that I’ve translated, was especially challenging. If while working on The Censor’s Notebook I was exceedingly aware of the possibility that a translator could also be a censor, while translating Too Great a Sky I felt the additional burden of accuracy in bearing witness, especially given the ongoing war in Ukraine. Though it is a fictional story, many of the events and details closely follow the facts of the Soviet deportation of Romanians from what was then part of Romanian Bucovina, now Ukrainian Bukovyna, during World War II. In her academic work, with Dumitru Covalciuc, Corobca edited a volume of over eighty oral histories of survivors entitled The Romanian Golgotha: Testimonies of Bucovinians Deported to Siberia (Golgota românească. Mărturiile bucovinenilor deportați în Siberia, Vestala, 2015). These oral histories and others inform many of the incidents narrated by Ana Blajinschi in the novel.

Bearing witness is difficult and often complicated, a reality that is heightened in this novel. At first, I had no intention of getting overly involved in the “facts” of the story. My engagement started simply enough — I wanted to render the Romanian spellings of foreign words into their most common spellings in English. Almost all place names in the novel are real. I felt that leaving the Russian and Kazakh ones in the Romanian spelling would seem inconsistent with the character Ana having learned Russian and Kazakh as she does in the novel. Finding the Russian and Kazakh names is easy enough for rivers such as the Irtysh and Ob. But then I couldn’t find which steppe the “Anarhai” steppe could be. Liliana sent me the spelling in Cyrillic and luckily a blog post on the writing of Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov came up allowing me to match it to the Anarkhay steppe, which would have been obvious had I been more familiar with that part of the world. Then came Central Asian foods and customs. Without having intended to, I found myself looking up every unfamiliar word, place, and name. In the process of doing so, I noticed several discrepancies that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Fortunately, Liliana and I have a collaborative working relationship as well as a friendship. We cross-checked Central Asian details with information that could be found online. We found the names of dishes that more closely resembled their descriptions in the novel. We changed the name of the Kyrgyz teacher, again thanks to Chingiz Aitmatov. We made it clearer that people from that part of the steppe happened not to have a ready supply of apples rather than never having heard of them, a detail that had come from the testimony of a deportee to Siberia rather than Kazakhstan.

I could have chalked up any errors to Ana Blajinschi not understanding certain words at the time of her deportation when she was eleven, or to her forgetting or confusing things in her old age while explaining them to her great-granddaughter in the novel’s present tense. But I realized I wanted Ana’s account to be as accurate as possible so long as Liliana felt the same way that I did and agreed with the changes. Ana as a character is somewhat otherworldly at the same time as she is very human — I wanted errors to be anyone’s but hers, even as I recognized no memory or testimony is perfect.

I also knew that Ana’s story, while based on real events, is fiction and that this is a source of power in the book. The emotions come from the way the story is told, how it draws the reader close. Though I was tempted to consult a Kazakh language specialist, I limited myself to imposing only once on the writer Maria Rybakova, who was living in Kazakhstan at the time, to help me find an appropriate word in Kazakh that could sound like an insult in English, since the word had to be changed from the Romanian version regardless. I’m grateful for her assistance in polling thirty people for options. Moreover, though I researched every unfamiliar word, I thought including notes would detract from the story (a decision supported by the editors at Seven Stories). Often, I added a couple words of description to Romanian words I left untranslated, such as cojoc and sarmale, to help readers without distracting them from the story. These changes were easier to make because Ana often explains things to her great-grand-daughter rather than simply narrating them.

The songs included in the novel were based on songs actually composed by deportees and sung by survivors. Corobca found them in the journal The Land of the Beeches (Ţara Fagilor) dedicated to the history and culture of Romanians in that area. She altered them slightly when writing them into the narrative and I was somewhat more liberal in my translation. For most of the songs I prioritized a folksy tone and rhyme, or at least half-rhymes. The only song fragments for which I adamantly created a regular meter were the songs the deportees danced to when they got off the train.

Liliana also read a range of religious books in preparation for writing the novel since several of the main characters, especially Ana Blajinschi, are marked by their Christian faith. In some ways this aspect was less of a challenge for me since my grandfather had been a Romanian Baptist pastor who had been imprisoned for his faith in the early years of the communist regime and so the language of Christian faith was already very familiar to me. In several of the prayers I preserved what may seem to be awkward syntax since it accurately depicts the rhythm of extemporaneous spoken prayer, with the common interjection of the word “Lord.” Specifically Orthodox aspects, which show up in the novel in layered ways, were less familiar to me. A troiță is a large wooden or stone cross set up at crossroads or to mark an event, but Troiță de Sus is also the (fictional) name of the village in Moldova where Ana settles, and de sus can be translated either simply as “upper” in geographic usage or as “from above” in a metaphorical sense. Part Three was entitled “Troiță de Sus” in Romanian and we decided that the most important meaning to keep was “roadside crosses,” especially since Ana had just shared the memory of the invisible crosses she saw along the train tracks.

Throughout the novel, Orthodox and folk practices and beliefs are often intertwined, as they continue to be in reality, especially in rural areas. Liliana collected many of the folk beliefs present in the novel during fieldwork in her own village in Moldova, especially those mentioned in the book during the burial ritual performed with words on the train. Ana’s last names also hold both religious and spiritual connotations. Her maiden name is Zeiţă, which means “goddess,” while her married name, Blajinschi, and its affectionate diminutives (Blajinica, Blajina, and Blajâna), has at its root the word blajin. The word means a combination of gentle, peaceful, kind, and forgiving, which calls to mind Christian virtues. The gentle mother in the train and Anton, Ana’s husband, are described using this word as well. But blajin can also refer to fairy-like creatures from Romanian folklore, also called Rohmani, as Ana notes. The syncretism of Orthodox and pre-Christian beliefs is especially present in the day in which the dead are honored, which I translate here as the “Feast of the Peaceful,” but a literal alternate translation could be the “Easter of the Blajins.”

Too Great a Sky is comprised of countless liminal spaces: between heaven and earth, both literally and metaphorically; different peoples; different languages, including words in Russian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uyghur, Polish, and Karakalpak; and different eras. Passages about various sewing machines and fabrics, and the process of manually preparing hemp, make sense in the context of Ana’s desire to bridge the gap between past and present. In telling her story to her great-granddaughter, Ana is both witness and translator. The further apart the spaces are, the more challenging the translation is, but also the more rewarding.

—Monica Cure
Bucharest, April 2024

MONICA CURE is a Romanian-American writer, translator, and dialogue specialist, as well as a two-time Fulbright grant award winner. Her poetry and translations have been published in journals internationally, and she’s the author of the book Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century (University of Minnesota Press). Her first published full-length translation, her 2022 translation of The Censor's Notebook, was awarded with the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is currently based in Bucharest.

October 25

Gary Indiana (1950 - 2024)

Gary Indiana, photographed by Hedi El Kholti

REMEMBERING GARY INDIANA
(1950 - 2024)

It is with great sorrow that we share the news that novelist, essayist, critic and literary icon Gary Indiana has died at age 74. Below, you will find a video from our last event with him, the launch of our recent reissue of I Can Give You Anything But Love, in which Gary reads from the book and shares some stories about his so-called anti-memoir. Watching it now, after his passing, we’re struck by the grace with which Gary oscillates between his biting wit and sardonic sense of humor, and a real tenderness that emerges when you least expect it. He was, as always, determined to not let anyone get too comfortable in their assumptions about him, about literature, about writing as a whole. We will miss him dearly.

Below that video, we've also included some links to some beautiful tributes from our friends at Frieze, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and more.

GARY INDIANA was a novelist and critic who chronicled the despair and hysteria of America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. From Horse Crazy (1989, reissued in 2018 by Seven Stories Press), a tale of feverish love set against the backdrop of downtown New York amid the AIDS epidemic, to Do Everything in the Dark (2003), "a desolate frieze of New York's aging bohemians" (n+1), Indiana's novels mix horror and bathos, grim social commentary with passages of tenderest, frailest desire. With 1997's Resentment: A Comedy, Indiana began his true crime trilogy, following up with Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story (1999) and Depraved Indifference (2002). Together, the three novels show the most vicious crimes in our nation's history to be only American pathologies personified. In 2015, he published his acclaimed anti-memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love (reissued in paperback by Seven Stories Press in 2024) and later the novel Gone Tomorrow (reissued in 2018 by Seven Stories Press). A renowned writer with a historic tenure as the art critic at the Village Voice, Gary Indiana is also the author of the essay collections Vile Days (2018) and Fire Season (Seven Stories Press, 2022), among others. Called one of "the most brilliant critics writing in America today" by the London Review of Books, "the punk poet and pillar of lower-Manhattan society" by Jamaica Kincaid, and "one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche" by the Guardian, Gary Indiana was a writer who was both inimitable and impossible to pin down. Gary Indiana passed away on October 24, 2024 after a long battle with cancer.

October 22

Media Literacy 101 - Take 30% off our Media Literacy Reading List

Crypto Cities: An Excerpt from “Proof of Stake” by Vitalik Buterin and Nathan Schneider

September 27

by Seven Stories Press

CRYPTO CITIES

vitalik.ca

October 31, 2021

 CityCoins.co, a project that sets up coins intended to become local media of exchange, where a portion of the issuance of the coin goes to the city government. MiamiCoin already exists, and San Francisco Coin appears to be coming soon.

 Experiments with NFTs, often as a way of funding local artists. Busan is hosting a government-backed conference exploring what they could do with NFTs.

 Much more ambitious projects creating crypto-oriented cities from scratch: see CityDAO, which describes itself as, well, “building a city on the Ethereum blockchain”—DAOified governance and all.

But are these projects, in their current form, good ideas? Are there any changes that could make them into better ideas? Let us find out . . .

WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT CITIES?

WHAT ARE CITY PROJECTS UP TO TODAY?

BLOCKCHAIN EXPERIMENTS IN RENO

Reno, Nevada, mayor Hillary Schieve is a blockchain fan, focusing primarily on the Tezos ecosystem, and she has recently been exploring blockchain-related ideas in the governance of her city:

 Selling NFTs to fund local art, starting with an NFT of the “Space Whale” sculpture in the middle of the city.

 Creating a RenoDAO, governed by Reno coins that residents would be eligible to receive via an airdrop. The RenoDAO could start to get sources of revenue; one proposed idea was for the city to rent out properties that it owns and use the revenue to fund a DAO.

 Using blockchains to secure all kinds of processes; for example, blockchain-secured random number generators for casinos, blockchain-secured voting, etc.

CITYCOINS.CO

CityDAO is the most radical of the experiments: Unlike Miami and Reno, which are existing cities with existing infrastructure to be upgraded and people to be convinced, CityDAO is a DAO with legal status under the Wyoming DAO law trying to create entirely new cities from scratch.

WHAT DO I THINK CITIES COULD BE UP TO?

I would argue that there are two distinct categories of blockchain ideas that make sense:

1. Using blockchains to create more trusted, transparent, and verifiable versions of existing processes.

2. Using blockchains to implement new and experimental forms of ownership for land and other scarce assets, as well as new and experimental forms of democratic governance.

So let’s get into the specifics.

WHAT ARE SOME EXISTING PROCESSES THAT BLOCKCHAINS COULD MAKE MORE TRUSTED AND TRANSPARENT?

This system could easily be extended. For example, procurement processes for choosing which bidder wins a government contract could largely be done on-chain.

Many more processes could be made more trustworthy with blockchains:

Eventually, even voting could be done on-chain. Here, many complexities and dragons loom, and it’s really important to be careful; a sophisticated solution combining blockchains,

zero-knowledge proofs, and other cryptography is needed to achieve all the desired privacy and security properties. However, if humanity is ever going to move to electronic voting at all, local government seems like the perfect place to start.

WHAT ARE SOME RADICAL ECONOMIC AND GOVERNANCE EXPERIMENTS THAT COULD BE INTERESTING?

EXPERIMENT #1: A MORE COMPREHENSIVE VISION OF CITY TOKENS

Here is a different possible sketch of a narrative of how city tokens might work. It’s far from the only possible alternative to the CityCoins.co vision. In any case, city tokens are a wide design space, and there are many different options worth considering. Anyway, here goes . . .

First, let’s start with some possible objectives. Not all are necessary; a token that accomplishes only three of the five is already a big step forward. But we’ll try to hit as many of them as possible:

 GET SUSTAINABLE SOURCES OF REVENUE FOR THE GOVERNMENT: The city token economic model should avoid redirecting existing tax revenue; instead, it should find new sources of revenue.

 PROMOTE SAVING AND WEALTH-BUILDING: Home ownership does this—as home owners make mortgage payments, they build up their net worth by default. City tokens could do this too, making it attractive to accumulate coins over time, and even gamifying the experience.

 ENCOURAGE MORE PRO-SOCIAL ACTIVITY: Such as positive actions that help the city and more sustainable use of resources.

 Create an incentive to hold the coin, sustaining its value.

 Create an incentive specifically for residents to hold the coin, as opposed to otherwise-unaligned faraway investors. Furthermore, the incentive’s usefulness is capped per person, so it encourages widely distributed holdings.

 Creates economic alignment (city becomes more attractive —> more people want to park —> coins have more value). Unlike home ownership, this creates alignment with an entire town, and not merely a very specific location in a town.

EXPERIMENT #2: MORE RADICAL AND PARTICIPATORY FORMS OF GOVERNANCE

CONCLUSIONS

Special thanks to Mr. Silly and Tina Zhen for early feedback on the post, and to a long list of people for discussion of the ideas.

VITALIK BUTERIN is a Russian-Canadian programmer and writer who co-founded Bitcoin Magazine in 2011 and launched Ethereum in 2014. In 2021, he was named as one of TIME magazine’s most influential people.

Proof of Stake

Recent posts

* We love all of our children equally, of course. These are just some books we're really digging at the moment.

EXPLORE MORE BOOKS ON SALE

A Kid from Marlboro Road by Edward Burns A Kid from Marlboro Road is a coming of age novel that is plainspoken and holy for its love of fragile family bonds and the places where the form, set in and around New York City and Long Island.

Fury by Clyo Mendoza Fury, a novel of ghosts that evokes the legendary classic of modern Mexican literature, Pedro Páramo, without actually imitating it. Steeped in indigenous Mexican culture, a stunning debut novel by the young Mexican poet Clyo Mendoza.

Global Justice: Three Essays on Liberation and Socialism by Ernesto Che Guevara Global Justice is the perfect, short Che book (80 pages) to get your younger cousin who just started sharing Luigi Mangione memes.

“This is just fucking sonnets, Cat”—Imogen Binnie, author of Nevada

The Duel by Inês Viegas Oliveira Circuses and marching bands instead of anger and fighting? I'm in. And the illustrations? Not surprisingly the NY Times called them "dazzling."

Fury by Clyo Mendoza A hallucinatory fever dream of love and violence that will leave you wanting more from this young, very talented Mexican poet and novelist. Wow.

REMEMBERING PETER WESTBROOK

(April 16, 1952 – November 29, 2024)

The title of his book, Harnessing Anger, says it all. To paraphrase: We’re not perfect, we’re human, and we may have enormous reservoirs of anger in us. So harnessing anger can be the great weapon that we turn into a force for good.

Pete himself could be a two-edged sword: quick to respond, alert, always in the moment, ready to pounce or pull back, gentle and hard. And his art, in life as in fencing, was to redirect the different emotions he was capable of into positive action.

We lost a true humanitarian, a consummate sportsman and a towering figure in fencing when Peter Westbrook died last week.

—Dan Simon

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The perfect excuse to grab yourself a little present too :)

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Triangle Square Book Clubs: Radical books for radical kids

Triangle Square Book Clubs are monthly kids’ book subscriptions focused on highlighting social justice kids' books and kids' books from around the world.

Whether picture books or chapter books, or people’s history books for tweens, all of the books included in these subscription options promote a radical kindness towards others, and emphasize the importance of standing up for what’s right.

To give a Triangle Square Book Club subscription as a gift, simply input the recipient's mailing address on the shipping page during checkout. If you have any questions, send us an email and we'd be happy to help.

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 Create an **incentive specifically for residents to hold the coin**, as opposed to otherwise-unaligned faraway investors. Furthermore, the incentive’s usefulness is capped per person, so it encourages widely distributed holdings.

A Kid from Marlboro Road by Edward Burns
A Kid from Marlboro Road is a coming of age novel that is plainspoken and holy for its love of fragile family bonds and the places where the form, set in and around New York City and Long Island.

Fury by Clyo Mendoza
Fury, a novel of ghosts that evokes the legendary classic of modern Mexican literature, Pedro Páramo, without actually imitating it. Steeped in indigenous Mexican culture, a stunning debut novel by the young Mexican poet Clyo Mendoza.

Global Justice: Three Essays on Liberation and Socialism by Ernesto Che Guevara
Global Justice is the perfect, short Che book (80 pages) to get your younger cousin who just started sharing Luigi Mangione memes.

The Duel by Inês Viegas Oliveira
Circuses and marching bands instead of anger and fighting? I'm in. And the illustrations? Not surprisingly the NY Times called them "dazzling."

Fury by Clyo Mendoza
A hallucinatory fever dream of love and violence that will leave you wanting more from this young, very talented Mexican poet and novelist. Wow.