Oct. 31 2022 Weekly Roundup (incl. new article & A. Locke's Bluebird, Bluebird review)

A blessed All Hallow's Eve, and Lula livre!

It is a great day for the international Left, and for humanity as a whole. Bolsonaro's defeat is perhaps the biggest triumph of electoral politics in my lifetime. A rare case where representative democracy chooses a noble man like Lula who works some good within that system's confines. May this be a turning point.

My own, far more meager contribution to the international Left dropped in The Statesman today, a personal piece about Battery Park and Anastazie Urban, an amazing Czech-American grocer who changed a small part of the world. She was also my second-great grandmother.

Anyone close to me can tell you this was the culmination of months of research. Please read it. It is the best article I have ever written.

Now for some reading:

Bluebird, Bluebird (Attica Locke)

An excellent gritty Southern gothic police thriller. Locke has the gravel in her gut and the spit in her eye of any great Texan writer. This is a geographically grounded book brushed in the dust of Paris and Downtown.

Locke provides an excellent, corrective look at how race shapes police fiction. Certainly having a Black Texas ranger investigate a group called the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas does a lot there. The book's politics are sensible without being didactic, exhibiting the messiness and ugliness of evil and law.

It has all the usual pleasures of detective stories: a dysfunctional sleuth, crumbling bureaucracy, rampant alcoholism, and a network of filthy politics. If you're going to write another police novel, this is how you do it.

And now...

The headlines

• Tal Lavin breaks down the horrors of Kanye West's antisemitism.

• Bolsonaro tried and failed to buy votes.

• Florida is moving forward on its youth HRT ban.

• Nilay Patel is smart and funny about Musk buying Twitter.