2019 "best of" list: highlights of my learning journey
Post-capitalism, post-patriarchy... post-oppositionality?
One of the privileges of my work is to come into contact with an incredibly diverse array of people, organizations, ideas, tools, and practices from a huge range of disciplines, sectors, identities, geographies, mediums, etc. I try to synthesize these around curated themes via this newsletter. Once a year I compile a “best of” list: reading/writing/listening/watching that really pushed my mind in provocative ways, opening up new possibilities. These are new to me this year, not necessarily new to the world (though in most cases, material is from 2019). I present them here. I’m going to err on the side of comprehensive so you can click through to whatever catches your fancy.
Best of the Best
TL;DR: if you only do one, these were for me the most mind-bending, each in a different and powerful way.
Book: Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture, by Nora Samaran (AK Press, 2019; 140 pages). This is the book-length expansion of her viral 2016 essay “The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture.” Packed with insight, equal parts brilliant analysis and path forward. A sharp critique of patriarchy, interwoven with discussions of attachment theory and implications for how we relate to each other. My full review here. A taste:
One of the processes for dismantling white supremacy is, oddly, building up white people's sense of fundamental worth and belonging... you can't shame someone out of a shame-aversion.
Podcast episode: Real Estate Capitalism and Gentrification with Samuel Stein (The Dig podcast with Daniel Denvir, 2019: 102 min) An absolutely devastating critique of late-stage capitalism. Sam Stein contends that an astonishing 60% of global wealth is tied up in real estate, and describes the unholy alliance of capital and politics that entrenches these systems in place. Brilliant analysis, unsparing in its sacrifice of sacred cows and critique of urban liberalism, and a powerful call for whole system transformation: tinkering around the edges with “affordable housing” just won’t cut it. A taste:
Gentrification is the third phase in a process of investment, disinvestment, and reinvestment. So, money goes into a place, and it gets built up with a certain, often very nice built environment. Money then flows out of that place either because of changes in policy, changes in the economy, other opportunities elsewhere, and it becomes disinvested. And then gentrification is the return of capital to those disinvested spaces…
If you think of space as socially produced, that takes a whole lot of labor of people who don’t necessarily have a whole lot of capital. People put their lives into building up not only their home but their neighborhood, in a way that makes it suddenly appealing to capital, which comes in and transforms spaces of labor into spaces of capital in a way that displaces those who built them up in the first place.
Speech/talk: Emergence, by Daniel Schmactenberger (2016: 25 min; transcript here) One of those talks that you have to watch several times to digest (I found myself pausing it every minute or so to take notes). Breathtakingly brilliant. Here’s a taste:
At the level of social system, primarily economics, the key shift… is moving from a differential advantage economy defined by private ownership, valuation based in scarcity and differential advantage, to an economic system that is defined by making sure that the incentive of every agent (and the wellbeing of every other agent in the commons) is perfectly aligned with no externality.
Meaning: we actually understand that it’s an interconnected system; we identify all the externalities and internalize them so the system’s actually defined by systemic advantage for the whole. This is not communism or socialism or capitalism; it’s something that was not possible before to even anticipate. But it is how your body works. Where none of the cells are advantaging themselves at the expense of the other, they’re doing what’s best for them and what’s best for the whole, symbiotically at the same time.
Article/Essay: From Status-Quo Stories to Post-Oppositional Transformation, by AnaLouise Keating. (Tikkun, 2019: 16 min) Hard to choose one article; according to my Pocket app, I read the equivalent of over 76 books worth of articles/essays this year. Like most things on my favorites list, it combines brilliant analysis/insight with a proposed way forward. Beautifully written, and in my view exactly what the world needs right now. A taste:
If we aspire to be creative, to think more independently, to enact progressive change, to break out of the status quo, we can’t allow ourselves to become further entrenched in binary-oppositional thinking and its “either you’re with us or against us” mentality and activism. When we always limit ourselves to this oppositional approach, we remain trapped in a reactionary stance that’s been shaped by the dominating culture and the existing frame-work. Post-oppositionality invites us to think more spaciously, to step beyond conventional rules, to liberate ourselves—at least occasionally—from the status quo. The possibilities might be almost endless.
If it’s not too shameless to plug my own writing here, I expanded on Keating’s ideas in dialogue with some of my other favorite thinkers/writers I encountered in a newsletter post on Bridging: the art of solidarity that is probably my favorite of the year (11 min).
Best Books
First, a caveat: as a full-time working parent of two young kids, I don’t read a lot of books. Instead I consume essays, podcasts. So anything that clears the high bar to actually get me to read cover to cover is by definition exceptional. In addition to Nora’s mentioned above, two others merit highlighting here.
Why Does Patriarchy Persist? by Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider (2019: 120 pages). Another deceptively brilliant book: despite its short length, its packed with insight and deeply nuanced wisdom. Challenges our preconceptions, invites us to un-learn and re-learn basic assumptions we have about human nature, how we’re raised, how we relate to each other. Brilliant. My full review here. A taste:
“Democracy, like love, is contingent upon relationship: on everyone having a voice that is grounded in their experience... Equal voice is what makes it possible to work through conflicts in relationship without the use of force or by other means of domination.”
The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin (1994: 387 pages). Fiction! Sweet, sweet literature. I loved it — full review here. This little gem:
“Coercion is the least efficient means of maintaining order.”
Best videos/speeches/documentaries/TED talks
Las Tesis & women of the world — Un violador en tu camino (viral protest song pioneered by Chilean feminist collective LasTesis): 2.5 min of chills
adrienne maree brown, et al — How to Support Harm Doers in Being Accountable (Barnard Center for Research on Women, 2019: 16 min)
“If folks are able to process their own trauma, they're much more ready to take accountability for the impact that they've had…. People who are stuck in patterns of lashing out and harming folks, a lot of times that comes from a place of feeling like you're not seen and held and loved as a person... often it comes to the surface that some of their needs are not being met.”
George Monbiot — The New Political Story That Could Change Everything (TED, 2019: 15 min)
“We have this incredible capacity for togetherness and belonging, and by invoking that capacity, we can recover those amazing components of our humanity: our altruism and cooperation. Where there is atomization, we can build a thriving civic life with a rich participatory culture. Where we find ourselves crushed between market and state, we can build an economics that respects both people and planet. And we can create this economics around that great neglected sphere, the commons.”
Myles Horton, interviewed by Bill Moyers — Radical Hillbilly - A Wisdom Teacher for Activism and Civic Engagement (PBS, 1981: 119 min)
An absolute master-class in the art of solidarity: lessons for self-organizing, for building multi-racial coalitions, for leadership, for identity: honestly, this should be required viewing/listening for all organizers.
“The greatest education is action, and the greatest action is the struggle for social justice.”
Trabian Shorters — Asset Framing, Keynote at ComNet19 (The Communications Network, 2019: 77 min)
“Narrative actually ends up mattering more than facts because narrative determines which facts you will credit and which facts you will ignore.”
Best articles/essays
Arundhati Roy, interviewed by Avni Sejpal — How to Think About Empire (The Boston Review, 2018: 30 min)
“The freer global capital becomes, the harder national borders become.”
Astra Taylor & Leah Hunt-Hendrix — One for All (The New Republic, 2019: 15 min)
“A solidarity aiming at transformational change—the horizon toward which solidarity must now, of necessity, be directed—demands we not just recognize and sympathize with the plight of others but also join them as equals, reaching across differences without erasing them. Solidarity in its sublime form shatters the boundaries of identity, connecting us to others even when we are not the same.”
bell hooks, interviewed by David Yancy — Buddhism, the Beats and Loving Blackness (New York Times, 2015: 21 min)
“It’s about humanization. And I can’t think of another way to imagine how we’re going to get out of the crisis of racial hatred if it’s not through the will to humanize.”
Charles Eisenstein — Interbeing (Self-published, 2013: 10 min)
“Upon each of us, the wound of Separation, the pain of the world, lands in a different way. We seek our medicine according to the configuration of that wound. To judge someone for doing that would be like to condemn a baby for crying. To condemn what we see as selfish, greedy, egoic, or evil behavior and to seek to suppress it by force without addressing the underlying wound is futile: the pain will always find another expression. Herein lies a key realization of interbeing. It says, ‘I would do as you do, if I were you.’ We are one.”
Chloe Watlington — Who Owns Tomorrow? (Commune Magazine, 2019: 11 min)
“To get to the future we need, we are going to have to generate new collective lives out of the wreckage of neoliberal atomization.”
Dahr Jamail & Barbara Cecil — As the Climate Collapses, We Ask: “How Then Shall We Live?” (Truthout, 2019: 10 min)
“What we write here is for those with the kamikaze courage to take in the facts of intensifying climate chaos, growing economic inequality, crashing biodiversity, growing fascism, a global debt bubble and extinction scenarios that are already coming through the front door. It is for those who are feeling the implications of these in the pit of our stomachs, even before the radical changes needed in our personal and collective lives dawn fully into awareness.”
David Ehrlichman — Cutting Through the Complexity: A Roadmap for Effective Collaboration (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2018: 16 min)
“Our ability to work together effectively across all kinds of differences is the last great hope for humankind.”
Doug Hattaway — Lessons for Social Change Communications Strategy From the US Marriage Equality and Antismoking Campaigns (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2019: 23 min)
“Connecting your cause to people’s authentic aspirations is the key that can open the door to durable attitude change. It moves your audience beyond empathy to self-reflection.”
Esther Perel — On Sex, Monogamy, and Who Really Gets Bored First (Goop.com, 2019: 9 min)
“In the US, sexuality is looked at through a moral, puritanical lens—America is at war with the concept of pleasure in general. All our pleasures are time-fraught, with overlays of discipline and work. Everything is about control. But sexuality in many ways is a negotiation with your surrendering—it’s about a loss of control.”
Eula Biss — White Debt (New York Times Magazine, 2015: 16 min)
“For me, whiteness is not an identity but a moral problem.”
Frances S. Lee — The Pain of Belonging (Medium, 2018: poetry; 8 min)
“There is a false, mostly implicit belief
Among us that your value is based upon
How much structural oppression you experience or
Have experienced, that only
People with enough credentials of
Being oppressed are allowed to speak,
Participate in, or contribute to
Cultural conversations and knowledge making.”
Frederic Laloux — The Future of Management is Teal (Strategy + Business, 2015: 24 min)
“All of us yearn for better ways to work together — for more soulful workplaces where our talents are nurtured and our deepest aspirations are honored.”
Hanna Thomas — Why don’t we just call Agile what it is: Feminist (Medium, 2019: 7 min)
“Successful organisations aren’t ones that adopt an ‘Agile mindset’. Successful organisations are ones that adopt a feminist, queer, anti-establishment, progressive mindset — one that is flexible, experimental, pushes boundaries, self-organizes, and acts in service of community.”
John Feffer — Nationalism is Global. The Left is on the Defensive (The Nation, 2019: 16 min)
“The populist right has a vision of the future it wants. This vision may be intolerant, exclusionary, and backward-looking, but it is presented as a strong, nationalist alternative to the current more-or-less liberal status quo. At a transnational level, in other words, the far right has not only declared that ‘another world is possible’; it is busy building that world.”
Jo Freeman — The Tyranny of Structurelessness (Self-published, 1970: 29 min)
“The more Unstructured a group is, the more lacking it is in informal structures, and the more it adheres to an ideology of "structurelessness," the more vulnerable it is to being taken over by a group of political comrades.”
Julia Serano — Cissexism and Cis Privilege Revisited - Part 2: Reconciling Disparate Uses of the Cis/Trans Distinction (Self-published, 2014: 33 min)
“While the first approach that I described merely decenters the dominant group (thus creating two legitimate groups: cis and trans people), reverse discourses re-center the binary on the marginalized group. Rather than reducing the social significance of the cis/trans binary, a reverse discourse emphasizes it—after all, one only gains the authority to speak about trans people and related matters of gender if one can indisputably claim a trans identity.”
Katie Wilson — Adrift and afraid, Seattle's outraged NIMBY needs someone to blame (Crosscut, 2019: 6 min)
“Homelessness at the modern scale triggers a kind of existential anxiety, because it is both sign and symbol of the dissolution of the structures that provide meaning and security, that make one’s sacrifices and sufferings worthwhile, that keep one’s life from feeling like a pointless farce.”
Mariame Kaba, interviewed by Eve Ewing — Everything Worthwhile Is Done With Other People (Adi Magazine, 2019: 24 min)
“The reason I’m struggling through all of this is because I’m a deeply, profoundly hopeful person. Because I know that human beings, with all of our foibles and all the things that are failing, have the capacity to do amazingly beautiful things, too. That gives me the hope to feel like we will, when necessary, do what we need to do.”
Miki Kashtan — From Obedience and Shame to Freedom and Belonging: Transforming Patriarchal Paradigms of Child-Rearing in the Age of Global Warming (self-published, 2017: 31 min)
“Ultimately, I don’t see any way of fully turning around the march to destruction without focusing on connection in all its dimensions: self, others, nature, and life itself. Connection with self manifests as full freedom; connection with others manifests as belonging; connection with nature manifests as trust in natural abundance; and connection with all of life manifests as care for the whole. Conversely, the loss of connection that came from and/or brought about patriarchy manifests, respectively, as obedience, shame, scarcity, and narrow self-interest.
Thus I believe that it is only when we find ways to both restore and pass on love, and the full experience of connection that love signifies, that our species and with it all life can continue to thrive on this one and beautiful planet.”
Otto Scharmer — Three Stages of Global Movement Building: Soil, Seed, & Eco-system Activation (Medium, 2018: 9 min)
“Organizations across sectors and systems all face the same problem: how to move from a hierarchical and siloed way of organizing to one that co-evolves with the surrounding innovation eco-system. Creating real institutional change usually requires taking an eco-system of partners on a journey from ego to eco, from me to we. Eco-system activation is a process that nobody can do alone.”
Peter Buffett — It’s not the concert that’s important, it’s the consciousness (Open Democracy, 2019: 6 min)
“Consciousness is rising again. It knows that war is not the answer. Violence in all forms is not the answer, whether it’s embedded in the economy or in xenophobic attitudes of nationhood, not only through the use of bombs and artillery for ‘spreading democracy’ but also by using opioids and alcohol for comfort, killing not only the flesh and blood of soldiers and children but souls in warehouses, slaughter houses, fields, factories and supply chains everywhere.
Already, in communities throughout America, people have begun the work of renewal and regeneration. A new consciousness is emerging, a consciousness that is relational again. Another revolution is underway.”
Shiree Teng and Sammy Nuñez — Measuring Love in the Journey for Justice: A Brown Paper (Latino Community Foundation, 2019: 30 min)
“Love, when fused with power, is our tool for justice, freedom, and liberation. Love is our sword and power is the blade. Our very survival is wrapped in love and power. Our work is amphibious, living in the both/and, beyond the shores of the binary, colonized world of separation and othering. Our practice is to love ourselves critically, to love others with deep humility, and to love in community in the struggle and movement for freedom and justice. We claim and assert our rightful power that is fused with love.”
Terry Real — Why Men Struggle with Intimacy (Goop.com, 2019: 16 min)
“The essence of traditional masculinity is invulnerability. The more invulnerable you are, the more manly you are; and the more vulnerable you are, the more girly you are—a momma’s boy, a sissy. But what we’ve come to understand is that human vulnerability is what connects us to each other. Our worries, sadness, imperfections, draw us close. Men have been sold a bill of goods.”
Best podcasts
My favorite way to engage new ideas and diverse wisdom is through podcasts: I play them while cooking, doing dishes, folding laundry, driving. This year I made the switch from Stitcher to PlayerFM, which is now my favorite podcast player. I’m naming here both my favorite overall podcasts — in no particular order — and some of my favorite individual episodes of the year.
Your Parenting Mojo, with Jen Lumanlan
Healing Justice, with Kate Werning
Who Belongs?, from the Othering & Belonging Institute
See e.g. Identity Politics and 2020 US Presidential Election, with Alicia Garza
See e.g. We don’t just feel emotions. We make them, with Lisa Feldman Barrett
Brave New Words, with Anat Shenker-Osorio
See e.g. Together for Yes, Ireland
How to Survive the End of the World, with adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown
See e.g. Parenting for Liberation: We live for the ‘we’, with Dani McClain
See e.g. The Edge of Democracy: The Rise of Authoritarianism in Brazil, with Petra Costa
On Being, with Krista Tippett
See e.g. The Erotic is an Antidote to Death, with Esther Perel
ReRooted, with Francesca Maxime
See e.g. Undoing Patriarchy, with Greg Snyder and Jozen Tamori Gibson
Individual Episodes
Miki Kashtan on the three shifts needed for self-managing organisations to thrive (Leadermorphosis podcast with Lisa Gill, 2019: 47 min)
Eve Ensler and the Radically Transformative Power of Apology (Inflection Point podcast with Lauren Schiller, 2019: Content warning: this involves Eve recounting childhood sexual abuse and was a tough listen; 51 min)
Bayo Akomolafe: The Times are Urgent, We Have to Slow Down (Simulation podcast, 2019: 87 minutes)
Frederic Laloux: Organizations Beyond Ego (Insights at the Edge podcast with Tami Simon, 2019: 69 min)
Abolishing Prisons with Mariame Kaba (Why is this Happening? podcast with Chris Hayes, 2019: 62 min)
Radically Normal (NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast, 2019: 52 min) This is a fascinating discussion of the success of the gay rights movement, as compared to other efforts to change social/cultural norms
How to Heal Your Triggers and Trauma with Peter Levine (Relationship Alive podcast with Neil Sattin, 2015: 44 min)
Decolonizing Sex with Kim Tallbear (All My Relations podcast, 2019: 43 min)
Boundaries and the Art of Saying No with Nicole Lepera (Phoenix Helix podcast with Eileen Laird, 2019: start at 5 min mark; 61 min)
Interview with Glennon Doyle (Good Ancestor podcast with Layla Saad, 2019: 75 min) Great discussion of white supremacy, healing, and parenting
Gun Violence and Movement Building from the Heart with Marianne Manilov (A Show of Hearts podcast with Rosemary Pritzker, 2018: 59 min)
As always, I welcome reactions. I’d love to know what made your “best of” list for 2019: please share what’s bending your mind in provocative and generative ways. I look forward to learning and creating together in 2020.