People Will Talk (on video): Robert Kuttner and Gerald Epstein on current politics and economics in context: Liz Miele: *Murder Sheets* (a comedy concert); Jackie Kashian and Anna Valenzuela on Community Colleges (and audio bonus: *This is Love: Maria Bamford*)

Robert Kuttner on Going Big: FDR’s Legacy, Biden’s New Deal, and the Struggle to Save Democracy [video link, as below]:

The New Press 

Gerald Epstein on Busting the Bankers' Club: Finance for the Rest of Us

U California Press

Liz Miele: Murder Sheets

Liz Miele as profiled in The New Yorker, 19 April 2004

Anna Valenzuela on Community Colleges, on Jackie Kashian's The Dork Forest

The Dork Forest video archive; Jackie Kashian online

Audio bonus: This is Love: Maria Bamford

Pretty-enough photos of some women doing a quotidian thing, albeit in "full" makeup, and why Are some people upset about this, anyway? (NSFW?)

I'm late to this, but I understand that various people have objected to this photo either because Ms. Olivia Cockburn (aka "Wilde"*) is breastfeeding on camera at all, or because she is Glamming Up Motherhood and making women who don't have a fashion-shoot staff working on them just before breastfeeding feel dowdy and sad. I would mostly wonder about the interaction of a diaper-free infant and an expensive gown, but it's not as if I care, and I have to wonder about those who Care Volubly in the first two cited tendencies. (Somehow, I doubt even the most impressionable teen will be moved to intentional pregnancy by actors' photos, even as many as a few dozen...the tipping point would surely occur elsewhere.)

(*Cockburn being a rather bad marquee name.)

Jaime King also among those famously sharing snaps of herself breastfeeding her child...around which is "controversy"...with some pro-lactation people arguing such things as "breastfeeding isn't nudity"...and my reflexive response tends toward, Well, even if a woman is briefly nude at the breast, why do we care? And even if, as some note with alarm or other sorts of consternation, somebody sees a breastfeeding woman as sexy, why should we care about that? (Intensely gawking or visibly salivating need not be indulged, except when that of the feeding infants themselves.) But, y'know, some people get squirrelly real quick when we are reminded of our mammalian-family membership. Perhaps some of the same people can get as upset about the dog on King's bed. 

Then again, in re glam motherhood: 
Comedian mother recreates celebrity motherhood photos

FFM: P.S. #1, April 1966: contributions from Avram Davidson, Alfred Bester, Nat Hentoff, Gahan Wilson, Jean Shepherd, Ron Goulart, Charles Beaumont, Russell Baker, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, et al.; Edward Ferman, editor; Gahan Wilson, associate editor; Ron Salzberg, assistant editor

This is a magazine I've been looking for copies of (in a casual way) for about 35 years, maybe a little more. I've written about it a little previously in the blog (and received some interesting and helpful comments there), and here's the (slightly corrected) index from the FictionMags Index previously reprinted at that occasion: 

P.S. [v1 #1, April 1966] ed. Edward L. Ferman (Mercury Press, 60¢, 64pp, 8" x 11") Gahan Wilson, associate editor; Ron Salzberg, assistant editor

Details supplied by Cuyler Brooks (and augmented by me).

• 3 · Don Sturdy and the 30,000 Series Books · Avram Davidson · ar
• 12 · Would You Want Your Product to Marry a Negro · Alfred Bester · ar
• 16 · The Gentle Art of Brick Throwing · Ron Goulart · ar
• 24 · Freaks · Gahan Wilson · ar
• 32 · Child Things · Russell Baker · ar (The New York Times 1965)
• 34 · The Lost Lovely Landscapes of Luna · Isaac Asimov · ar
• 39 · Lugosi: The Compleat Bogeyman · Charles Beaumont · ar (F&SF 1956)
• 42 · When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed · Ray Bradbury · pm
• 44 · Joe Louis in Atlantic City · Jerry Tallmer · ar
• 49 · The Thirties Quiz · Robert Thomsen · qz
• 50 · Sweet and Lowdown: The Lost Jazz Years · Nat Hentoff · ar
• 58 · Captain Ahab Is Dead; Long Live Bob Dylan, Or, Are the Beatles Really the Andrews Sisters, In Drag? · Jean Shepherd · ar
• 62 · Now You See Them · Ron Salzberg · ar

As often the case with an example of this much delay in gratification, the contents of the issue don't quite live up to my expectations (I can see why Davidson's good, but not superb, essay hasn't been reprinted, for example), but nonetheless I'm not sorry I paid a reasonably high price (though not as exorbitant as prices often are on this title, when it can be found) to finally have it at hand. The Davidson essay deals with the series adventure books aimed at children from the first several decades of the 20th century, produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate (whose products have included Nancy Drew, Tom Swift and Hardy Boys novels)...several of the examples Davidson considers from a thrift-store scrounge were among such series as the Don Sturdy and Bomba the Jungle Boy books (durable creature in comics as well) that he'd read in his own childhood, and some attributed to the same "Roy Rockwood" house name that Rich Horton was treating with in his FFB last week. 

Bester's essay is telling about the delights of commercial (in at least two senses) practical censorship in the period when American apartheid, at least in certain areas, was still just beginning to come undone, and the pressures newly applied by the likes of the Congress of Racial Equality from their direction to further make things Interesting for those in the advertising and commercial radio/television industries in what we can now think of as the Mad Men era. (Bester also notes that the best actor who'd auditioned to play Charlie Chan in the radio series Bester was writing in the late '40s was spiked because the actor was black, and who'd dare have a black man play a Chinese-American detective...far safer to settle on eventual star Ed Begley, Sr.). And while there is a bit of mockery of what was already being tagged Political Correctness in certain quarters in both the Davidson and particularly the Bester essays, the Shepherd is an unsurprisingly unsubtle bleat about the then-new androgyny as seen by the radio and print satirist, with particular contumely expended toward Tom Wolfe and to a lesser extent Andy Warhol; mocking the claims to the brawling life by Bob Dylan seems a bit more grounded. 

Gahan Wilson's thoughtful essay about the history of the freak show (with special attention to the activities of P. T. Barnum and his associates), Isaac Asimov's survey of the end of Romantic Mars with new Mariner probe imagery and data, and particularly Charles Beaumont's memoir of his meeting with Bela Lugosi very near the end of the actor's life (and by the time of this reprint, presumably from Beaumont's film column in F&SF, Beaumont was already far gone in his fatal premature Alzheimer's), Ron Goulart's run through the history of George Harriman and Krazy Kat, and Nat Hentoff on the jazz legends of his youth are all fine, and some at least among the pioneering writing of the time about these matters. The magazine as a whole, in its first of only three issues, is more about nostalgic reflection than I expected, with the Shepherd blast (and to some extent the Bester) being the prime example(s) of the kind of pop-sociological consideration I expected to comprise more of the content, but it really is a pity on several counts that this magazine didn't flourish. It was a good start. 

For more actual books this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog. I'll be (rather more promptly) hosting the links over the next two Fridays at this one.