Your Art Will Save Your Life by Beth Pickens

Your Art Will Save Your Life by the Queer writer Beth Pickens is a guideline and slim handbook about surviving fascism by creating art and sharing it with your community and community building as an antifascist tool and means of staying politically engaged.

The author wrote the book in 2008 during the first period of Mango Mouselini’s presidency. The book also provides additional guidelines for artists to sustain their practices of creating art, navigating the art world, residencies, and funding.

It’s time we reclaimed the cyberspace

Coming from the Y2K era of open-source innovations, the Internet could’ve been enjoyable and beneficial, but the tech Broligarchy ruined it for everyone! It’s time we reclaimed that space. I miss the Un-conferences and other community events where we built tools for the goodness of humanity!

Fascism is here, it’s time to wake up

Y’all, fascism is here now, and those of you who are still in denial better wake up and participate in taking action before more people get hurt and more of your democratic and scientific institutions are destroyed.

Also, it’s time to do some soul-searching. Suppose you have been harbouring any ideas that align with fascist ideologies. In that case, it’s time to purge those before your humanity is lost.

Shape — The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else — by Jordan Ellenberg

Geometry and Graph Theory were two of my favourite topics at University. I particularly enjoyed solving physics mechanics problems using geometry proofs rather than writing a long list of equations whenever possible.

Shape—The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else—by Jordan Ellenberg was a particularly satisfying read despite my only understanding of about 60-70% of the material and skipping over the mathematical works and proofs in the book.

Shape covers recent and relevant topics, such as epidemics, the spread of infectious diseases, artificial intelligence, and democracy. The book’s final chapter explains how gerrymandering votes work in Republican states and how Republicans redraw the electoral maps whenever they take office to change the outcomes in their favour without facing legal consequences.

How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley

What is fascism? Is someone who disagrees with your progressive values a fascist or far-right? Jason Stanley’s book “How Fascism Works” provides a solid checklist to identify fascist narratives by conservative-leaning and right-wing governments and political parties. Some come directly from Hitler’s Mein Kampf book and are repackaged in charming and inviting coded language such as “family values,” “protecting the children,” and “personal responsibility.”

The book provides examples of how far-right leaders and conservative political parties use these narratives in different countries worldwide, specifically the United States, and how they create a politics of Us vs. Them, in which the “us” are the members of a chosen group that are superior and more deserving than “other” groups.

Some of the ideas were references to a mythic past when things were better, such as the MAGA slogan, the use of propaganda to widen the urban and rural conflicts, anti-intellectualism targeted towards scientists and journalists, vilifying the journalists and creating an alternate reality of alternative facts, having a hierarchical point of view of society and the world in general, victimhood and claiming that their values and livelihoods are under attack by the “other” groups, claiming that the members of “us” group believe in “Law and Order,” and having constant sexual anxieties and wanting to restrict rights and autonomy of women and LGBTQ+ communities while enforcing traditional heteronormative and gender binary ideas as family values and protection for children.

The book is a little over 193 pages; it is fluid, if not emotionally heavy. It is suitable for all ages, and I strongly encourage you to read it; you won’t be disappointed! I even bought more than one copy for friends and family members.