In the summer of 2020, I started an Instagram project sharing articles, essays, and other writings that I found useful or interesting. Sharing links on Twitter and Facebook is already easy; I just wanted to find a way to use what little IG platform I had/have to do something other than just promote myself (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I wanted to share some of the most powerful writing on the pandemic, abolition, anti-authoritarianism, the climate crisis, and other issues that define this moment. Here’s the list so far. Order note: most recent link at the top.
Volume Four: August 2023 – July 2024
- Activist Responds to RICO Charges Intensifying Criminalization of Stop Cop City (Micah Herskind interviewed by Kelly Hayes)
- “We’re Living the Climate Emergency”: Native Hawaiian Kaniela Ing on Fires, Colonialism & Banyan Tree
- Fifty Years of Hip-Hop in a World That Could Not Exist Without It (Tressie McMillan Cottom)
Volume Three: August 2022 – July 2023
- Of What Future Are These The Wild, Early Days? (Resources for Emerging Movement-Builders)
- ‘If you win the popular imagination, you change the game’: why we need new stories on climate (Rebecca Solnit)
- ‘Get off our backs and let us live’: Miss Major is still fighting for trans rights after 50 years of resistance (Sam Levin interviews Miss Major)
- Out of My Hands: A musician in prison pines for his bass (David Annarelli)
- How to Stop Neo-Nazis From Crashing Pride Month (Melissa Gira Grant)
- What Time is it on the Clock of the Police Abolition Movement? (Ricardo Levins Morales)
- Male Supremacy is at the Core of the Hard Right’s Agenda (Cassie Miller, SPLC)
- How to Learn a Language (UyenThi Tran Myhre)
- Reproductive Justice: a University of Minnesota Women’s Center Zine Collaboration
- Let This Conversation With Mariame Kaba Radicalize You (Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba)
- The Shared Anti-Trans and Anti-Abortion Playbook (Irin Carmon)
- Balancing Act: Asian American Organizations Respond to Community Crises and Build Collective Power (Building Movement Project & Asian Americans Advancing Justice Asian Law Caucus)
- What is gender-affirming health care? ‘Trans refuge’ bill would help kids get it (Nicole Ki and Sam Stroozas)
- Info via the East Phillips Urban Farm on the planned Roof Depot demolition:
- The Meaning of African American Studies (Robin D. G. Kelley, in conversation with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor)
- What would have saved Tyre Nichols’ life? (Derecka Purnell)
- ‘It perpetuates fear’: Monterey Park shooting compounds trauma in Asian American communities (Sam Levin)
- Be Sweet, Stay Gold (UyenThi Tran Myhre)
- End of 2022 Double Feature:
- All Organizing is Science Fiction (adrienne maree brown)
- MPD150’s Sunsetting Links and Resources
- Abled-Bodied Leftists Cannot Abandon Disabled Solidarity to ‘Move On’ From COVID (Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha)
- Beyond the Hate Frame: When Systemic Violence Masquerades as Hate and Extremism (A PRA Roundtable)
- Amid Wave of Right-Wing Terror, Trans Communities Are Keeping Each Other Safe (Meghan Krausch)
- “We Can Do Something Different”: Andrea Ritchie and Mariame Kaba on Their New Book “No More Police” (Kaitlyn Greenidge)
- Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric roils Wisconsin, providing political fuel for the right (PBS Wisconsin)
- Why climate despair is a luxury (Rebecca Solnit)
- ‘We Have Broken the Wall of Fear’ Iranian protesters on what brings them back to the streets four weeks in. (Alex Shams)
- After Floyd (Austin McCoy)
- The Country That Could Not Mourn (Sarah Jaffe)
- Let Puerto Rico Be Free (Jaquira Díaz)
- Ron DeSantis Flew Immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Echoing a Racist Stunt From Exactly 60 Years Ago (Kate Storey)
- “The Human Psyche Was Not Built for This:” How Republicans in Montana hijacked public health and brought a hospital to the brink (Marilyn W. Thompson and Jenny Deam)
- As Attacks on Queer and Trans People Accelerate, We Need Solidarity Now (Melissa Gira Grant in conversation with Kelly Hayes)
- Organizing for Reproductive Justice: Joseph R. Fitzgerald interviews Barbara Smith
- “We Need to Take Away Children:” The secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy (Caitlin Dickerson)
- Why the Right Doesn’t Want Kids to Talk About Gender (Samantha Riedel)
Volume Two: August 2021 – July 2022
- Mike Davis is still a damn good storyteller (Sam Dean)
- Sex ed was in trouble before Roe v. Wade’s reversal. Now the curriculum matters even more. (Nadra Nittle)
- Justice in America Ep. 20: Mariame Kaba and Prison Abolition
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore Talks Abolition Geography and Liberation
- Pick Your Fighter: The Next Major Reproductive Freedom Movement Has Begun
- This Fight Isn’t Over. Not Even Close (NNAF statement on the Supreme Court overturning Roe)
- 40 years after Vincent Chin’s death, activists work to keep legacy from fading (Frances Kai-Hwa Wang)
- A Pizzagate in Every City (Melissa Gira Grant)
- The Courts Won’t Free Us — Only We Can (Chase Strangio)
- The bleak spectacle of the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial (Michael Hobbes)
- All These Brave Men: We can’t be protected by the same masculinity that kills us (Jessica Valenti)
- Hope Is Not a Given. We Must Cultivate It Together. (Tanuja Jagernauth interviewed by Kelly Hayes)
- Why do white supremacists want to kill Black people? What are the roots of this violence and how do we fight it? (Derecka Purnell)
- Reflecting on Mariama Kaba’s reflections on the quote ‘Hope is a Discipline’
- The Limits of Privilege The new abortion regime is going to affect everyone. (Rebecca Traister)
- The Real Fight for Abortion Rights Is Not in the Courts or Congress (Melissa Gira Grant)
- ‘It is painful to have your child rejected’: the parents group fighting new anti-trans laws (Katelyn Burns)
- “Multiple Things Can Be True”: Understanding the Roots of Anti-Asian Violence (Jason Wu interviewed by Panthea Lee)
- The Final Pandemic Betrayal (Ed Yong)
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore on Abolition, the Climate Crisis and What Must Be Done (Movement Memos w/ Kelly Hayes)
- What to Do When the World Is Ending (Yotam Marom)
- IPCC: We can tackle climate change if big oil gets out of the way (Amy Westervelt)
- Here’s How We Beat Amazon (interview with Angelika Maldonado)
- The Fight For Trans Liberation Is Everyone’s Fight (Raquel Willis interviewed on What a Day)
- Bonus: Join me in donating to the Protect & Defend Trans Youth Fundraiser!
- (Release Day special: I used ONE entry in this series to highlight my own writing): Poem for the First Day of the Poetry Unit in Language Arts Class
- The Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy: A Future for All of Us
- Disabled and d/Deaf Poets Anthology, Curated by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
- COMIC: How To Intervene When Someone Is Harassed Or Attacked (Ruth Tam interviews Gabriela Mejia; comic by Connie Hanzhang Jin)
- How the Atlanta Spa Shootings—the Victims, the Survivors—Tell a Story of America (May Jeong)
- “Next-Level Horrific:” A Lambda Legal Attorney Explains Texas’ Anti-Trans Directive (Wren Sanders interviews Currey Cook)
- Strike! Minneapolis educators declare walkout to begin Tuesday. (Becky Z. Dernbach)
- Masculinity As Radical Selfishness: On the Maskless Men of the Pandemic (Rebecca Solnit)
- Trans Youth Are Facing Right-Wing Attacks and a Solidarity Shortage (Kelly Hayes in conversation with Chase Strangio)
- ‘Nowhere is safe’: Asian women reflect on brutal New York City killings (Sakshi Venkatraman)
- Educational Gag Orders Target Speech About LGBTQ+ Identities with New Prohibitions and Punishments (PEN America)
- Activists Are Building a Counterculture of Care in Apocalyptic Times (Kelly Hayes in conversation with Shane Burley)
- Grief Over Time: Sybrina Fulton, who lost her son Trayvon Martin ten years ago this month, found her painful place in American history (Derecka Purnell)
- Washing for the New Year (Kao Kalia Yang)
- Book bans in schools are catching fire. Black authors say uproar isn’t about students (Tat Bellamy-Walker)
- Grief Belongs in Social Movements. Can We Embrace It? (Malkia Devich-Cyril)
- You Are Not Entitled To Our Deaths: COVID, Abled Supremacy & Interdependence (Mia Mingus)
- “My father didn’t just happen upon death…” quote (Bernice A. King)
- Eugenics with a Smile (Talia Lavin)
- Montgomery Bus Boycott: What Happened and When Was It? (Jacqui Germain)
- bell hooks will forever be a foundational force in Black feminist thought (Barbara Ransby)
- 800,000 Deaths (Clint Smith)
- What Will We Do With Our Rage in 2022? (Kelly Hayes)
- Abortion decriminalization is part of the larger struggle against policing and criminalization (Interrupting Criminalization)
- Demanding Justice for the Living (Nia T. Evans interviewing Derecka Purnell)
- Should I have kids? Move? Recycle? Your climate questions answered (Kendra Pierre Louis and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson interviewed on NPR)
- Climate Hunger Strike Shows a Dangerous Generational Divide (Molly Taft)
- A post with some links and resources for people doing Minneapolis election 2021 research
- Bodycam shows Minneapolis officers ‘hunting’ civilians during Floyd protests (Deena Winter)
- The Darwin Variant, and/or Love of the Fittest (adrienne maree brown)
- On Abolition (UyenThi Tran Myhre)
- The Life Abortion Gave Me (Jessica Valenti)
- An Excerpt From “All We Can Save” (ed. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson)
- The Whitewashing of the Afghan War (Emran Feroz)
Volume One: August 2020 – July 2021
- How the Pandemic Defeated America (Ed Yong)
- We Should Still Defund the Police (Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor)
- The Abolition Movement (Josie Duffy Rice)
- Ur-Fascism (Umberto Eco)
- On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic (Jesmyn Ward)
- “Enough Is Enough” Report and Toolkit (MPD150)
- An ICE Nurse Revealed That A Georgia Detention Center Is Performing Mass Hysterectomies (Izzie Ramirez)
- Saturday Afternoon Thoughts on the Apocalypse (Kelly Hayes)
- The Life Breonna Taylor Lived, In The Words Of Her Mother (Tamika Palmer via Ta-Nehisi Coates)
- Bystander Intervention Guide (Southern Poverty Law Center)
- Aching for Abolition (Camonghne Felix)
- Between the Waves (Ricardo Levins Morales)
- The Tenants Who Evicted Their Landlord (Matthew Desmond)
- How COVID-19 Has Impacted the Search for Separated Families (Michelle Wiley & Adriana Morga)
- Earth’s New Gilded Era (Vann R. Newkirk II)
- Mass Protest Is Coming and the Cops Are on Trump’s Side (Kelly Hayes)
- So You’re Thinking About Becoming an Abolitionist (Mariame Kaba)
- ‘No One Is Listening to Us’ (Ed Yong)
- The Pandemic Safety Rule That Really Matters (Rachel Gutman)
- Defund the Police and Refund the Communities (Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor)
- Not Just Another Pipeline (Louise Erdrich)
- The Actions of the (Well-Funded) Capitol Police Show Why We Need to Defund the Police (D.A. Bullock)
- The problem is white supremacy (Barbara Smith)
- The women who brought down Burger Records (Jessica Gelt)
- post nationalism in the age of cooptation and other dumpster fires (adrienne maree brown)
- Chronic Illness and COVID-19: Understanding the Financial and Physical Costs (Jacqui Germain)
- Responding as a Bystander (Hollaback)
- “What Are We Going to Do About It?” Mariame Kaba Talks Abolition in Action (Jindu Obiofuma & James Kilgore interviewing Mariame Kaba)
- Working Two Jobs, and Barely Surviving (Bridget Read)
- Wisconsin’s anti-transgender sports bills strike at a fragile moment in LGBTQ politics (Emily Mills)
- Bystander intervention trainings to stop anti-Asian violence from Hollaback and AAJC + AAJC-Atlanta’s statement
- ‘People can’t turn their backs anymore’: Asian American women often feel invisible. After Atlanta spa killings, they’re making their pain public (Becky Z. Dernbach)
- Attacks on Asian Women Are Fueled by Criminalization, War and Economic Injustice (Rachel Kuo & Salonee Bhaman)
- Visibility Alone Will Not Keep Transgender Youth Safe (Chase Strangio and Raquel Willis)
- To End Mass Incarceration, We Need to Bust the Myths That Prop It Up (Victoria Law interviewed by James Kilgore)
- MPD150’s Resources Page
- Abolition Is a Collective Vision: An Interview With Mariame Kaba (Elias Rodriques)
- A World Where George Floyd And Ma’Khia Bryant Would Still Be Here Is A World Without Police (Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie)
- The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea (Robert P Baird)
- “Ethnic Cleansing”: Amid Protests of Palestinian Evictions in Jerusalem, Israel Raids Al-Aqsa Mosque (Mohammed El-Kurd, interviewed on Democracy Now)
- My Child Asks, ‘Can Israel Destroy Our Building if the Power Is Out?’ (Refaat Alareer)
- Why are Palestinians protesting? Because we want to live (Mariam Barghouti)
- The discovery of a mass gravesite at a former residential school in Kamloops is just the tip of the iceberg (Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond)
- My Palestinian Poem that “The New Yorker” Wouldn’t Publish (Fady Joudah)
- Ny Nourn: the woman convicted of murder and pardoned – who now fights for other battered women (Anna Moore)
- Climate Change Is Destroying My Country. The Nations Causing It Must Help. (Bernard Ferguson)
- Biden’s Silence on Minnesota Oil Pipeline Frustrates Advocates (Cody Nelson)
- A silence louder than words (Taylor Moore)
- The Climate Crisis Is a Call to Action. These 5 Steps Helped Me Figure Out How to Be of Use (Dr. Katharine Wilkinson)
- How the Pandemic Now Ends (Ed. Yong)
You can find my own writing on some of these topics and more here.