Wednesday!

* Whole Foods boycott update: consumer opinion towards the Whole Foods brand is tanking and two unions have joined the boycott. Hard to see whether anything is actually being accomplished, though. I must confess I bought a pack of Smart Dogs there last week.

* Jason Schwartzman seems to like Fantastic Mr. Fox much more than I'm expecting to.

* Please feel free to politicize my death.

* And my hometown mall had an exciting day today.

Still still more more.

* Marc Bousquet says the appointment of Wilma Liebman as chair of the NLRB is a good sign for advocates of grad student unionization. One of the most striking things about meeting grad students from other schools at conferences is always the recognition of just how good we actually have it at Duke—our situation is pretty far from perfect, but a lot of people at other institutions really do have it much worse.

To admit graduate students in the humanities with no or almost no funding isn't just insane, it's cruel.

* Iceland to appoint first openly gay woman as prime minister. The gynocracy (lesbocracy?) is finally here.

* Matt Yglesias, who of course now blogs for a nonprofit, says nonprofits are the future of journalism.

* Science fiction book covers that channel pure id.

* Create your own original Star Trek story: a flowchart.

* What? A Blade Runner sequel? Has the whole world gone crazy?

* While we're on the subject: some articles about Blade Runner. Via MeFi.

* The words of David Foster Wallace.

The good news: grad students at U. Chicago are unionizing in the face of absurdly low wages.

The bad news: their revolutionary poetry needs a little bit of work.

Longshoremen on the West Coast went on strike today to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If 2007-2008 has taught us anything, it's that organized labor still has some fight left in it after all. Via MeFi.

Nevada's Culinary Workers Union has endorsed Obama. I'm sorry this blog has turned into the Obama News Network the last few days, by the way. I'll calm down shortly.

But while we're on the subject: When is Gore going to secure permanent sainthood in the Church of Canavan by stepping in and endorsing Obama? Any day now, Al.

Strike! The UAW proves it's still got a little fight left after all.

Pauline Kael called it "as clear a piece of Communist propaganda as we have had in many years," but 1953's Salt of the Earth—widely denounced and then buried in the McCarthyite political climate of its time and the only blacklisted film in American history—is of course nothing of the sort, simply a powerful celebration of bravery, sacrifice, and the transformative power of solidarity in a company town in New Mexico where miners (and eventually, notably, their wives) are forced to strike against their East Coast bosses for nearly a year before negotiations are begun. Based on a real 1951 strike against Empire Zinc in Bayard, NM, the film has only a handful of professional actors, including its lead actress, Rosaura Revueltas, who after the filming was deported to Mexico for her involvement; most of the cast was drawn instead from the local area, including many members of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Local 890.

And it's in the public domain, so you can watch it on Google Video with an entirely clear conscience.



(via, unsurprisingly, the film class I'm TAing)