Black Arms To Hold You Up (with Ben Passmore)

From The Final Straw Radio

First up, Ian talks with Philadelphia-based cartoonist Ben Passmore about his new book, Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance. They discuss the research and making of the book, Passmores anarchism, the themes of inter-generational struggle, contextualizing history through lived experience, and the pitfalls of mythmaking. In addition, they spend some time discussing Ben’s martial arts practice and the legacy of Assata Shakur in light of her recent passing.

Who Are Putting Our Lives at Risk?

From Abolition Media by Marianna Manoura

As an inmate, you come face-to-face with the judicial apparatus and its bureaucracy at regular intervals, whether you like it or not. Documents that are either late or never come, documents that you don’t expect and turn up or look forward to and don’t come. Folders are closed, opened, plugs added, categories removed. There prevails, especially in the sub-judicial regime, a continuous waiting which sometimes gives motivation and sometimes causes tension. As far as our own case is concerned, the judicial system remains silent. After 13 months, the file was just closed after negative release decisions with ridiculous and non-existent justifications preceding it. The judicial mechanism, as it usually does in such cases, unfolds its vindictiveness in our case while it turns its gaze to the simultaneous systemic crimes.

Message/greetings from Nikos Maziotis at the International Conference on Political Prisoners

From Act for Freedom Now! by Nikos Maziotis

Comrades, thank you for your invitation to the International Congress of Political Prisoners that you are organizing. I send you my warmest greetings from Domokos Prison, Greece.

In memoriam: Leslie Fish

From Gary McGath

Leslie Fish, one of the best-known members of the filk music community, has died. She was talented, opinionated, outgoing, and just weird (in the best sense of the word). I didn’t know her well, but I’d seen, heard, and talked with her on many occasions. Other people who knew her better will write about her, but I should give my perspective here.

North Macedonia: 2026 Balkan Anarchist Bookfair, Sep. 24-27

From Balkan Anarchist Bookfair 2026 Skopje

After fifteen years, the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair returns to Skopje, where it was last held in 2011. It returns to a completely changed city, a transformed region and a radically altered global context. What remains unchanged is the need to meet, organize, exchange, and resist together. The return of BAB to Skopje is not a nostalgic gesture, but a political necessity: to reconnect old and new struggles, to strengthen regional and international ties, and to confront the realities of the present with collective force. A new movement of anarchy is once again being mobilized in this city shaped by contradictions, devastation and survival.

TOTW: Determinism

Robert Sapolsky’s 2023 Detemined: A Science of Life Without Free Will is a recent major influence on me. Sapolsky, a neuroscientist, argues free will either does not exist or at best, exists at a lower rate than we like to believe. Sapolsky’s previous book, Behave states, “And [human behavior] is indeed a mess, a subject involving brain chemistry, hormones, sensory cues, prenatal environment, early experience, genes, both biological and cultural evolution, and ecological pressures, among other things.”
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