Two Important Books

Andrew Marantz – Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation 

For several years, Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer, has been embedded in two worlds. The first is the world of social-media entrepreneurs, who, acting out of naïvete and reckless ambition, upended all traditional means of receiving and transmitting information. The second is the world of the people he calls “the gate crashers”–the conspiracists, white supremacists, and nihilist trolls who have become experts at using social media to advance their corrosive agenda. Antisocial ranges broadly–from the first mass-printed books to the trending hashtags of the present; from secret gatherings of neo-Fascists to the White House press briefing room–and traces how the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and then how it becomes reality. Antisocial reveals how the boundaries between technology, media, and politics have been erased, resulting in a deeply broken informational landscape–the landscape in which we all now live. Marantz shows how alienated young people are led down the rabbit hole of online radicalization, and how fringe ideas spread–from anonymous corners of social media to cable TV to the ex-President’s Twitter feed.

Laura Levitt  – The Objects That Remain

Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies, and Gender, Laura Levitt was raped in her own bed. The police arrived too late to apprehend her attacker. When they left, investigators took items with them—a pair of sweatpants, the bedclothes—and a rape exam was performed at the hospital. However, this evidence was never processed. Decades later, Laura returns to these objects, viewing them not as clues that will lead to the identification of her assailant but rather as a means of engaging traumatic legacies writ large. Her book, The Objects That Remain is equal parts personal memoir and fascinating examination of the ways in which the material remains of violent crimes inform our experience of, and thinking about, trauma and loss. Considering artifacts in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and evidence in police storage facilities across the country, Laura’s story moves between intimate trauma, the story of an unsolved rape, and genocide. Laura Levitt talks frankly about the trauma of her rape and reveals how these objects that remained the stories that surround them enable forms of intimacy. In this way, she models for us a different kind of reckoning, where justice is an animating process of telling and holding.

Plus, new music from UK-based singer-songwriter, Léanie Kaleido with All The Things I’m Made Of a cut from her new album, How To Weigh A Whale Without A Scale. With a stellar musical heritage – her father is Top Topham of The Yardbirds fame, Léanie says “I’m an indie freak who makes music that isn’t very indie at all”. Her album was produced by Mark Gardner of Ride which kind of contradicts her not so indie claim. Expect to hear more from Léanie Kaleido on an upcoming Life Elsewhere Music show.