The March B-List

The B-List is your monthly media supplement of 7 recommended readings from beyond the Briarpatch.

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1. The Next Slum: Suburbia?

By Christopher B. Leinberger
Atlantic Monthly
March 2008

“A structural change is under way in the housing market—a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work. It has shaped the current downturn, steering some of the worst problems away from the cities and toward the suburban fringes. And its effects will be felt more strongly, and more broadly, as the years pass. Its ultimate impact on the suburbs, and the cities, will be profound.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/subprime

2. Going Underground: Paul Stamets On The Vast, Intelligent Network Beneath Our Feet

By Derrick Jensen
Sun Magazine
February 2008

“We evolved from fungi. We took an overground route. The fungi took the route of producing these underground networks that are highly resilient and extremely adaptive: if you disturb a mycelial network, it just regrows. It might even benefit from the disturbance. I have long proposed that mycelia are the earth’s ‘natural Internet.’”

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/386/going_underground?page=1

3. The Violence of Capital: A Review of The Shock Doctrine

By Michael Hardt
New Left Review
November/December 2007

“Is disaster capitalism only an aberration, a moment of excess that has distorted a more virtuous form of capital or is it, in fact, the core of contemporary capital itself? Klein insists at several points in the book that it is the former, but her theoretical argument points more strongly toward the latter.”

http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/2976

4. Rethinking political parties: Rethinking leadership, knowledge, & power

By Hilary Wainwright
Red Pepper (UK)
February-March 2008

The membership and influence of political parties is declining throughout the western world, and most quickly in Britain. Hilary Wainwright examines the role of the party in transformative politics and asks how the left might reimagine this crucial instrument of political change.

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/article1017.html

5. NAFTA and Canada’s Energy Security

By Richard Heinberg
Energy Bulletin
February 7, 2008

“Canada’s energy security and global climate security are both held hostage by a provision within a trade agreement—a provision that is unique in all of the world’s treaties. Canada has every reason to repudiate the proportionality clause, and to do so unilaterally and immediately.”

http://www.energybulletin.net/40035.html

6. In Defence of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (Excerpt)

By Michael Pollan
Penguin, 2008

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.”

http://www.michaelpollan.com/in_defense_excerpt.pdf

Plus two chilling stories on the global impact of rising food and energy prices:

Feed the world? We are fighting a losing battle, UN admits (The Guardian)

Why the price of peak oil is famine (The Telegraph)

7. And now for something completely different: Marxist sock puppets!

Monochrom
Boing Boing TV
February 15, 2008

“Web 2.0 meets Marxist (Foucaultian?) economic theory in the latest video hijinks from Austrian subversive art collective monochrom. Meet an online porn monster (“iPhone? noooom nom nom nom”) and learn how Google-y eyed neo-liberalism screws over the proletariat in ‘Kiki, Bubu, and the Shift.’”

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/15/boing-boing-tv-monoc-1.html

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This month’s B-List compiled by Dave Oswald MitchellPlease support the B-List by subscribing to Briarpatch Magazine.