Erik Loomis

This is not even remotely surprising. When you have companies that don't care about safety for environment or consumers, you have companies that don't care about labor conditions either.

On August 7, 1933, sugar beet workers strike in Oxnard, California, organized under the communist-led Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union, a communist union, went on strike. Part of a much larger set of agricultural strikes led by the CAWIU in 1933, the Oxnard strike showed the potential of interracial organizing in the fields, though victory was not to be given the larger structural conditions against rural organizing at this time.

On August 8, 1635, a slave named Maria was killed by her master in the Philippines and he is later executed for it. This is a window into issues of sex slavery and colonialism, a topic which deserves more attention in our larger consideration of labor history.

I am of course talking about the most hypocritical nation in the world, my own. And this essay on the financing of public education demonstrates how for all people might want to talk about things like “all men are created equal,” nothing in this nation allows such a radical statement to come to fruition.

This is the grave of Albert Goldman. Ah….this fucking guy. This ought to be fun. Born in 1927 in Dormont, Pennsylvania, Goldman grew up in a Jewish family in a different Keystone town, Mount Lebanon. He went to the Carnegie Institute of Technology and started studying something not very CIT–theatre. But then World War II […]

This might be a bit in the weeds for LGM readers, who at least in the comment section seem like the type of people who generally don't go outside much, forget about long hikes in our wilderness areas. But the issues brought up here are important–how are we to manage the forests under the restrictions of the Wilderness Act? The Wilderness Act was well-intentioned and has largely been a great law, but banning any kind of machines, including chainsaws, means that you can't fight the fires that are destroying this critical habitat.

Last weekend was Newport Jazz Festival. I go to all three days of Newport Folk, but one day of Newport Jazz is usually enough for me, both in terms of cost and the physical exertion that I am still feeling after 3 days standing in the sun the previous weekend. In some ways, I prefer Newport Jazz–the crowd is older and more diverse. It's also less a scene, fewer white kids in the festival clothes pretending like they are at Woodstock. But the programming usually frustrates me, as it trends pretty conservative. Now, I grant you there's a reason for that, which is that it is a commercial enterprise in a world where lots of people like to say they like jazz, but few people really like jazz that much. Jazz is like forests. People say they want to go to the forest and spend time in nature, but in reality, they get bored in 5 minutes so you have ziplines and putt putt outside the park to do instead. Any jazz festival at this size has to include a very broad definition of jazz because this isn't Big Ears and people aren't going to listen to 8 hours of challenging music.

Alice Rohrwacher's 2024 film La Chimera is certainly worthy, though with some significant flaws.

This is a mass grave of monks killed in the Black Death in 1348. Of course we know nothing about these particular monks, but who doesn't welcome a good post on the Black Death?

A history lesson Mike Quill and the Transport Workers Union.