On July 12, Columbia City experienced a hiphop/R&B/funk event organized by Beatwalk. A festival held primarily on a closed off section of South Ferdinand Street, Beatwalk includes participation from small area businesses (including Island Soul and Taco City) and a good number of  performances (including singer/pianist Darrius Willrich and The Double Dutch Divas). Because the weather was perfect—not too hot but lots of sun—people crowded the street, most of them Black, middle-aged, middle class, with kids and grandkids. Also in attendance was, much to the surprise of Beatwalk’s organizers, Kshama Sawant’s team. They had three tables and about 10 volunteers searching for voters in the race for Congressional District 9, a seat that Adam Smith has held since 1997. 

Now, why is this at all important? For one, as Beatwalk’s director Tisha Gallow pointed out to me in a text: “The fact that [Sawant] even knew about Beatwalk is impressive because it is small and all about community… It’s a mini Black Festival in South Seattle.” It’s mostly absent from Seattle’s main cultural radar. But somehow it’s on Sawant’s. But it’s clearly not on that of her main rival in the race, the conventional and pro-war Dem Adam Smith (Melissa Chaudhry, the third main candidate in the race can be dismissed for reasons relating to her non-public position on LGBTQ rights and her bizarre plan to eventually do a party “switcheroo” if she wins a slot in the primaries.)  

Why wasn’t Smith in Columbia City on Sunday? Kate Bond, Beatwalk’s operations manager, has this answer: “Adam Smith not showing might loosely relate to a lack of visibility into what happens in SE Seattle because we are so often overlooked.” In an email sent the day after Beatwalk, Smith’s team countered her interpretation by claiming that Team Smith is actually very plugged in. They had attended “Auburn 4th, Federal Way 4th, Kent Cornucopia, Mercer Island Summer, and Seattle Pride.” But Sawant’s team not only attended two of those mentioned events (Kent Cornucopia, Pride), but also, and get ready, attended: Green River Farm Stand, Federal Way Farmers Market, SeaTack Farmers Market, Music at Angle Lake Park, Kent Music at Morrill Meadows Park, Auburn Farmers Market, Trans Pride, and 13 more events. And while Smith was attending the Auburn 4th, Sawant attended the Somali Independence Day in Rainier Beach on July 4th. What a class difference.

Despite the criticisms Seattle’s most-famous socialist faces from the left and right, and criticisms that often appear with racist and sexist baggage—scolds from the “know your place” crowd, if I may borrow an expression by the LA/Seattle-based filmmaker Zia Mohajerjasbi—it’s impossible to dismiss Sawant’s determination, resolution, and organizational finesse. 

It’s not enough to say she is divisive. That explains next to nothing. Nor can Sawant’s past successes (she was elected once for what used to be Position 2 on the Seattle City Council, and two times for what became and still is the 3rd District in City Council) be attributed to her strictly leftist positions. Sawant means business, and so easily stands out among the wafflers and the candidates who take voters for granted. For her, every vote counts.

Combine that ground game in an emerging political climate that’s become more and more anti-war and critical of Israel’s total destruction of Gaza and swaths of Lebanon, and you have a real recipe for an Adam Smith disaster. Indeed, his kind (established Dems), have recently been dethroned by social democrats and progressives in New York and Colorado—in part because they have yet to provide an answer to the “Palestinian question” that involves peace; and in part because the Democratic Socialists of America’s candidates are, like Sawant, serious political organizers. 

To make matters worse for Smith, mainstream media is facing Israeli messaging with tougher questions, as exemplified by the recent appearance of Israel’s ambassador to the US, Michael Leiter on CBS’s Face The Nation With Margaret Brennan. During the show, Leiter, who claimed J Street (a liberal Jewish American organization that doesn’t support the current Israeli government) was “irrelevant” and not really Jewish. Brennan did not at all hide her shock at this brazen assertion. 

But Sawant’s position on Gaza, her push for higher wages and affordable housing for the working classes, and her call to end Immigration and Customs Enforcement are not enough to beat Smith. Indeed, Melissa Chaudhry held similar positions when she ran against Smith in 2024, but she still lost by a whopping 33 percent. Why? Because Chaudhry didn’t have Sawant’s organizational capacity. In the coming days, her team will be found at the main Link stops, at a grocery store in Skyway, and, of course, the next Beatwalk.

The post Sawant’s Ground Game Against Adam Smith Is Getting Red Hot  appeared first on The Stranger.

Tech titans claim the genre inspired them. But all they’ve done is graft their politics onto stories of a better future

- by Ali Rıza Taşkale

Read on Aeon

The Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died on Saturday, after what reports have called a "brief and sudden illness" following an official visit to Ukraine. He was 71. In 2003 Graham succeeded ancient dread Confederate mummy Strom Thurmond in the Senate, and was an actively malevolent force in American society for all the remaining 23 years of his life, at a scale larger than he'd been an actively malevolent force in American society for the preceding 48.

Graham's hatreds and bigotries were bog standard for his party, and they were legion. He hated gay and queer people; he hated black and brown people; he hated Muslims; he hated liberals; he hated efforts to make the nation more just, the environment cleaner, the future better. He hated free speech and the free press and privacy for anyone else. He hated the idea that the United States ought ever to be constrained by anything other than its own self-interest, as defined exclusively by guys like him. He hated the expectation that the United States would ever project its might with anything less than maximal imperial violence and bloodlust. He hated all of these with blithe good-ol'-boy cheer and the sneer of the frontrunner. He went on The Daily Show a bunch, so that both sides could playact a kind of broadminded comity that the suckers they both held in contempt just lap right up. Guh hyuk hyuk hyuk, isn't it charming how I want all of y'awl dead.

For a little while in the aughts and again at intervals Graham played at a kind of shriekingly insincere, cornpone Bible College John McCain act, pretending to part with his party on judicial nominees, on immigration reform, on gun control, on vaccines, when that fake disunity could be performed safely at the "sponsoring a doomed, dead-on-arrival bill" or "going on Meet the Press" stage and abandoned long before anybody had to cast a vote. Like many in his party he pretended to care about decorum and civility when he thought Donald Trump was just a freak novelty act the establishment would eventually crush; like everyone in his party he ditched that pretense as soon as the prediction turned out to be wrong. He spent the last decade of his life letting Donald Trump wear him as a glove and telling himself it was the other way around. It bought him the war with Iran he'd worked for decades to make happen, and he fucked off the mortal coil before he could be made to reckon with it being a failure.

If you haven't heard about the Prairieland defendants, these are 9 protestors convicted for protesting at an ICE detention center in Texas. You can read about their protest, the grisly sentencing, and one protestor's conviction over being in a book club. These folks are in prison for protesting the injustices they see in their community.

If you are able, their supporters ask us to send letters of support to these brave folks. Click here to find contact information for each person. Please also review the guidelines for what's acceptable to send. There are also links to send money to their commissary accounts.

The sun is finally shining here in Seattle. Temperatures are hovering in my favorite range: chilly in the morning, warm (but not too hot) during the day, and cool at night. I'm taking a short break while I recharge my writing battery. I'm hoping the charger is solar powered.

Stop Asking People to Think Like Planners, by Charles Marohn

Community engagement can be hard to get right for exactly the reasons in this essay. We often ask for ideas from people who may not think that way. I've waited an hour for a bus, but I don't know enough about the bus system to know how to fix my grumbling. Are more buses the right answer when budgets are tight? Do I know about the intersection several miles away that buses take forever to get through? Gather people's problems, come up with solutions, then work through them together. That will produce real and effective results.

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

That statement is often misunderstood as an argument against listening to customers. It isn't. Apple listened obsessively to customers. What [Steve] Jobs understood was that customers experience frustrations, desires, and obstacles. They do not necessarily experience solutions.

Lost Recipes, by Abe Beame

This article writes about american culture told through the pages of hip-hop magazines. These magazines covered musicians and issues that mainstream media never touched. Archivists and historians are working to preserve these stories now at risk of being lost forever.

“Oftentimes, when we're thinking about American journalism, we're thinking about Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, or Gay Talese, and they’re important. But we also need to think about Mimi Valdés and Bönz Malone and Bobbito Garcia,” Gates told me. “Hip-hop journalism was responsible for talking about American culture in a way that no one else was at the time. In a Source magazine in ’92, you could read about Palestine, you could read about Nelson Mandela being freed, you could read about a new demo tape on the way from a guy named Biggie Smalls. It showed a people's history of alternative culture that you're not getting from the mainstream publications.”

Calvin and Hobbes and the Price of Integrity, by Matthew Morgan

Ever wonder why there were no Hobbes dolls to keep the stuffed Garfields of the world company? It turns out that Bill Watterson made sure it would never happen. His righteous crusade, defending art against cheap commercialization, seemed quaint three decades ago. But in a world where art is both disposable content and IP, maybe he was onto something.

"For Watterson, craft has never been a side dish to the main course. It’s inextricable from the truths he wants to express and the meaning he hopes his work might have for its readers. It’s his belief that half a century ago, the best comics were more than amusing to look at; they were beautiful and undoubtedly counted as capital-A Art. Here in the mid-nineties, he 'can’t think of a single strip today that comes close to that standard of craftsmanship'."

All Hail the Cheese Enchilada, by Amy McCarthy

Is there any dish more perfect than the cheese enchilada? You can dress up an enchilada with all kinds of fillings and it will be delicious. But nothing beats a real Tex-Mex cheese enchilada: a melted river of cheese wrapped in a corn tortilla drenched in chili sauce, topped with raw onion and baked. This is still the only way I like eating raw onion. My mouth watered while reading this deep dive into one of my favorite dishes.

"When I have been away from Texas for more than about 48 hours, I start to crave a cheese enchilada. It’s not that they don’t exist in other places — of course they do, incredible Mexican food exists all over the country — it’s just that there’s no need for me to go in search of a great cheese enchilada when I am anywhere else, no reason to search for sand when I live in a vast desert dotted with more Tex-Mex temples than I can count. As a (mostly) lifelong Texan, that’s always what I come back home to, whether or not I’ve actually left the Lone Star State."

Fiona Apple hasn't been too absent recently. The elusive singer-songwriter co-wrote a track on Cara Delevingne's upcoming debut album, and she released a new song for the Anya Taylor-Joy miniseries Lucky. Now, she shared an update on her music, saying she's struggling to write about the world's "endless barrage of horrors."

The post Fiona Apple Says She’s Struggling To Write About The World’s “Endless Barrage Of Horrors” appeared first on Stereogum.