The Indy Brief: Women-Led Revolutions

The Izzy Award will celebrate its 15th year this spring, and nominations are officially open for work produced during the calendar year 2022.

The Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College (PCIM) will again grant this honor — named after legendary journalist I. F. “Izzy” Stone — for outstanding achievement in independent media. As always, the award will go to an independent media outlet or individual journalist or producer who publishes their work through their own site or that of an independent outlet.

Journalists, academics, and the public at large may submit nominations until midnight EST on Friday, February 3, 2023. The winner will be announced early next spring, with an award ceremony to follow in April 2023.

Read more on how to nominate here.

To not see women as a political force along with those who support our movements is to be blinded by the very misogyny used against us, writes Zillah Eisenstein.

It is to be unable to see the women-led revolutions that are being made, whether they are successful or not. Women taking off their enforced hijabs, women refusing to leave their classroom, women providing or seeking abortion, women ready to use hand grenades if caught by the enemy — are part of this chaotic revolutionary process.

Revolution is not one act or one moment — it is a continuous process of discovery.

Read more from Eisenstein on The Edge.

As dangerous conditions intensified across the globe this year for writers, artists, and journalists, the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN) persisted in its work to offer them protection.

ICORN noted how rising instability has damaged human rights throughout the world, and Reporters Without Borders’ 20th World Press Freedom Index has shown democracy struggling amid a “two-fold increase in polarisation, amplified by information chaos.” 

But through these challenges, ICORN has welcomed 21 new residents to its Cities of Refuge, including in Ithaca, New York; and for the first time in Lyon, France, and Fredrikstad, Norway.

Read more on ICORN’s 2022 achievements on The Edge.

Not only does Ukraine suffer from Russian metallurgical products in the form of shells, tanks, and missiles, but also through European manufacturers. The flow of cheap imports of Russian metallurgical semi-finished products, along with astronomical energy prices, is forcing European metallurgists to cut production.

Oleksiy Goncharenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, demonstrates the economic danger Russian metal producers pose to Ukraine and Europe as a whole.

This year, and at least next year, Russia will be able to earn at least 5 billion euros from the supply of its metal to Europe. And the money will go to the war in Europe. And factories in Europe will be forced to continue to reduce production and lay off people.

Read Goncharenko’s full commentary on The Edge.

Harry and Meghan are royals, or were royals, but this Netflix docudrama is not really about the monarchy. The doc also is not an indictment of how the royal family is a problematic imperial, racist, misogynist institution.

It rather shows how some of the royals have been unkind and abusive, so the focus is on individuals rather than systems of power. Harry and Meghan have faced more extreme demands than most of us non-royals, but much of their story applies to many traditional (heterosexual white) families’ function too — with obligation rather than love, with power rather than discussion, with arrogance rather than reparation.

Zillah Eisenstein unravels the complexities of family and monarchy in the documentary that falls short of demanding the revolution Harry and Meghan may need.

Read Eisenstein’s full commentary on The Edge.

When I speak with students about electronics in class, they generally arrive at similar conclusions. They have misused their laptops in class. They have been distracted by others on iPads, iPhone, laptops. They would be more than happy to learn in an electronics-free space.

Whoever thought laptops constituted a universally good idea in classrooms was either on the take from the high-tech industries or had never been web surfing on their computer during a meeting.

By the end of the Fall semester, Jonathan Ablard had run out of both jokes and patience.

Read the full commentary by Ablard on The Edge.

After a summit in 2019 where Facebook’s news-partnerships team announced a plan to spend $300 million over three years expanding infrastructure for local news, the company, now known as Meta, has spent the past year cutting funding for and downsizing most of its journalism efforts.

Facebook had issued a stated goal of “supporting local journalists and newsrooms with their newsgathering needs in the immediate future, and helping local news organizations build sustainable business models.”

Read the full report on The Edge.

1. We now have a full picture of what Trump did on January 6. Here it is | The Independent

2. The GOP Is a Battering Ram Against Truth | The Atlantic

3. Immigrant Rights Groups Blast Biden’s New Border Policy As From ‘The Trump Playbook’ | HuffPost

4. How January 6 may have doomed Kevin McCarthy’s speaker hopes | BBC

5. Investors pressure top firms to halt production of toxic ‘forever chemicals’| The Guardian