The Fragile Bridge

In this full-length study of the 1913 Paterson silk strike, Steve Golin examines the creative collaboration between the silk workers, organizers from the Industrial Workers of the World, and Greenwich Village intellectuals. Although the strike was defeated, this alliance could become a model for the American left because it suggests the possibilities of connecting economic, political, and cultural struggles.Combining perspectives from labor history, social history, and intellectual history Golin argues that while the silk workers began the 1913 strike and controlled it themselves, the IWW helped them create institutions that supported the strike and reinforced its radically democratic character. The deadlock in Paterson dictated the need for a "bridge" to New York that was facilitated by a growing mutual trust between the Wobblies and intellectuals from Greenwich Village. At the height of the struggle, the IWW and the Village radicals joined the workers in presenting a powerful strike pageant in Madison Square Garden.The story of the 1913 silk strike is important because it challenges long-held conservative assumptions about labor history, including the elitist role of skilled workers, the bureaucratic function of union organization, and the irrelevance of intellectuals. Although the strikers were ultimately defeated, the strike's failure had more damaging consequences for the IWW and the intellectuals than for the workers themselves and Golin views this loss as a major turning point for the American left. Author note: Steve Golin is Professor of History at Bloomfield College in New Jersey.

Book 9 of 12

A New York Times New & Noteworthy Book One of the Daily Beast’s 5 Essential Books to Read Before the Election A collection of the New Yorker’s groundbreaking reporting from the front lines of climate change—including writing from Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, Ian Frazier, Kathryn Schulz, and more Just one year after climatologist James Hansen first came before a Senate committee and testified that the Earth was now warmer than it had ever been in recorded history, thanks to humankind’s heedless consumption of fossil fuels, New Yorker writer Bill McKibben published a deeply reported and considered piece on climate change and what it could mean for the planet. At the time, the piece was to some speculative to the point of alarmist; read now, McKibben’s work is heroically prescient. Since then, the New Yorker has devoted enormous attention to climate change, describing the causes of the crisis, the political and ecological conditions we now find ourselves in, and the scenarios and solutions we face. The Fragile Earth tells the story of climate change—its past, present, and future—taking readers from Greenland to the Great Plains, and into both laboratories and rain forests. It features some of the best writing on global warming from the last three decades, including Bill McKibben’s seminal essay “The End of Nature,” the first piece to popularize both the science and politics of climate change for a general audience, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning work of Elizabeth Kolbert, as well as Kathryn Schulz, Dexter Filkins, Jonathan Franzen, Ian Frazier, Eric Klinenberg, and others. The result, in its range, depth, and passion, promises to bring light, and sometimes heat, to the great emergency of our age.

“There are people who break open and make a new, bigger, self. But some of us are ... brittle.” When stress causes an old trauma to surface, Lucy, a longtime community organizer, teacher and anti-poverty activist, loses control of her life. On probation and living on the streets of Halifax’s North End, all she has left is friends. Faithful friends like Judith, her lawyer, who is helping her take back her life. Lucy begins to regularly sneak into Judith’s basement to take refuge from the cold, but Lucy’s presence in the house betrays their friendship, and she uncovers mysteries from Judith’s past. As events draw their lives closer, Lucy and Judith are forced to face the toll taken by their secrets. Each of them must choose between confronting past pain or remaining broken.