At Forbes, Janice Gassam rounds up black businesses to support today for Blackout Day 2020. During the blackout, you can use Gassam’s list to purchase wine, kettle corn, coffee, clothes, and, of course, books: The list includes Elizabeth’s Bookshop & Writing Centre, a literacy center and store focused on celebrating marginalized voices.
Nick Estes writes about the role disease has played in the mass killing of Indigenous people in the US, challenging the popular consuseus that the deaths were the result of “invisible, chance forces” such as old-world microbes that Indigenous people were not immune to: “When confronted with science and hard facts that deny its mythology, the United States chooses hallucination. It sees Indigenous genocide unfold before its very eyes and blames ‘pre-existing conditions.’”
At The Cut, writer and activist Raquel Willis on her morning routine; writing her forthcoming book, The Risk It Took to Bloom; public speaking, and her speech at the Brooklyn march for Black trans lives.
Human-rights lawyer Derecka Purnell explains “How I Became a Police Abolitionist”: “If we abolish the police, what’s the alternative? Who do we call? As someone who grew up calling 911, I also shared this concern. I learned this: Just because I did not know an answer didn’t mean that one did not exist.”
Dana Canedy has been named the senior vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster. Canedy has worked for twenty years as a writer and senior editor at the New York Times and as an administrator of the Pulitzer Prize.
On Paul Holdengräber’s A Phone Call From Paul podcast, Parul Sehgal explains how her love of books grew out of the fact that she was banned from her mother’s library: “When you come to reading in this kind of way that is not systematic, that is really governed by appetite, that is really governed by and laced with this idea of something that is subversive and secret, that never leaves you. I was that kind of reader, and . . . I still will read until my eyes burn, and have had to go to CityMD more than once.”