New Piece Out in Counterpunch on Non-Prison Stuff, Some Updates & Thoughts on Other Stuff
I went with something a little different for my last Counterpunch piece, a re-polished version of a Substack essay I published around a year ago about Alan Dershowitz and Mike Lindell (yes, the pillow guy). It’s mostly about Alan Dershowitz. Here’s the link to the Counterpunch version below, published in this weekend’s online edition:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/20/the-preventive-war-scholar/
Thanks to
for helping me edit the piece for the Counterpunch version.Also, I don’t want to say too much yet, but things are looking good for the book I’ve written on Bullock Prison in Alabama, and I will have updates about that soon! Stay tuned!
Since finishing the book, I’ve been giving myself a bit of a break from writing, but I am slowly starting up again, I guess (hopefully briefly) starting today. I have continued interviewing during my time off from writing over the past couple months, so new articles are in the works. A series on a longtime prison activist in Alabama will be out soon.
I recognize that many, perhaps most, subscribing to this Substack are here because of my work on prisons. And that’s primarily why I’m here too. And maybe some of you have mixed feelings about me branching out into other topics. And to be honest, I do too. Don’t worry. This newsletter will stay overwhelmingly focused on prisons. The more I read and write and the older I get, the more I’ve learned to focus on what I’m best at, what/who I can interview, read, and write most concretely about in the real world, and the less broadly I publish. I work on what I feel I am able to and that I don’t see many others working on. I try to interview people who have never been interviewed before, in places that are not reported on or are not reported on enough. For the time being, my reading, interviewing, and writing is not focused on much else. I am not a great mind, so I have to work hard, and I am at my best when I stay as specific as I can.
I do believe, for example, that my book on Bullock Prison could appeal to people across the political spectrum.
With that said, I do still have my own politics. I try to read as broadly as I can about the country, about the world, about international relations, though sadly I can only deviate from my primary focuses these days as much as time permits. And I don’t make a living at this, so I work a day job, and I have a life, and that probably informs my politics too, perhaps in some ways that are more conscious than others.
I’m just thinking about it all today, and I figured I’d use sharing this piece about Dershowitz as an opportunity to share some of these other, non-prison related thoughts in light of recent events.
Through my late teens and 20s, and still today — maybe some would find it cliche — my political thinking was largely influenced by the linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky, particularly my thinking about foreign policy.
I’m not going to spend a paragraph, or a page, describing all of Chomsky’s accomplishments or summarizing any of his many works. And while I can’t promise it’ll be satisfying, I can promise I’ll kind of tell you why I’m saying all this and sort of tie it back to my work on prisons.
The main thing I want to say about Chomsky, as we enter war with Iran, and because I don’t want to join the sea of leftists who wait until he dies to write an article about his influence on me, especially because that kind of broad political writing is not what I’m best at or what I do anymore, is this:
Chomsky spent the last two and a half decades of his working life and of this century, and (I think it’s fair to say) made the most consistent theme in his political writings and speakings in that time, the threats of nuclear weapons and climate change, which he considered to be the greatest (but not the only) existential threats to humanity in the 21st Century.
I’d refer people to this talk, for example:
Anyway, I promise I’m not going to lecture you about nuclear weapons, or climate change, or anything like that. I do not have the time or the natural intellectual ability or the vast body of knowledge of a Noam Chomsky to calmly and soberly scare the shit out of you like that on a Sunday afternoon.
And I have no second thoughts about spending my time the way I do these days, focusing on a prison I don’t think other reporters are focusing on much, telling the life stories of prisoners that other journalists aren’t interviewing, reading books that not many people are reading, etc.
But I also do read reports about how many children are being killed in Gaza, how the U.S. and Israel, two nuclear armed countries, are starting a new war in the Middle East, how the U.S. and Russia continue to build up their nuclear arsenals, how the U.S. government is accelerating climate catastrophe, threatening the future, rounding up people without due process at home, inflicting some of the same suffering on child prisoners that I’ve covered in adult prisons, and the list goes on and on.
I’m really trying to get at something here, which is that it can be hard sometimes, even if you think it’s what you do best, to just relentlessly focus on one small project about one prison, for example, when it seems like the threats of nuclear war and climate change, let alone other problems, are growing.
It feels odd to have any platform, even a small one, and not to encourage my readers, at a moment like this, to oppose this war, to oppose a world war, to oppose increasing the risk of nuclear war and the damage caused by climate change any amount, and to do whatever you can, whether it’s through calling your representatives in Congress or protesting in the street, to oppose the war in Iran, to oppose the genocide in the prison of Gaza, to oppose increasing the buildup and threat of nuclear weapons, to oppose the accelerated destruction of the planet and try to reverse it.
I guess I feel compelled to mention it today because, as a still relatively young person with family and loved ones, while there are many privileges to living in the time and place in which we live in history for which I don’t mean to seem ungrateful, I believe I am noticing a frightening cultural trend in this country: Life is getting cheaper.
And I don’t mean that in a good way. We’re not talking cost-of-eggs kind of cheaper here. I mean it in the worst way.
Whether you’re trying to write a story about a prison in a small corner of a small state where (I think it’s fair to say) too many people endure too much suffering, or you’re trying to urge your leaders to care about children being shot in the head, chest, and back in Gaza, or urge them not to start World War III, or to try to do something to reduce the risk that we all die of nuclear weapons or climate change, or maybe you don’t care about any of that stuff but it simply sucks to work the amount of hours you do just to get by, sucks that you can’t spend more time with your loved ones because you have to spend most of your life at work, whatever it is: Life feels cheap these days.
It feels like we’re being hit with a political tidal wave of efforts to cheapen human life as much as possible, to show us repeatedly and try to make us understand how cheap life is and how the plan is to keep making it cheaper and cheaper, perhaps until the nukes start flying or we enter climate apocalypse.
I feel it when I cover the prisons. I feel it when I read the news. We are watching it play out in our lives. Life is being cheapened at an accelerated pace. From increasingly callous, genocidal, ecocidal leaders at the top to mass shooters at the bottom, the suffering and death of others is becoming an increasingly and casually accepted part of life in the normal course of things. I believe it is important to do whatever we can to oppose this trend.