What’s a Slum? by Michael Parenti

by Michael Parenti
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Michael Parenti Blog
www.michaelparenti.org
January 5, 2014

Image by joseph a via Flickr

When I was about thirteen-years-old I chanced upon an article in  Henry Luce’s Life magazine that described East Harlem (a Manhattan working class neighborhood)  as “a slum inhabited by beggar‑poor Italians, Negroes, and Puerto Ricans,” words that stung me and wedged in my memory.

“We live in a slum,” I mournfully reported to my father.

The Man From The North: Baking the Bread of Revolution by Rivera Sun

The Essays of The Man From the North by Rivera Sun
Writer, Dandelion Salad
January 5, 2014

Image by oxfordian.world via Flickr

The Man From the North is a fictional writer in Rivera Sun’s novel, The Dandelion Insurrection. The novel takes place in the near future, in “a time that looms around the corner of today”, when a rising police state controlled by the corporate-political elite have plunged the nation into the grip of a hidden dictatorship.