tyler

have to agree with Andy. we really really need our readers—our Patreon has dwindled to $1400 a month. that’s not enough to run a mag that pays writers fairly ($300+/piece). without this budget restraint, we could do so much more.

if you have even $1/month, every giver helps! patreon.com/proteanmag

@abbraxas.bsky.social looks like we may need to call you in for an airstrike yet again

Get more from Protean Magazine on Patreon Independent, ad-free leftist magazine: essays, interviews, art

This year marked the 8th anniversary of Protean's founding; it was also our busiest yet. Below is a selection of the best work that we published, online and in Issue V.

As ever, readers' generosity is the only reason any of this is possible. Support us by becoming a patron: patreon.com/proteanmag

This book by @lukeoneil47.bsky.social is full of beautiful, gut-wrenching prose. I'd call it Cormac McCarthy-esque.

Wondering what work is like for all those tasked with delivering those last-minute Christmas gifts? For @proteanmag.com I wrote this on algorithmic management, logistics work, and the possibilities for class struggle at the tail end of the supply chain x.com/brechtfast/s...

Extractive Frontiers: An Interview With Thea Riofrancos • Protean Magazine In this extensive, wide ranging interview, Laleh Khalili speaks with Thea Riofrancos about her new book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, the political economy of lithium mining, the poss...

In this wide-ranging interview, Laleh Khalili (@lalehkhalili.bsky.social) speaks with Thea Riofrancos (@triofrancos.bsky.social) about her new book, "Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism"—on lithium mining, prospects for a just climate transition, and more.

proteanmag.com/2025/12/22/e...

Please do not reply to me with a gif. If you reply to this post with a gif I will block you! Very small stakes but those are nonetheless the stakes.

Victor Serge, Turncoat? • Protean Magazine Andrew Holter interviews Mitchell Abidor on Abidor's new book, Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary, out from Pluto Press. "It seems like we in the English-speaking world, at least, have misunderstood s...

Andrew Holter interviews Mitchell Abidor on his new book, Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary (@plutopress.bsky.social). "We in the Anglophone world have misunderstood some pretty important things about Serge"—including, Abidor claims, his late-life reactionary turn.

proteanmag.com/2025/12/18/v...

The End of Resistance History • Protean Magazine As the Biden administration is swept into the dustbin, Charlotte Rosen wonders: what was the liberal Hashtag-Resistance "Twitterstorian"? And, as a product of the first Trump term, what did commentato...

saw the term "Richardsonism" on the TL; if you want to read something actually useful about the phenomena of H*ather C*x R*chardson, may I suggest (in @proteanmag.com): proteanmag.com/2025/01/20/t...

from what i've read, she would very much disagree with his central contention that capitalism has its origin in much older Middle Eastern markets—that's a point she explicitly rebukes in the book

we had a lot of fun picking books from Verso’s archive. and i got to talk about two absolute classics, Ellen M. Wood’s Origins of Capitalism and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.

many thanks to Verso for showing us around and for letting us give our little mini-lectures

VIDEO: The team behind @proteanmag.com (@jakeromm.bsky.social, @multiwhirl.bsky.social, @stevanzetti.bsky.social, and @walletcheck.bsky.social) visits our offices in New York City and makes their way through the Verso Archive, sharing some of the titles that have influenced their work.

On World-Building: Lessons From a Martyred Teacher • Protean Magazine Bayan Haddad once taught literature to Oudeh Hathaleen, who would become a teacher himself, as well as Palestinian community advocate and consultant on the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land. In ...

Bayan Haddad (@BayanHaddad) remembers her former student Oudeh Hathaleen—a Palestinian teacher, father, and community leader, murdered by an Israeli settler. Haddad testifies against the inhuman colonial violence that was the antithesis of Oudeh's spirit.

proteanmag.com/2025/12/08/o...

if you missed it—i want everyone to know about the extremely disturbing warrantless spying made possible by "Flock Safety," a policing surveillance startup that gives local cops (and even some corporations) an AI-enabled camera network, empowering them to follow individual drivers all around a city.

fucking hell. by which i mean to both swear like an Englishman and reiterate that we live in fucking hell

this month marks Protean's 8th year. the mag has been wholly reliant on many, many hours of our free labor. output is also limited because we pay writers.

i just lost my main day-job income (to AI, no less). unfortunately, without more support, it's just not viable to keep going like this forever.

Horizons of Youth Liberation • Protean Magazine Sarah Brouillette reviews Madeline Lane-McKinley's new book Solidarity With Children, out this month from Haymarket Books.Sarah Brouillette reviews Madeline Lane-McKinley's new book Solidarity With Ch...

So glad to have been able to write about Solidarity with Children by @lalouverouge.bsky.social for @proteanmag.com. Special thanks to Tyler Walicek, an extraordinary editor.

www.kptv.com/2025/11/20/i...

meant to add that this piece was also written with the help of Sarah's very smart and thoughtful son Ben! as one of Madeline's central points is that children should be our partners in solidarity, not our property, we thought it was more than fitting to enlist Ben and print his thoughts on the text.

i hope you'll read this compelling survey from Sarah Brouillette of the newest work from the always-astute and incisive Madeline Lane-McKinley—it's a tautly reasoned case for affording children greater rights and autonomy, reimagining social institutions that produce suffering and dehumanization.

The Case for Child Liberation Through Children‘s Books In troubling the idea of childhood, there is perhaps no better place to go than children’s literature. Children’s literature is where stories of childhood are produced, ostensibly, for children; it…

Sharing a practice of reading with children is also a practice of listening to children: “What are you thinking about? What are your questions?“ @lalouverouge.bsky.social

i love this. partly out of my deep love for archival anything. but it also brings to mind the flow state i achieve during hours of DSLR scanning 35mm and 120 film rolls

We must remember that t*r*or*sm does not describe an objective reality; it is, like other pieces of language weaponized to murder, an ideological word used by ideological powers, with specific legislative and carceral bodies attached to its use. C. Heike Schotten, in Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler-Colony, offers us the only definition of terrorism that matters. She writes that the figure of the te*ro*ist: “…can be understood as the contemporary settler state’s moralized imperial name for the unthinkable indigenous remainder that, in the insistence on remaining, challenges the settler state’s claim to sovereignty, security, and civilizational value. Indeed, indigenous peoples’ continued existence not only challenges settler sovereignty’s claim to legitimacy and ‘first’-ness, but is the harbinger of that sovereignty’s death insofar as they become legible to it as existing.”

I've been banging on & on about Fargo Tbakhi's essay in @proteanmag.com ever since it came out almost 2 yrs ago

this part spoke to me the most, cuz i've been pleading with ppl to stop using this word, so i am sharing it again with y'all.

"t*r*or*sm is the great weapon of the West. It is used only

A History of Violence • Protean Magazine Noah Kulwin reviews Seth Harp's new book, "The Fort Bragg Cartel," tracing the historical continuities between Vietnam War-era drug smuggling operations and the overwhelming present-day criminality ta...

Now up: Noah Kulwin reviews Seth Harp's new book, "The Fort Bragg Cartel," tracing the historical continuities between Vietnam War era drug smuggling operations and the overwhelming present-day criminality taking place at the Fort.

proteanmag.com/2025/11/12/a...

Book event flyer: Powell’s on Hawthorne Thursday November 13 at 7

Excited to be in conversation with Abby Anderson, part of the Budding Roses collective, organizers of an excellent youth liberationist project here in Portland.

Return of the Body Snatchers • Protean Magazine This Halloween, Kim Kelly digs into the history of medical graverobbing and desecration-for-profit—a long-buried symptom of the heedlessness and abject cruelty of centuries past. Right? Surely nothing...

That’s all very fair but my most recent story literally compares AI to Victorian grave robbers, like let’s think about who we’re piling on before going off proteanmag.com/2025/10/31/r...

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man it'd been a while since my last real chortle of glee

always, always, always read Mel: