Story by Pete Shaw Judging from Facebook on the morning after the recent elections, it seems there are two very important things that need taking. One is that the proposed wisdom that we were watching the destruction of the Republican Party turned out to be false. Instead, it is the Democrats who have imploded, or…
Story and photos by Pete Shaw Thursday, November 3, late Justin Buri, the former executive director of the Community Alliance of Tenants (CAT), an organization that fights for renters and their rights, died on Tuesday, November 1. He was 36. I will not pretend that I knew him, but I did have the pleasure of…
Story by Pete Shaw Let’s skip the formalities and conventions and get right to the point: Mayor Charlie Hales, Commissioner Nick Fish, and Commissioner Amanda Fritz are racists. They are dangerous racists whose recent support for the new police contract shows a complete disregard for the lives of people of color–particularly Black people–and an equally…
Article and photos by Pete Shaw September 24, 2016 Dear Mom, Early morning at a very large table in a quite nice house in a really neat artists’ commune in the quaint Montmartre neighborhood of Paris, far enough from the madding crowd of Sacre Couer. The tourists run wild there, which is hardly a bad…
Story and photos by Pete Shaw “I’ll never stop believing in your smile Even though you didn’t stay, it was all worthwhile.” –Donnie Fritts This month Portland is losing two very fine activists in Alyssa Pagan and Walidah Imarisha. They will be deeply missed, but this city is all the better for the time we…
Story and photos by Pete Shaw A few weeks ago I was in New Jersey. I go there twice a year, and I should tell you now that this is not the lead-in to a joke, although I am sure you have already come up with numerous punchlines. My brother and my father live there,…
“Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.” …
Lord, I’ll tell the world the water, Done crept through this town. …
Story and photos by Pete Shaw There is an odd moment at the end of the first section of Walidah Imarisha’s Angels with Dirty Faces (published by AK Press), that only reveals its peculiarity in retrospect. While visiting her adopted brother, Kakamia, who is in prison for conspiracy to commit murder, Imarisha meets a man…
Story by Pete Shaw When the healthcare law debate was raging a few years back, there was a rally at which people were urging Senator Ron Wyden to support the “public option,” something that perhaps would have more rapidly led to single payer health insurance system. If memory serves, the precise point of the rally…
