January 2, 1905 The Conference of Industrial Unionists in Chicago formed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), frequently known as The Wobblies. The IWW mission was to form “One Big Union” among industrial workers. IWW home ======================================= January 2, 1920 U.S. Attorney General Alexander Palmer, in what were called the Palmer or Red raids, ordered the arrest and detention without trial of 6,000 Americans, including suspected anarchists, communists, unionists and others considered radicals, including many members of the IWW. Attorney General Alexander Palmer This followed a mass arrest of thousands two months earlier based on Palmer’s belief that Communist agents from Russia were planning to overthrow the American government. A suicide bomber had blown off the front door of the newly appointed Palmer the previous June, one in a series of coordinated attacks that day on judges, politicians, law enforcement officials, and others in eight cities nationwide. Palmer put a young lawyer, J. Edgar Hoover, in charge of investigating the bombings, collecting information on potentially violent anarchists, and coordinating the mass arrests. More on the Palmer raids FBI perspective ========================================== January 2, 1975 A U.S. Court ruled that John Lennon and his lawyers be given access to Department of Immigration and Naturalization files regarding his deportation case, to determine if the government case was based on his 1968 British drug conviction, or his anti-establishment comments during the years of the Nixon administration. On October 5, 1975, the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned the order to deport Lennon, and he was granted permanent residency status. Watch the trailer for the documentary, “The U.S. v. John Lennon” ================================================== January 2, 1996 Khaleda Zia An estimated 100,000 Bangladeshi women traveled from the countryside to attend a rally in Dacca, the capital, to protest Islamist clerics’ attacks on women’s education and employment. Khaleda Zia, the country’s first female prime minister, had introduced compulsory free primary education, free education for girls up to class ten, a stipend for the girl students, and food for the education program. About Khaleda Zia
Greater pipefish, Syngnathus acus 54, and Sargassum pipefish, Syngnathus pelagicus 55,56. Handcolored copperplate engraving from Gottlieb Tobias Wilhelm’s Encyclopedia of Natural History: Fish, Augsburg, 1804. Wilhelm (1758-1811) was a Bavarian clergyman and naturalist known as the German Buffon. (Photo by: Florilegius/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
A new study out of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand has called into question traditional perceptions of mating.
“In most species, males compete to attract females. But with pipefish, the males carry and protect the embryos,” says PhD student Nicole Tosto, who led the research.
“Pipefish are unique because they don’t follow the usual ‘rules’ of evolution.”
The research highlights how biological differences in male and female pipefish influence their survival and mating habits.
While females have genes to support egg production, males activate genes to strengthen their immune system.
This is a key adaptation that allows the males to nurture and care for embryos in their bodies.
The study, published in Molecular Ecology, also uncovered how this switch in activated genes impacts mating selection.
In most species, females prefer larger, dominant males as mates because it often increases their chance of having healthy offspring, as the strong male can provide security and defence from predators.
Instead, the study found that female pipefish swim against this trend and tend to choose smaller males with high fitness levels.
Tosto suggests that this selection is based on efficiency as smaller males may need fewer resources.
Robust Ghost Pipefish, Solenostomus cyanopterus, Bali, Indonesia (Photo by Reinhard Dirscherl\ullstein bild via Getty Images)
She also believes smaller males could be better suited for the synchronised water movements that are a part of the species’ courtship rituals.
In many animals, males and females of the same species can have physical features that are different between the sexes and are often used to attract mates. These visible traits are known as sex-specific ornaments.
However, the pipefish species involved in the study were monomorphic, meaning that male and female pipefish looked almost identical and had no visible differences.
“Nicole’s research has brought up important questions for evolutionary biologists when it comes to current vs past selection,” says her doctoral supervisor, Dr Sarah Flanagan, a senior lecturer in Biological Science at the University of Canterbury.
Natural selection is a process where individuals with traits that help them survive become more likely to reproduce and therefore pass on those traits to their offspring. Overtime these advantageous traits become more commonly inherited among the species.
“For example, whether the existence of sex-specific ornamentation is evidence that selection is currently acting strongly on those sex-specific traits or whether ornaments are evidence of selection having happened in the past.”
Pipefish don’t have sex chromosomes meaning both sexes share the same genetic blueprint, they just use the genes in different ways.
For example, females focus on producing egg-enhancing proteins, whereas males produce immune-boosting proteins for pregnancy.
“Knowing how these pressures shape mating systems helps us better understand how species survive and adapt to their environments,” says Tosto.
While there is no current extinction concern for dusky pipefish (Syngnathus floridae), the species of pipefish investigated in the study, other pipefish species such as the estuarine pipefish are critically endangered.
If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence. —Thomas Merton, from “New Seeds of Contemplation,” 1961
I swear to God, mom, I am exhausted, but praise be to God in all circumstances. —writing, translated from the Arabic, on the Al-Shifa Hospital walls, April 2024
All I can see is nothing Fields of
Hollow The O that escapes
A pasture of Mouths
An apartment building Of locked jaws
The silent weeping Of rocks
I hear nothing In the bags of soft limbs sighing
Milk teeth Sharpening a father’s heart
The cone hat on the small head Singing to plumes
Iftar in the tents Flapping pages off the moon
But Your name over and over On the hospital walls
But Your name stilling The fire that does not cease
But Your name everywhere Everything all at once
I see nothing From this distance
This deepest night This longest darkness
Fumble at fajr To loosen my gasps
I repeat Your name Over and over
Then bow to Your wisdom To the terror of Your liberation
During the “Best Books of the Year” season, I’ve been going through and picking out which queer books get featured on the biggest lists. My plan was to mash all this information together into a Frankensteined spreadsheet and then share with you the queer books included on the most “best of” lists. Luckily, I was saved a step, because LitHub already made an Ultimate Best Books of 2024 List that includes best-of lists from 39 outlets. I just went through that and pulled out the queer books.
I am limited to the books I recognize, so please let me know if I missed any! As far as I could tell, though, here are the nine queer books mentioned on the most Best Books of 2024 lists, from horror graphic novels to literary fiction to historical sports romance to poetry, biography, fantasy, and more.
If you’ve been paying attention to the best of lists at all, I bet you can guess which titles are tied at #1. Regardless, this makes for a great reading list if you want to catch up on the best queer books that came out in 2024 that you may have missed!
We finally have the sequel to this celebrated graphic novel, and it was worth the wait. Intricately etched with full, exciting pages and a bold story, it picks up where the last left off: Karen, a young monster, is investigating her neighbor’s murder in the Uptown apartment where she’s grown up. But the secrets she’s discovered aren’t the ones she was looking for, and in this book, she’ll have to fight hard to avoid coming apart at the seams. This bold coming-of-age tale about queerness, difference, family, and the city of Chicago is impactful, emotional, and bold, and I was both overjoyed and very sad to see the story of Karen Reyes come to its conclusion. —Leah Rachel von Essen
This award-winning book follows siblings Greta and Valdin as they contend with an eccentric, multiracial family, queerness, and just trying to figure it all out. Valdin is doing superficially well after having been dumped by his boyfriend a year ago—his colleagues are only occasionally weird about his Maaori heritage, and he has intermittent sad sex with a friend—when work sends him from New Zealand to Argentina, where his ex is. Meanwhile, Greta has her own bubbling sadness. She’s experiencing unrequited pining, and her family is in a state made even more perplexing by her brother’s sudden, secretive move to South America. —Erica Ezeifedi
In this M/M historical baseball romance, Mark is a reporter in the 1960s who’s stuck interviewing the obnoxious New York shortstop for his whole first season. Eddie is having a tough enough time on the team, so he’s also reluctant, but neither of them is exactly given a choice. Mark is still mourning the death of his partner, the one no one knew about. He’s vowed never to have a secret relationship again—but now Mark and Eddie are falling for each other…
If you’re looking for a dry, birth-to-death, “here’s an accounting of the events of this person’s life” biography, this book is not for you. If you’re looking for a biographical poem, a multilayered close read of Audre Lorde’s poetry, a book that centers her relationships, an exploration of the ongoing legacy of her liberation work, an ode to complexity and nuance—then you’re going to want to run to this astounding, prismatic work of nonfiction. —Laura Sackton
Danez Smith is a must-read poet who has been recommendedincountlessBookRiotlists. This is their newest, and I’ll let the publisher’s description summarize it: “Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love—those given and made—are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.”
Like a lot of fantasy lovers, I’ve read my fair share of King Arthur-related novels. So many of them take themselves very seriously, portraying these majestic and austere knights as the fierce protectors of the land. But Grossman’s version of Camelot is different. It’s funny, delightfully ridiculous in so many ways. Like his take on magical schools in the magicians, The Bright Sword pokes fun at stories of Arthurian legend as much as it also celebrates it. But we, the readers, are in on the joke, understanding that this story is in conversation with the many previous tales of King Arthur and his knights.
If you’re looking for a humorous yet simultaneously heartfelt, funny, and queer-inclusive story from the world of Camelot, The Bright Sword may be the pick for you. —Kendra Winchester
Alan Hollinghurst is the Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty, The Swimming-Pool Library, and many other acclaimed novels. Our Evenings is about Dave, a mixed-race queer child who receives a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school and experiences the opportunities and cruelties of this turn of fate. We follow him from the 1960s through his coming of age, including first love affairs, a career on stage, and a late-in-life marriage.
It’s always nice when one of the biggest literary fiction titles of the year is queer. This is a bestseller that comes highly recommended by authors like Tommy Orange, Lauren Groff, John Green, Clint Smith, and more. It follows Cyrus, a twentysomething queer poet who has been numbing his pain with drugs and alcohol. His mother was killed when her plane was shot down over Tehran in a senseless act of violence by the U.S. military. His father recently died of a heart attack. As he becomes sober, Cyrus goes looking for meaning, and he finds it by researching martyrs. When he hears about an artist dying of cancer in an exhibition at a museum, he is determined to meet her.
In The New York Times Notable list, they categorize this literary fiction title with a bisexual main character as “Sexy Perimenopause Fiction” and recommend it for fans of Big Swiss by Jen Beagin. The top 10 list describes it as “the talk of every group text — at least every group text composed of women over 40” and “the first great perimenopause novel.”
January 1, 1831 William Lloyd Garrison first published The Liberator (four hundred copies printed in the middle of the night using borrowed type), which became the leading abolitionist paper in the United States. He labeled slave-holding a crime and called for immediate abolition. From the first issue: “I will be harsh as truth, and uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation.“Assenting to the ‘self-evident truth’ maintained in the American Declaration of Independence, ‘that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights—among which are life, liberty,and the pursuit of happiness,’ I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population.” Selections from The Liberator
January 1, 1847 Michigan became the first state – the first government in the English-speaking world – to abolish capital punishment (for all crimes except treason). This was done by a vote of the legislature, and was not a part of the state’s constitution until 1964. How it happened (it’s a .pdf)
January 1, 1959 32-year-old lawyer Fidel Castro led Cuban revolutionaries to victory over the corrupt government of Fulgencio Batista who had fled the island the day before. Batista, a former army sergeant, had seized power in a coup, canceling an election, in 1952. Fidel Castro More on pre-Castro Cuba The news at the time Perspective of a U.S. intelligence agent
January 1, 1983 44 women scaled a 12-foot fence at dawn, breaking into a cruise missile base at Greenham Common in Great Britain, and danced on a missile silo. The lyrics to their “Silo Song”
January 1, 1987 Ten anti-nuclear activists were arrested for trespassing at the Nevada Test Site, the culmination of a 54-day encampment at the main Test Site gate. The camp established momentum for what became a movement ultimately involving over 10,000 arrests in numerous Test Site protests over the following years in the campaign to achieve a freeze of all nuclear weapons testing. Nevada test site landscape The Nevada site includes more than 14,000 sq. km. (nearly 6000 sq. miles, larger than the state of Connecticut) of uninhabited land where atmospheric, and later underground, nuclear testing had been conducted since the 1950s. About the the Nevada Test Site
January 1, 1989 Kees Koning Kees Koning, a former army chaplain and priest, and Co van Melle, a medical doctor working with homeless people and illegal refugees, entered the Woensdrecht airbase (for a second time), and began the “conversion” of NF-5B fighter airplanes by beating them with sledgehammers into ploughshares. The Dutch planned to sell the NF-5B to Turkey, for use against the Kurdish nationalists as part of a NATO aid program which involved shipping 60 fighter planes to Turkey. Koning and van Melle were charged with trespass, sabotage and $350,000 damage; they were convicted, and both sentenced to a few months in jail. Read more about the plowshares movement
January 1, 1991 Early in the morning Moana Cole, a Catholic Worker from New Zealand, Ciaron O’Reilly, a Catholic Worker from Australia, and Susan Frankel and Bill Streit, members of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker community in Washington, D.C., calling themselves the ANZUS (Australia, New Zealand and U.S.) Peace Force Plowshares, entered the Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York. Moana Cole After cutting through several fences, Frankel and Streit entered a deadly force area, and hammered and poured blood on a KC-135 (a refueling plane for B-52s), and then hammered and poured blood on the engine of a nearby cruise missile-armed B-52 bomber. They presented their action statement to base security who encircled them moments later. About Moana Cole
January 1, 1994 The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect. A treaty among Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, it called for all three countries to follow similar policies for environmental, safety and investment regulation, apart from laws passed by their respective legislatures.
January 1, 1994 On the day NAFTA (see above) took effect, more than 2,000 native Mayans in Mexico’s Chiapas state marched into the state capital, San Cristóbal de las Casas, and five neighboring towns, and seized control. Calling themselves Zapatistas, or the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), a “declaration of war” was issued. Chiapas is among the poorest parts of Mexico. The indigenous peoples of Mexico long suffered as second-class citizens due to the dominance of the Roman Catholic church and the traditional Mestizo (mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry) political leadership of the country. The EZLN was certain that NAFTA would permanently lock in the top-down economic situation in Mexico. The Zapatistas’ slogan was !Ya basta! (“Enough is enough”). Employees at the Mexican stock exchange were evacuated by riot police. 25,000 Mexican soldiers arrived in Chiapas equipped with automatic weapons, tanks, helicopters and airplanes. 145 deaths were reported, mostly civilians. Massive arrests and subsequent torture of prisoners by the government took place.
The weather outside is frightful, but The Twilight Zoneis… well, also pretty frightful on occasion. But we can’t think of a better way to ring in 2025 than with SYFY‘s annual New Year’s marathon featuring three uninterrupted days of back-to-back episodes from Rod Serling‘s classic and groundbreaking anthology series between December 31 and January 2.
“It’s interesting, because The Twilight Zone has never been off [the air]. It’s always been there. It’s never died,” Rod’s elder daughter, Jodi Serling, told SYFY WIRE while speaking about her father’s lasting impact. “It’s because the message that he’s sending is so apparent today. Everything that he predictively wrote about is coming back to us. It’s just an honor to know that his legacy will continue to live on forever. He was such a humble kind of guy, I don’t think he realized what an impact that he was going to make on our society.”
“When the original Star Trek debuted, when I was 10, I recorded it on reel-to-reel audio tape in case it never aired again. You couldn’t watch a show whenever you wanted to. There was no way to revisit the shows you loved unless they were in syndication and then they’d be cut up,” adds Marc Scott Zicree, author of TheTwilight Zone Companion, during a separate conversation. “We live in a blessed age where you can watch anything you want, anytime you want. I really love these marathons, because I’ve heard from so many people that they just leave the TV on and glance over. It’s like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the one with Talky Tina! That’s The Howling Man!’ The great thing about Twilight Zone, is that it’s also a family show. You can literally sit down with your kids, and it may scare them, but you know that they’re not going to see something inappropriate. They know what they’re signing up for. I really love the fact that there are Twilight Zone marathons. I think it’s terrific.”
Greater pipefish, Syngnathus acus 54, and Sargassum pipefish, Syngnathus pelagicus 55,56. Handcolored copperplate engraving from Gottlieb Tobias Wilhelm’s Encyclopedia of Natural History: Fish, Augsburg, 1804. Wilhelm (1758-1811) was a Bavarian clergyman and naturalist known as the German Buffon. (Photo by: Florilegius/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Scottie's Playtime 