Authors withdraw from PEN America festival in protest over Israel-Gaza war

Posted on March 15, 2024 by Admin

Group of more than a dozen writers decry organization’s inadequate response to ‘genocide’ being committed by Israel

More than a dozen prominent authors and literary figures have withdrawn from PEN America’s flagship World Voices Festival in protest of what they see as an inadequate response by the organization to the “genocide” being committed against Palestinians by Israel in Gaza.

The group of writers, which includes Naomi Klein, Michelle Alexander, Hisham Matar, Isabella Hammad and Zaina Arafat, sent a letter to PEN America asserting it had “betrayed the organization’s professed commitment to peace and equality for all, and to freedom and security for writers everywhere” by failing to call for a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war.

‘Steve Bannon is watching us closely’: Naomi Klein on populists, conspiracists and real-world activism

Posted on October 18, 2023 by Admin

Author speaks candidly about a ‘mirror world’ that feeds our anxieties, distorts reality and fuels the polarisation of society

Naomi Klein is aware that her new book, Doppelganger, looks strange. A distorted picture of her face stares at you from the front cover. “Everyone who holds it looks like they’re holding my severed head, including me. It feels like Macbeth,” she says. Her laugh punctures the quiet communal space we’re sitting in on the first floor of a London hotel in late September.

But the weirdness is intentional. It’s supposed to capture what she’s writing about – a mirror world where her sense of self becomes distorted. Her starting point is her very own doppelganger, the writer Naomi Wolf. For more than a decade Klein has repeatedly been confused with Wolf. What at first irked her became more frustrating – destabilising, even – as it moved to social media and Wolf dived full on into conspiracy culture, allying with the far right in the process. The two are so frequently mixed up that social media algorithms began to autocomplete Klein’s name when people were writing about the latest thing Wolf had said or done.

Fears that Egypt may use Cop27 to whitewash human rights abuses

Posted on July 29, 2022 by Admin

Naomi Klein and Caroline Lucas among signatories to letter voicing concerns over country’s hosting of climate summit

A hundred days before the Cop27 summit is due to start in Sharm el-Sheikh, a group of environmentalists and activists have expressed alarm over Egypt’s ability to host the event successfully because of its poor record on human rights, as thousands of prisoners of conscience remain behind bars.

“We are deeply concerned that [a successful conference] will not be possible due to the repressive actions of the Egyptian government,” they said. “Indeed, it seems more likely at this point that the conference will be used to whitewash human rights abuses in the country.”

Naomi Klein: ‘We are seeing the beginnings of the era of climate barbarism’

Posted on September 14, 2019 by Admin

The No Logo author talks about solutions to the climate crisis, Greta Thunberg, birth strikes and how she finds hope

• Read an extract from her new book, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal here

Why are you publishing this book now?
I still feel that the way that we talk about climate change is too compartmentalised, too siloed from the other crises we face. A really strong theme running through the book is the links between it and the crisis of rising white supremacy, the various forms of nationalism and the fact that so many people are being forced from their homelands, and the war that is waged on our attention spans. These are intersecting and interconnecting crises and so the solutions have to be as well.

The book collects essays from the last decade, have you changed your mind about anything?
When I look back, I don’t think I placed enough emphasis on the challenge climate change poses to the left. It’s more obvious the way the climate crisis challenges a rightwing dominant worldview, and the cult of serious centrism that never wants to do anything big, that’s always looking to split the difference. But this is also a challenge to a left worldview that is essentially only interested in redistributing the spoils of extractivism [the process of extracting natural resources from the earth] and not reckoning with the limits of endless consumption.