Dear John,
In our last News Digest of 2022, we’re sharing our top culture of the year - we asked our colleagues to share favorite viewing, reading, and listening of 2022. We’d love to know what some of your highlights were!
We will be taking time to rest over the next couple weeks and will return January 13th with more news highlights. See you in 2023.
1. Joy and Power
You may have heard Joy Oladokun’s hit “Power” at our People’s Celebration. Or you may have heard Joy perform in news coverage of the Respect for Marriage signing ceremony. About the new legislation, Joy says it “serves as a reminder that the loving and accepting world I longed for as a queer kid is not a myth. It’s a reality that we have to build brick by brick every single day.” Read more about Joy and listen to their music, especially if you need a dose of joy.
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2. Mother Country Radicals
This podcast features intimate and detailed longform storytelling from the children of the Weather Underground and Black liberation movement. Senior climate organizer Jesse shares that this is “amazing movement history told between parents and kids.”
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3. Reservation Dogs
It’s been a huge year for good television. Vulture TV critic Kathryn VanArendonk says, “There is no physical way anyone could ever watch even one episode of these shows” about this year’s releases. Listen to the podcast and learn more about why Reservation Dogs is a staff favorite from this year.
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4. That’s Where I Am
Lead Organizer DyAnna shared about this song from Maggie Rogers: “I have listened to it while I ugly cried in my car, frolicked in the Tuscan Hillside, made big decisions, made bread. It's kind of just my song for all the things now.”
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5. Andor
Our Ops and IT Manager Max shared: “I'm not necessarily the biggest Star Wars fan, but I was struck by how vividly Andor speaks on resistance, rebellion, and the people you meet in the movement. We're not all going to be heroes. We don't even have to be friends. But we have to work together, because a well-organized community can be more powerful than the most lethal militarized police.”
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6. Beautiful Country
Development Coordinator Nadine shared about this book by Qian Julie Wang: “So intense but SO good! A powerful, and often traumatic, look inside what life is like as an immigrant in the US.”
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7. Let The Record Show
This is Katie’s pick: it is so rare to learn in detail about the people and meetings and debates and fights and despair and grief and romance and dreams and losses and wins that are a part of building movements and organizations through crises. This oral-history-centered book by Sarah Schulman about ACT UP and queer organizing around AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s is a fraught, generous, devastating gift to our movements. Here’s an interview with Schulman.
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8. A NEGRONI… SBAGLIATO… WITH PROSECCO in it.
Much of our team watched House of Dragon this year… and others enjoyed this TikTok trend. Read this Rolling Stone article to catch up on the television show and cocktail phenomenon.
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9. What to do when the world is ending
We passed this essay around last winter, so grateful for honest and inspiring words from organizer and facilitator Yotam Marom. We hope you might find grounding, too, in these words about hope and despair.
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10. Prince 💖 Minneapolis teachers
We’re calling it: this is the cutest Minnesota movement news story of 2022. In the NY Times, here’s how WCCO found the footage of Prince supporting the Minnesota Teachers Union in their last strike, in 1970.
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And that’s a wrap!
Send us what you’re reading, watching and listening to.
Until next time,
Katie Blanchard (she/her)
Basebuilding Director
Jessica Zimmerman (she/her)
Development Director
Paid for by TakeAction Minnesota
TakeAction Minnesota
705 Raymond Ave Ste 100
Saint Paul, MN 55114
United States
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