Back in the summer of 1975, a group of women met at the first United Nations Conference on Women in Mexico City. A Danish economist named Ester Boserup had just published an analysis noting that while women performed over 65% of the world’s work, they earned only 10% of the income, and owned less than 1% of the world’s property. And women were routinely denied commercial banking privileges. One of the attendees, Michaela Walsh, had what was at the time a radical observation: unless women got access to money and credit, they would never have power.

Over the next decade, the network she created, which has come to be known as Women’s World Banking, became one of the pioneering forces in helping women entrepreneurs enter the financial world and get credit they would not otherwise have been able to access. Today, WWB is an integral part of what we all know as microfinance.

In The Foreign Policy Auction: Foreign Lobbying in America, Freeman unpacks the ways in which governments from around the world attempt to use finance capital to ensure that the sausage factory on Capitol Hill churns out American foreign policy in their favor. The book is unrelentingly thorough, engaging, and sober. “There is no arch-villain here,” Freeman warns at the start, “no dark lord, no one to unmask at the end of the show. There are only politicians seeking reelection, lobbyists seeking more revenue, and foreign governments competing for influence over the most influential government the world has ever known.”

When I sat down to read Friends, Followers and the Future by Rory O’Connor, I thought I knew what to expect. This is how I earn my living- by advising others on how best to integrate social media into their lives and work. The world that is social media is at best a microcosm of the world at large and at worst a poor substitute for the offline world, and I figured that it would be easy to read this book, digest it into manageable pieces and write this intro for today’s book salon.

I was wrong.

The National Association of Manufacturers courageously condemns the undemocratic tyranny of five teenagers in California.

Consumers don’t change things. Citizens change things.

The United States was founded on the principle that no individual is above the law. We are, as John Adams said, “a nation of laws, not men.” But that principle is under assault, as Glenn Greenwald explains in his powerful new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.

Progressives need a fundamentally new approach to politics. They have been losing not just because conservatives have so much more money and power, but also because they have accepted the conservatives’ framing of political debates. They have accepted a framing where conservatives want market outcomes whereas liberals want the government to intervene to bring about outcomes that they consider fair.

The title, Who Are We, signals a questioning about identity and begins an exploration of its “vexed terrain.” Gary Younge, columnist for the Guardian and The Nation and the author of two previous books, lifts our understanding of identity from the taken-for-granted where it is too often treated as a fixed and done thing. Instead, Younge brings us into layers of our identities from micro to macro, from the personal to the political, revealing paradoxes both in how we know ourselves and how others (too often wrongly) ascribe identity to us.

Tonight’s movie, Bell, Book and Candle, based on the play by John Van Druten addresses aspects of love and power, as well as magic and romance. It’s really a tragedy rather than a comedy, as it reinforces stereotypical roles about men, women and witches.

In BB&C–which was directed by an old family friend Richard Quine, who I thought was soooo cool as I was growing up–Greenwich gallery owner/witch Gillian’s attention is drawn to new neighbor Shep Henderson (Jimmy Stewart) so her aunt, also a witch, does a spell to draw them together. The implication is that it’s lust, as opposed to falling in love–according to the plot, not real life–will cause a witch to loose her powers.

William Upski Wimsatt is one of those writers that one tends to either not know, or feel passionately about – there is little if any middle ground. If you’ve read Wimsatt’s cult classics No More Prisons and Bomb The Suburbs, then you already know why his work inspires so much feverish devotion, along with why his earlier, fearless examinations of race, power and politics were bound to instigate the occasional controversy. You also, if familiar with Wimsatt’s work, have made up your mind on reading through this salon. So rather than write to those folks already in the know, I’m going to provide a quick introduction to Please Don’t Bomb The Suburbs as a standalone work, distinct from his previous efforts, that has something to say of singular importance to progressives working in this historical moment.