Now in its 15th year, Coachella is the highest-grossing festival in the world. For the region it’s a quarter-billion-dollar revenue generator, which outstrips Jamaica’s GDP on an annual basis. Tickets run up to $800, luxury Safari tents top out at $6,500, and everything costs: parking, water, showers, even charging phones. The dominant tribe is money-flush youth with the will to endure three sleepless days of being mashed in a delicious sound taco of Indie rock. But Coachella is also the modern incarnation of medieval carnivals that revealed “another way of life that stood in stark contrast to the austerity and fixed hierarchy of the official order,” notes Al Sandine in The Taming of the American Crowd.  | more…

Horace Campbell is the author of Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, published by Monthly Review Press. In this article he follows up on his analysis of Libya by discussing Obama’s current trip to Africa in the context of U.S. imperial strategy.  | more…

Henry Giroux is the author of America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth, recently published by Monthly Review Press. You can read an exclusive excerpt from the book on Truthout, titled “Challenging Casino Capitalism and Authoritarian Politics in the Age of Disposability.” | more…

Alan Wieder will be in South Africa for the month of July to talk about his new book Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid, published by Monthly Review Press and Jacana Media (in South Africa). Click here for a schedule of book launches and talks across the country.  | more…

On Saturday, June 29, 3 to 7 pm, Horace Campbell will discuss Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya at the The Book Suite in Columbus, Ohio. He will be joined in discussion by Horace Ike Newsum of Ohio State University. The event in sponsored by Africa and Diaspora Development Linkages.  | more…

Henry Giroux is the author of America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth, recently published by MR Press. He discusses some of the issues covered in the book—including varieties of pedagogy and fundamentalism, markets, and the prospects for public schools—with Truthout editor Leslie Thatcher.  | more…

Clairmont Chung is the editor of Walter A. Rodney: A Promise of Revolution, published by Monthly Review Press, and director of the film W.A.R. Stories: Walter Anthony Rodney. He discusses the life and legacy of revolutionary and scholar Walter Rodney with C.S. Soong on KPFA’s Against the Grain radio program.  | more…

The following is Joan Stone’s Foreword to Dispersed City of the Plains by Harris Stone, his final book, published by Monthly Review Press in 1998. It provides a little context for the book’s creation and insight into Harris’s major aim: examining “the built form of the American city, the built form of monopoly capital.” | more…

Nancy Stout is the author of One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution. In this in-depth interview, Stout discusses Sánchez’s life, her role in the Cuban revolution, and her relationship with Fidel Castro. The interview was conducted by Hazel Kahan for her Tidings podcast and WPKN in Bridgeport, CT.  | more…

Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker are well known for their important contributions to the study of Latin American Marxism, Latin American revolutionary politics and Jose Carlos Mariategui’s thought. Their new joint contribution is a volume that makes available to English readers a considerable number of Mariategui’s shorter texts… Mariategui, an undoubtedly gifted journalist, political author and literary critic, offers readers engaging and rich perspectives—mainly but not exclusively Latin American and Marxist ones—on some of the main issues that concerned European and Latin American progressive public opinion at the time. These translations are a welcome and useful aid for all engaged in teaching Latin American history and literature, the history of socialist ideas, indigenismo, world history, third world studies and so on. | more…

Giroux offers a compelling primer for the chaos that neoliberalism has wrought on our youth and education system. Giroux writes with passion that borders on poetic. And, unlike a lot of critical theory, the book is intelligible and easy to read. It would make a welcome addition any OWS-style people’s library or intro-level college class. | more…

Bruce Neuburger is the author of Lettuce Wars: Ten Years of Work and Struggle in the Fields of California. Join him for a talk at Revolution Books in New York City on June 11 at 7pm.  | more…