May 1, 2024 6 min read Weekly Digest

Protest resource round-up

Digest 05.03.2024 - Stone Soup

Welcome to the Stone Soup Weekly Digest! This is where I share what I'm up to and some of my favorite things from around the internet. Subscribe to Stone Soup to get this in your inbox every week.

As of the time I’m writing this, college and university students and faculty across the United States and around the world, including at Tehran University, are protesting against academic institutional investment in genocide, arms manufacturing, and the military industrial complex. These students are courageous, dedicated, and deeply principled. Their actions are helping to fight oppression, and are demonstrably giving hope to those who are currently living in refugee camps in Rafah. In a time when it is easy to feel hopeless and helpless, these students are creating a movement that absolutely matters.

Many of these protests are being met with violence and retaliation. As I write this, that violence is surging as militarized police forces – America’s gendarmerie – attack peaceful protestors. If you’re planning to attend a protest, either as an organizer, a supporter, or an observer, it’s crucial that you know how to protect yourself legally and physically. Here are some resources to get you started:

Know Your Rights as a Protestor - This guide from the ACLU will help you understand where you are and are not legally protected as a protestor.
Know Your State’s Laws - Find more granular information on the protest laws in your state.
Check out this non-comprehensive guide to preparing for, organizing, and protecting your protest
Check out this guide to personal safety and how to handle yourself at a protest. This includes information on protecting yourself from surveillance.
Check out this guide to electronic safety at protests. Remember, your devices are built to snitch on you; it’s up to you to keep yourself and your community as safe as you can from digital surveillance.
National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Program - This program provides legal support for protestors across the country, and includes an attorney referral directory.
Specific to Illinois: If you are arrested in Illinois at an encampment protest, @theleftistlawyer will represent you pro bono; contact sheryl@weikallaw.com

I’ve seen a lot of folks taking note of the fact that the national conversation about student protests tends to focus on the protestors themselves, and not on the things they’re protesting. The truth is that our minds are complex and robust ecosystems of thought; we can consider both things at once. We can acknowledge that student protestors here in the United States are being subjected to illegal, oppressive violence at the hands of the state—and we can also, simultaneously help fight the thing they’re protesting. Many student protests are specifically focused on academic institutional support of and involvement in systems that drive the war machine. Below are some resources for how you can fight that machine, and support those who are suffering during the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.

Turning the Tables

Students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign reinforced their protest signs with drywall, then used them to kettle the riot police who were attacking their protest. Hilariously, folks online have been pointing out to me that this is a technique the students at this agricultural school likely learned when they were being taught how to manage herds of swine. Here’s a video if you feel like seeing innovation in action.

A Practice in Hostile Geometry

Friend of the newsletter Jordan Kurella wrote this beautiful editorial about how unsimple life is:

Living is mercurial. Becoming more alive is a process of taking in and letting out—messy chemistry. This is evidenced as easily as taking one’s temperature. All that we once knew can be undone, can be untied and retied neatly later at a feverish pace. Such as this: as children in the United States, we’re to follow our ABCs as a hard and fast rule. And yet, in studying languages, the ABCs follow different orders, are written in different scripts. Nothing, nothing, in this life follows such succinct logic as simple as that song.

Support the San Francisco Mime Troupe

Since 1959, SFMT has been creating art that demands change, growth, and equality. They have no corporate sponsors, and provide free theater, entertainment, and community education in the San Francisco Bay Area. They uphold that standard through donations, and are currently fundraising for future efforts. You can donate to support their work, and learn more, here. Their mission statement is as follows:

The mission of the San Francisco Mime Troupe is to create and produce theater that presents a working-class analysis of the events that shape our society, that exposes social and economic injustice, that demands revolutionary change on behalf of working people, and to present this analysis before the broadest possible audience with artistry and humor.

Have You Eaten?

Did you know I have a new novella out? Have You Eaten is about queer dirtbags on the run, searching for their missing best friend. It's the story of how they nurture and nourish each other with their limited emotional and material resources. You can now read the ENTIRE THING, for free, at Reactor!

I’m Reading: The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy

Lorel has always dreamed of becoming a witch: learning magic, fighting monsters, and exploring the world beyond the small town where she and her mother run the stables. Even though a strange plague is killing the trees in the Kingdom of Cekon and witches are being blamed for it, Lorel wants nothing more than to join them. There’s only one problem: all witches are women, and she was born a boy.

When the coven comes to claim her best friend, Lorel disguises herself in a dress and joins in her friend’s place, leaving home and her old self behind. She soon discovers the dark powers threatening the kingdom: a magical blight scars the land, and the power-mad Duchess Helte is crushing everything between her and the crown. In spite of these dangers, Lorel makes friends and begins learning magic from the powerful witches in her coven. However, she fears that her new friends and mentors will find out her secret and kick her out of the coven, or worse.

Pre-Order from Bookshop.org

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Featured New Release: Funny Story by Emily Henry

Daphne always loved the way her fiancé Peter told their story. How they met (on a blustery day), fell in love (over an errant hat), and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it…right up until the moment he realized he was actually in love with his childhood best friend Petra.

Which is how Daphne begins her new story: Stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only person who could possibly understand her predicament: Petra’s ex, Miles Nowak.

Scruffy and chaotic—with a penchant for taking solace in the sounds of heart break love ballads—Miles is exactly the opposite of practical, buttoned up Daphne, whose coworkers know so little about her they have a running bet that she’s either FBI or in witness protection. The roommates mainly avoid one another, until one day, while drowning their sorrows, they form a tenuous friendship and a plan. If said plan also involves posting deliberately misleading photos of their summer adventures together, well, who could blame them?

But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex…right?

Buy Now

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—Gailey