Anthropology (Documentaries)

• Dead Birds
• Nanook of the North (watch to critique)
• Forest of Bliss
• Leviathan
• Sweetgrass
• Ongka's Big Moka
• Framing the Other
• Secrets of the Tribe

Must-watch Documentaries. POLITICS AND HISTORY

• “Why We Fight” (BBC, 2005)
• “Fahrenheit 9/11” (Michael Moore, 2004)
• “War on Democracy” (John Pilger, 2007)
• “Hijacking Catastrophe” (Sut Jhally, 2004)
• “Breaking the Silence” (John Pilger, 2003)

Violence:

• Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice - Geoffrey Robertson
• Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning - Timothy Synder
• Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships - Alan Page Fiske

specifically about ones that pose more against "human rights" based interventionism.

Single Author/Topic Books

• A Republic, Not An Empire - Patrick J. Buchanan. An overview of American foreign policy history from a Conservative non-interventionist perspective
• The Illusion of Victory & The New Dealers’ War - Thomas Fleming. These two large histories of the 1st and 2nd world wars are a good primer for the average person,...

• Mine Boy - Peter Abrahams
• This Island Now - Peter Abrahams
• GB84 - David Peace
• No Mean City - Mcarthur & Long
• The Aguero Sisters - Christina Garcia
• Petals of Blood - Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
• Weep not, child - Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
• God's Bits of Wood - Sembene Osmane
• Tar Baby - Toni Morrison
• Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
• Union Street - Pat Barker
• Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy
• Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell
• Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi
• Germinal - Emile Zola
• The Iron Heel - Jack London
• Slow Birds - Ian Watson
• Parable of the Sower - Octavia E. Butler
• Parable of the Talents - Octavia E. Butler
• The Inhabited Woman - Gioconda Belli

• The Promise of Happiness - Sara Ahmed
• Where We Stand: Class Matters - bell hooks
• Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? - Michael J. Sandel
• A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster - Rebecca Solnit
• Oh, HuMANity! Race Relations In The Trump Era - Beverlyn L. Elliot
• Through the Eyes of Rebel Women: The Young Lords, 1969-1976 - Iris Morales
• Capitalism: A Ghost Story - Arundhati Roy

--- Violence, Human Rights, and Justice

• Multicultural Odysseys : Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity - Will Kymlicka
• The International Struggle for New Human Rights - Clifford Bob

• Clarence Darrow: Attorney For The Damned - John A. Farrell
• Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), Carol Tavris - not strictly about law, but fascinating discussion of cognitive dissonance & false evidence
• 24 Hours With 24 Lawyers, Jasper Kim - includes insight into criminal law.
• Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse, Steve Bogira - comprehensive, disturbing, riveting
• The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, William J. Stuntz - the classic scholarly analysis of America’s incarceration problem. Gigantic but profound.
• Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice, Paul Butler - damning perspective on the racial and class biases of the US criminal justice system.
• Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing - Ted Conover...

• Ward No. 6 - Anton Chekhov
• In Exile - Anton Chekhov
• White Nights - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Dream of a Ridiculous Man - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Queen of Spades - Alexander Pushkin
• The Blizzard - Alexander Pushkin
• Diary of a Madman - Nikolai Gogol
• The Overcoat - Nikolai Gogol
• Twenty-six men and a Girl - Maxim Gorky
• The City - Leonid Andreyev
• Stepping Stones - Leonid Andreyev
• A Country Doctor - Franz Kafka
• In the Penal Colony - Franz Kafka
• The Black Spider - Jeremias Gotthelf
• The Dead - James Joyce
• Unexpected Reunion - Johann Peter Hebel
• The Oval Portrait - Edgar Allan Poe
• The Black Cat - Edgar Allan Poe
• The Unknown Masterpiece - Honoré de Balzac

• La Belle Sauvage - Phillip Pullman
• Voyage in the Dark - Jean Rhys
• The Palace of Dreams - Ismail Kadare
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• Deerskin - Robin McKinley
• The Monkey Wrench Gang - Edward Abbey
• Calling a Wolf a Wolf - Kaveh Akbar
• The Hours - Michael Cunningham
• Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy - Mark Doty
• Written on the Body - Jeanette Winterson
• Voyages and Discoveries: Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation - Richard Hakluyt
• Angel Dust Apocalypse - Jeremy Robert Johnson
• Magic America - C.E. Medford
• Iris Murdoch - The Black Prince
• Reaper Man - Terry Pratchett
• The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky - Vaslav Nij...

• Elizabeth of Toro: The Odyssey of an African Princess Paperback – Elizabeth Nyabongo
• The Old Ways - Rob MacFarlane
• A Defense of Ardor: Essays - by Adam Zagajewski
• Voices from Chernobyl : The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
• Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone - Eduardo Galeano
• "Who, What Am I?": Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self
• Standard Operating Procedure - Philip Gorevich
• Notes on Thought and Vision - H.D., Paul Bowles
• Anais Nin's Lost World: Paris in Words and Pictures - Britt Arenander
• Reclaiming Conversation - Sherry Turkle

On Writing and Fiction:

• https://www.poetryproject.org/
• Bowery Poetry Club: http://www.bowerypoetry.com/summer
• Brooklyn Poets

http://brooklynpoets.org/

• The Poetry Brothel

http://www.thepoetrybrothel.com/index.ht...

• The Poets House

http://www.poetshouse.org/

• Under St. Mark's

http://www.horsetrade.info/

• Le Poisson Rouge

http://lpr.com/

• Parkside Lounge

http://inspiredwordnyc.com/

• KGB Bar

• “The Fire Next Time” in Collected Essays by James Baldwin.
• The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life, His Own by David Carr
• The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist
• Battle Cry of Freedom: The Era of the Civil War by James McPherson
• Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 by Arnold R. Hirsch
• Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America by Beryl Satter
• Confederate States of America - Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union from Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale La...

• The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship - Marilyn Yalom

(Many of these texts are admittedly problematic, but it's important to know where we've come from in order to move forward.)

Introduction

• Manifesta - Jennifer Baumgardner
• Feminism is For Everybody: Passionate Politics - Bell Hooks
• Full-Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti

More

• The Second Sex - Simone de Beauvoir
• Gender Trouble - Judith Butler
• Backlash - Susan Faludi
• No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women - Estelle B. Freedman
• The Essential Feminist Reader edited - Es...

Pursuing a Literature Degree

• Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction - Jonathan Culler

Winter

• Winter - Ali Smith
• Averno - Louis Gluck
• The Bottom of the Jar - Abdellatif Laâbi, André Naffis-Sahely
• Harmonium - Wallace Stevens
• Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
• Roland Barthes’ The Lover’s Discourse
• Anna Akhmatova’s Selected Poems

18-20

• History of the Conquest of Mexico - William H. Prescott
• Tales of Good and Evil - Nikolai Gogol "Overcoat", "The Two Ivans", "Nevsky Prospect"

• Sven Birkerts, Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age
• Our Sea of Islands - Epeli Hau’ofa
• Emergent Multiverse: Quantum Theory According to the Everett Interpretation - David Wallace
• The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life? - Paul Davies
• The Feynman Lectures on Physics - Richard Feynman
• The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos-  Brian Greene
• Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us - Nicholas Evans
• Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind - George Lakoff
• The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language - John H. McWhorter

History, Politics, Classics, Law

• BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time
• Backdoor Broadcasting
• Oxford University Podcasts
• Amicus (law & legal systems)

Science & Science Fictionish

• The Message: meta podcast
• NPR’s Invisibilia (human behavior, forces & ideas that shape it)
• EOS 10
• Star Talk
• Imaginary Worlds

Crime

• Criminal
• Limetown
• In the Dark
• S-Town
• Missing

Non-Fiction, Film, Television, Pop Cultur...