Join us for a 3-part series to engage with practices from P4L: Book. Each week, we will focus on practices from each section of the book.

Oct 12: Reconnection to Self
Oct 19: Reconnection to Child
Oct 26: Reconnection to Community

oin the Building Up People Not Prisons coalition, National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, New Beginnings Re-Entry Services, and SURJ Boston for a symposium about Black-led organizing to defund systems of harm and punishment, reimagining communities where everyone can live in health and safety, and how we can end the incarceration of women and girls in MA.

Please note that we will work to secure closed captioning, but due to unprecedented demand many captioning services are overwhelmed. Please indicate your need for captions below and we will do our best!

zoom link for event on 10/19: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIqdu-rrD0oE9Fk3H4O9iT-jOVSrNK_moN-
zoom link for event on 10/25: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYrduyprz4sHNGPDf6QG2FrWXBID-VbwFaF

Denunciations of populism had been commonplace for years but flowered into a full-blown panic in 2016, when commentators identified it as the force behind the unlikely presidential bid of celebrity billionaire Donald Trump. Then came Brexit. Populists were charged with misleading people about globalization, with disparaging elites, with subverting traditional institutions of government.

Our speaker Thomas Frank writes in his new book, The People, NO: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, that this is all a mistake. The author and political commentator argues that the real story of populism is one of enlightenment and liberation. It’s an account of American democracy itself, of its promise of a decent life for all. From the tumultuous 1890s, when the radical left-wing Populist Party fought Gilded Age plutocrats, to the reformist triumphs under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Frank points out how much is owed to the populist ethos.

Our current president? Not a populist at all, Frank maintains, but a candidate who made promises of “populist-style reform, none of them sincere,” that sounded good enough to enough voters to secure his election by one of the least populist of institutions, the Electoral College.

Frank, a former columnist for the Wall Street Journal and Harper’s and founding editor of The Baffler. In his books What's the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal, he focuses on the relationship between culture and politics in the United States.