Tommy Craggs
@tcraggs22.bsky.social
Writer and editor. Late of "Game Theory With Bomani Jones" on HBO, Mother Jones (no relation), HuffPost, Slate, Gawker Media, Deadspin, etc. Subscribe to @flaminghydra.com. Email: tcraggs22@gmail.com.
The first McDonalds in Oakland and the building Boots Riley used as Jackie's Chicken in *I Love Boosters*: "Between the Eastmont Town Center and Evergreen Cemetery, a broken down fast food joint is a relic of the moment things went bad in the Deep East": www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/dead-at-mcdo...
Dead at McDonald's
Between the Eastmont Town Center and Evergreen Cemetery, a broken down fast food joint is a relic of the moment things went bad in the Deep East.
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
for the great @oaklandreviewofbooks.org, I wrote about the On the Calculation of Volume novels, why I find them so bizarrely compelling, and what it might have to do with our favorite new american proverb www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/maybe-it-wil...
Maybe it will happen today
Solvej Balle monitors the situation.
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
I wrote this a couple years ago about Caitlin Clark, whose fame had already become, to borrow a phrase, the modality in which class and race and gender get lived in the WNBA. defector.com/who-made-cai...
Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 4w agoTrump’s GOP is trying to remake the wnba over into wwe’s image. Racist stereotypes, symbolic race wars, and everyday eugenics. it’s a sign of how popular the sport is and how captured everything is. www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/j...
Are rumors of a leftist LitRPG genre more than fantasy? Corley Miller read the Dungeon Crawler Carl series to find out: www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/dungeon-craw...
Left in the dungeon
Are rumors of a leftist LitRPG genre more than fantasy? On the "Dungeon Crawler Carl" phenomenon.
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
Boots Riley made a movie about how to make art for yourself.
I wrote a thing about Backrooms, Us, the underground labyrinths of the Bay Area where I grew up, AI slopplegangers, and what's really lurking underneath Silicon Valley. It's my first for @oaklandreviewofbooks.org, and I think you'll really enjoy it.
The Undervalley
Why is the Bay Area emerging as the preeminent setting for underground labyrinth horror?
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
This is a phenomenal article and in light of the story this tells, it makes the Trump admin's actions vastly more infuriating. It's not just a giveaway to his friends, it's close to a declaration of war on the people who live here.
Oakland Review of Books@oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 2mo agoWould you like to know SO much more than you did about the export coal terminal legal fight in Oakland? www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/unpaid-debts/
Alcatraz wants you to imagine it is a relic from a time before prisons were "reformed." But travel nine miles north and you'll find cell blocks in use that look exactly like those preserved in the island's museum. They're at San Quentin.
Prison tours
What Left in the Bay’s “Radical History of Alcatraz” teaches a college instructor at San Quentin about the spectacle of prison reform on the bay.
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
The first installment of ‘Lavender Scare’ just dropped!! What's that, you ask? A new column from Rough Notes, home to bold, unapologetic & experimental coverage of the Golden State Valkyries & the WNBA from a sociological + queer perspective. Because women's basketball changes everything:
Introducing: 'Lavender Scare' from Rough Notes
A new way to keep Valkyries + WNBA coverage bold & unapologetic.
wnbaroughnotes.substack.com
This is the longest story I have ever written. It is also the most meaningful. It will go out in The Small Bow's newsletter tomorrow. You can read it here now: www.thesmallbow.com/p/consider-t...
Consider the Sister
Amy Wallace has spent two decades guarding the human her brother was—against a world that prefers David Foster Wallace as a puzzle.
thesmallbow.com
The stuff the @oaklandreviewofbooks.org has been pumping out has been incredible. Subscribe now!
A thoughtful if infuriating read on what it’s like in the alleged progressive bastion of the East Bay. Reminds me why I get so annoyed when folks say we need a strong local conservative party to keep the local Democratic party in check — we have that, they just also consider themselves Democrats.
Oakland Review of Books@oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 3mo agoLet us peer into the soul of the nation, via a staged non-discussion about a contentious tax measure for library funding in El Cerrito. And then let us heal: www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/we-dont-deba...
If you count the first calendar we did as the beginning of ORB, which we do, then today is our one-year anniversary of being An Actual Thing! One full ORBIT around the sun!
a computer generated image of the earth and moon in orbit
ALT: a computer generated image of the earth and moon in orbit
media.tenor.com
Does Lake Merritt smell? The answer isn't so simple.
Oakland funk
How to smell Lake Merritt.
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
"These fancams are the work of what I call the the Center for Surveilling Unwitting Players via Guerrilla Investigative Reporting by Lesbians, aka SUPGIRL, for which a member requires no training. The only requirement is the ability to see in gay."
The guerrilla investigators of WNBA queerness
The league may be out of the glass closet, but fans are more obsessed than ever with cracking the sapphic code.
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
Actually have been waiting for a piece like this about Oakland’s sideshows for quite some time. Got to give it up to @oaklandreviewofbooks.org on this. www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/sideshow-his...
"Cult nonfiction presumes that a cult is an aberration, a pocket of strangeness on the margins of society that fools are lured into, into which readers are given an opportunity to peek...But is the structure of a startup so incompatible with a cult?" www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/riding-nicol...
Riding Nicole's wave
In Ellen Huet’s “Empire of Orgasm,” growth is the real cult we meet along the way (and no one is immune to being touched by the spectacle)
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
One (anonymous) woman's account of navigating the "sexual marketplace" of Silicon Valley ca. 2015, as the rich tech dudes were beginning to get a little fashy.
I was a Silicon Valley sex pet
It was 2015. Something was shifting in the tech industry, and I felt it in the bedroom.
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
We asked Alex Werth, author of “On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland,” to make a playlist of songs and sounds that he thinks are characteristic of Oakland in some way. Here’s a thread, pulled from this piece: www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/black-sonic-...
Black sonic politics in Oakland, in nine sounds
A playlist.
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
“…the most pointed lesson in the book is that art draws its power from the resistance of its medium and the traces of creative labor left behind. It’s why you would use an oscillator that can’t maintain pitch rather than a digital filter that pretends it can’t.” @oaklandreviewofbooks.org is so good
Oakland Review of Books@oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 4mo agoThe great @pauline2k.bsky.social unboxes the bay's synths: www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/tracing-the-...
A lot of people have asked what the Oakland Review of Books is. One good answer is that ORB is the opposite of whatever these guys have become. Give a thought to subscribing, won't you? www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org#/portal/signup
Oakland Review of Books@oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 4mo agoRead the article about the history of Oakland's sideshows that everyone at r/OaklandCA (that's the reactionary Oakland subreddit) absolutely hated: www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/sideshow-his...
The noise about sideshows
The screeching moral panic over the sideshow hides what it really is: an event, shaped by cops and capital flight, where Oakland youth fight for a place to play.
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
Cops and media go the other kind of dumb at the sideshow.
The noise about sideshows
The screeching moral panic over the sideshow hides what it really is: an event, shaped by cops and capital flight, where Oakland youth fights for a place to play.
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
Among the myriad benefits of being an ORB subscriber--including at the "pay nothing, get everything" level--is that we send out a "Sunday Reading" on Sundays, with links to things to read (thus the name): www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/email/0c8775...
Far too much Sunday reading
During the first week of our Six Week Senses of Oakland subscription drive!!!!!1111, we published a bunch of great stuff: Cole Hersey found the Lake Merritt monster, Maya Weeks found microplastics, Aa...
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
Subscribe to ORB! It is cool and interesting and local (in the not annoying way) if you become a member and ever run into me IRL you can be like, “hey, I subscribe to ORB and I enjoy it” and I can be like, “me too!”
Oakland Review of Books@oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 4mo agoWe're up to 116 founding members on our subscription drive (to 250, which is what we've calculated, on the back of envelope) will be enough to get ORB in business going forward: www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/look-at-us/ Help us out if you can!
"The existence of aquatic “cryptids,” creatures unrecognized by mainstream science, requires a cloudy body of water to suspend our disbelief. Without this opacity, legends of these creatures would eventually go extinct..." www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/theres-a-mon...
There’s a monster in Lake Merritt
A return to the lake’s original state would mean dismantling the city of Oakland itself. Do we want to see the monster, or let it live on as a legend?
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
Our subscription drive is making progress! We added 25 new Founding Members in the last 24 hours, 1/10 of the way to our goal of 250! Only 142 to go!
