Greetings from the newest iteration of Prickly Paradigm, and welcome to Prickly Dispatches, the digital extension of our press. Once a month, we’ll be sharing the best of what we’ve been up to. That includes new pamphlets, fresh thinking on old pamphlets, and a round-up of what our authors are saying, writing, and doing.

This Dispatch is special because it’s our first. We’re eager to introduce you to our new vision of what PPP can be—a print press, yes, but also a newsletter, a research tool, and a dynamic forum where books can expand beyond their initial form. We’re starting to bring that vision to life this month with literary critic Jim Chandler’s The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning, now available to read online and pre-order in print on our new website and free to explore via our first Book Forum here on Prickly Dispatches. All the while, we’re looking at politics, the war in Iran, and the rise of AI through a Prickly lens.

Read on!

Prickly Paradigm Press was born in 2002 in effort to expand debate beyond the university, so it feels fitting that the first title from the relaunched PPP focuses on the university in peril. From Columbia to Caltech, the second Trump administration has borne down on universities as part of a wider campaign to upend the knowledge systems and deliberative institutions that have been essential to modern democracy. But this isn’t the first time American universities have faced down such a threat.

In The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning, literary and film critic James Chandler spotlights an American tradition of hostility to intellectual life. The 19th century “Know-Nothing” nativist movement is a crucial antecedent to the current crisis facing higher education. Chandler deftly connects then to now, leaning into the tropes of satire and irony in the liberal tradition to weave together Steve Bannon, Alexis de Tocqueville, and the WWE.

We’re excited to share the full text of Chandler’s pamphlet online now. You can read it on our website or preorder the print copy, available this July.

Prickly Dispatches allow our authors to update and reflect on their pamphlets. So far, Chandler’s three posts expand on his account of Trump’s first year in office.

And in “Trump and Anti-Catholicism in America,” Chandler ties the nativist strain from the Know-Nothing era to Trump’s squabbles with Pope Leo XIV, tracing a line from Steve Bannon’s great-grandfather to Trump’s wedding officiant to today.

We invite colleagues and critics to respond to our pamphlets through our Book Forums. For The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning, leading voices from the war on higher education weigh in. What does Chandler get right? What does he miss?

For this first edition of Prickly Dispatches, we highlight two particular contributions. Political scientist Jennifer Pitts tackles Chandler’s treatment of kayfabe and questions whether irony “is adequate to the trolling, the provocations, and the bullshit inflicted on us by Trumpism.” Elsewhere Nicholas Dirks, President of the New York Academy of Sciences, puts The Know-Nothing Campaign in conversation with Christopher Rufo and the right-wing intelligentsia’s targeted assault on DEI and critical race theory. “It appears that the Trump administration has not just read Rufo but also the Marxist theorist Louis Althusser, for what it is seeking is the creation of a full-blown ideological state apparatus,” he writes. “Who is the radical revolutionary now?”

You can read the full suite of commentary on Chandler’s pamphlet at our Book Forum for The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning.

Since PPP relaunched at the beginning of the year, a new war in the Middle East has radically reshaped the global order. We’ve looked to our backlist and our authors for historical perspective and fresh insight.

We’ve also been reading a lot from PPP author Danny Postel. His pamphlet Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran (2006) is more relevant than ever, and poignant given the recent passing of Jürgen Habermas. We’ve also been following his excellent work as politics editor over at New Lines Magazine. Read about the legacy of the Iran-Iraq war and the rising specter of nuclear war.

Postel isn’t the only PPP author on or minds or in the press.

We’ve been reflecting on the work of James Ferguson, who passed away last year, in light of the rhetoric coming out of the White House and the ICE crackdown this past winter. His PPP pamphlet Presence and the Social Obligation (2021) is a striking work on the language of exclusion and the importance of sharing as a concept and a culture.

Our publisher Peter Sahlins revisited the work of Richard Rorty, who graced PPP with a pamphlet-length interview about the politics of the Left. His conversation with Derek Nystrom and Kent Puckett, published under the title Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies (2002), shows that many of the debates facing today’s Democrat party go back decades.

As Anthropic and OpenAI duke it out for market supremacy, we’ve consulted Paul Kockelman’s Last Words (2024) to better understand the “jagged intelligence” of large language models. The full text of Last Words is now available on our website. And Donna Seaman, author of River of Books (2024), co-authored an op-ed on the role of AI in education for Newsweek.

With his colleagues at the Center for Coastal Resilience and Adaptive Futures at Rice University, Dominic Boyer, author of Understanding Media (2007), developed a striking interactive map that shows the hypothetical impact of flood damage in Houston. Read a summary here or consult his full article at The Conversation.

Franco La Cecla, author of Pasta and Pizza (2007) and co-author of The Culture of Ethics (2013), lent his wide-ranging intellect to the readers of Marie Claire, speaking on the cultural and economic implications of the architecture you see on TV. He also wrote an elegant reflection on travel writing for Luoghi dell’Infinito. Read it in Italian or avail yourself of Google Translate.

We also celebrated World Book Day and Independent Bookstore Day last month. Both occasions are near and dear to our hearts, and very much aligned with Ode Books, our imprint that celebrates history and cultural significance of the book, the publishing industry, and reading. We discuss some of the top trends and data points from the world of publishing here.

Lastly, PPP remains deeply troubled by the firing of Olivier Nora from Editions Grasset. From Grasset to The Washington Post to The Tonight Show, monied interests are stamping out independent voices in publishing. Here we explain why “the Grasset affair is not just a French story” but a serious concern for publishers everywhere.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading and see you next time.