THIS BOOK IS ABOUT failure and defeat.” It seems whether writer, activist, and podcast host Amber A’Lee Frost’s new memoir, Dirtbag, will stir lively curiosity or morbid fascination will depend on the reader. Those prone to wisecracks will revel in the deluges of “shade” dripping from each page; it has Chapo Trap House, the irreverent Left podcast the author co-hosts, written all over it. Like Chapo — Patreon’s most popular podcast until 2020 and which remains in the platform’s top 10 — Frost’s rise to prominence coincided with the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, with Frost endorsing Sanders on the podcast and in the pages of Jacobin.
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On May 17, 2024, Platypus New Zealand members Jamie Adam and Michael McClelland interviewed Helen Hindpere, lead writer on the video game Disco Elysium (2019). Set in the fantastic realist world of Elysium, the role-playing game includes skill checks and dialogue trees that allow the player to determine their political ideology while exploring the aftermath of a defeated revolution. Disco Elysium was created by ZA/UM, an Estonian studio with socialist art collective origins.
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On June 6, 2023, Platypus Affiliated Society member Michael McClelland interviewed Sue Bradford. Bradford joined the Left in Aotearoa, New Zealand during the New Left era, participating in various organizations that recruited on campuses during the anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s and 70s. After a brief absence from activism, she took part in 1981’s anti-racist campaigns against apartheid South Africa’s rugby team, who were then touring New Zealand. Shortly after, she joined the unemployed workers’ movement in the 1980s, before eventually becoming a household name as a Green Party Member of Parliament for 10 years in the 2000s. She now runs workshops for activists from a cooperative which she co-founded, Kōtare in Wellsford, where she also lives.
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ON DAY TWENTY-THREE of the New Zealand Freedom Convoy protests, a movement which set up tents around the country in February in response to vaccine mandates, the nation’s largest riot in forty years broke out.
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