📖 A new incarnation of Dan Allosso’s Obsidian Book Club begins this coming weekend with David Graeber’s last book Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia (2023). If you’re interested in history, anthropology, or our conceptualizations of freedom, racism, and erasure, this is sure to be your cup of tea. Come join us.

Acquired Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The final posthumous work by the coauthor of the major New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything. Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies―vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of the European empire. In graduate school, David Graeber conducted ethnographic field research in Madagascar for his doctoral thesis on the island’s politics and history of slavery and magic. During this time, he encountered the Zana-Malata, an ethnic group of mixed descendants of the many pirates who settled on the island at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, Graeber’s final posthumous book, is the outgrowth of this early research and the culmination of ideas that he developed in his classic, bestselling works Debt and The Dawn of Everything (written with the archaeologist David Wengrow). In this lively, incisive exploration, Graeber considers how the protodemocratic, even libertarian practices of the Zana-Malata came to shape the Enlightenment project defined for too long as distinctly European. He illuminates the non-European origins of what we consider to be “Western” thought and endeavors to recover forgotten forms of social and political order that gesture toward new, hopeful possibilities for the future.
Picking up a copy for Dan Allosso’s next book club read.

🔖 Talk Like a Pirate, Me Hearties | Adactio.com

Bookmarked Talk Like A Pirate, Me Hearties! by Jeremy Keith (adactio.com)
Simply, you put in a URL and this tool will return a web page that “translates” the page into pirate speech. The UI is so sparse here you can’t do much but put in a URL (though without knowing exactly what is going to happen).

Ideal for your talk-like-a-pirate-day browsing every September 19th. Maybe a bookmarklet that does this would be cool? Come to think of it, maybe having a browser extension that does this for you automatically on every page you visit on September 19th would be a fun little toy!