David Helps

Dec 4, 2024 | publicbooks.org | David Helps |Charlotte Rosen

When Evelyn Reeves bought her first rental property in 1969, it felt like freedom. Born in Los Angeles in 1941 to a waitress and a postal worker from Alabama, Reeves purchased this four-unit apartment building for just $1,600 down, thanks to a new federal mortgage program aimed at low-income Black homebuyers. “It was a great program,” she recalled in 2018.

Aug 3, 2023 | publicbooks.org | Selin Gumrukcu |David Helps

On May 31, 2023, a gathering of activists took place in Taksim, Istanbul, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Gezi Park protests. Among the participants were the recently elected members of parliament from the Turkish Workers’ Party (TİP). Chanting familiar slogans—such as “Everywhere Taksim, Everywhere Resistance”—the group was met with police intervention, leading to the arrest of 59 individuals. Apparently, even commemorating these decade-ago protests threatens the government.

Mar 1, 2023 | proteanmag.com | David Helps

Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World is available at the n+1 store. ♦♦♦ I like to imagine that, as the anesthetic began to take hold, John Vasconcellos thought about swimming. In the weeks before his septuple bypass surgery, in 1984, the state assemblyman for Silicon Valley asked his friends to visualize themselves as tiny scrubbers, paddling and scouring the plaque from his veins.