The first is a short story, one of very few I’ve gotten into print. It’s called “The Door,” and is about a young man who begins noticing small but disconcerting changes in his daily routine. It ran in the anthology Red Blood, Black Sky from Another Sky Press. You can read it for free online.

The second is a review of Jim Trombetta’s The Horror! The Horror! Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You To Read. Trombetta’s book is partly a textual examination of 1950′s horror comics, partly a collection of some of the genre’s best stories and artwork, and partly a history of the effort to censor comics, leading to the imposition of the Comics Code. My review, “The Untimely Death of ’50s Horror Comics,” ran in the November issue of Hustler. It isn’t online.

Speaking of censorship and reading things online — if you happened to stop by this site on January 18th, you would have seen that it was blacked out. That’s because kristianwilliams.com, along with I-don’t-know-how-many other sites closed shop for the day to protest a couple nasty bills before Congress. SOPA and PIPA, as they were called, would have authorized widespread censorship in the hopes of defeating online piracy. The black-out action resulted in millions of emails being sent to congress and, thank goodness, the bills are now effectively dead. It turns out, if nothing else, the internet can be used to save the internet.

(Thanks, Joe, for keeping me in touch with the 21st century and managing the technical side of blacking out, and then restoring, the site.)

On Saturday, December 10, I’ll be speaking about Oscar Wilde’s politics at the Humboldt Anarchist Bookfair. The book fair is at the Manila Community Center, 1611 Peninsula Drive, Arcata. The talk is in Room B at 11am.

On Tuesday, December 13, I’ll give a talk on police violence. The event is at 421 Miner Street in Stockton. Food will be served at 6pm, and I’ll speak at 7pm.

Then on Wednesday, December 14, I’ll be discussing strategies for resisting police violence. The talk is at the V-Hive, 2315 K St., in Sacramento, and starts at 6:30pm.

The result is an essay available at The World and I.

The first, “Exclusion Zones,” appears in the September issue of In These Times. It describes the policing of public space in Portland, Oregon (where I live), and outlines the race and class dynamics driving the cops’ approach. I link two deaths at the hands of police — those of James Chasse and Keaton Otis — to the agenda established by the local business elite, in particular, the Portland Business Alliance.

The second article considers the role cops played in the labor unrest in Wisconsin earlier in the year, and contrasts it to their more usual job of breaking strikes. Specifically, I try to identify the conditions under which the cops sometimes side with striking workers, and the limits to that solidarity. That article is in the September/October 2011 issue of Dollars and Sense, but isn’t available online.

More recently, I wrote a short essay for the Progressive Populist, comparing two comics explaining the economic crisis — Erich Origen and Gan Golan’s Adventures of Unemployed Man and Seth Tobocman, Eric Laursen and Jessica Wehrle’s Understanding the Crash. The piece is mis-labeled as a review, but it isn’t really evaluative; instead it reflects on the different genre choices and visual strategies the two titles employ.

Old horror or new economics — Which is scarier?

I’m offering the keynote address Saturday, July 23rd, at 9am. Titled “Making Copwatch Matter,” the talk will consider the political potential of copwatching and the real challenges copwatch groups face.

Then, on Sunday, July 24, at 3pm, I’ll be participating in a panel discussion on copwatch tactics. There, I’ll tell the story of Rose City Copwatch’s debut action — a poster campaign to expose killer cops.

It looks like there are going to be a lot of great presentations at the conference. Check out the full schedule.

I’ve also just written a piece, “Profiles of Provocateurs,” looking at a few recent cases of anarchists or radical environmentalists being entrapped by state agents. In an effort to learn from past mistakes, I point out some of the warning signs that the victims of these campaigns overlooked, or sometimes, deliberately ignored. I’m posting the essay to various activist sites.

And, I took my lecture from the “Law and Disorder” conference, and turned it into a small essay. The piece considers the political and strategic divergences between the police accountability framework and that of police abolition, and it describes the areas of overlap where cooperation between the adherents of each can cooperate. It’s appeared in the most recent Slingshot.

I’ll discuss my recent research on counterinsurgency and community policing. I’ll outline the counterinsurgency model, describe its transfer from the military to the police and back again, explain how it is being implemented domestically, and consider some implications for social movements.