WHO I AM

My name is Leighton Akira Woodhouse. I’m a freelance journalist and a documentary filmmaker, based at the moment in Oakland, California, which is right next to Berkeley, where I grew up. A long time ago I was a labor organizer, and almost as long ago, a doctoral grad student in Sociology at UC Berkeley (I got my MA and dropped out). Then I went into filmmaking and journalism.

This newsletter is a mix of original, reported-out stories and essays where I’m just trying to puzzle things out (“think pieces” would be the somewhat unflattering phrase for it). Even though dropping out of academia was one of the best decisions of my life, I still relish the education I got in grad school and continue to make sense of the world primarily through the perspectives of the theorists I studied there: Weber, Marx, Durkheim, Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Erving Goffman, Karl Polanyi, Norbert Elias, Barrington Moore and others. I write about them quite a bit here, and part of my goal with this newsletter is to help bring their ideas out of the Ivory Tower and into mainstream public debate.

I encourage you to sign up for free emails, and if after a couple of months you decide you value what you’re reading, consider paying for it. I appreciate every one of my readers, but it’s the ones who chip in who make this whole project physically possible to do.

Thanks, in any case, for reading.