The Extreme Centre

Ali is indeed a kind of professional, or inveterate heretic, a writer who has made a career of dissenting from every kind of orthodoxy. -Robyn Creswell, The National Ali is smart as fire. -Ian Epstein, New City Ali remains an outlier and intellectual bomb-thrower; an urbane, Oxford-educated polemicist. -The Observer Ali spins metaphors, re-establishes certain truths, shines a light on issues shrouded in ignorance. He enthralls, entertains, instructs. This is high art. -Le Figaro For years, left-wing critics have framed the debate. Angela Davis, Ruthie Gilmore, Marc Mauer and, more recently, Michelle Alexander gave us the terminology to speak about all this: the prison industrial complex, abolition, non-reform reform and The New Jim Crow ... [Ali's theorized term 'extreme center'] provides us with a new language to describe our problems...[O]ne of the key tasks of the extreme center is to take center stage, to ensure that no alternative seems either reasonable or possible. -James Kilgore, author of Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People's Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of our Era, in CounterPunch