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