As the two and a half week old occupation of Wall Street continues to gain steam and media attention, a similar protest is rumoured to be coming to Bay Street in Toronto. There have already been hundreds of arrests in New York, an excessive use of police force, and divisive and confusing media coverage of the events—all unpleasant reminders of the Toronto G20 summit last year. In anticipation of what may be in store for Toronto, we’ve gathered some recommended reading:

Homepage of the Occupy Wall St movement

Hosted on naomiklein.org, an Open Letter on the Wall Street Occupation from Arun Gupta, editor of The Indypendent

In What’s Behind the Scorn for the Wall Street Protests on Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald offers an insightful look at the mainstream media dismissals of the protests and their characterizations of the protesters as incoherent or naively idealistic. He addresses how these not only deter citizen agency, but ultimately de-legitimize the protests themselves — for example, by imagining the protesters as stoned hippies who got lost on their way to Burning Man.

Why I Was Maced At the Wall Street Protests, by Jeanne Mansfield, a protester writing for the Boston Review

In The Anti-Wall Street Protester’s Best Friend: Ray Kelly, John Cassidy, for his New Yorker blog, looks at what the aftermath of the recent police interventions in the protests mean for it.

An Economist blogger visits the scene of the protests and interviews protesters.

In #occupywallstreet on N + 1, Eli Schmitt offers a personal account of his experiences from right in the middle of it all.

Online video of a lecture delivered by prominent theorist and activist Judith Butler discussing the underlying relations between space, location and collective action, offering an interpreting for today of Hannah Arendt’s conception of the “space of appearance” and the “right to appear.”