Utne receives some 1,200 magazines, newsletters, journals, weeklies, and zines. Add in hundreds of books, CDs, and DVDs, and it's a flood of media that lines the walls of our library and piles high on our desks. All the ideas, people, and stories inspire lively daily chatter, but they can't all fit into our bimonthly magazine. So we share the gems here in our weekly editions of 'From the Stacks.' Check in every Friday for the freshest highlights of the independent and alternative media.

4strugglemag publishes essays, poetry, and artwork from 'the hearts and minds of North American political prisoners and their friends.' Edited by Jaan Laaman, an anti-capitalist activist who has been imprisoned for more than 20 years, the zine is primarily an online publication, with print copies free to prisoners without Internet access. The seventh issue focuses on inmates in the United States, with reports on Black Panthers imprisoned as early as the 1970s and environmental activists fighting current charges. In one essay, a death-row inmate urges others to nonviolently protest the death penalty by refusing to walk to their own executions. There is also a damning list of statistics about prisons and prisoners in Texas. -- Danielle Maestretti

The International Rivers Network is an organization that 'protects rivers and defends the rights of communities that depend on them,' focusing heavily on the problem of dams. The recently arrived August issue of their newsletter, World Rivers Review, dives into Africa. Environmental destruction, displaced people, economic plight, and famine are just some of the problems exacerbated by dam building throughout the continent. And China, currently pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into dam construction in Africa, isn't helping. Concerned African voices, however, offer some hope. In the words of one man from Togo: 'I want to see independence from external influences, and have Africans really profit from Africa's resources.' -- Elizabeth Oliver