Last Born In The Wilderness

Author, teacher, and editor Max Haiven joins me to discuss his book ‘Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire,’ published through Pluto Books. As Silvia Federici states, this book "powerfully demonstrates how, by following the history of a key commodity, we can reconstruct the logic of imperial capitalism: its destruction of land and bodies, its drive to constantly reduce the means of our reproduction, its...

Activist, analyst, and author Brynn Tannehill joins me to discuss the recent leak of the Supreme Court's drafted majority opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade and Casey. Having extensively documented the factors leading to the fascist turn the United States is taking in her book ‘American Fascism: How the GOP Is Subverting Democracy’ and elsewhere, Tannehill predicted a conservative stacked Supreme Cou...

Political theorist, anti-capitalist activist, and translator Sabu Kohso joins me to discuss his book Radiation and Revolution, a text that "uses the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster to illuminate the relationship between nuclear power, capitalism, and the nation-state." This interview was recorded in the Gray Coast Guildhall in Quilcene, WA, for the Communal Life & Planetary Relations at the End of...

Award-winning investigative journalist, media critic, and activist Barrett Brown joins me to discuss Silicon Valley billionaire and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. He describes the complex web of media outlets and personalities, hackers, and intelligence community assets connected directly or indirectly with Thiel — a powerful, enormously well-resourced figure aiming to undermine the last remnants...

Charlie Angus, MP for the riding of Timmins-James Bay in Ontario, Canada, joins me to discuss his new book ‘Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of a Mining Superpower,’ published through House of Anansi Press. He shines a light on how the fascinating, and disturbing, history of a small mining town in Ontario, aptly named Cobalt, is tied up in the genocidal, and ecocidal, history of the natio...

Beatrice Adler-Bolton, disability justice advocate and co-host of the Death Panel podcast, joins me to discuss the sociological production of the "end of the pandemic," and what that means for the "surplus" populations made most vulnerable by the economic demands of capital. She is the author of the upcoming book ‘Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto,’ co-authored with Artie Vierkant, which "argu...

Eric Draitser, independent political analyst and host of CounterPunch Radio, joins me to discuss the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We recorded this discussion March 3rd 2022 — exactly seven days into this ongoing conflict. Eric has been publishing very concise, clear, and measured analysis of the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian military almost daily since it began — mostly through 15-20 minute v...

Lily Kay Ross, sexual violence researcher and Arts and Gender Editor at Psymposia, joins me to discuss her research and insights into the dark underbelly of psychedelic therapy — a subject expertly explored in Power Trip, a New York Magazine investigative podcast series she is the co-creator and producer of. As psychedelics become less stigmatized in the West and popularized as tools for trauma th...

Andy Ciccone and Elliott Evans, hosts of The Poor Prole's Almanac, join me to discuss a variety of subjects relating to the broad subject of collapse. We expound on what the "death wobbles" of the fragmenting, and declining, society we live within means for present and near future survival. How do we prepare for what is happening? How do we orient ourselves beyond the hyper-individualist notion of...

Pagan author and poet Christopher Scott Thompson joins me to discuss the intersections between animism and anarchism as defined in his essays, and books, published through Gods & Radicals Press, including Pagan Anarchism, and most recently, The Book of Onei (an antinomian dream grimoire), and If In Ruins We Must Live (a collection of mystic poetry). // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilde...

Award-winning journalist, policy researcher, author, and historian Paul Street joins me to discuss the highly controversial and divisive Kyle Rittenhouse case and subsequent acquittal. Along with providing a substantive exploration of the broad sociopolitical context of this trial, we also touch on the case of the modern-day lynching of Ahmaud Arbery and the recent conviction of the men who murder...

Rob Wallace—evolutionary epidemiologist, agroecologist, and author of Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19—joins me to discuss the complex interplay between the increase in infectious pathogens globally, the role of epidemiology within the neoliberal capitalist project, agribusiness and ecological destruction, and Empire at the end of the "cycle of accumulation" in late-stage capitalis...

Michael Beyea Reagan, historian and activist, joins me to discuss his book Intersectional Class Struggle: Theory and Practice, an "innovative study [that] explores the relevance of class as a theoretical category in our world today, arguing that leading traditions of class analysis have missed major elements of what class is and how it operates." In our time of increasing wealth disparity and wide...

Mark Freeman, narrative psychologist and Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society at the College of the Holy Cross, discusses his book Do I Look at You with Love?: Reimagining the Story of Dementia, documenting the final twelve years of his mother’s life of cognitive decline with dementia. This interview explores the complex reality of the narratives of the self, memory, the “tragic promise”...

Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen, historian of religion and founder of the Nordic Animism project, returns to the podcast to discuss animism and the Raven totem flag project he, and others, have created to define and symbolize humanity's role in the climate disrupted present we find ourselves in. Through years of in-depth research into the history and contemporary practice of animist religious/spiritual trad...

Writer, poet, and essayist Sophie Strand joins me to discuss the "emergency of storytelling" in our climate disrupted present and future, and the subjects she explores in her upcoming book releases, The Madonna Secret and The Flowering Wand. Sophie and I entered this conversation a bit fuzzy, a little stunned. We acknowledge this from the get-go. We were processing devastating news that morning: H...

Journalist Shane Burley joins me to discuss his newest book, Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse, published through AK Press. In Why We Fight, Burley navigates this territory of the here and now, providing deep insights into the conditions that gave rise to some of the most dramatic developments of the past several years. In this interview, I ask Burley to pro...

Journalist, activist, and author Eric Laursen joins me to discuss his recent book The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State, published through AK Press. Anarchism presents a unique challenge to State power. Since it emerged as a coherent political and social movement in the 18th and 19th centuries, anarchists of various stripes and creeds have pointed to the illegitimate power...

Ecologist and prolific author Carl Safina joins me to discuss his work with the more-than-human (animal) world, particularly his writings about the cultures and emotional lives of various animal communities, beautifully documented in two of his most recent books, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel and Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace. Human...

Critically acclaimed author Melissa Febos joins me to discuss her most recent collection of essays, Girlhood—"a gripping set of stories about the forces that shape girls and the adults they become." I first became aware of Melissa and her book Girlhood from an essay she published in The New York Times Magazine titled I Spent My Life Consenting to Touch I Didn’t Want, adapted from an essay publishe...

Oh goodness, finally, it’s done. It took too long to produce — a month or so longer than I intended to put this all together. I became exhausted, weary of hearing my own voice, editing hours of audio, listening and trimming and organizing and reorganizing and recording my wandering commentary, cutting and slicing and trimming, exporting, finding mistakes, fixing and then re-exporting, uploading ch...

Finally, we have reached the end—in more ways than one. This long series has been a labor of love. It took too long to produce, but ultimately, preparing and releasing each of these parts has been a gratifying, and even cathartic, experience. This last part, fittingly, is a meditation on endings, transitions, the death of things. And, most importantly, love—the love that accompanies all of it. We...

We are haunted beings. Unintegrated traumas, like ghosts, possess us, poison us — until they don’t. Colonization, rupturous, severs the body from its relations, from ancestors and earth. It flattens the diversity of human experience, relying on the multifaceted dynamics of intergenerational trauma to replicate itself, in perpetuity. Like ghosts, these traumas haunt us, hijack us. The line between...

Let us gaze into the void at the heart of this country. What happened on January 6th was neither the beginning, nor the endpoint, of the fascist trajectory this nation has been lurching headlong toward. It was a flashpoint. The events that led to this explosion of violence did not happen in a vacuum. Donald Trump’s rise to the highest political office in the land was neither an anomaly nor an acci...

Everything changed after the 3rd Precinct fell. In 2020, a pandemic began to course its way through the collective body, and the dead began to pile up. Tens of millions of U.S. citizens lost their jobs, and the capitalist system shuttered. As it turns out, these are the perfect conditions for revolt. On May 25th, George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in the streets of Minneapolis. Ev...