Last Born In The Wilderness

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...

May we live in interesting times. The fertile grounds that bred a novel, deadly coronavirus and the misinformation that accompanied its spread is our subject. Over the last year-and-a-half since COVID spilled over, and more specifically, when our collective reaction to it began to reshape every aspect of our lives, I conducted numerous interviews to make sense of this thing. Disruptions in the ver...

Let's proceed to part two. From December 2019 to February 2020, I was in Brazil. Without full comprehension, I (we) stood on the edge of a pandemic. The global scope of the crisis had yet to be fully felt and realized. Before "normal" ended. Before lockdowns, mask burnings, social isolation, uprising—I was in Brazil, with its complexities, beauties, intensities, realities. My time there left its m...

Bear with me on this. I wanted to do something different, original, for this episode, this milestone of 300. As you will hear in my introduction, I will be releasing seven parts for this, covering numerous themes that I've explored over the past 100 episodes of Last Born In The Wilderness. This first part is quite substantial, in and of itself. Weaving together fifteen carefully selected interview...

Ian MacKenzie — visionary filmmaker, storyteller, and host of The Mythic Masculine podcast — returns to discuss manhood, mythology, and emerging masculinities in the wake of calamity.  This conversation runs deep. Ian and I attempt to navigate the complexities and shadows of men's work in our time of emerging inquiries and contemplation about gender identity and expression. We wholeheartedly ackno...

Acausal heathen poet and author Ramon Elani joins me to discuss his new book, Wyrd Against the Modern World, published through Night Forest Press. This audio interview is actually a reading of a written interview I conducted with him, originally published at the Gods&Radicals Press supporter-only blog Another World. // Episode notes + transcript: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/ra...

Liz Oliva Fernández, Cuban journalist and lead protagonist of The War on Cuba documentary series, joins me to discuss her work with Belly of the Beast Cuba, a Havana-based media project made up of Cubans and foreigners that highlights the daily lives and experiences of the Cuban people from the ground level. // Episode notes + transcript: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/liz-oliva-...

World-renowned environmental and reproductive epidemiologist Dr. Shanna Swan joins me to discuss her groundbreaking research identifying the causes and rate of rapid decline of fertility in the Western world, documented in her new book Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race. // Epi...

Anthropologist, experimental archaeologist, and historian Peter Michael Bauer joins me to discuss several major subjects of his work, including rewilding, collapse, and humanity's place within these frameworks. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/peter-michael-bauer // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me...

Roy Scranton, bestselling author of We're Doomed. Now What? and Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, joins me to discuss his recent op-ed in the New York Times, I’ve Said Goodbye to ‘Normal.’ You Should, Too. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/roy-scranton // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastborn...

Brian Mier, co-editor at Brasil Wire and correspondent at teleSUR English, returns to the podcast to detail some of the most prominent and pressing issues facing Brazil today, much of which was documented in the recently released Redfish documentary Dismantling Brazil: Bolsonaro's Neoliberal Agenda, which he co-produced. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/brian-mier...