OCCUPY! An Unfinished Uprising

Thursday, February 23rd, 2023 Leah Goodridge has served on the New York City Planning Commission since 2021 and is the Managing Attorney for Housing Policy at Mobilization for Justice. She oversees a team that provides legal representation to tenants in eviction proceedings. We talk about housing in New York City, ranging from high rents and evictions to land use discussions. Tenant unions have ad...

Thursday, February 16th, 2023 Gregg Colburn is the co-author of Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain US Patterns. He's also an Assistant Professor of Real Estate at the University of Washington's College of Built Environments. We discuss the prevalence and variety of homelessness and the big ideas to tackle the housing crisis. About 5% of the population in the US will...

Thursday, February 9th, 2023 Octavia Abell is the co-founder and CEO of Govern For America, which describes its mission as bridging the gap between governments and emerging leaders to build a pipeline of diverse and dynamic public sector talent. We discuss the power of public sector workers to be agents of change, whether that's public policy on climate or streamlining the process of getting a bir...

Thursday, February 2nd, 2023 Ruth Milkman is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and History at the CUNY Graduate Center and at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, where she chairs the Labor Studies Department. Her most recent books are Immigration Matters and Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat . Unions remain a voice for the voiceless, especially given that the playing field has been...

Thursday, January 26th, 2023 Jared Yates Sexton is a self-described Hoosier, a Political Analyst, and host of the Muckrake Podcast. His latest book is The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis. We discuss our current era of neo-liberalism and what may be in store in the future. One of the most dangerous things that Reagan and Thatcher did on behalf of neoliberalism...

Thursday, January 19th, 2023 Victor Shi is a Gen Z activist, host of On the Move, co-host of iGen Politics, a junior at UCLA, and Strategy Director of Voters of Tomorrow. He was elected as the youngest delegate for Joe Biden in 2020 and previously interned at the White House and DNC. We discuss the power of the youth vote to determine elections and which issues motivate Gen Zers to go to the polls...

Thursday, January 12th, 2023 Danielle Moodie is a cultural connoisseur, a political junkie, and, in addition to Democracy-ish , also hosts the Woke AF Daily podcast. Wajahat Ali is a Daily Beast columnist, public speaker, recovering attorney, and author. His most recent book is Go Back To Where You Came From: And, Other Helpful Recommendations on Becoming American . We discuss the struggle toward...

Thursday, January 5th, 2023 Steve Phillips is the host of the Democracy in Color podcast and the author of How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good . We start off a new year of civic engagement and fighting for democracy with a conversation about his political leadership, thought leadership, and coalition building. The Confederate Battle plan o...

Thursday, December 29th, 2022 We're sharing a clip from an episode of Some of My Best Friends Are… Here's a preview of another podcast, Some of My Best Friends Are, from Pushkin Industries. Harvard professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad and journalist Ben Austen are friends, one Black and one white, who grew up together on the South Side of Chicago. On Some of My Best Friends Are, Khalil and Ben, along...

Thursday, December 22nd, 2022 Chris Kang is the Co-Founder and Chief Counsel of Demand Justice. He served in the White House for nearly seven years as Deputy Counsel to President Obama and Special Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs. We talk about court reform from diversifying the bench of judges to expanding the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court of the United States is actually the...

Thursday, December 15th, 2022 Jackie Salit and Thom Reilly are co-directors of the Center for an Independent and Sustainable Democracy at Arizona State University and co-authors of The Independent Voter . Independents are making a statement about the culture, the practice, and the destructiveness of the current political culture. You have almost half the country identifying themselves as independe...

Thursday, December 8th, 2022 Chris Melody Fields Figueredo is the Executive Director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which seeks to strengthen democracy by building a national progressive strategy for ballot measures. We discuss ballot initiatives and how they put the issues directly into the hands of voters and out of the two-party system. It can really flip the script! Ballot measures...

Thursday, December 1st, 2022 Cecile Richards is the co-chair of American Bridge, former president of Planned Parenthood, a co-founder of Supermajority, and author of the book Make Trouble . We make sense of the midterms, take away some gold nuggets for democracy, and are reminded that grassroots organizing is all about the long game. A way to suppress democracy is by telling people it doesn't matt...

Thursday, November 23rd, 2022 Andrew Koppelman is the author of Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed . It's a fascinating history of this idea and an excellent lens for understanding so much of American life and politics. The core idea of liberalism is that people ought to be able to live as they like and libertarianism appeals to that desire for f...

Thursday, November 10th, 2022 Rebecca Cokley is a disability-rights advocate and the first U.S. Disability Rights Program Officer for the Ford Foundation. From 2009 to 2013, she served as an appointee in President Barack Obama's White House. We discuss the lived experience of being disabled in America. It's an important conversation that truly exposes the inequities of our society. We don't live i...

Thursday, November 10th, 2022 Thaddeus Johnson is a former police officer, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, and Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice & Criminology at Georgia State University's Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. This broad-ranging conversation discusses law enforcement and empowering communities and citizens so we can all be safer. Public safety falls...

Thursday, November 3rd, 2022 Dr. Alison Gill is a veteran, former federal government executive, and Host of Mueller She Wrote and the Daily Beans Podcast. We discuss democracy, accountability and all the legal troubles the former president is facing, and the power of your vote. Your vote matters and can deliver accountability at the ballot box, which is why there are so many efforts to suppress it...

Thursday, October 27th, 2022 Amanda Brown Lierman is the Executive Director at Supermajority and Supermajority Education Fund, which builds women's political power through efforts to inform, train and organize women across age, race, and background. Women are 52% of the vote. Fundamentally, women believe that their lives should be safe, their bodies should be respected, their work should be valued...

Thursday, October 20th, 2022 Orly Lobel is the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Employment and Labor Law. Her latest book is The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future . We discuss reframing our public discourse around technology in order to proactively use it as a tool for equality. Lobel urges us to think abou...

Tuesday, October 18th, 2022 We're sharing an episode of Civics 101 from New Hampshire Public Radio. The House and the Senate have mostly the same powers: they both propose and vote on bills that may become law. So why does the House have 435 members, and the Senate have 100? Why does legislation have to pass through both sides, and what kinds of power do each have individually? And finally: what r...

Thursday, October 13th, 2022 Ryan Busse is a former firearms executive, Senior Policy Advisor to Giffords, and author of Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America . We discuss how guns are intricately interwoven through our democratic division and radicalization in our everyday lives and in our politics. The assault weapons ban helped codify societal norms. In the years aft...

Thursday, October 6th, 2022 Aidan Kohn-Murphy is the founder and Executive Director of the organization Gen Z for Change, a youth-led nonprofit working to educate and create change on issues that affect young people. Jack Petocz is a political strategist who also mounted a campaign to recall his local school board in Florida to fight back against anti-LGBTQ board members. With the tool of social m...

Thursday, September 29th, 2022 Jonathan Friedman is the director of free expression and education programs at PEN America. He oversees research, advocacy, and education related to academic freedom, educational gag orders, book bans, and general free expression in schools, colleges, and universities. We discuss the driving forces behind campaigns to ban books and silence teachers. Education has alw...

Thursday, September 22nd, 2022 Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale and the author of 5 books, including How Propaganda Works and most recently How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. We discuss the logic of fascism and why we need to use it as a concept to make sense of our times. Using a concept like fascism makes plain that their goal is to end democracy. F...

Thursday, September 15th, 2022 Steve Pierson is the host of the How We Win podcast. He's an activist, community organizer, and trainer, who started as a "class of 2016" volunteer. He's currently an elected California Democratic Party Delegate and chairs their Organizing Committee. We discuss the nitty gritty of Get Out the Vote, phone banking, and a whole host of other boots on the ground politics...