Pretty Heady Stuff

Katherine Stewart has covered the intersection of faith and politics for over 17 years; her work appears in the New York Times, the New Republic, Religion News Service, the Guardian and elsewhere. Her latest book, Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, is one of Foreign Affairs magazine’s Best Books of 2025. Her previous, award-winning title, The Power Worshippers:...

What are the politics of party loyalty in Canada? Why do politicians follow the leader and rarely rock the boat? What solutions could exist for strengthening Canada's democracy by injecting more dissent into the system? Alongside Mireille Lalancette and Jared J. Wesley, Alex Marland is the author of No “I” in Team: Party Loyalty in Canadian Politics, a book that offers in-depth analysis of the...

Carl Wilson is a Canadian music critic who has written for many publications including The Globe and Mail. He writes wonderful long thought-pieces on music for Slate. Best known for his classic book Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, published in Continuum's 33 1/3 series, Wilson unpacks the claims of that book in terms of contemporary trends in music. Let's Talk Abo...

Why does the nation trigger so much emotion in us? How does being from a specific country shape our understanding of identity, and when does it drift into dangerous territory? Maria Janion, one of Eastern Europe’s most profound and original intellectuals, explores this fine line, and Marta Figlerowicz unpacks the trajectory of her thinking for us in The Bad Child. Janion witnessed some of the most...

Alexander Gallant and Joel Plaskett are songwriters based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They have both written extraordinary records that take genre and move it a few degrees to the left to make something unexpected. In this conversation, we talk about Plaskett's foundational relationship to the Halifax Pop Explosion of the 1990s, the music that made that scene, and the ways that sacred spaces for...

What might the politics of masochism be able to do for the dangerously stagnant politics of liberation Is masochism more mobilizing than empathy? Empathy requires the Palestinian to be a "perfect victim," to use Mohammed El-Kurd's phrase. It says that the other must remain othered in its incomprehensible but familiar suffering. Masochism, on the other hand, insists that we are all Pa...

Vijay Kolinjivadi is an assistant professor at the School for Community and Public Affairs, Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He is also a co-editor of the website Uneven Earth. The co-author, with Aaron Vansintjan, of The Sustainability Class (The New Press), he has been published in Al Jazeera, New Internationalist, Truthout, and The Conversation. He lives in Montreal. Aaron Vansintjan i...

Arang Keshavarzian is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He’s one of the most shrewd thinkers you’ll see on the politics of modern Iran and the Persian Gulf because he pays serious attention to how social and economic hierarchies constrain the formation of political solidarity. His most recent book is Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the...

Aaron Hagey-MacKay is a Canadian satirist as a longtime writer for The Beaverton and host of ‪The Goose Media on YouTube. In a piece for The Tyee, Aaron writes that "satirists, like journalists and academics, are targeted by authoritarian bullies because satire deals with hard truths." In this conversation, he insists that, while he's not a journalist, he's invested in satire as...

Ava Val is a John Candy Award-winning comedian/musician/actress from Toronto. Her honest and insightful-yet-silly and spontaneous account of her transgender journey has turned heads across North America, earning her repeat appearances at renowned festivals including Just For Laughs, JFL Toronto and Vancouver, Off-JFL/Zoofest, and the Winnipeg, Halifax, and Arctic Comedy Festivals, among others. Va...

Wim Carton is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University, Sweden. He's the author of over 20 academic articles and book chapters on climate politics. His work has appeared in top journals such as Nature Climate Change, WIRES Climate Change and Antipode. His book with Andreas Malm, The Long Heat: Climate Action When It's Too Late, is a study of the science and politics...

Jeff Diamanti is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and Professor of Global History of Sustainable Development at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. For over a decade he has researched and written on logistical cartographies, energy infrastructure, and political ecology. Diamanti and I discuss the reverberations in the global economy caused by Ira...

Publisher bio and book description: C. Thi Nguyen is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, and a specialist in the philosophy of games, the philosophy of technology, and the theory of value. A former food writer for the Los Angeles Times, Nguyen is active in public philosophy, writing for The New York Times, The Washington Post, New Statesman, and elsewhere. One of the leadi...

Shora Esmailian is a journalist, author and lecturer based in Sweden. Her latest book is entitled Gaza: Att Spranga Ett Getto (2024). She is also the co-author, with Andreas Malm, of Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War (2007, Pluto Press) and Explosive Power in Iran: Workers’ Fight and War Threat (2005).In the wake of the United States and Israel illegally attacking Iran and spark...

Alyssa Battistoni is an assistant professor of political science at Barnard College. She is the coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal and the recent Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. Alyssa knows why you feel helpless to stop the end of nature. In Free Gifts, she looks at the history of environmental degradation under capitalism and explains how an economic sys...

Timothy Leduc is faculty in Land-based and Indigenous Social Work at Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ontario. He is author of A Canadian Climate of Mind (2016) that looks at climate change as a spiritual initiation into healing the pain at the root of modern culture. In this conversation, we talk about being stuck within a system that extracts and destroys the Earth, not knowing how to ho...

James Adomian is a brilliant stand-up comedian, voice actor, writer and impressionist known for his work on Comedy Bang! Bang!, Last Comic Standing, and his many hilarious podcast appearances. He's also one of the funniest people in the world. Renowned for his impressions of figures like Bernie Sanders, David Attenborough, Elon Musk and Mike Lindell, Adomian's recent comedy special Path of...

Harsha Walia is a South Asian activist and writer based in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish Territories. Author of the essential Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Walia has been involved in community-based grassroots migrant justice, feminist, anti-racist, Indigenous solidarity, anti-capitalist, Palestinian liberation, and anti-imperialist movements,...

In this episode of Pretty Heady Stuff, Halifax's Poet Laureate Anna Quon talks about the places and people that her poetry comes from, why she is committed to using art as a means of documenting the suffering and joy that we experience, and how to advocate for more inclusive forms of care. Quon is a writer and writing workshop facilitator. Her first novel, Migration Songs, was released by Invi...

In the wake of October 7, two political modalities have emerged: one is an imperialist one that seeks to forcefully normalize the retaliatory genocidal violence Israel has inflicted on Palestine, the other is an anticolonial one that refuses the racial domination of people rendered disposable by the imperial machine. A primary effect of the so-called "Palestine exception" -- where one ca...

Kai Bosworth is a human geographer and political ecologist, and an Associate Professor at the School of World Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University. He is currently working on a book project provisionally entitled ​Protectors of the Subsurface: Militant Investigation and Critical Imagination in Anti-Oil Activism. In this discussion, we look at his terrific book Pipeline Populism at a moment of...

Many academic workers are striking for better labour protections, including CUPE 3916 in Nova Scotia, but where are the connections forming between different labour movements? Can we forge deeper solidarity in this moment of crisis? Do we blow up the system or try to repair it? Nora Loreto, host of the podcast Sandy and Nora Talk Politics and author of many books on politics, and Alex Khasnabish,...

Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She’s the editor of a number of academic journals, including the Journal of Palestine Studies. She’s also a policy member of Al-Shabaka and the Palestinian Policy Network. Seikaly and I talk about the question of Palestine and the ongoing catastrophe. When we spoke, the central focus was famine, which...

Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano (https://www.sarahsteinlubrano.com/) got her PhD from Oxford and Masters degree from the University of Cambridge. She works with the Sense and Solidarity Initiative and the Future Narratives Lab. She's also served as the head of content at The School of Life. Her new book, Don't Talk About Politics, has me reeling. (https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/dont-talk-about-poli...

Ingrid Waldron is the founder and director of The ENRICH Project, the co-founder and co-director of the Canadian Coalition for Environmental and Climate Justice (CCECJ), and currently a consultant for Canada's Environmental Justice Strategy. Ingrid Waldron partners with equity demanding groups because their health depends on this thing called structural competency. There is a massive body of r...