Pretty Heady Stuff

Carlyn Zwarenstein (https://carlynzwarenstein.com/) is a writer and journalist based in Toronto. Her second book On Opium was just published by Goose Lane Editions (https://gooselane.com/products/on-opium). I speak with her about her push within that work to question narratives around whose lives are “enabled” and “destroyed” by opioids, and about how, for her, drug use became a tool for writing,...

Francesca Ekwuyasi (https://www.ekwuyasi.com/) is a writer you read with the windows open. Her work embodies what it means to be attentive to life, in spite of the fact that, as she admits in this interview, “paying attention is overwhelming.” Francesca’s novel Butter Honey Pig Bread was one of the most critically acclaimed works of fiction in 2020. It’s a book that shows the deep love that motiva...

Henry Adam Svec is an author, musician and an assistant professor of communication arts at the University of Waterloo. He’s produced two extraordinary albums (http://www.folksingularity.com/download.html). His album The CFL Sessions (http://www.thecflsessions.ca/songs.html) is perhaps most relevant to this conversation. This album, along with a series of live shows that Svec did to support it, for...

Judith Butler is an internationally recognized feminist philosopher whose work is incredibly difficult to summarize. The author of more than twenty books of groundbreaking critical theory, she has indelibly shaped our ability to understand the body politic, the politics of the body, and the unbelievable complexity of our relationships to one another. Because it's so challenging to adequately captu...

Andreas Malm works in The Department of Human Geography at Lund University. He’s a scholar of human ecology and environmental history and the author of The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, How to Blow Up A Pipeline (www.versobooks.com/books/3665-how-…w-up-a-pipeline) and most recently White Skin,...

Nora Loreto is an author and political organizer, and a vital voice in podcasting within Canadian politics especially. Sandy and Nora Talk Politics (https://sandyandnora.com/) features conversations with co-host Sandy Hudson on a broad cross-section of contemporary issues. She tells me, in this interview, that the podcast started by recording her conversations with Sandy -- as a consequence of the...

Natasha Lennard is a columnist for The Intercept. She has also written for The Nation, The Guardian, Bookforum and the New York Times, among other venues. She currently teaches critical journalism at the New School for Social Research in New York. Her books include Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life (https://www.versobooks.com/books/2949-being-numerous), and a co-written anthology of inter...

Daniel Lombroso is a director and journalist (http://www.daniellombroso.com/). His debut feature film, White Noise (https://www.theatlantic.com/white-noise-movie/), based on his four years of reporting inside the alt-right, premiered last year and was met with high praise from film critics. The film has also garnered a large academic audience: scholars of communication, sociology and political sci...

Caroline Monnet is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist whose work experiments with many languages, art forms and genres to search out and dwell with the dualities, grey areas, and forms of hybridity that resonate with her own personal experience of inhabiting a self that exists across multiple languages and competing and conflicting cultural histories. Currently based in Montreal, she has exhib...

Anna Tsing is a professor of Anthropology at the University of California: Santa Cruz and the author of books that show us how a multitude of different forms of life are bound together in a web of complex and fragile interdependence. Her books include Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, The Mushroom at the End of the World and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of t...

Holly Jean Buck has released two books on the subject of geoengineering. After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration(https://www.versobooks.com/books/3091-after-geoengineering) focuses on the overwhelming questions that humanity now has to face as we begin, finally, to confront the reality of the climate crisis. Has It Come to This?, co-edited with J.P. Sapinski and Andreas Malm...

Kathi Weeks is an Associate Professor in the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Program at Duke University. Her book Constituting Feminist Subjects was reissued by Verso in 2018 (https://www.versobooks.com/books/2696-constituting-feminist-subjects); it looks again at feminist standpoint theory and tries to remove some of the imaginary blockages that have stymied the development of a socialist...

Cara Daggett is an assistant professor of political science at Virginia Tech and the author of The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-birth-of-energy), a book that explores the histories of energy from the perspective of feminist political ecology. In this conversation, Daggett makes it clear that the system of global capitalism...

Derf Backderf is the creator of several acclaimed graphic novels: Punk Rock & Trailer Parks, My Friend Dahmer, Trashed, and most recently Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio. We discuss his distinctive art style, the joys and challenges of accepting the adaptation of one’s work into film, comics as both an established and emergent art form, and the ethics of representing violence. Backderf's work is bes...

Alexis Shotwell, is a social theorist and professor of sociology and anthropology at Carleton University who has a rare gift for addressing and expressing the unbelievable complexity of our current system. Her book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (2016) was released at a moment where it had become impossible to ignore the overlapping emergencies that we now face. How do we ex...

Max Taylor is a young communicator and mayoral candidate here in Halifax. His campaign is not built to win; instead, it's designed to produce a scarce resource in political communication locally and globally: engagement. In this conversation I talk to him about the kind of courage he’s needed to run for mayor, why people who see it as a transparent attempt to gain followers don’t get it, and why h...

Jesse David Fox, senior editor at Vulture and host of the fascinating Good One podcast, discusses his divisive theory of “post-comedy” (or forms of humour that don't fit the traditional rubric of "laughs-per-minute"), how the rhythm of comedy has changed in the context of our coronavirus-induced isolation, and how the notion of booms and busts in comedy doesn’t really match up with the historical...

Andy Brown is a publisher and writer who runs Conundrum Press in Wolfville, Nova Scotia (https://www.conundrumpress.com/). The books Conundrum puts out are immensely immersive and artful, so it was really exciting to discuss the challenges of operating in a niche market with Andy. We discuss Conundrum's beginnings in Montreal in the 90s, and the moment when Andy decided to change Conundrum’s manda...

Summer Pierre is an extremely inventive illustrator whose debut graphic novel All the Sad Songs (https://retrofit.storenvy.com/products/24567828-all-the-sad-songs-by-summer-pierre) is a text that pushes you to explore connections to the past and to think about how specific objects and pieces of art stand out and score the process of self-realization. How can an artist convey how it feels when musi...

Veronica Post is a graphic novelist whose sharply drawn debut book Langosh and Peppi: Fugitive Days has just been published by Conundrum Press (https://www.conundrumpress.com/new-titles/langosh-and-peppi-fugitive-days/). In this conversation, she talks about her direct experience of the European migrant crisis, and how it shaped the narrative of this immersive and incredibly thoughtful graphic tex...

Rebecca Roher is a cartoonist and educator whose captivating work of graphic memoir Bird in a Cage won the Doug Wright Award in 2017. We discuss her current project, 100 Year Old Wisdom, and its interest in making us more open to the lived realities of aging and the aged. We also talk about her forthcoming graphic biography of civil rights activist Viola Desmond, which will be out in October as pa...

Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist, she is also the author of the forthcoming book, The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future (https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745343327/the-hologram/). All of the work that Cassie does is intensely concerned with the pervasive barriers to flourishing that are so entrenched in our late capitalist society--as such, she’s focused on...

Liza Mandelup is a director with an uncanny eye and a deeply perceptive sense of how culture is changing. Her brilliant documentary Jawline (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoVA0-w6VtA) premiered last year at the Sundance Film Festival, where she won the Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker. The film is an invaluable study of content creation today, and it has stunned audiences due to its int...

Elaine Power is a professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies and the Head of the Department of Gender Studies at Queen's University. She is also the co-founder of the Kingston Action Group for a Basic Income Guarantee. In this episode we discuss the challenge of making the field of food studies "inherently feminist" by stressing the importance of "power differentials" in determining...

Dave Zirin is the sports editor for The Nation and has written many path-breaking books on the politics of sports and the legacy of radical, outspoken athletes who have used, and risked, their stature in order to resist racial oppression. Here Zirin talks about how prominent athletes are “breaking out from the corporate shackles” to help mobilize for justice in the wake of the murders of George Fl...