Speaking Out of Place

It’s always a pleasure to talk with Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood, two seasoned political observers, and activists, based in New York City.  Today we discuss the results of the recent primaries in NYC, which saw a wave of impressive victories by DSA candidates and other progressives, defeating incumbent after incumbent.  We discuss some of the causes of these successes, and look to other sign...

Today it is my great pleasure to talk with Dr Lara Sheehi about her new book, From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures . We talk about the ways that those fighting for Palestinian liberation are constantly confronting what Sheehi calls “psychic intrusions,” which seek to interrupt and divert our energies. These intrusions take a number of forms, from direct attacks...

Today it is my immense pleasure and honor to welcome Amitav Ghosh to Speaking Out of Place to talk about his new novel, Ghost Eye .  The novel is about reincarnation, but also a lot more. In our conversation we talk about the need to address the terrible set of environmental and other crises we face, and the seeming foreclosure of the imagination by the obsession with technology and the future it...

On today’s show we take a deep look into universities, and education more broadly with Tristan Ahtone, Andrew Herscher, and Robert Warrior. We focus on a  critique of land grant universities, which were built on land granted by the federal government. What we learn is that lands were stolen from Indigenous peoples through violence-based treaties and seizures. These 57 universities have used wealth...

Today I am delighted to talk with Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff about their new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed . This is much more than a biography or popular account of Elon Musk, it is a radical analysis of a deeply disturbing, computational way of seeing the world.  We see a mind that is profoundly troubled by any contagion spreading into seemingly closed systems—it can take the for...

Today I am excited to talk with three members of Youth United for Community Action , an organization based in East Palo Alto that has been fighting for community empowerment since 1994, when a small group of young people of color active in their communities came together to form YUCA—“a grassroots community organization created, led, and run by young people of color, the majority from low-income c...

In 2021, the City of Atlanta announced that it was entering into a partnership with the Atlanta Police Foundation to destroy the South River Forest and build what became known as “Cop City,” a large facility for the training of police officers. This met with massive public outcry from those outraged by the destruction of the environment and an important historical site (a former prison farm), and...

Today I have the immense pleasure of speaking with author Anna Badkhen about her new collection of essays, To See Beyond .  Badkhen talks about how her experiences as a veteran war correspondent exposed her to War’s multiple forms of violence, destruction, and carnage, and how that compelled her to write these essays about survival, and hope.  Speaking from many global locations and from a wide ra...

Today I have the immense pleasure of talking with Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at the University of Oxford, about her new book, Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future—from Ancient Oracles to AI .  Linking this work to her previous book, Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data , Véliz writes: “ surveillance and prediction are digital techn...

Today I am deeply honored to welcome back Iranian journalists Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy. Before, they talked about their book, For the Sun After Long Nights: the Story of Iran’s Women-led Uprising , today they tell us of conditions in Iran, which since January has suffered the government’s massacre of tens of thousands of protesters and the onslaught of the US/Israel war on Iran. Instead...

Today I am excited to talk with journalist and media critic Adam Johnson about his new book, How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza .  Many of us gained an intuitive sense of just how bad the media coverage of the genocide in Gaza and beyond was—not just in the right wing media, but also in the center-left media.  Adam Johnson scoured thousands of stories, articl...

Today I am honored to speak with veteran journalist Victoria Law.  She is the author of such books as Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women , Prison By Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms (co-authored with Maya Schenwar), and “Prisons Make Us Safer” and 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration. Today we talk about her new book, Corridors of Contagion: H...

Today it’s a special honor to welcome Serhat Tutkal and Hevin Karakurt to Speaking Out of Place. These two scholars engage in a broad discussion of Kurdish history, culture, politics, literature and language, with particular attention to issues of statelessness, identity, and violence. We talk about the current moment with regard to Turkey, Syria, Palestine, and the US-Israel war on Iran and beyon...

Today it gives me special pleasure to speak with Fernando Racimo, a leading scientist-activist, about his new book, Science in Resistance . This book gives a riveting account of the founding and growth of the international group Scientist Rebellion, in which now thousands of scientists from around the world have organized direct actions to draw attention to the climate crisis. Breaking through the...

Today I am excited and honored to be talking with Dr. Shamell Bell and Sherena Razek, two activist scholars who join us to talk about their work on the Coalition for Action in Higher Education, which will be convening its Third Annual National Day of Action on April 17th.  We talk about  the unique and central position CAHE occupies on the activist landscape.  The Coalition brings together labor,...

Today, on Speaking Out of Place, I have the pleasure of talking with Say Burgin about her book, Organizing on Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit . Tracing the changing terrain of anti-racist organizing and activism in the 1960s and 1970s, Burgin’s book focusses on what became known as “parallel organizing” amongst Blacks and whites.  Delving into fascinating archival materials fr...

Today it gives me special pleasure to speak with Helen Whybrow about her book, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life .  Besides being a detailed account of the day to day, season by season life on her farm, where she and her family raise sheep, build a broad community, and maintain Knoll Farm, a center for activists, writers, artists and others to share ideas on how to promote healthier an...

Today I am deeply honored to spend time with poet, activist, and scholar Jamaica Osorio. Shortly after October 7, 2023, she began to write a series of astonishing poems about the war in Gaza and the genocide. Osorio graces us with readings of some of those poems, and engages in a rich, complex, and deeply moving discussion of what went into their composition. Throughout, we talk about the power of...

 Starting in the autumn of 2025, the US began attacking small civilian boats in or near Venezuelan waters, summarily executing over 126 people. January, 2026 began with it kidnapping Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and bringing them to the US. This month, just weeks after the kidnapping, Haymarket Books published the immensely useful and urgent book, Venezuela in Crisis . The his...

Today I am deeply honored to speak with novelist, essayist, and scholar Yuri Herrera about his new novel, Season of the Swamp, which is a deeply researched and dazzlingly imagined account of Benito Juarez’s time spent in exile in New Orleans.  We talk about what that time and place offered to Juarez’s understanding of a world coming into being—one of créolité and carnival, of mixedness and multipl...

Today I am delighted to speak with Andrew Ross about his new book, The Weather Report: A Journey Through Unsettled Climates. In this study, Ross revisits areas of the world that he has written about before—Palestine, the United Arab Emirates, Phoenix, Arizona, and China. While he found no absolute correlates, he did discover that what he calls a “subterranean current of thought” emerged as he spok...

Today I am happy to speak with Ananya Roy and Veronika Zablotsky about their co-edited volume, Beyond Sanctuary: The Humanism of a World in Motion , which was based on a Sawyer Seminar they convened at UCLA. The essays collected in this book are international in scope and interdisciplinary in nature. What links them is a commitment to show that the idea of sanctuary all too often forgets its radic...

I am delighted to talk with scholar, journalist, and activist Thea Riofrancos about her new book, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism .  She takes us deep into the mining of lithium and the production of lithium batteries, which have been welcomed as a key element in our transition from fossil fuels.  Traveling widely through Latin America to see lithium extraction at work, Thea brings u...

Today I am delighted to talk with Roderick Ferguson about his provocative and much-needed intervention, “An Interruption in Our Cowardice.”  Initially driven by his deep disappointment in some Black intellectuals’ compliance and even assistance with reactionary forces, this essay opens onto profound issues of institutionalization, professionalization, and the deadening and repressive mental, socia...

Today I have the true honor of speaking with journalist, storyteller, historical researcher, and Native American ceremonial dancer Julian Brave Noisecat about his book, We Survived the Night.  This highly original book blends many voices and registers, from both well-known but also buried and purposefully obscured historical archives, to tribal and family stories.  Foremost are the legends and ada...