12:00 PM Pacific Time: Mondays - Wednesdays
Acclaimed program of ideas, in-depth analysis, and commentary on a variety of matters—political, economic, social, and cultural—important to progressive and radical thinking and activism. Against the Grain is co-produced and co-hosted by Sasha Lilley and C. S. Soong.
If the problem is religious polarization and inequality, isn’t the solution secular governance? Secularism, after all, promises the equality of citizens regardless of religious affiliation. Saba Mahmood argues that modern secular governance, contrary to its grand claims, has in fact exacerbated religious inequalities. It has also, she says, constrained our political imagination to a significant … Continued
Santiago, the capital of Chile, was a hotbed of radical, non-sectarian organizing in the early 1920s, when a repressive backlash led to the death of poet José Domingo Gómez Rojas. Historian Raymond Craib tells the story of anarchists and communists, students and workers, radicals and reactionaries, the pursuing and the pursued, whose politics echo down … Continued
How many stories feature the Black Panthers, the Daley machine, the Young Lords, the original (pre-Jesse Jackson) Rainbow Coalition, and Chicago’s first black mayor (Harold Washington)? Jakobi Williams’s story does; he discusses how cross-racial coalition-building revolutionized Chicago’s politics and how it can and should inspire social justice organizing today. Jakobi Williams, From the Bullet to … Continued
Every day, the police kill someone in America. But in the last several years, widespread anger about police violence had led many to take to the streets — and the prevailing model of policing, known as broken windows, seems to be in crisis. What will replace it? And how should we understand the role that … Continued
How are race and ethnicity represented in U.S. news coverage of health and medicine? Charles Briggs argues that whiteness tends to be portrayed as an aspirational state of well-being, while people of color are far too often depicted as deficient, as trapped by culture and thus to be blamed for their own health problems. Charles … Continued
Movements like Black Lives Matter have turned a spotlight on the mass criminalization of people of color in the United States. But are we any closer to understanding why the American state locks up its residents in record numbers? Radical scholar Jordan Camp discusses working class insurgency from below—from the Watts Rebellion to the Los … Continued
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels laid out their understanding of how a socialist revolution would unfold. Emanuele Saccarelli shows how that notion changed and evolved, in the minds of Marx, Engels, and a number of subsequent socialist thinkers who took part in debates over the value of reformism versus revolution. Carver and Farr, … Continued
A radio and web media project whose aim is to provide in-depth analysis and commentary on a variety of matters — political, economic, social and cultural — important to progressive and radical thinking and activism.
A radio and web media project whose aim is to provide in-depth analysis and commentary on a variety of matters — political, economic, social and cultural — important to progressive and radical thinking and activism.
Terence McKenna gave a talk entitled “Dreaming Awake at the End of Time.”
