Religious Neoliberalism
Jason Hackworth looks at the uneasy marriage between rightwing economic libertarianism and religion.
Against the Grain
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 produced and hosted by Sasha Lilley.
The Pacific Islands are, well, tiny, and often go unnoticed, except by the US military. Guam was made a US territory in 1898, and what’s happened to its indigenous Chamorro population and its environment is a case study in how militarism and colonialism operate. Craig Santos Perez writes about Guam, its people, and their ongoing struggle … Continued
Capitalism, Nature, Crisis
Humans seem to be at war with nature — epitomized by the system of capitalism, which plunders as it grows. But what if we understood the realm of Nature as not separate from the human realm of Society? Radical scholar Jason W. Moore suggests that we need to embed our critique of capitalism within the … Continued
Losers and Winners in the Sharing Economy
Uber, Airbnb, and other high-profile enterprises in the so-called sharing economy are fundamentally transforming the economic landscape. Should we welcome these changes, or are they doing more harm than good? Keally McBride examines what the rise of the sharing economy has meant for workers, for institutions, and for the digital platforms on which its participants … Continued
Industrial Agriculture in the Soviet Union
Historian Jenny Leigh Smith takes a second look at the successes and failures of Soviet agriculture, much reviled during the Cold War as an unmitigated disaster.
Although white women have been largely excluded from histories of the domestic U.S. slave trade, they were in fact active participants in the buying and selling of enslaved Blacks. So argues Stephanie Jones-Rogers; she also elucidates the power slave owners had under federal and state law to go into so-called free states to reclaim runaway … Continued
Commodifying the Oceans
Environmental sociologist Stefano Longo discusses the multiple threats to the oceans — from overfishing to ocean acidification — and whether the notion of the “tragedy of the commons” is insufficient to explain the root of the crisis.
If Iran is (still) viewed as the enemy, how then must Iranian Americans conduct themselves? What kinds of concerns and anxieties do they harbor, and how do they go about forging identities and cross-cultural understanding? Siamak Vossoughi has written a collection of short stories that examine the Iranian American experience. Also: comments by Price Cobbs … Continued
Medicine and Risk
Historian of medicine and medical doctor Robert Aronowitz asks whether Americans are over-tested and over-treated for illnesses such as heart disease and cancer based on probabilistic calculations of risk.
National memorials and parks bombard visitors with rhetorics of nationhood. But the official stories propagated at such sites leave out critical things, including, asserts Stephen Germic, the claims of American Indians to territory and recognition. Germic examines a range of Native initiatives, both legal and militant, to assert their presence in the face of official … Continued