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.
Keramet Reiter calls supermax prisons “the black hole” in this nation’s system of prisons and punishment: So little is known about them, and yet supermax confinement is the most extreme form of punishment next to the death penalty.
Scholar/activist Jason Ferreira describes how groups like the Black Panthers and the San Francisco Mission-based group Los Siete rejected narrow nationalist conceptions of identity, instead creating cross-racial, Third Worldist communities of resistance in the 1960s and ’70s.
Christian Parenti, author of “Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence,” speaks with Sasha Lilley about global warming, neoliberalism, counterinsurgency, and how elites plan to respond to climate change-related civil unrest and migration in the Global South by further sealing and militarizing the borders of the rich countries.
Scott Saul, author of “Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties,” speaks with Sasha Lilley about the intersection of Black Power, Civil Rights, and the counterculture in the late 50s and 60s, and the brilliant music produced during that era.
Joan Baxter has written two new investigative reports on the frenzied, large-scale acquisition of fertile land in Africa by foreign investors, and on the social, economic, and environmental consequences of this accelerating land-grab.
Journalist John Gibler, author of “To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War,” talks to Sasha Lilley about the economics and politics of the US-Mexico drug trade, which has claimed over 40,000 Mexican lives since 2006.
UC Berkeley anthropologist Laura Nader explains what Edward Said meant by “Orientalism,” and describes what Arabs who visited the West in past centuries came to think of Western models of liberty.
George McKay, author of “Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism, and Rebellion in the Garden,” talks with host Sasha Lilley about the utopian, as well as thorny, politics of gardening.
Leslie Martin, one of the scientists who analyzed data from a ground breaking 80 year study, discusses the project’s findings about what social and personal characteristics are associated with long lives.
Jeffrey Webber, author of “From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia,” talks about how the government of Evo Morales and the Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, has not lived up the radical promise of the upheaval that brought it to power.
