Against the Grain – February 1, 2011
Several guests weigh in on the protests in Egypt, US government interests, and the continuing crackdown on internet activism.

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.
Several guests weigh in on the protests in Egypt, US government interests, and the continuing crackdown on internet activism.
Private foundations, including Bill Gates’s, are pouring billions of dollars into efforts to remake our public schools. Joanne Barkan finds these market-based initiatives and their wide-ranging impacts deeply disturbing.
Anthropologist Gerald Creed, editor of “The Seductions of Community, speaks with Sasha Lilley about what might be wrong with the notion of “community” and the uses the term is put to.
Clichés about hope and individual responsibility pervade popular narratives about cancer in the US. Sarah Lochlann Jain critiques what she calls “the cultural management of cancer terror” and suggests alternative, politically conscious ways of discussing disease.
Jared Diamond talks about why some civilizations endure and others are short-lived in this speech given in Los Angeles.
Benita Roth contends that a New Left ethos of “organizing one’s own,” and not racism, explains why white feminists and feminist women of color did not build cross-racial coalitions in the 1960s and 70s.
Political scientist Mona El-Ghobashy discusses the recent parliamentary elections in Egypt–the second biggest recipient of U.S. military aid–and the social movements roiling the economic powerhouse of the Middle East.
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.
Christina Kiaer, author of “Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism,” speaks with Sasha Lilley about the attempt to rethink the objects of daily life in a post-capitalist society by the avant-garde in the early Soviet Union.