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.
In two new monologues, Mike Daisey examines what money does to human relations and reveals the human cost of our love affair with electronic gadgetry. And Stephanie Rearick describes a system of alternative currency called TimeBanking.
Can potentially violent students, like Jared Loughner and the Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho, be identified and caught before they kill? Benjamin Reiss objects to what he sees as the intrusion of psychiatric risk assessment and intervention into the classroom.
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.
