Against the Grain – May 21, 2008
The environmental crisis extends far beyond global warming. The experts featured in the film "The 11th Hour" describe the breadth of the challenges we now face and suggests concrete solutions.
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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.
The environmental crisis extends far beyond global warming. The experts featured in the film "The 11th Hour" describe the breadth of the challenges we now face and suggests concrete solutions.
In the film "The Overspent American," Juliet Schor examines, and suggests alternatives to, the work-and-spend cycle that has so many Americans feeling trapped and unfulfilled.
In a talk entitled "Damaged Care," population health expert Stephen Bezruchka reports that medical care is a leading cause of death. He also asserts that people in the US die much earlier than we should.
The award-winning film "The Corporation" explores the nature, impact, and spectacular rise of one of the most powerful institutions of our time. It features experts like Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, Maude Barlow, and Howard Zinn.
John Yoo, the Boalt Hall law professor who authored memos that provided the basis for the Bush Administration’s torture of prisoners, debated Duke legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky recently at UCLA.
In his book "The Lemon Tree," Sandy Tolan traces the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lives of two people, an Arab who had to leave his home in 1948 and a Jew who grew up in the Arab man’s former house.
In the film "A Really Inconvenient Truth," Joel Kovel argues that we need to go far beyond Al Gore’s reading of the climate change crisis. The author of "The Enemy of Nature," Kovel contends that global warming is directly related to the workings of capitalism.
Veteran political analysts Naomi Klein and Tariq Ali delivered talks about the current economic crisis, Iraq, Latin America, right-wing ideology, and Left resistance at the recent Left Forum gathering in New York City.
According to Colin Duncan, contemporary civilization is about to collapse because of the imminence of rapid and vast climate change. And yet the environmental historian harbors a certain optimism about humans’ ability to usher in radically different ways of meeting human needs.
In her book "Torture and the Twilight of Empire," the sociologist Marnia Lazreg argues that torture is essential to the imperial project, particularly when the empire — like the French in Algeria in the 1950s — is in decline. She also draws parallels to recent and current US military conduct in Iraq.