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 co-produced and co-hosted by Sasha Lilley and C. S. Soong.
Jessica Hagedorn While much of Jessica Hagedorn’s work addresses the experiences of Filipinos and Filipino Americans, she’s always drawn on universal themes of passion, conflict, humor, corruption, romance and survival. She and actor Catherine Castellanos discuss Hagedorn’s new play Stairway to Heaven, about social outcasts in San Francisco’s Tenderloin.
Harvard president Lawrence Summers set off a firestorm when he said that women have less innate scientific ability then men. Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Barnett, authors of Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs, discuss the questionable science behind such claims with host Sasha Lilley.
A discussion about the economic revolution — or counterrevolution — that’s afoot in Washington, with Daniel Altman author of Neoconomy: George Bush’s Revolutionary Gamble with America’s Future. With host Sasha Lilley.
A discussion about the destabilizing influence and radical potential of pensions, in light of the Bush administration’s plans to privatize Social Security, with New Left Review’s Robin Blackburn and guest host Sasha Lilley.
Newdow’s Pledge. Michael Newdow sued to remove the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. He discusses his years-long campaign to get religion out of government. Sally Mahé describes the efforts of the United Religions Initiative to promote interfaith cooperation.
Robin Kelley; Gloria Anzaldúa. Robin D.G. Kelley asks us to consider the dreams of liberation, the flights of imagination, that animated many progressive struggles. Envisioning a better world, he suggests, is at least as important as critiquing the current one. AnaLouise Keating remembers Gloria Anzaldúa, the groundbreaking theorist and writer who passed away last May. … Continued
What happens when civil war and natural disaster collide? A discussion of the long running conflict between Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority government and the separatist Tamil Tigers — and how the tsunami catastrophe may affect its outcome.
Lauren Coodley discusses a new book she’s edited about Upton Sinclair and California, entitled The Land of Orange Groves and Jails. And Janet Galligani Casey talks about left-leaning Depression-era fiction, the subject of a new volume she’s edited called The Novel and the American Left.
Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, returns to Against the Grain to talk about why low income Americans vote against their class interests.
