Letters and Politics – May 26, 2025
A look at burning political issues and debates and their historical context within the US and worldwide, hosted by Mitch Jeserich.
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Letters and Politics
10:00 AM Pacific Time: Monday - Thursday
Letters & Politics seeks to explore the history behind today’s major global and national news stories. Hosted by Mitch Jeserich.
Host Mitch Jeserich reads excerpts of the Iliad by Homer and translated by Emily Wilson. Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance and early modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. In addition … Continued
Mitch Jeserich reads excerpts from the classic writings The Way of Chuang Tzu translated by Thomas Merton. Thomas Merton composed a series of his own versions of the classic sayings of Chuang Tzu, the most spiritual of Chinese philosophers. Chuang Tzu, who wrote in the fourth and third centuries B.C., is the chief authentic historical … Continued
Guest: Laurence Rees is an award-winning English historian and documentary filmmaker. He has authored several books including The Holocaust: A New History, Hitler and Stalin, Auschwitz: A New History, and his latest, The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History.
Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American author, born in Argentina. He is a prominent human rights activist who worked as press and cultural advisor to Salvador Allende in the final months before the 1973 military coup, and later spent many years in exile. He is the Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University and … Continued
Guests: Tiny (Lisa) Gray-Garcia aka “PovertySkola” is a formerly unhoused, incarcerated, revolutionary journalist, lecturer, poet, visionary, teacher and single mama of Tiburcio, daughter of a houseless, disabled mama Dee, and the co-founder of POOR Magazine/Prensa POBRE/PoorNewsNetwork. Victoria Montaño is a Po-scholar, interdisciplinary artist focussing on Indigenous Solidarity across seas and borders, Queer liberation, the Land Back … Continued
Guest: Paul Cooper is a podcaster, a historian, and the author of Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline. He writes, produces, and hosts the Fall of Civilizations podcast which explores the collapse of different societies through history.
Guest: Natalie Lawrence, author of Enchanted Creatures: Our Monsters and Their Meaning.
Guest: Kelly Lytle Hernández is the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History and the director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. She is a 2019 MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient and the author of the award-winning books Migra!, City of Inmates, and her latest, Bad Mexicans Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands winner of the 2023 Bancroft … Continued
Guest: Adam Shatz is the US editor of the London Review of Books and author of The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. He is the host of the podcast Myself with Others.
Guest: William Dalrymple is the author of The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire.