In February, a New York assemblyman little known outside New York City was polling at 1% in his bid for mayor of NYC. This Tuesday, he became mayor-elect, after running a remarkable and inspiring campaign that drew 100,000 volunteers to knock on two million doors. Largely centering on making NYC affordable for everyone, Zohran Mamdani toppled a political dynasty by weaving together a broad constituency with his charisma, intelligence, compassion and energy. We talk to Liza Featherstone ...

Today I have the pleasure of talking with Dean Spade about his new book, Love in a Fucked-up World: how to build relationships, hook up, and raise hell together. This book builds on all of Dean’s previous books, and shares their commitment to finding ways to build better movements for better worlds. Like all of his work, Love in a Fucked Up World homes in on the obstacles we face not only from repressive states and destructive ideologies, but also from our own very human weaknesses and blinds...

In 2017, activist-scholar Robyn Maynard published her groundbreaking study, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present. Today, I have the privilege of talking with her about the second edition of this study, which has just been published by Duke University Press. Robyn tells us what has happened since 2017 that compelled her to revise the book and add important new materials to address the challenges of the present. At the core of this new edition is a po...

Today I talk with Professor Nisrin Elamin about the situation in Sudan, where we find both a war between rival factions and these same factions continuing counter-revolutionary campaign against pro-democracy forces. We discuss how regional actors such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have contributed to the repression of democracy, and not only the ineffectiveness of NGOs and the United Nations in quelling the violence, but their roles in exacerbating it. In the midst of for...

How have young people in rural areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo invented new forms of radicalism in response to the impact of new flows of foreign investment and the inability of normal national and international politics to serve their needs and interests? Zachariah Mampilly explains how rural and urban spaces have seen a complex transit of peoples and funds that complicate politics, and emergent forms of radical activism have taken root and spread in many African countries. These f...

Today I have the pleasure of talking with Supriya Khandelwal and Koa Tran, two members of the South Bay Youth Changemakers, and one of its co-directors, Amulya Mandava. This Asian American organization, located at the heart of Silicon Valley, seeks to both challenge and expand the label, Asian American. The SBYC directs its energy into projects that go far beyond the stereotypes of wealth, acquisition, and status associated with its location, and focuses on empowerment and social justice.&nbs...

Today I have the honor and the pleasure of speaking with legal scholar Mary Anne Franks, about her book, Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment. As the title of the book indicates, this is a fearless and iconoclastic critique of the ways that the First Amendment has been interpreted and mobilized in ways that protect and extend racism, misogyny, religious fundamentalism, and corporate self-interest. Among other topics, we talk about Amber Heard case and the limitations ...

Today I am delighted to speak with primatologist Christine Webb about her new book, The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why it Matters. The title of the book itself is a concise and precise description of its two constituent halves. First, Webb tells us how science itself, from premodern times onward, has operated with an assumption it keeps reconfirming constantly--that humans are not only exceptional, but also superior to other forms of life. Webb convin...

Today I have the honor of speaking with longtime activist Silky Shah, Executive Director of the Detention Watch Network, about her new, and extremely important book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. Shah provides a critical discussion about the intersection between detention, the prison industrial complex, and anti-immigrant racism. She explains how this relationship is hardly new, but stretches back at least to the Reagan presidency and through Clinton, Bush, Obama, and ...

Today I have the real pleasure of speaking with Maytha Alhassen and Halah Ahmad, two prominent feminist activists, writers, and scholars deeply committed to exploring the connections between the Arabic language, storytelling, and political agency, from the historical past to the present. We talk about the continuity of storytelling forms and techniques that bridge generations and support and convey a durable set of values and beliefs that resist western appropriation and distortion. These phe...

Today I talk with poet Maya Salameh about her poetry collection, How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave, which won the prestigious Etal Adnan Poetry Prize in 2022. The judges remarked, “Maya Salameh’s poetry stood out for its inventiveness in cracking the code of life ‘between system and culture'…The turns and swerves the poems make are astonishing; the expectations they upend are remarkable… It’s a testament to the aesthetic boundaries and intellectual revolt poets of Arab heritage are pu...

Today I am extremely grateful to Ardi Imseis and Chris Gunness for joining me for an urgent discussion of Israel’s accelerated genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank. These eminent international human rights scholars discuss Israel’s longstanding violations of international law and the complicity of the US. We also discuss at length the responsibility of states to immediately halt their direct and indirect support for the genocide. Our conversation includes an in-depth ...

Today I have the pleasure of speaking with cultural anthropologist Greta YOU-LING about her new book, Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom, a fascinating story about an indigenous group in Crimea fighting for its rights. Uehling tells us of the complex history of the Crimean Tatars, a Sunni Muslim group who were driven off their land in 1944 by the Soviet Union. This group now finds itself caught in the Russia-Ukraine war. It has rebuffed attempt...

In this episode of Speaking Out of Place, investigative journalist Karen Hao explains that OpenAI is anything but “open”—very early on, it left behind that marketing tag to become increasingly closed and elitist. Her massive study, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI had a rather different subtitle in its UK edition: “Inside the reckless race of total domination.” In our conversation we flesh out the overlap between these two points of emphasis. Hao argues that in...

Today I talk with Huda Fakhreddine, writer, translator, and scholar of Arabic literature. Among the many topics we touch upon are the challenges of teaching Arabic literature, especially Palestinian literature, in a time of genocide, when universities, professional organizations, and political groups militate against any honest discussion of these topics, and punish those who do. We talk about the notion of belonging, and the importance of being able to choose what to belong to, and wha...

Today it’s my honor to speak with Danica Savonick about her marvelous book entitled Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College. This is a riveting and deeply inspiring story of how each of these luminaries in the fields of literature and feminism found their way into the City University of New York in the 1960s, when community activists had forced open what was called the Harvard for the proletariat to...

Today I'm delighted to talk with Quinn Slobodian about his new book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. We take a deep dive into the genesis of a weird and powerful merging of two seemingly different groups the Far Right and neoliberals. Slobodian writes, “as repellent as their politics may be these radical thinkers are not barbarians the gates of neoliberalism but the bastard offspring of that line of thought itself.” We talk about how this meshing i...

Today we are deeply honored and privileged to speak with journalist-activist Yousef Aljamal, one of the editors of a remarkable, gripping, and altogether inspiring collection, Displaced in Gaza: Stories from the Gaza Genocide, 27 stories written by Palestinians in Gaza. We talk about the conception behind the book, and concentrate on certain keywords like obligation, pride, inventiveness, and resilience. Aljamal talks about how Palestinians are relying on a long history of survival and persis...

Recently, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio imposed sanctions on the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, saying, “The United States has repeatedly condemned and objected to biased and malicious activities of Albanese that have long made her unfit for service as a Special Rapporteur.” Today we are joined by three of Albanese’s predecessors—John Dugard, Richard Falk, and Michael Lynk, who talk about what these sanctions mean. They trace the U...

perpetuate beliefs that maintain social orders that deserve to be strenuously re-evaluated? Archaeologist and anthropologist Dan Hicks traces the development of a particularly virulent strain of monument-worship, that which emerges out of what he calls “militarist realism,” which harnesses technologies of war, particularly colonial, white supremacist war, to build institutions, disciplines, museums in its image in order to permanently maintain a border between those deemed human subjects and ...