As the environment heats up and authoritarianism is on the rise, dgivide and conquer has been a very effective technique to keep people from organizing for political or economic change. In her book Common Ground Eileen Flanagan explores how we can come together in spite of difference in race, class and religion.

Homelessness is visible in every city in the United States but the number of people on the streets is just the tip of the iceberg according to journalist and anthropologist Brian

Goldstone. In his new book, There Is No Place For Us: Working and Homeless in America , he follows families in Atlanta as they struggle to stay housed. The combination of low wages, skyrocketing housing costs and lax government regulations bear down on working families. Goldstone looks at the causes, magnitude and consequences of the problem with portraits of families who are left off the official statistics because they sleep in cars or squalid extended stay hotels.

Universal education was envisioned as a great equalizer that would fuel a meritocracy. But like so many American ideals it has been tainted by slavery and the Native genocide. Native boarding schools were founded with the goal of eradicating Native culture. Schools set up during Reconstruction taught the newly freed slaves that obedience would be rewarded and any attempts at retribution were forbidden. In her book Original Sins: The Miseducation of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism Eve L. Ewing looks at how the current education system has been shaped by its history.

The unacknowledged truth about the capitalistic machine we all live in is that it relies on our compliance. When companies freely exploit workers without effective restraint from the government there is still power in grass roots organizing. In their book Get on the Job and Organize: Standing up for a Better Workplace and a Better World Jaz Brisack details the ins and outs of organizing Starbucks workers one coffee shop at a time.

How safe and effective are the drugs we take? Why do Americans pay more for prescription drugs than people in other high-income countries? Jerry Avorn, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, explains why ineffective, dangerous and overpriced drugs make it through the FDA approval process in his new book Rethinking Medications.

In his new book Hope Dies Last Alan Weisman documents how people from all over the world are coping with our ecological predicament. The stories range from rewatering the marsh that might have been the Biblical garden of Eden to kelp farming, fusion reactors and other creative and imaginative ways to mitigate past destruction and navigate an uncertain future.

Before the 2024 election Russell Muirhead and his co-author Nancy RosenBlum predicted the destruction of the administrative state by Trump and his regime in their book 'Ungoverning'. In this episode we talk about how we got here and where we might be headed.

Locking people away for long periods of time seems like a tough but effective way to deal with crime but multiple studies have shown that states with draconian sentences have the same amount of crime as states with more lenient laws. Imprisoning just one person costs tens of thousands of dollars per year and there’s other costs. When parents are taken away from their children families are strained and communities are weakened. When the prison sentence is done, people traumatized by imprisonment are released into communities where they face discrimination in housing and employment. In her book Talking About Abolition Sonali Kolhatkar looks at alternatives to the current system of policing and imprisonment.