400) Anand Giridharadas: Expanding empathy and breaking political binaries

For Green Dreamer’s 400th episode, we welcome Anand Giridhardas, a writer and journalist whose books include The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy (2022), Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018), The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (2014), and India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking (2011). A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, Anand has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and is the publisher of the newsletter The Ink.

Spanning themes of philanthropy, political change, and social media, Anand unsettles the assumptions of “win-win” social change. How does the rise of elite philanthropy and plutocratic “do-gooding” coincide with the hoarding of power? We look at how in an age of bifurcated American politics, many people fighting for social change face burnout or have given up. Accordingly, Anand calls for the need to stay with the art of persuasion and simultaneous calling-in and calling-out—digging deeper into the political spectrum rather than simplifying people’s complex humanity into binaries.

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//The musical offering featured in this episode Drop The Stone by Oropendola.//