Across the Margin: The Podcast

This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with Keith Wailoo, Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University. His books include Dying in the City of the Blues, How Cancer Crossed the Color Line, and Pain: A Political History. Along with Dr. Anthony Fauci and others, Wailoo won the prestigious 2021 Dan David Prize which supports outstanding contributions to the study of history and other disciplines that shed light on the human past. Wailoo is also the author of Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette which is the focus of this episode. In Pushing Cool, he tells the intricate and poignant story of menthol cigarettes for the first time. Wailoo pulls back the curtain to reveal the hidden persuaders who shaped menthol buying habits and racial markets across America: the world of tobacco marketers, consultants, psychologists, and social scientists, as well as Black lawmakers and civic groups including the NAACP. Today most Black smokers buy menthol cigarettes, and calls to prohibit their circulation hinge on a history of the industry’s targeted racial marketing. In 2009, when Congress banned flavored cigarettes as criminal enticements to encourage youth smoking, menthol cigarettes were also slated to be banned. Through a detailed study of internal tobacco industry documents, Wailoo exposes why they weren’t and how they remain so popular with Black smokers today. Spanning a century, Pushing Cool reveals how the twin deceptions of health and Black affinity for menthol were crafted — and how the industry’s disturbingly powerful narrative has endured to this day. In this episode host Michael Shields and Keith Wailoo discuss exactly why menthol cigarettes were “pushed” so vigorously upon Black urban communities and assess how increased governmental restriction on cigarette advertisements actually heightened this push. They explore the lies about the health benefits of menthols used to market the cigarettes, point out a plethora of surprising public figures who have consistently pushed back against a ban on menthols, examine the link in the fight to ban menthol cigarettes to e-cigarettes, and much, much more.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with best-selling author Gloria Feldt, an acclaimed expert on women, power, and leadership. Feldt is co-founder and president of Take The Lead, whose mission reflects her life’s passion: to prepare, develop, inspire, and propel women to take their fair and equal share of leadership positions across all sectors. She is the author of five books. Her latest, Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics and How Women Will Take The Lead, examines how people can seize the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of massive disruption to build back stronger with women at the center of the recovery. Through the lens of women’s stories, Intentioning delivers a fresh set of leadership tools, skills, and concepts that help all women reach their own highest intentions, purposefully creating new norms, while guiding institutions to break through the remaining barriers to gender and racial parity for everyone’s good. Feldt is formerly president and CEO of the world’s largest reproductive health and advocacy organization, Planned Parenthood. She teaches “Women, Power, and Leadership” at Arizona State University and has been widely quoted and published, including by the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, The Daily Beast, Forbes, Fast Company, Time, Huffington Post, Glamour, Elle and Ms. She has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, the Today Show, Good Morning America and The Daily Show. In this episode host Michael Shields and Gloria Feldt examining exactly what the word "Intentioning" means while conversing upon how the disruption of the pandemic can lead to positive changes (if we #putwomenatthecenter). They talk about Feldt’s Nine Leadership Intentioning Tools, how men can be a part of the movement towards women’s parity, the difference between power “over” and power “to,” and much, much more! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with Amitav Ghosh, a novelist and essayist whose many books include the acclaimed Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire), Gun Island, Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban, and The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. His latest book, The Nutmeg’s Curse (Parables For a Planet in Crisis), is a powerful work that traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg’s Curse argues that the dynamics of Climate Change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation — of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning. Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Ghosh frames these historical stories in a way that connects our shared colonial histories with the deep inequality we see around us today. By interweaving discussions on everything from the global history of the oil trade to the migrant crisis and the animist spirituality of Indigenous communities around the world, The Nutmeg’s Curse offers a sharp critique of Western society and speaks to the profoundly remarkable ways in which human history is shaped by non-human forces. In this episode host Michael Shields and Amitav Ghosh discuss the history of the nutmeg, a spice whose narrative is tied to colonialism in ways that relate to today’s Climate Crisis and particularly fossil fuels. They discuss terraforming, a term known in science-fiction writing that relates to the ways in which colonizers, both in days of yore and today, reshape landscapes to meet their covetous ways. They converse on the power of storytelling in fighting Climate Change, those who see the Earth as an inert body, the future of vitalist politics, and much, much more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with Stuart Blume, a professor emeritus of science and technology studies at the University of Amsterdam. Blume’s latest book, entitled Immunization: How Vaccines Became Controversial, is an important and extremely relevant-to-the-moment work that is the focus of this episode. At a time when vaccines are a vital tool in the fight against Covid-19 in all its various mutations, Blume’s hard-hitting book takes a longer historical perspective. It argues that globalization and cuts to healthcare have been eroding faith in the institutions producing and providing vaccines for more than thirty years. It tells the history of immunization from the work of early pioneers such as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch through the eradication of smallpox in 1980, to the recent introduction of new kinds of genetically engineered vaccines. Immunization exposes the limits of public health authorities while suggesting how they can restore our confidence in the fight against infectious disease. In this episode host Michael Shields and guest Stuart Blume examine how vaccines protect the human body while also looking at how exactly viruses are “born” into human populations. They contemplate the dawn of vaccine hesitancy, converse about the corporations and politicians that are chiefly to blame for it, and champion the idea that while vaccine technologies are extraordinary tools, addressing the root causes of viruses is absolutely crucial in confronting urgent public health concerns. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with Chris Gibson and Andrew Warren. Chris is a professor of geography at the University of Wollongong, Australia while Andrew is a senior lecturer in economic geography at the same university. They are also the co-authors of The Guitar: Tracing The Grain Back To The Tree, a deeply insightful book which lies at the center of this episode.Guitars inspire cult-like devotion. An aficionado can tell you precisely when and where their favorite instrument was made, the wood it is made from, and that wood’s unique effect on the instrument’s sound. In The Guitar, Chris and Andrew follow that fascination around the globe as they trace guitars all the way back to their source tree. The authors visit guitar factories, port cities, log booms, remote sawmills, Indigenous lands, and distant rainforests, all on a quest for behind-the-scenes stories and insights into how guitars are made, where the much-cherished guitar timbers ultimately come from, and all the while introducing you to the people and skills that craft those timbers along the way.The authors interviewed hundreds of people to give readers a first-hand account of the ins-and-outs of production methods, timber milling, and forest custodianship in diverse corners of the world, including the Pacific Northwest, Madagascar, Spain, Brazil, Germany, Japan, China, Hawaii, and Australia. They unlock surprising insights into longer arcs of world history: on humanity’s exploitation of nature, colonialism, industrial capitalism, and cultural tensions. But the authors also strike a hopeful note, offering a parable of wider resonance — of the incredible but under-appreciated skill and care that goes into growing forests, felling trees, and milling timber in order to craft these enchanting musical instruments. The Guitar promises to resonate with anyone who has ever fallen in love with a guitar.In this episode host Michael Shields explores with Chris and Andrew the many compelling facets of their comprehensively researched book, including how tracing the roots of the guitar can teach profound insights about history and the human condition. Chris and Andrew pinpoint the exact origins of the modern guitar and examine how Climate Change is threatening the industry, as well as deforestation and irresponsible harvesting. They tip a hat to all the foresters and those in the guitar industry who are employing forest management techniques to preserve guitar wood for generations to come, and much, much more.Grab a copy of The Guitar: Tracing The Grain To The Tree here! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with Lizzie Johnson, a staff writer for the Washington Post. Previously, Johnson worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she reported on fifteen of the deadliest, largest, and most destructive blazes in modern California history, and covered over thirty communities impacted by wildfires. Recently she released a book entitled Paradise: One Town's Struggle To Survive An American Wildfire — the focus of this episode — which serves as the definitive first hand account of California’s Camp Fire, the nation’s deadliest wildfire in a century. Paradise is a riveting examination of what went wrong and how to avert future tragedies as the Climate Crisis unfolds.On November 8, 2018, the people of Paradise, California, awoke to a mottled gray sky and gusty winds. Soon the Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history was upon them, consuming an acre a second. Less than two hours after the fire ignited, the town was engulfed in flames, the terrified residents trapped in their homes and cars. By the next morning, eighty-five people were dead. As a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Lizzie Johnson was there as the town of Paradise burned. She saw the smoldering rubble of a historic covered bridge and the beloved Black Bear Diner and she stayed long afterward, visiting shelters, hotels, and makeshift camps. Drawing upon her years of on-the-ground reporting, and reams of public records, including 911 calls and testimony from a grand jury investigation, Johnson provides a minute-by-minute account of the Camp Fire, following residents and first responders as they fight to save themselves and their town. We see a young mother fleeing with her newborn; a school bus full of children in search of an escape route; and a group of paramedics, patients, and nurses trapped in a cul-de-sac, fending off the fire with rakes and hoses. In Paradise, Johnson documents this unfolding tragedy with empathy and nuance. But she also investigates the root causes, from runaway climate change to a deeply flawed alert system to Pacific Gas and Electric’s decades-long neglect of critical infrastructure. A cautionary tale for a new era of megafires, Paradise is the gripping story of a town wiped off the map and the determination of its people to rise again. In this episode, host Michael Shields and Lizzie Johnson explore how Climate Change has increased the intensity and size of wildfires throughout the world, how economic factors have increasingly swelled the population in the wildland-urban-interface, the challenges of evacuating the entirety of a town, forest management suppression miscalculations and the need for “controlled” burns, the emotional toll of reporting on tragedies, and much, much more.This episode concludes with a deeply affecting song by John-Michael Sun, a Camp Fire survivor. Listen to the entirety of the song here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker Yael Bridge. Bridge is the producer behind Left on Purpose, winner of the Audience Award at DOC NYC, and also Saving Capitalism, starring former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, which was nominated for an Emmy Award in Business and Economics. Her latest documentary, The Big Scary “S” Word, which is the focus of this episode, delves into the rich history of the American socialist movement and follows the people striving to build a socialist future today. In this enlightening documentary, a former Marine and a public school teacher in two different states find themselves broke and unable to sustain their livelihoods despite being employed. Activated by the energy of the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and the murmurs of a state-wide teacher strike, both turn to socialism, a once-fringe ideology, to tackle problems larger than themselves. With inequality growing, a climate catastrophe looming, and right-wing extremism ascending around the world, many Americans are wondering whether capitalism is to blame. But what is the alternative? Socialism is plagued by conflicting definitions. Is it dictatorship or democracy? Norway or Venezuela? Reform or revolution? The Big Scary “S” Word explores where American socialism has been, why it was suppressed, and imagines what a renewed American socialism might look like. In this episode host Michael Shields and Yael Bridge converse on the inadequately discussed and rich history of socialism in America, revealing that socialism is in fact, as American as apple pie. They explore the roots of current misconceptions about socialism, expose the threat that capitalism poses to human life, expound on the growing appreciation of socialism in America, and much, much more.Learn more about The Big Scary "S" Word and sign up for updates here!  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with Dr. Fabian Holt, associate professor in the Department of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University. He is the author of Genre in Popular Music and of Everyone Loves Live Music: A Theory of Performance Institutions, the focus of this episode. For decades, millions of music fans have gathered every summer in parks and fields to hear their favorite bands at such renowned festivals as Lollapalooza, Coachella, and Glastonbury. How did these and countless other festivals across the globe evolve into glamorous pop culture events, and how are they changing our relationship to music, leisure, and public culture? In Everyone Loves Live Music, Dr. Holt looks beyond the marketing hype to show how festivals and other institutions of musical performance have evolved in recent decades, as these once meaningful sources of community and culture are increasingly consumed by corporate giants. Examining a diverse range of cases across Europe and the United States, Dr. Holt upends commonly-held ideas of live music and introduces a pioneering theory of performance institutions. He explores the fascinating history of the club and the festival experience both in San Francisco and New York, as well as a number of European cities. This book also surveys the social forces shaping live music as small, independent venues become corporatized and as festivals transform to promote consumerist trappings. Dr. Holt’s book further provides insight into the broader relationship between culture and community in the twenty-first century. Everyone Loves Live Music reveals how our contemporary enthusiasm for live music is more fraught than we would like to think. In this episode host Michael Shields and Dr. Fabian Holt explore the ins-and-outs of Everyone Loves Music, discussing the history of music festivals, the joys and community they can offer in the most ideal of form, while dissecting in depth how popular music festivals have been developed into mass-market commodities by a cultural industry and capitalistic societies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode host Michael Shields interviews Sally Weintrobe, a Fellow of The British Psychoanalytical Society and a founder member of the Climate Psychology Alliance who Chairs the International Psychoanalytic Association’s (IPA’s) Committee on Climate. In 2021 she won an award from the IPA for her climate work. Her past publications include, as editor and contributor, Engaging with Climate Change, short-listed in 2014 for the International Gradiva Prize for contributions to psychoanalysis. Her recent book, Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and The Culture of Uncare, which is the focus of this episode, tells the story of a fundamental fight between a caring and an uncaring imagination. It helps us to recognize the uncaring imagination in politics, in culture, and also in ourselves.In her enlightening and important book, Sally Weintrobe argues that achieving the shift to greater care requires us to stop colluding with Exceptionalism, the rigid psychological mindset largely responsible for the climate crisis. People in this mindset believe that they are entitled to have the lion's share and that they can 'rearrange' reality with magical omnipotent thinking whenever reality limits these felt entitlements. Throughout the episode host Michael Shields and Sally Wintrobe explore the themes present in Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis, exploring in depth how the rigid psychological mindset of Exceptionalism is largely responsible for the Climate Crisis. They also explore how lively entitlement powers the will to act for and care for others, how changing demographics are motivating the neoliberal empire to act more manipulative and brutal to hold onto power, how the Climate Crisis is affecting today’s youth psychologically, and much, much more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode host Michael Shields interviews Ben Proudfoot, the Oscar nominated creative force behind Breakwater Studios. Dedicated to the art of the short documentary, the studio’s work has been recognized by the Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, The Emmys, The Webbys, James Beard Foundation, and Telluride Film Festival among others. His film A Concerto is a Conversation, co-directed by Kris Bowers and executive produced by Ava DuVernay, debuted at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Short Subject. Proudfoot’s latest documentary, The Queen of Basketball, is the story of Lucy Harris, a pioneer in women's basketball who led a rural Mississippi college to three national titles, scored the first basket in women's Olympic history in 1976 and was remarkably the first and only woman to be drafted into the NBA. In 1992, she became the first Black woman to be inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. Throughout the episode Michael and Ben expound upon Lucy's incredible story, from her upbringing in rural Mississippi to her unparalleled dominance playing college basketball, unto her history making run in the Olympics, and beyond. They also explore what it means to Lucy to be featured in a documentary, how extraordinary it was that she was drafted to play in the National Basketball Association, all the important and fascinating work Ben is doing with Breakwater Studios, his Almost Famous anthology series, and so much more in an episode that serves as an ode to one of the most important American athletes of the 20th century. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.