KPFA - Letters and Politics
KPFA
Letters & Politics seeks to explore the history behind today’s major global and national news stories. Hosted by Mitch Jeserich.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Sep 17, 2025 • 53min
The Killing of Charlie Kirk and the Crackdown on the Left
Guest: Ben Burgis is a philosophy professor at Rutgers University, a columnist for Jacobin magazine, the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give Them An Argument, and the author of several books, most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters.
Photo credit: Wikimedia
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Sep 16, 2025 • 60min
Jeff Chang on the Legendary Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America.
Guest: Jeff Chang is an award-winning journalist and author who has written extensively on culture, politics, the arts and music. He is the author of the books Who We Be: The Colorization of America. We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation; Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation; and his latest, Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America.
Photo credit: Wikimedia
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Sep 15, 2025 • 18min
The Power of Adrienne Rich
Guest: Hilary Holladay is a biographer, novelist, poet, and scholar of modern and contemporary American literature. She is a former director of the Jack and Stella Kerouac Center for American Studies and professor of English at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. Holladay is the author of several books, her most recent is The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography.
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Sep 11, 2025 • 60min
What Monsters Tell Us About Us
Guest: Natalie Lawrence, author of Enchanted Creatures: Our Monsters and Their Meaning.
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Sep 10, 2025 • 60min
Serial Killers & Toxins: The Correlation
Guest: Caroline Fraser is the author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize, and the Plutarch Award for best biography of the year. She is also the author of God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, and her latest Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers.
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Sep 9, 2025 • 21min
A History of the American Jewish Left and Cultures of Anti-Zionism
Guest: Benjamin Balthaser is associate professor of multi-ethnic US literature at Indiana University, South Bend. He is the author of Anti-Imperialism Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War and his latest Citizens of the Whole World: The American Jewish Left and Cultures of Anti-Zionism.
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Sep 8, 2025 • 6min
Shirley Chisholm, A Revolutionary Thinker
Guest: Zinga A. Fraser is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College and Director of the Shirley Chisholm Project on Brooklyn Women’s Activism. She is the author of Shirley Chisholm in Her Own Words: Speeches and Writings.
Photo credit: Wikimedia
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Sep 4, 2025 • 1min
Federal Takeover of D.C.
Guest: Clarence Lusane is an author, activist, scholar, and journalist. He is a Professor of Political Science at Howard University and is the author of many books including his latest Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy.
Photo credit: Airmen from the D.C. National Guard were deployed in response to protests and riots after the death of George Floyd. (U.S. Army photo by Kevin Valentine)
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Sep 3, 2025 • 60min
Understanding the Current Redistricting War
Guest: John Nichols is the executive editor of The Nation. He previously served as the magazine’s national affairs correspondent and Washington correspondent. He has written, co-written, or edited over a dozen books on topics ranging from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Party to analyses of US and global media systems. His latest, co-written with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Times bestseller It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.
Credit: Wikipedia by Elkanah Tisdale (1771-1835). Originally published in the Boston Centinel, 1812., Public Domain,
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Sep 2, 2025 • 7min
Ending Isolation with Dr. Terry Kupers
Guest: Dr. Terry A. Kupers is a psychiatrist and professor emeritus at The Wright Institute in Berkeley, California. He is an expert on the intersection of mental health and incarceration and is the author of several books including Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars, Solitary: The Inside Story of Supermax Isolation, and most lately, Ending Isolation: The Case Against Solitary Confinement co-authored with Christopher William Blackwell, Deborah Zalesne, and Kwaneta Harris.
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