The Dig

Dan interviews political scientist Megan Ming Francis about the NAACP’s struggle against racist violence in the teens and 20s and how it remade the criminal justice system and the civil rights movement alike. Join a Dig book club! Next book is Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism thedigradio.com/dig-book-club/ Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Mike Davis on what the election reveals about this US political moment and the way forward for the Left. Support this podcast at www.patreon.com/TheDig Join a Dig book club! Next book is Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism thedigradio.com/dig-book-club/

Dan interviews Cornel West on how to think about and act upon the world that this week presented to us. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

What else to talk about right now other than everything about right now? Election, pandemic, BLM, climate, and how the left should think about and struggle with it all. Dan interviews Naomi Klein and Nikhil Pal Singh. Support this podcast on Patreon.com/TheDig Join a Dig Book Club. Next book is Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism thedigradio.com/dig-book-club

Political theorist Wendy Brown on how neoliberalism attacked society and democracy and in doing so laid the foundation for right-wing authoritarianism and nihilism. Episodes from the archives on neoliberalism: A History of Neoliberalism with Quinn SlobodianFamily Values with Melinda Cooper

Roberto Lovato on Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas. Growing up Salvadoran-American in The Mission, fighting with the FMLN in El Salvador, making sense of MS-13, weaving back together the pieces of a transnational history severed by borders and violence. Lovato retells El Salvador and US history through his family’s story. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Join The Dig book club at thedigradio.com/dig-book-club/

Dan interviews legal scholars Aziz Rana and Amna Akbar, and Movement for Black Lives lawyer Marbre Stahly-Butts, on SCOTUS, liberal RBG and court veneration, and other big questions on the law and politics facing the left. Join a Dig book club at thedigradio.com/dig-book-club Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Bathsheba Demuth on her monumental book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. From the 19th century through today, governments and capitalists on the Russian, Soviet, and American Arctic borderlands extract energy from a natural world whose reproductive cycles they don’t comprehend and strive to convert Indigenous people into national subjects. Support this podcast with a contribution at Patreon.com/TheDig

Tech organizer and scholar Meredith Whittaker discusses the negative aspects of social media, worker exploitation, biases, and the economic/social consequences of digital technology. They emphasize the importance of dissent and challenging big tech companies, debunk the myth of platform neutrality, delve into the complexities and risks of AI, address the harmful effects of technology, raise concerns about tech companies gaining too much control during the pandemic, highlight the biases of facial recognition technology, and discuss the need to build worker solidarity.

Dan interviews historian Paul Renfro on his book Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State. Stranger Danger is also this month’s Dig Book Club book. Read and discuss it with fellow listeners, and then on Zoom with Paul by signing up here: thedigradio.com/dig-book-club/ A relevant Dig ep from the archives: Melinda Cooper on her book Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism thedigradio.com/podcast/family-values-with-melinda-cooper/ Please support this podcast with a contribution at Patreon.com/TheDig