Against Climate Doomism | KPFA

As mega-fires rage around the world, why have so many people given up on the climate fight? Environmental sociologist Diana Stuart examines how fatalism about addressing the climate emergency has been...

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Americans: Unequal and Sick | KPFA

The United States spends as much on healthcare as almost half the world combined, yet so many Americans are unhealthy. Would universal healthcare be enough alone to rectify this costly state of ill he...

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Rolling Stone and the Limits of the Counterculture | KPFA

It’s often argued that culture is the gateway to politics — that if you can influence cultural values, it will ultimately change society as whole. In the late Sixties, the counterculture was animated ...

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Financial Censorship | KPFA

Imagine, as a journalist or activist, trying to access your bank accounts and mysteriously finding them frozen. Debanking — when financial institutions close the accounts of those flagged as problemat...

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America’s Drug Binge | KPFA

Americans as a population have an unusually large appetite for psychoactive drugs, whether legal or illegal. And American history has been marked by periodic moral panics over drug use and normalizati...

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In Search of Shade | KPFA

Fossil fuel combustion has made dangerous heat waves ever more frequent. The short term answer — for those who have it — is to turn on the air conditioner. But air conditioning makes the the problem e...

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Thinking Beyond Prisons | KPFA

Prisons won’t be dismantled anytime soon. So what does—or should—prison abolition mean? Anna Terwiel draws from Angela Davis’s writings a host of insights that buttress what Terwiel considers a realis...

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The Fall and Rise of Urban Wildlife | KPFA

One of conservation’s greatest achievements happened mostly by accident and is still hiding in plain sight from most of us. When settlers established cities in the United States, they decimated the ex...

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The Making of a Rightwing Media System | KPFA

How did conservatives come to dominate so much of the media in the U.S.? Historian A.J. Bauer looks at the formative period between the advent and repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in which the right lo...

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Deferring to Computers | KPFA

For many decades, the idea has held sway that we humans should leave consequential decisions to a higher power: computers. And that assumption has become more deeply entrenched, the more powerful comp...

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Why Trans Misogyny? | KPFA

The backlash against trans people, which has swept both the United States and the world in recent years, is not as new as it seems, according to historian Jules Gill-Peterson. She traces the emergence...

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Rethinking Capitalism | KPFA

The rise and fall of unemployment, our dependence on the market for our livelihoods — such things are taken as a given. But economist Clara Mattei suggests we need to recognize them as being fundament...

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Against the Attention Economy | KPFA

It’s been called a new gold rush, yet not of our external environment, but of our internal environment — of our minds and psyches. Historian of science D. Graham Burnett, one of the Friends of Attenti...

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Texas: Vanguard of the Far Right | KPFA

The Texas Republican Party has evolved from a corporate libertarian institution to one in which free market capitalism and evangelical Christianity are united in authoritarianism. Political scientist ...

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The Anti-Defamation League and the Left | KPFA

Scholar Emmaia Gelman reflects on the Anti-Defamation League’s long history of targeting the left in the United States and abroad. She describes the purported civil right group’s involvement in the Re...

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AI, the Media, and the Billionaire Class | KPFA

The Trump administration has exposed the enormous power, as well as astounding wealth, of the billionaire class. And the power of that class partially emanates from their ownership of much of our medi...

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Fighting Surveillance | KPFA

The revelations of widespread surveillance by the National Security Agency after 9/11 brought to light one aspect of how the government has capitalized on digital technology to amass power – and such dangers have only multiplied. Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has been involved in numerous groundbreaking legal battles with the … Continued

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Fighting Surveillance | KPFA

The revelations of widespread surveillance by the National Security Agency after 9/11 brought to light one aspect of how the government has capitalized on digital technology to amass power – and such ...

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Triumph of the Yuppie | KPFA

In the 1980s, yuppies were celebrated in the media and reviled by many others. Working in finance or as management consultants or lawyers, they quickly put their stamp on cities around the country, di...

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Sex and Strength | KPFA

Are women as strong as men? According to science writer Starre Vartan, in some cases, they are stronger. She argues that scientific research over the last several decades shows that culture shapes str...

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Controlling Workers | KPFA

Over the past four centuries, owners have sought to wrest control of the labor process away from the workers in plantations, factories, and warehouse. Ideas about labor management, dressed up as a sci...

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How the GOP Lurched Further to the Right | KPFA

The Republican Party has traditionally been the party of the business class. But since the era of Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, the GOP has been marked by internal strife and ideological chaos — and in ...

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Changing Sound | KPFA

We inhabit a world in which what we look at — what we see, read, scroll through — has often supplanted what we hear. The visual has replaced sound. But, of course, sounds are everywhere, both human-ma...

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U.S. Capitalism, Empire, and Anti-Asian Violence | KPFA

Recessions, trade wars, labor unrest — in moments of societal crisis in the United States, Asian-Americans have been perennially targeted, from the destruction of Chinatowns by white mobs, to the mass...

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Sugar and Capitalism | KPFA

Sugar may seem like a natural, almost eternal substance, cultivated over thousands of years. But it was remade by capitalism and turned into a homogenized commodity. Enslaved labor was central to suga...

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Science Fiction and the Far Right | KPFA

Fiction that imagines alternate futures is often associated with the left — with writers like Octavia Butler and Ursula LeGuin. But the tropes of science fiction are well-suited to the right and, as J...

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American Jews and the Left | KPFA

Jews and the left have been closely associated with each other for well over a century, both in Europe where the Nazis genocidally linked one with the other, and in the United States. Scholar Benjamin...

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The Political Power of the Police | KPFA

The power the police wield on the streets of this country is plain to see. Less visible, but no less formidable, is the immense political power and influence that the police exercise. Historian Stuart...

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The Decline of U.S. Capitalism? | KPFA

The left has a long history of predicting the decline of US capitalism and empire. Some argue that Trump is a symptom of that decline — a strongman chosen by capital to set things right — and that the...

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