This Is Hell!

Producer Dan presents an October 2017 interview with Ajamu Nangwaya and Kali Akuno from Cooperation Jackson, talking about retaking democracy for the people and how to build functional, bottom-up cooperation. Jeff Dorchen presents this week's Moment of (SUPER!)Truth, and Dan declares a winning answer to this week's Question from Hell!

Chuck is out, preparing for surgery, so cross your fingers and send good vibes. Inspired by the preceding episode's new interview with Kate Manne, producer Lindsey plays the 2017 interview with her on her book "Down, Girl - The Logic of Misogyny." We also have this week in Rotten History, and Lindsey reads more answers to this week's Question from Hell!

We welcome writer and philosophy scholar at Cornell University, Kate Manne. Kate talks about her Substack article "Criminalizing Pregnant People: A Brief Retrospective." We present this week's Hangover Cure, as well as the newest installment of Seb's Soapbox, where our resident historian producer takes the Turner Thesis to task.

Jon Schwarz talks about his Intercept article "Right-Wing Supreme Court Continues Its “Great Fraud” About the Second Amendment." We also hear from Jeff Dorchen in this week's Moment of Truth about a new UFO conspiracy, and we announce this week's winning answer to the Question from Hell!

We welcome political theorist and legal scholar Zachari Manfredi to talk about his Boston Review article "Radicalizing Human Rights." Then we have more of your answers to this week's Question from Hell!, as well this week's installment of Rotten History. https://bostonreview.net/articles/radicalizing-human-rights/

Chuck welcomes Spencer Roberts, science writer and contributor to Jacobin Magazine, the Intercept, Wired, and others to the program to talk about his research into the looming extinction of the Mexican grey wolf, a species whose repopuluation efforts are endangered by corrupt government officials, and greedy cattle ranchers. We also have this week's hangover cure, a new Question from Hell!, and producer Seb steps on his soapbox, fighting the misconception that things keep always getting better.

Chuck talks to freelance writer, journalist, and Wire contributor Kamala Thiagarajan about her Wired.com article "India is Not Prepared for the Combination of Heat and Humidity." Jeff Dorchen reveals the Super Truth(R), and we announce this week's winning answer to the Question from Hell!.

Latin Americanist Susan Paulson returns to the show to talk about her contributions to the collected edition "Degrowth & Strategy" published by Degrowth Vienna. Producer Sebastian steps on his soapbox to talk about how our understanding of past sexuality is likely wrong. Answers to this week's Question from Hell! are read and hilarity ensues. https://www.degrowthstrategy.org/

Chuck welcomes Reece Jones to the show to talk about his book "Nobody Is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States." We have your weekly Hangover Cure, this week in Rotten History as well as a brand new Question from Hell!

Chuck welcomes back This is Hell! Brazil correspondent and writer for Brazilwire, and Telesur English, Brian Mier to talk about the upcoming elections in Brazil and the possibility of a coup by far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro. Jeff Dorchen basks in the glory of the Jan 6 Insurrection Show, and we declare the winning answer to this week's Question from Hell!

Chuck welcomes historian Donna Murch to talk about her book "Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Mass Incarceration, and the Movement for Black Lives." We have this week in Rotten History, and new answers to this week's Question from Hell! https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1650-assata-taught-me

Independent scholar Laura Basu talks bout her OpenDemocracy article "Attention Deficit Disorder - The Anticapitalist Condition."

Chuck welcomes economics editor and scholar at the University of Utrecht Laura Basu to talk her OpenDemocracy article "Attention Deficit Disorder, the Anticapitalist Condition." We present this week's hangover cure, and producer Seb gets on his soapbox to talk about why hero worship is dangerous in democratic societies.

Chuck welcomes writer and journalist Pranay Somayajula to the show to talk about his Jacobin article "From Buffalo to India, the Right’s Demographic Paranoia Fuels Deadly Violence." We will also have this week's Rotten History *and* this week's Moment of Truth with Jeff Dorchen *and* this week's winning answer to the Question from Hell!

Chuck is taking a sick day, so Producer Dan plays a 2020 interview with environmental scholar Giorgos Kallis and with Latin Americanist Susan Paulson on their book "The Case for Degrowth." https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-case-for-degrowth--9781509535620

Scholar, writer, professor, and cultural critic Henry Giroux talks to Chuck about his recent Counterpunch magazine article "Targeting Children - Killing Fields in the Age of Mass Shootings." Seb gets on his soapbox for a lesson on why people doing monstrous things should never be denied their humanity. https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/05/31/targeting-children-killing-fields-in-the-age-of-mass-shootings/

Adrian Shirk talks to Chuck about her book "Heaven is a Place on Earth: Searching for American Utopia." In a Moment of Truth Jeff Dorchen takes the Party of Manson Family Values to task. A winner of the weekly Question from Hell! is chosen.

Legal scholar Joseph Marguelies talks to Chuck about his Boston Review article "A Path to Neighborhood Power." We have new answers to this week's Question from Hell!, and other shenanigans.

Political scholar Aasim Sajjad Akhtar talks to Chuck about his Catlyst Journal article "Breaking Afghanistan." We also have a new Rotten History, and your weekly Hangover Cure. https://catalyst-journal.com/2022/03/breaking-afghanistan

Chuck interviews, Dominic Boyer, professor of anthropology at Rice University and Berggruen Institute fellow, who wrote the Noema Magazine article "Why We Have To Give Up On Endless Economic Growth." Jeff Dorchen is doing some deep brooding in a brand new Moment of Truth. A winner is declared for the weekly Question from Hell!

Chuck is back! He welcomes writer, activist, and co-founder of the Los Angeles Tenants Union Tracy Rosenthal, who wrote the New Republic article "Inside L.A.'s Homeless Industrial Complex" Also: A new Rotten History, and a new Hangover Cure, and a new Question from Hell! https://newrepublic.com/article/166383/los-angeles-echo-park-homeless-industrial-complex

Producer Sebastian muses on origin and utility of racial categories and introduces a 2019 interview with writer Ben Ehrenreich explains how Enlightenment-era ideas of progress and Western civilization collapsed time and space around the bumbling, destructive European ideology of early capitalism, and why those ideas still mis-guide the bumbling, destructive European ideology of late capitalism on a dying planet. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/after-the-storm-ehrenreich

Producer Lindsey introduces a 2017 interview with Journalist Sharon Lerner, who reports on the Exxon Mobil refinery polluting the majority-black Charlton-Pollard neighborhood of Beaumont, Texas, and the poisonous, 14 year silence from the EPA after the citizens' civil rights complaint, and connects the mechanisms of environmental racism to a history (and present) of regulatory rollbacks and industry noncompliance in powerless communities across the country.

Producer Dan introduces an interview with African American studies scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor who in her book "Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership" examines the mechanism of racism in the American real estate industry - as post-1968 public policies pushed Black renters and homeowners into a racially stratified, predatory housing market without Civil Rights protection, a predatory inclusion took shape, funneling wealth into private industry and foreclosing the futures of Black families for decades to come. https://uncpress.org/book/9781469653662/race-for-profit/

Chuck is back live in studio for his first full interview in two months, welcoming back independent journalist and writer Alexander Zaitchik, who wrote the book "Owning the Sun - A People's History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines." Chuck and Alexander talk about medical monopolies, the role people like Bill Gates and Joe Biden play in keeping medical patents in place, and why this makes the world sicker and poorer. It is a new week, so we have a new Question from Hell! as well as a new Hangover Cure and an all new Rotten History! https://www.counterpointpress.com/dd-product/owning-the-sun/

Black Agenda Report's Danny Haiphong examines the lies at the root of the story America tells itself - as the corporate media obscures the reality of social relations at the base of American power, our collective notions of exceptionalism and innocence mask the exploitation that occurs around us everyday, and the exploiting class at the top of American society. In a brand new Moment of Truth Jeff Dorchen takes the Catholic Fascist United States Supreme Court Justices to court. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/American-Exceptionalism-and-American-Innocence/Roberto-Sirvent/9781510742369 https://abortionfunds.org/funds/

Writer DaMaris Hill traces a history, and present, of Black women imprisoned in America - under a parallel regime of sexual violence and exploitation in the Jim Crow era and beyond, subject to the edges of a legal and economic system built on repression, risking freedom and safety in the simple acts of navigating daily life in a racist country. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/a-bound-woman-is-a-dangerous-thing-9781635572629/ https://abortionfunds.org/funds/

Producer Dan presents a 2019 interview with organizer Jenny Brown who examines the long history and present politics of the fight for abortions in America, and explains why the left must be clear and honest about abortion - as an unrestricted right, as a social service to be included in national healthcare, and as an unfinished front of the feminist revolution. https://www.versobooks.com/books/3095-without-apology https://abortionfunds.org/funds/

Alex plays two interviews with Black Agenda Report founders Bruce Dixon (Jan 2017) and Glen Ford (Dec 2008)

Producer Sebastian presents a June 2020 interview with Writer Connor Woodman on his Verso blog series "The Imperial Boomerang" and in a new segment, Sebastian gets on his soapbox and lectures about the history of abortion rights and the anti-abortion right in the United States. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs?tag=375 Abortion rights: https://billmoyers.com/story/history-of-abortion-law-america/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/08/abortion-us-religious-right-racial-segregation https://abortionfunds.org/funds/

Writer Jessa Crispin rejects today's mainstreamed, neoliberal feminism, and calls for a return to feminism's radical promise: as a sharp-edged, outsider's social critique, as a challenge to the supremacy of capitalism, and as a path towards a radically reorganized society. https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/why-i-am-not-a-feminist/ https://abortionfunds.org/funds/

Producer Dan presents a 2018 interview Chuck conducted with the amazing multi talented artist Boots Riley prompted by the release of his movie "Sorry to Bother You." Also due to the current news surrounding the United States Supreme Court's impending overturning of Roe v. Wade and the coming outlawing of abortions, here is a link to the National Abortion Fund where you can find a local fund to contribute to. https://abortionfunds.org/about/abortion-funds-101/

Writer Asad Haider explains how today's reductive form of identity politics acts as an obstacle to understanding and confronting oppression. FIRST BROADCAST: June 2018.

Political scientist Cedric Johnson examines the collisions of race, class, policing and activism in the wake of George Floyd's murder, and explains why the Democratic Party and capital threaten to co-opt and re-direct the protest movement's energy unless it commits to a politics of redistribution and power for the working class. https://nonsite.org/the-triumph-of-black-lives-matter-and-neoliberal-redemption/

Anthropologist James Doucet-Battle on sugar, diabetes, racialized science and his book "Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes" from University of Minnesota Press. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/sweetness-in-the-blood

Dan replays two interviews Chuck did with the late, great David Graeber, the first about his book on bureaucracy "The Utopia of Rules," the second on the book "Bullshit Jobs." https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/the-utopia-of-rules/ https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Bullshit-Jobs/David-Graeber/9781501143335

Alex replays Chuck's Oct 2021 conversation with writer Panashe Chigumadzi on her article "The Cry of Black Worldlessness" for Africa Is A Country. https://africasacountry.com/2021/10/the-cry-of-black-worldlessness

Writer adrienne maree brown explores the radical, liberatory potential of pleasure - to reclaim the self from the bounds of oppression, to restore our relationships with other people and the planet, and to imagine (and inhabit) the future worlds we hope to win with our activism. adrienne is author of the book Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good from AK Press. https://www.akpress.org/pleasure-activism.html

Anthropologist Sarah Ihmoud on the dynamics of colonialist violence and domination against indigenous people in Palestine and across the globe, connecting those struggles across borders, and her article Sheikh Jarrah: The Question Before Us for Jadaliyya. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/42757/Sheikh-Jarrah-The-Question-Before-Us

In another This is Limbo! episode, producer Sebastian muses about what drives fascism and presents two interviews, one with Antidote writer Ed Sutton and one with political analyst Natasha Lennard who both mused on these very questions themselves.

Alex replays Chuck's interview with theorist Jodi Dean on her book "Crowds and Party" from Verso Books. [First broadcast January 23 2016]

Sebastian replays Chuck's interview with historian Trevor Griffey on his article "A New Deal for College Teachers and Teaching" written with Mia McIver for the American Association of University Professors website, and in an ALL NEW Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen introduces The Other White Pride: Calcium. [Griffey interview first broadcast May 4, 2021] https://www.aaup.org/article/new-deal-college-teachers-and-teaching

Dan replays interviews with Gary Brecher (The War Nerd) and Mark Ames. [First broadcast Oct 20 2012 and April 30 2011]

Lindsey replays artist Cassie Thornton explores the revolutionary potential of The Hologram - a peer-to-peer system of care between people as equals in an unequal society. [First broadcast August 4, 2020]

Chuck returns! Plus Producer Alex replays Assistant Public Defender Adofo Minka on prisoner uprisings in St. Louis and across the United States [First broadcast April 29, 2021]

Writer and Activist Hadas Thier talks to Chuck about her Dollars & Sense Article "Cryptocurrency Will Not Liberate Us." Jeff Dorchen sees a phantom. Or was it a famine? Everyone wrestles with how to pronounce "paczki." http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2022/0122thier.html

Writer Mary Jane Gibson on her article "Inside California's Cannabis Crisis" for Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/california-weed-cannabis-crisis-emerald-triangle-1302545/

Immigration lawyer Daniel Melo on his article "The Capitalist Imperative Driving Cruel and Bipartisan US Migration Policies" for Black Agenda Report. https://blackagendareport.com/capitalist-imperative-driving-cruel-and-bipartisan-us-migration-policies

Writer Os Keyes on their Real Life article "Condition Critical," and in a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen flags your non-Jewish privilege. https://reallifemag.com/condition-critical/

Writer Daniel Fernandez on his article "The Classroom and the Cell" for The Baffler. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-classroom-and-the-cell-fernandez