This Is Hell!

From October, Brian Mier, editor and contributor to, “Year of Lead: Washington, Wall Street and the New Imperialism in Brazil,” co-editor of Brasilwire, Brazil correspondent for TeleSur English's News Program, From the South, and co-host on Brazil 24/7. Brian was on to discuss his most recent writing at the time, “Media Spins Lula Victory As Defeat,” which was posted just before Lula da Silva won the Brazilian presidential run-off over incumbent Jair Bolsonaro.

We replay a listener chosen favorite interview from 2022 with Dorothy Roberts, an award-winning author and expert on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare. She is a professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Chuck Mertz interviews Roberts about her latest book, TORN APART: How the child welfare system destroys black families—and how abolition can build a safer world.

Live from Sebastian's living room where he hasn't calibrated his mic correctly, here's the Best of 2022 for Boxing Day with an interview from July 2022 with writer Kate Manne on abortion rights and pregnancy criminalization.

We continue our Best of 2022 series, wherein we revisit the very best interviews of the past year. This week we return to our interview with Gerald Horne, author of, “The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & JIm Crow and the Roots of U.S. Fascism.” Gerald continues his dynasty of repeated appearances on our year-end best-of round-ups! Moreover, this week's Question From Hell contest reaches its electrifying culmination.

We replay a listener chosen favorite interview from 2022 with Laura Mauldin who is a writer, sociologist, and interdisciplinary scholar based in New York City. The interview was initially recorded August 22, 2022 and discusses Mauldin's article "Care Tactics" published by the Baffler https://thebaffler.com/salvos/care-tactics-mauldin

The Listeners (you) chose this August interview with Heather Berg, Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Washington University St. Louis. Dr. Berg talked about her Boston Review article "Freedom, not Benefits: Sex Workers are the Vanguard of Labor. The Left ignores them at its own Peril." We also feature an somewhat new Past inside the Present, present this week's Question from Hell!, and then also give you this week's much needed Hangover Cure.

Michael Hawthorne is on to talk about his investigation into "Forever chemicals: They’re in your drinking water and likely your food. Michael is a Pulitzer-finalist investigative reporter who focuses on the environment and public health for the Chicago Tribune.

Our planned interview is rescheduled for tomorrow. Today we review Rotten History and new answers to the Question from Hell. We play back an interview with Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law, recorded August 5th, 2020. https://thisishell.com/interviews/1214-victoria-law-maya-schenwar

We welcome environmental scholar Leslie Kern to talk about her new book "Gentrification is Inevitable - And other Lies." We also present you this week's (long) Question from Hell!, and have another Icelandic hangover cure. Producer Sebastian has this week's Past Inside the Present, in which he details some of the reasons for Germany's awkward relationship with Israel.

Today's guest had to reschedule, so we replay a past episode, Lindsey has a hellride to work and is called to play back a musical episode featuring artist Wesley WIllis, recovered from the vaults by producer Dan Hill.

Lawyer and activist Flint Taylor returns to the program to discuss his recent article in the Police Misconduct and Civil Rights Law Report "The Wrongful Conviction of Johnnie Lee Savory. Taylor’s work in fighting against police torture in Chicago over the past 29 years has been instrumental in obtaining the conviction and imprisonment of police torture ringleader Jon Burge and the precedent setting decision that upheld the inclusion of former Mayor Richard M. Daley as a co-conspiring defendant in the Tillman civil rights case.

We welcome Associate Professor of Media and Communication Matthew Crain to the show to talk about his Boston Review article "How Capitalism and not a Few Bad Actors Destroyed the Internet." We also present this week's Question from Hell!, have a brand new Hangover Cure, and producer Sebastian talks about how railroad strikes getting cracked down upon by the government is a tradition in this country almost as old as railroads themselves in this week's Past Inside the Present. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-capitalism-not-a-few-bad-actors-destroyed-the-internet/

Mick Dumke is a reporter for ProPublica. His work has focused on politics and government, including investigations of local and federal gun policies, secret police databases and corruption at Chicago City Hall. Mick is on to discuss his reporting on the growing Chicago Housing Authority scandal. Mick's most recent article on the topic at ProPublica is headlined, "Chicago Officials Withhold Key Financial Information as City Hands Public Housing Land Over to Wealthy Ally of the Mayor.

Chuck Mertz speaks with science writer Spencer Roberts and political economist Jan Dutkiewicz about their New Republic Article, "How the Meat Industry Undermines Effective Climate Policy". https://newrepublic.com/article/168766/meat-industry-lobbying-climate This week in Rotten History and new responses to the Question from Hell! Spencer Roberts is a science writer, ecologist, musician, and engineer from Colorado. His writing focuses on corporate greenwashing and science corruption. It is featured in places like Jacobin, Wired, and Current Affairs. @Unpop_Science Jan Dutkiewicz is a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and comes to Harvard after Postdoctoral Fellowships at Johns Hopkins University and with the Swiss National Science Foundation. He is a political economist whose research focuses on large-scale conventional meat production and the emergent world of alternative protein. His work examines how business interests, ethical and environmental debates, and consumer behavior both shape and are shaped by the law, policy, and politics, and how this all influences what Americans eat. @jan_dutkiewicz

Chuck returns to the studio, we have this week's Hangover Cure where Sebastian mispronounces Icelandic names, an all new Question from Hell! for the week, and a brand new installment of The Past inside the Present, talking about the connection between billionaire worship, the Puritans and the history of the prosperity gospel movement. Chuck welcomes historian, writer, and activist Austin McCoy to talk about his Baffler Magazine article "After Floyd - If you can’t rein in the police, you can’t save democracy."

Board Operator Dan selects a Golden Oldie from the This is Hell! vaults while Chuck recuperates from the Creeping Crud. In this selection, Dr. Monique Morris talks about how racism and sexism collide to criminalize Black girls. After which, this week's Question From Hell contest culminates thunderously.

Producer Lindsey Gorry replays an interview from 2019 with political scientist Thea Riofrancos while Chuck recovers from Covid-19. More info on Thea Riofrancos work here: http://www.theariofrancos.com/about And find her on twitter here: https://twitter.com/triofrancos

Chuck is out sick this week, so the producers run the show in Limbo Mode. Sebastian presents a 2015 interview with South African political economist Patrick Bond, talking about the FIFA bribery scandals of which the now (in 2022) ongoing world cup in Qatar is a fruit.

We speak with political science scholar, Nojang Khatami who is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Justitita Center for Advanced Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. Beginning in the fall of 2023, he will be Assistant Professor of Political Science at Fordham University. Nojang is on to talk about his Boston Review article, “The Lifeblood of Iranian Democracy: From street demonstrations to song, dance, film, and poetry, women are advancing a long legacy of struggle against authoritarianism in Iran.”

Alec Karakatsanis joins Chuck Mertz to discuss his piece "Warning to Journalists About Elite Academia" published at https://equalityalec.substack.com/ . Alec is the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps and Author of Usual Cruelty. New responses to the Question from Hell and this week in Rotten History.

Chuck interviews political scientist Lilliana Mason on her books on partisan violence in the United States. We also introduce this week's Question from Hell!, and the weekly Hangover Cure. Producer Sebastian talks about why it's really better to not use the term "Kristallnacht" to talk about the pogroms against German Jews on November 9, 1938.

Board Operator Dan spins some golden oldies; two classic interviews with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Regular shows resume next week!

Lindsey replays an interview with Jenny Odell from May 18th, 2019. Odell is an artist and author of the books How to Do Nothing and the forthcoming, Saving Time. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672377/saving-time-by-jenny-odell/

We revisit an interview with Michael Parenti from November 2005. Chuck is back next week.

Sudip Bhattacharya talks about his article at HardCrackers.com, "Socialism or Suburbia." Sudip is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Rutgers University. He is also a writer, organizer, and you can find his other work at outlets like Protean Magazine, CounterPunch and Reappropriate, and the Aerogram.

Correspondent Brian Mier connects with host Chuck Mertz to discuss the upcoming run-off 2022 Brazilian presidential election between Jair Bolsenaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Also featuring this week's Rotten History, Chuck has Christmas in October, and Lindsey shares the pear harvest from Oriana's Orchard. Brian is an editor and contributor to, “Year of Lead: Washington, Wall Street and the New Imperialism in Brazil,” co-editor of Brasilwire, Brazil correspondent for TeleSur English's News Program, From the South, and co-host on Brazil 24/7.

CD Davidson-Hiers and Jeff Vandermeer speak with Chuck about their article "Is Florida Becoming a Failed State?" published October 11th, 2022 by The Nation. This week's Hangover Cure and new Question from Hell. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/florida-hurricane-ian/ CD Davidson-Hiers is a native Floridian who grew up on a 40-acre horse farm in North Florida. Her work has appeared in the Bitter Southerner, Flamingo Magazine, and USA Today. She works for the nonprofit Education Writers Association while also overseeing the Florida Student News Watch, an organization to mentor new journalists. Her work covering the US Covid-19 vaccine rollout received recognition from NPR, The Washington Post, Soledad O’Brien, and other national news outlets. Jeff VanderMeer’s award-winning novel Annihilation is set in the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge. His environmental advocacy has included helping save cypress swamp in North Florida and sponsoring research into the endangered frosted flatwood salamander. A 35-year resident of Florida, he has previously written about the state for, among others, Current Affairs and The Los Angeles Times.

We have filmmaker Joe Winston on to discuss his new movie, ‘Punch 9 for Harold Washington, “The story of Harold Washington, elected in 1983 as Chicago's first African-American Mayor, the political battles he fought, and his legacy to Chicago and the nation.”

Los Angeles, California-based freelance journalist Cerise Castle speaks with host Chuck Mertz about her research and reporting published on Knock LA: “A Tradition of Violence,” the first history of deputy gangs inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the largest local law enforcement agency in the United States. The investigation was published as a 15-part reporting series exposing 18 gangs, 19 documented murders (all of whom were people of color), and over $100 million dollars in lawsuits paid for by the people of Los Angeles. The podcast of the same name and subject matter is due October 19th 2022. https://knock-la.com/tradition-of-violence-lasd-gang-history/ Cerise Castle specializes in arts & culture, civil rights, crime, and human interest stories. She's produced and hosted segments for the Emmy-award winning nightly news program, VICE News Tonight, NPR, and several podcasts. Her reporting and commentary have been featured in publications like Knock LA, the Daily Beast, the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, and MTV.

We have on Jodi Dean, author of, "Socialist Reconstruction, A Better Future for the United States."

Theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist Liz Theoharis is on to discuss her TomDispatch article, "No More Sacrifices: Mercy Makes Good Policy." Liz is Co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. She is the author of, "Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor," and, "We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People’s Campaign."

Reporter Alex Vuocolo speaks with host Chuck Mertz about his NOEMA Magazine article "The Disappearing Art Of Maintenance" published September 22nd, 2022. This week in Rotten History and new listener responses to the Question from Hell.

Elyas Nawandish is on to talk about his article at The Intercept, “I Watched the Afghan Government Collapse Under the Weight of Its Own Greed: Our leaders failed to give Afghan soldiers the food, tools, and respect they needed to defeat a brutal insurgency.” Elyas is an Afghanistan Observatory Scholar at New America. Since 2014, he has worked with the Kabul-based Etilaat Roz daily newspaper, where he is currently the online chief editor, supervising a team of 20 journalists. Previously, he served as news manager, investigative reporter, and text editor for Etilaat Roz. He has produced around 160 reports and editorials, including 12 major investigations on politics, security, human rights, rule of law, corruption, and abuse of state resources by former Afghan government officials.

We speak with Fatema Ahmad, co-author, along with Azadeh Shahshahani, of a new article at The Progressive, “The Surveillance State Can’t Solve White Supremacy: After the January 6 attack, federal surveillance programs expanded to counter white supremacist violence have made Black and brown communities their main target.” Fatema is executive director of the Muslim Justice League.

Sophie Lewis returns to This Is Hell on Tuesday, October 4th to speak with host Chuck Mertz about her new book, Abolish the Family, out on Verso, October 2022. https://www.versobooks.com/books/4075-abolish-the-family Sophie Lewis is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019), hailed by Donna Haraway as “the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for.” Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso, 2022) is her second book. As a member of the faculty of Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, Sophie teaches courses on feminist, trans and queer politics and philosophy, including family abolitionism, Shulamith Firestone, and Kathi Weeks. With the Out of the Woods writing collective, Lewis contributed to the collection Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis (Common Notions, 2020). With Blind Field Journal, she has helped foster communities of Marxist-feminist cultural criticism. Previously, Dr. Lewis studied English Literature (BA) and Nature, Society and Environmental Policy (MSc) at Oxford University; Politics (MA) at the New School for Social Research; and Geography (PhD) at Manchester University. Her doctoral dissertation, “Cyborg Labor: Exploring Surrogacy as Gestational Work,” sought to reframe the political economy of contract pregnancy for the purposes of an antiwork polymaternalist utopianism. Sophie’s essays and commentaries appear in venues such as n+1, Boston Review, The Nation, The Baffler, Mal, e-flux, the New York Times and London Review of Books; her papers appear in, e.g., Signs, Paragraph, and Feminist Theory. A Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research on Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies, Sophie is nevertheless a freelance writer dependent on public speaking and Patreon (patreon.com/reproutopia). Her lectures are archived at lasophielle.org.

It's Chuck's Birthday! Jubilations all around! We welcome writer, researcher, and oral historian Lyndsie Bourgon to talk about her book "Tree Thieves - Crime and Survival in North America's Woods." We also present your Hangover Cure for this Monday, and have a new Question from Hell! for the week. Also producer Sebastian talks immigration history in another installment of The Past Inside the Present.

Journalist Kari Lydersen is an author and assistant professor of journalism at Northwestern University. She's on to discuss her article at The New Republic, "Can Liberal Evanston, Illinois, Atone for Its Racist Past?"

Hadas Thier returns to This is Hell! to discuss her In These Times Article "A Left Answer to Inflation." Producer Alex returns for one show. We have new answers to this week's Question from Hell!, and This Week in Rotten History.

Chuck talks to cultural anthropologist Andrea Vetter and economic historian Matthias Schmelzer about their new book "The Future is Degrowth - A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism. https://www.versobooks.com/books/3989-the-future-is-degrowth We also have your hangover cure for this Monday, and this week's new Question from Hell!

Investigative journalist Boyce Upholt wrote The New Republic article, "Will the Next Pandemic Start With Chickens?: This spring, a virulent strain of bird flu ripped through U.S. farms. The public hardly noticed. That we could ignore the disease shows just how little we’ve learned about the origin of new viruses."

Host Chuck Mertz speaks with with Geographer Matthew Huber to discuss how individualized focus on the purification of consumer choices divides the working class and depletes energy for collective organizing against the the Capitalist culprits profiting off the extraction of environmental resources. Matthew T. Huber is Professor of Geography in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet published May 2022 on Verso. https://www.versobooks.com/books/3973-climate-change-as-class-war Chuck also discusses the 26th Anniversary Listener Appreciation Party, reads this week in Rotten History, and new responses to the Question from Hell.

Legal scholar Daniel Medwed talks about his book "Barred: Why the Innocent Can't Get Out of Prison." We present your Hangover Cure, talk about the weekend's Listener Appreciation Party, and present this week's Question from Hell!.

Today we have on James Wilt, author of, “Drinking Up the Revolution: How to Smash Big Alcohol and Reclaim Working-Class Joy.” James is a writer and PhD candidate based in Winnipeg, Canada. James discusses how working class people form their relationship with drugs and alcohol when these are commodified by big business interests as well as the way in which enforcement of norms surrounding drugs and alcohol are often racialized.

Dorothy Roberts is an award-winning author and expert on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare. She is a professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Chuck Mertz interviews Roberts about her latest book, TORN APART: How the child welfare system destroys black families—and how abolition can build a safer world. TORN APART available Now at Basic Books https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/dorothy-roberts/torn-apart/9781541675445/

Historian Steve Fraser talks about his Tom Dispatch article "The Trump Supreme Court is Nothing New," about how the Supreme Court has over time been used to kneecap the democrat process in the U.S., and how it's been originally designed to provide that function to uphold the rule of the powerful against the masses. https://tomdispatch.com/the-trump-supreme-court-is-nothing-new/

Steve Fraser talks about his Tom Dispatch article "The Trump Supreme Court is Nothing New." Chuck complains about the hell of a week he's had. Seb presents another Past inside the Present, in which he muses about what 9/11 means in the age of Covid. We reveal this week's Question from Hell! (anniversary edition), and this week's Hangover Cure.

Chuck Mertz talks with Sean O'Leary about his writing for the Ohio River Valley Institute on the impact of the natural gas industry on Appalachian Americans. Also including this week's Hangover Cure, Rotten History, and Introducing this week's Question from Hell. Featuring a first announcement of musical artists performing at This Is Hell's listener appreciation party on September 17th, 2022. Sean O’Leary is senior researcher of energy and petrochemicals at the ORVI and is a native of Wheeling, WV. He has written about coal, natural gas, and their role in the economies of Appalachia in a book, a newspaper column, and blog titled, “The State of My State”. Previously, Sean served as communications director at the NW Energy Coalition in Seattle, Washington.

Brianna Muir wrote the Sapiens article, "An Archaeology of Personhood and Abortion: Opinions about fetal personhood and abortion have fluctuated enormously throughout history and differ in surprising ways between cultures." Brianna is a master’s student in biological anthropology at the University of Central Florida. As an emerging bioarchaeologist, she is interested in how integrative approaches can be used to address questions of personhood, identity, and agency in the past. In particular, she investigates how these factors may have shaped and influenced a person’s lived experiences. Muir received her B.A. from the Australian National University in 2019 and has undertaken fieldwork and research in the Philippines, Vanuatu, and Australia.

William Deresiewicz is a writer and former professor of English at Yale University. William discusses his article "Why I Left Academia (Since You're Wondering)" published August 17th 2022 on Quillete.com with host Chuck Mertz. New responses to the Question From Hell and this week in Rotten History

We have on Tarence Ray from the Trillbilly Worker's Party podcast to discuss the devastating effects of recent flooding in Eastern Kentucky and how the government response affected the poor and working class.