A shattering account of the crack cocaine years from award-winning American historian David Farber, Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed (Cambridge University Press, 2019) tells the story of the young men who bet their lives on the rewards of selling 'rock' cocaine, the people who gave themselves over to the crack pipe, and the oft ... Show More
Today
Sebastian Truskolaski, "Adorno and the Ban on Images" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Adorno and the Ban on Images (Bloomsbury, 2022) upends some of the myths that have come to surround the work of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno – not least amongst them, his supposed fatalism.
Sebastian Truskolaski argues that Adorno's writings allow us to address what is argua ... Show More
58m 5s
Today
Amy Hughes, "An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
Harry Watkins was no one special. During a career that spanned four decades, this nineteenth-century actor yearned for fame but merely skirted the edges of it. He performed alongside the brightest stars, wrote scores of plays, and toured the United States and England, but he neve ... Show More
1h 4m
Yesterday
Heather Davis, "Plastic Matter" (Duke UP, 2022)
Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Nanoplastics penetrate our cell walls. Plastic is not just any material—it is emblematic of life in t ... Show More
1h 1m
Jan 2021
Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy
In the early 1980s, the crack epidemic tore through America like a tsunami, ravaging all in its wake. And the destructive effects on people's lives, families, and communities are still deeply felt decades later. “Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy” examines the drug’s devast ... Show More
28m 59s
Jan 2022
Martin Luther King Jr: Dialectics, Materialism, and the Black Radical Critique of Racial Capitalism with Andrew J. Douglas and Jared A. Loggins
<p>In this episode we interview Andrew J. Douglas and Jared A. Loggins to discuss their recently published book, <em>Prophet of Discontent: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Critique of Racial Capitalism</em>.<span class= "Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p>Andrew Douglas is a p ... Show More
1h 44m
May 2024
Introducing - Cocaine Inc.
Coming on 9 June - Inside the global cocaine industry, where profits are counted up in millions and losses measured out in murders. This worldwide investigation from The Times, Sunday Times and NewsCorp Australia, reveals how the drug business works like any multi-billion dollar ... Show More
2m 4s
Jan 2021
“White Americans Need to Understand That Their Interests Coincide with Black People’s Interests”
In a conversation with Professor Brian Lowery, Dr. Spencer Crew, professor of history and art history at George Mason University joins Dr. Clayborne Carson, professor emeritus of history at Stanford and the director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute ... Show More
33m 31s
Mar 2023
Racism, Class, and the Opioid Crisis
Featuring Helena Hansen, Jules Netherland, and David Herzberg on how American capitalism and its illusions of whiteness both created the opioid crisis and shaped the response to it. We are discussing their book Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in Ameri ... Show More
1h 43m
May 2021
The Rise and Fall of Black Wall Street
May 30, 1921. Dick Rowland, a Black teenager, works as a shoeshine in the predominantly white downtown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. On his break, he goes into a nearby office building to use the restroom, and gets on the elevator. Sarah Page, a white teenager, is the elevator operator. Wh ... Show More
26m 16s