Think about the last time that you saw or interacted with an unhoused person. What did you do? What did you say? Did you offer money or a smile, or did you avert your gaze?
When We Walk By: Forgotten Humanity, Broken Systems, and the Role We Can Each Play in Ending Homelessness in America (North Atlantic Books, 2023) takes an urgent look at homelessness in ... Show More
Nov 19
Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations" (Princeton UP, 2025)
In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even tod ... Show More
54m 29s
May 2024
Amy Schiller, "The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It" (Melville House, 2023)
Amy Schiller's The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It (Melville House, 2023) makes an attempt to rescue philanthropy from its progressive decline into vanity projects that drive wealth inequality, so that it may support human flourishing as originall ... Show More
38m 36s
Jul 2024
Amanda McMillan Lequieu, "Who We Are Is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Half a century ago, deindustrialization gutted blue-collar jobs in the American Midwest. But today, these places are not ghost towns. People still call these communities home, even as they struggle with unemployment, poverty, and other social and economic crises. Why do people re ... Show More
41m 40s
Mar 2022
John Zerzan, "When We Are Human: Notes from the Age of Pandemics" (Feral House, 2021)
These are dark and darkening times, challenging us to look deeper to grasp the roots and dynamics of the looming civilizational crisis. Chronic illness of the planet calls for radically new thinking if there is to be any hope of renewal. When We Are Human: Notes from the Age of P ... Show More
58m 17s
Nov 2024
Harvey Whitehouse, "Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World" (Harvard UP, 2024)
Each of us is endowed with an inheritance--a set of evolved biases and cultural tools that shape every facet of our behavior. For countless generations, this inheritance has taken us to ever greater heights: driving the rise of more sophisticated technologies, more organized reli ... Show More
44m 17s
Feb 2019
David Ray Papke, "Containment and Condemnation: Law and the Oppression of the Urban Poor" (Michigan State UP, 2019)
The law does things, writes David Ray Papke, and it says things, and if we are talking about poor Americans, especially those living in big cities, what it does and says combine to function as powerfully oppressive forces that can much more likely be counted on to do harm than go ... Show More
31m 17s
Oct 2024
Lisa-Jo K. Van den Scott, "Walled-In: Arctic Housing and a Sociology of Walls" (Lexington Book, 2024)
Walls profoundly shape the spaces we live in and the places we move through, impinge on our everyday lives, and entangle power relations, identity, and hierarchies. Walled-In: Arctic Housing and a Sociology of Walls (Lexington Books, 2024) explores these effects in the context of ... Show More
53m 30s
Dec 2024
Wendy Pearlman, "The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora" (Liveright, 2024)
War forced millions of Syrians from their homes. It also forced them to rethink the meaning of home itself.
In 2011, Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom. Brutal government repression transformed peaceful protests into one of the most devastating conflicts of our times, ... Show More
1h 4m
Dec 2024
Andy Hines, "Imagining After Capitalism" (Triarchy Press, 2025)
Imagining After Capitalism (Triarchy Press, 2025) is the culmination of a decade-long exploration of what comes next after capitalism. It leverages previous work in developing foresight methodologies, which are featured in two previous books: Teaching about the Future and Thinkin ... Show More
48m 29s
Oct 15
How Can We Break Our Addiction to Contempt? (Update)
<p>Arthur Brooks, an economist and former head of the American Enterprise Institute, believes that there is only one remedy for our political polarization: love. In this 2021 episode, we ask if Brooks is a fool for thinking this — and if perhaps you are his kind of fool?</p><p> < ... Show More
40m 23s
Sep 1
212 - The War Within
In this episode, Noah reflects on the heaviness of living in a world filled with violence, hatred, and suffering. From school shootings to war and personal experiences of pain, he explores the Buddhist teaching of the three poisons: ignorance, greed, and hatred, and how they mani ... Show More
28m 52s