Most accounts of post-1950s political history tell the story of of the war on drugs as part of a racial system of social control of urban minority populations, an extension of the federal war on black street crime and the foundation for the "new Jim Crow" of mass incarceration as key characteristics of the U.S. in this period. But as the Nixon White House un ... Show More
Aug 11
John E. McDonough, "America's Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026)
How can a nation with unmatched wealth and medical innovation also have the highest health care costs and the poorest health outcomes among its peers? In America's Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Dr. John E. McDonough offer ... Show More
1 h
Aug 9
Beyond Free Speech: Why AI Governance Demands Freedom of Thought
Are we driving our technology, or is it starting to drive us? In this thought-provoking conversation, Eli Karetny sits down with researcher and author Eduardo Albrecht to explore the invisible, rapidly encroaching frontier of AI governance and data surveillance.Moving far beyond ... Show More
58m 4s
Feb 2023
Helena Hansen et al., "Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America" (U California Press, 2023)
In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some argued that skyrocketing overdoses were “deaths of despair” signaling deeper socioeconomic anguish in white communities. Whiteout: Ho ... Show More
1h 32m
Dec 2024
Helena Hansen et al., "Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America" (U California Press, 2023)
The phrase "racial capitalism" was used by Cedric Robinson to describe an economy of wealth accumulation extracted from cheap labor, organized by racial hierarchy, and justified through white supremacist logics. Now, in the twenty-first century, the biotech industry is the new ca ... Show More
1h 15m
Dec 2020
Kyle Riismandel, "Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975–2001" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)
One of the lures that drew Americans to the suburbs in the years after World War II was the promise of a secure life. By the mid-1970s, however, it seemed that this security was under threat from a variety of sources. In Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Cultu ... Show More
42m 37s
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