WFHB: Recent Episodes
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Here are the opening paragraphs of an article in the Guardian from March 30 of this year: Thousands of graduate student workers around the US at private and public universities have gone on strike over the past few years, from Ivy League institutions like Harvard University and Columbia University to public state universities in California. …
Today we present Part 2 of the Producer’s Choice Awards – The Poetry Show. Poetry – Many might turn away at even the mention of the word, but to do so would miss out on work that reveals humans grappling with the great questions of their moments. Today we feature four poets who help us …
Today we’ll hear four clips from four shows that weave together ideas of slavery, imperialism, and ideological and environmental pollution. Each clip is about ten minutes long. Those shows are: Slavery’s Imperial Skein: Knitting Together the Capitalist Empire with guest Zach Sell Spreading Global Freedom, or the Divine Right to Traffic Drugs, Guns, and People, …
Last week, the Indiana Grad Workers Coalition announced preparations for a strike vote in early April. This step was provoked by IU administrators, who have stonewalled recognition of a grad workers union, despite the supermajority of IU grad workers who have signed union cards. This sequence, including recent grad workers’ protests at the IU Board …
When Rasul Mowatt first shared his work on this book with me I immediately thought of it as “The Book of Interchange.” Its investigative breadth seemed to run on a parallel track to this program, and in fact, many of the books and authors cited by Rasul have appeared on the program. Of course, this …
In his 1923 book, Towards a New Architecture, French architect Le Corbusier wrote, The machinery of Society, profoundly out of gear, oscillates between an amelioration, of historical importance, and a catastrophe. The primordial instinct of every human being is to assure himself of a shelter. The various classes of workers in society to-day no longer …
Marie Louise Berneri’s Journey Through Utopia, written in 1950, opens with a dissection of the reactionary authoritarianism of Plato’s Republic in which the State must create a mythology of divinity and purity in its Guardian class to mystify the masses. Berneri writes: “Throughout history one sees that the existence of a State implies the division …
This episode from October 10, 2021 begins a 3-part series with Rasul Mowatt about his book The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence which will take us on an historical tour of the use of the City as the locus of State power – where the State is given form, we might say embodied, …
In his new book, The Writer’s Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five, author Tom Roston examines the connection between Kurt Vonnegut’s life and his anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Roston spent some time researching his subject here in Bloomington, where the Lilly Library at Indiana University houses the Kurt Vonnegut Manuscript Archives. Did Vonnegut …
Today much of the history of American radicalism, including the work of cartoonist Art Young, languishes in obscurity just when it is needed most. But be cheered, along with Michael Mark Cohen’s website, Cartooning Capitalism: Art Young and the Cartoons of American Radicalism, there are now two collections of Young’s work in print, both out …
When will you come, O Hidden One Portuguese dream of every age, To make me more than the faint breath Of an ardent God-created yearning? Ah, when at last will you, Returning, turn my hope into love? In the aftermath of the death of his father (by tuberculosis) and in the face of losing his …
This is the first of two shows on Fernando Pessoa, perhaps the greatest modern Portuguese poet, who proclaimed himself greater than Luís Vaz de Camões, author of The Lusiads, an epic fantasy of the adventuring, marauding, slaving, nation published in 1572. And in a like manner, Pessoa strives to better, or at least equal, another …
Our rising awareness that we have destroyed our planet has simultaneously provided us not with remorse or resolve but with a new fantasy: that the Anthropocene delivers an opportunity to remake our terrestrial environment thanks to the power of technology. Today’s guest says “No!” in thunder. In The Unconstructable Earth (Fordham) Frédéric Neyrat proposes an …
Today we repeat our May 25th episode with poet, dramatist, essayist, and novelist, Thalia Field. This Extended Version of “Captivating Animals” with Thalia Field includes a discussion of Émile Zola and his attempt to recreate in fiction the scientific methodology of the Positivists and Claude Bernard; a reading of a medical journal article on the …
In this episode of Interchange we welcome back Holly Buck whose new book is Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough, published by Verso. And as we did in our previous show with Buck, which was called “Capturing the Carbon Imaginary,” we’ll feature music from Polish jazz pianist and composer Krzysztof Komeda. Komeda …
Our topic today is a modernizing, industrializing, Japan, and the life and thought of Tanaka Shozo, the the late 19th and early 20th century Japanese peasant, politician, land speculator, liberal parliamentarian, transgressor against the Emperor, and environmental rights activist. But, we are, in the end, talking about liberal modernity and industrial capitalism across the globe. …
Today’s show is a repeat from June 25, 2019. In her book, Carceral Capitalism, poet and scholar Jackie Wang confronts mass incarceration in the US by delving into the processes that feed into and maintain the prison system: anti-black racism, predatory lending, algorithmic policing, privatized prisons, credit scams, data analytics and histories of exclusion. The …
In an English romantic novel from 1796, the title character and hero, Marchmont, exclaims “is it possible that for a small sum, such as it is likely such people as these can owe, their creditor has a right to shut them up from the common air, and use of their limbs, by which alone there …
Today we begin a conversation with Rasul Mowatt about his book The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence which will take us on an historical tour of the use of the City as the locus of State power – where the State is given form, we might say embodied, in things like city …
In this repeat from March 13, 2018, we’re joined by noted film scholar, Jim Naremore, author of Charles Burnett: A Cinema of Symbolic Knowledge; Michael Martin, editor-in-chief of Black Camera: an International Film Journal, and professor in the Media School at Indiana University, who values Burnett as an artist who shows the banality of oppression; …
Today we discuss the work of the late Noel Ignatiev using the memoir that has just been published by Charles H. Kerr. It’s called Acceptable Men: Life in the Largest Steel Mill in the World. That steel mill is the Gary Works of US Steel which was indeed the largest steel mill in the world …
Today we engage with a masterpiece…literally: scholar Steve Volan’s Master’s thesis, Gownsburg: The Campus as Municipal Phenomenon. Volan has also been a City Council member in Bloomington, Indiana since 2004. In Gownsburg, the politician and the geographer seek common ground in order to describe what the University does well – but more importantly, to help …
The Checkerboard Lounge permanently closed its doors in 2015 – but these doors were not those of the storied blues shrine that had stood on 43rd Street since 1972. The demise of this cultural mainstay opens Davarian Baldwin’s new book, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universites Are Plundering Our Cities. In 2003 …
With the IPCC’s most recent report clanging “Code Red for Humanity” we revisit our show with Jason Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life, from December 2019…it’s only gotten, and will continue getting, worse. Interchange – Disorganizing Nature: On the Capitalocene with Jason Moore “Moore’s writing is that of a sincere, discerning and …
Our opening song is the opening track off of Metaraga, the 2020 release by the Purna Loka Ensemble for Origin Records. This is “Syzygy.” In case you’d never heard that word (like me) I’ll offer the definition: A syzygy is the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies (such as the sun, moon, and earth …
Today’s show is a repeat from June 2, 2020. In the introduction we state that Louisiana had the highest rate of mortality from COVID-19 in the United States. That is no longer the case. Louisiana is now 7th on that list with the following states now having higher rates of mortality (deaths per 100,000): New …
For today’s show we welcome two guests – returning to Interchange is Viren Murthy, associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and also joining us is Annapurna Mamidipudi who is currently a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. They’ve co-authored …
Original air date August 22, 2017. Philosopher, poet, and revolutionary, José Martí, believed that knowledge and understanding do not originate within us, but come to us through our cultural institutions and that what is expressed when you “express yourself” is a collective mind and so if your culture is imperial, slave-holding, and expansionist, what kind …
Today’s show is a repeat of “Roll Jim Crow” (April 30, 2019) about the very intentional practice of white supremacy by the corporate managers of the American Tobacco Company and how, via corporate imperialism, that same racial project found expression in countries all over the world, most notably China. Some of the topics covered are: …
How can one expect the revolutionary struggles in Qing China at the turn of the 20th century to matter to humans in the United States? In the wake of celebrating the outcome of the American Revolution in 1776 we might turn our attention to revolutionary parallels. The great globe has been settled, divided, conquered, and …
Our opening song is “Cherokee” from Count Basie, featuring Buck Clayton, which is, I promise, oddly apropos for a show which centers on narco trafficking in East Asia. The music for this program features two men who likely had some measure of influence on each other’s future work: American Jazz Trumpeter Buck Clayton and Chinese …
Last week’s show with Zach Sell was about how US Slavery troubled the imperial imaginary, asking if US plantation overseers could translate the brutal practices of slavery’s violent efficiencies onto Britain’s colonial empire in India and the West Indies in the mid-19th century. Next week’s show with Mark Driscoll again centers on Imperial Britain and …
While today’s conversation centers on slavery’s influence during the forty years from the 1830s to the 1870s, we’re going to begin a bit prior to that with a journal entry by Benjamin Banneker who lived from 1731 to 1806 near Ellicott’s Mills, Maryland (now known as Ellicott City). In that entry Banneker recalled a “great …
Today’s show offers a remix of a July 2016 interview with Alex Lichtenstein on the documentary photographs of Margaret Bourke-White, “Focus on Apartheid.” The conversation was recorded live in our WFHB studios. All of our music for this remix comes from five albums by Johnny Dyani, South African double bassist and pianist. In the early …
This Extended Version of “Captivating Animals” with Thalia Field includes a discussion of Émile Zola and his attempt to recreate in fiction the scientific methodology of the Positivists and Claude Bernard; a reading of a medical journal article on the “insanity” of antivivisectionists; the tragedy of Charles Darwin’s “support” for vivisection. Radio Version of Captivating …
Our guest today, Thalia Field, is an acclaimed experimental novelist, essayist and poet, modes of writing she often combines in one text. It’s also likely that historical figures, philosophers, or dog trainers, will walk onto the page to be the connective tissue between multiple distinct texts that span decades. In what follows, we’ll hear Field …
We begin with some “Happy” news…last week the New York Court of Appeals—one of the most influential state courts in the United States—agreed to hear the habeas corpus case Happy the elephant – an autonomous and cognitively complex nonhuman animal who has been imprisoned at the Bronx Zoo for over four decades. This marks the …
Today’s show is about the life and work of Edward Said, author, literary critic, teacher, musician, public intellectual, and Palestinian American. And all our music today comes from Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, a favorite of Edward Said’s and the subject of several of Said’s essays. Notably, “Glenn Gould, the Virtuoso as Intellectual” and “The Music …
Our show today selects segments from four recent programs that highlight Colonial Mentality…and of course I’m stealing that phrase from the great Fela Kuti – whose song of the same name opens this show. Our music throughout the show comes from each of the original programs. We’ll begin with our show on the revolutionary life …
Today we’ll revisit our interview with historian Nancy Isenberg about her book, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. But there’s a twist – I’ve re-edited the program to make use of a broader musical perspective, feeling like I had betrayed the spirit of the program in my original choices. Isenberg’s 2016 …
Because I want to use this introduction to correct a gap in the show today – entirely of my doing – I’ll have to rush a bit to tell you what you will hear about. Here we go: Booker T. Washington and Racial Conservatism Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and his “machine politics” W. E. B. Du …
Angels: what do we really know about them? Where do they come from, what are they made of, how do they communicate and perceive? Today’s guest, Eliot Weinberger, has mined and deconstructed, resurrected and distilled centuries of theology into his new book, Angels & Saints. And when you’re trying to find out about angels, it’s …
Born in poverty in rural Vermont, the Pennsylvania politician, Thaddeus Stevens, was among the first to see the Civil War as an opportunity for a second American revolution—a chance to remake the country as a true democracy which meant equal suffrage for all and more importantly the necessity of being a landowner. One of the …
Today’s show is a somewhat altered version of a program that first aired on November 3rd, 2015, called Tracking Subversives with the noted scholar of the “literary Left,” Alan Wald. According to Wald, the aim of the literary radical is “to endow history with meaning.” Wald has published a trilogy of books brought out by …
(Original air date: May 19, 2020) In the United States of the 1950s there was a struggle over the very idea of what it would mean to be an American. After World War II, an American could ride high on military power and new technologies. But the Cold War and Nuclear Anxiety undermined the very …
Our opening song is “Stardust,” a song written by Indiana native Hoagy Carmichael and here performed by Dave Brubeck off the live album Jazz at Oberlin recorded in May of 1953. In June of that same year Sylvia Plath would find herself in New York as an intern at Mademoiselle magazine. In August she would …
Part One of “The Automation Ruse” aired on February 9th and featured author Jason E. Smith whose new book, Smart Machines and Service Work, is subtitled “Automation in an Age of Stagnation,” and it’s that crisis of stagnation that propels us into today’s conversation with Aaron Benanav, a researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin and …
We open the show with “The Purest Kind of Guy,” performed by Paul Robeson, a song from Marc Blitzstein’s 1941 opera No For An Answer which concerns the life and fate of members of a social club of Greek-American waiters, hotel-workers, restaurant-workers, chefs, laundresses, chambermaids, taxi-drivers, who are out-of-work. In 1958, Blitzstein was subpoenaed to …
In our previous conversation with Eileen Hunt Botting (April 2020) as the pandemic began to deceptively settle into our routines we focused on Mary Shelley’s post-apocalypse novel, The Last Man – a book which explored loss in its most extreme form in order to find a more humane way to live and love, and create …
We’ll open with “Powerhouse” performed here by Don Byron off of Bug Music from 1996. Composed by Raymond Scott in 1937, “Powerhouse” was featured in over 40 Warner Bros. cartoons and perhaps best known for its use in the 1946 Looney Tunes cartoon “Baby Bottleneck” which stars Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. 1946 is also …
Today’s show is a “repackaging” of a program from August 2015 about service sector workers and the future of unions with a focus on the question can there be a labor movement with any strength in the service sector? Perhaps that movement needs to find new forms of organization to stay relevant. In the coming …
Today we feature the radical work of Muriel Rukeyser, whose poetics treatise, The Life of Poetry, first published in 1949, can be called an anti-Fascist manifesto. We struggle at times to place Rukeyser inside our understanding of politics and poetry as she herself struggled to not be placed – like Thoreau, she did not wish …
It’s January 19, 2021, the day after the nation’s official sanction of a narrow understanding of the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the day before the country “swears in” a new president, the representative of one of only two parties allowed to compete for the style of window dressing in this House of …
Born in 1866 Art Young was the exact contemporary of W. E. B Du Bois though Du Bois would outlive him by 20 years, and he was about a decade younger than the great Indiana Socialist Eugene V. Debs. Young was the most widely recognized and beloved cartoonist of the golden age of American radicalism. …
Today’s episode looks at social reproduction on the margins of the state – where there is a vitalizing drive to create life beyond, against, and outside of imposing limitations, and a persistence of radical sociality — a fundamental challenge to the normalized organization of life around degradation and exploitation. This vitalizing drive is what our …
It’s December 29th. For our last show of 2020 we’ll turn back to a program from July 2015 as an attempt to hit the reset button. While the book of Ecclesiastes laments there’s nothing new under the sun, the Middle Ages lights the way for the old to become new again. We need to find …
It’s the holiday season, a time of encounter with religious traditions even for the most secular people. This year, the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of Black men and women by police has highlighted socio-economic inequity, the violence of the state, and the need for new forms of life that do not rely on police, …
Our show today is “Patterns of Segregation and Alibis for Abandonment,” Part 2 of our conversation with Walter Johnson about his book, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States published by Basic Books. The opening song is the main theme from the 1944 musical film “Meet Me …
Today’s show is Part One of our conversation with Walter Johnson on his book The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States published by Basic Books We’ll open with “Skin Deep” from Duke Ellington’s “Black, Brown and Beige” performed here by Louie Bellson and His All-Star Orchestra featuring …
Once again we’re joined by Kimberley Brownlee to talk about the necessity of Social Rights being a rock-bottom human right. We need each other and we need to be needed so that we might become fully human. Last week we discussed how Social Rights should have priority as human rights in the same way that …
This is the first of two conversations I had with Kimberley Brownlee about her recent book Being Sure of Each Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms. Brownlee writes that our social needs are so fundamental, basic, and universal, that they lead us necessarily into the territory of human rights. Meeting our social needs …
Today we’re stalking the middle class – from Marx to Middletown (Muncie, IN) to Macomb County, Michigan – to reveal what it’s hiding. Our conversation with historian David Roediger took place about a month ago on October 14th and in between then and now fell November 3rd, Election Day in the U.S., and we have …
Last week was a tense time for many, as Joe Biden has claimed victory in the presidential election, and for the first time in one hundred and fifty years, the sitting president has refused to concede. This has raised the prospect, however distant and indistinct, of civil war and called survival into question. It’s in …
It’s Election Day, Tuesday, November 3, 2020, and you’re listening to Interchange on WFHB. Okay, so, this is a repeat airing of a program that appeared BTD or Before The Donald, in what seems decades ago, August of 2015. Tonight, while we chew our nails and continually refresh our favorite likely partisan election results site …
Last week I spent a few days with Bloomington’s Scott Russell Sanders, a well-known writer of novels, short stories, children’s books, and essays. His work is generally described as “nature writing” though as we’ll hear, Sanders does not accept this, insisting he’s an “earth” writer. To clarify, I didn’t actually spend time with Sanders – …
The deeply racist Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Faulkner once wrote in his 1951 novel, Requiem for a Nun, that the past isn’t dead, it’s not even past. In that same book Faulkner has the “nun,” which carries the meaning of prostitute in Shakespeare’s time, a Black drug addict named Nancy, offer that salvation comes from …
In 1936, twenty-two-year-old Muriel Rukeyser, who had just won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book Theory of Flight, was suddenly (almost accidentally) in Spain as a journalist to cover the Olimpiada Popular, or People’s Olympiad, a protest event against the 1936 Berlin Olympics presided over by Hitler and the Nazi Party. Intended …
In April, 1955, representatives from twenty-nine governments of Asian and African nations gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to discuss peace and the role of the Third World in the Cold War, economic development, and decolonization. The twenty-nine countries that participated represented a total population of 1.5 billion people, 54% of the world’s population. The conference was …
The 1980’s farm crisis defined an entire generation of farmers and the rural communities that surrounded and relied on them. Interest rates soared. Farm land value dropped. A decade of record-breaking production in farm commodities led to a glut, a surplus, that depressed prices. Exports declined as the U.S. imposed an embargo on the Soviet …
(Original air date: July 30, 2019) Forget the haters – they have not read deliberately nor with imagination, only as partisans. You could do much worse than spend many hours reading and studying just two of Thoreau’s great essays, “Civil Disobedience” and “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” The first, influential for a non-violent response …
Our opening song is “Ezz-thetic,” from the 1961 release Ezz-thetics by George Russell. In the conversation to come we’ll make reference to the American modernist poet Ezra Pound, and what the literary scholar Hugh Kenner termed “The Pound Era” in his 1971 book. Pound is perhaps best known for the poetic movement he named Imagism …
Late last month in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the police shooting of a Black man named Jacob Blake set off riots and looting in a city just a little smaller than Bloomington, Indiana. Three months prior, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin prompted a string of riots and looting that resonated throughout …
Our opening song is “Brother Malcolm” by Archie Shepp, from his 1999 release Conversations. Archie Shepp, surely one of the great political philosophers of so-called Jazz, accompanies us throughout. While preparing for this conversation another Black man, Jacob Blake, was shot in the back by police, this time in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but it could have …
This is a repeat airing of an October 9, 2018 live interview with Micol Seigel. *** In Violence Work, Micol Seigel shows how the police put violence to work for the state; policing being the quintessential translation of state power. She highlights a number of fallacies or myths, about policing: that it is civilian and distinguishable …
The current uprisings, which are beginning to threaten the status quo of policing in the United States and bringing the demands of abolition into the broad daylight of public debate, have created an unprecedented potential for radical change in the US. But these threats and demands upon the carceral logic of state violence are not …
Our guest today is Yannick Marshall and as I find all his recent essays crystallizations of important truths about the US of A, I’ll let his words serve as an introduction to our conversation. This is from “The Racist’s Peace“: In the times when videos of Black people being killed fall out of the news …
The title of our opening song, performed by Deacon Tom Jones, from the compilation album Mississippi Saints and Sinners, “If I Had My Way I’d Tear this Building Down,” serves as an epigraph to Baldwin’s 1972 masterpiece, the essay collection No Name in the Street, which features heavily in our program today. Born on August …
Civil-rights leader John Lewis died Friday, July 17th, at the age of 80. Today we’ll pay tribute to the life-work of Lewis by revisiting our September 2015 program “ “Necessary Trouble: A Graphic Example from John Lewis.” This is an edited version. Host and Producer Doug Storm interviews Nate Powell and Andrew Aydin about their …
Today we speak with anarchist author Kristian Williams about his interest in George Orwell and Oscar Wilde, seemingly quite disparate thinkers to attract one’s admiration. But it turns out that Williams isn’t the first anarchist to be interested in them. It also turns out that Orwell himself admired Wilde, writing in a letter to a …
Think of it this way, W. E. B. Du Bois, born in February 1868, that’s 3 years after the end of the American Civil War, two years after Melville’s volume of Civil War poetry, Battle Pieces, died in August 1963, at 95, the year John F. Kennedy is assassinated, the year Medgar Evers is assassinated, and the day …
Today we’re joined by two of the four hosts of the Black Myths Podcast which is produced in Indianapolis: Too Black, a spoken word poet and teaching artist, and elle roberts, a writer and facilitator. As described on the show’s website, “The Black Myths Podcast is an informative conversational show analyzing popular myths about Black …
Today, workers in the United States are out of work. After the market free fall this spring, crowded lines at food banks replace crowded sports arenas. All industries contracted. Businesses of all sizes floundered. More than 20 million people lost their jobs in April alone, and 6.6 million unemployment claims were filed. In three months, …
The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25th has quickly become the catalyst which has given rise to mass uprisings in every major city in the United States. In the days following Floyd’s murder, thousands upon thousands of people across the country have taken to the streets in a massive display of …
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the figure of the Virus demands our attention. Elizabeth Povinelli’s conceptual work on the Virus feels prescient. Povinelli is a critical theorist, filmmaker, and Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late settler liberalism that would …
Let’s begin with what prompted me to contact today’s guest – the opening paragraph from an article from April 30th in The Nation magazine. In 1807, Heinrich von Kleist published a short story called “The Earthquake in Chile.” Its heroes are a man sitting in prison and a woman in a convent, each confined for …
In the United States of the 1950s there was a struggle over the very idea of what it would mean to be an American. After World War II, an American could ride high on military power and new technologies. But the Cold War and Nuclear Anxiety undermined the very real economic prosperity being experienced by …
We’re not talking about the mind today, but of internment, and ghettos, of settlement camps. Today’s conversation focuses on the history and origins of concentration, a form of biopolitics that seeks to manage and structure the movement of social groups in a predictable manner. Modern forms of concentration have become a nearly ubiquitous force of …
It’s May 5th, 2020 and today we’re going to bring our interview with Joshua Clover on poetry and crisis, strikes and riots, back to your attention. This conversation took place at the end of September in 2015 when Clover was completing his Verso book Riot. Strike. Riot that would be published in May of 2016. …
Our conversation (recorded on 4/17) highlights the way we think about medical, social and policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. An event like this reveals a “complex system” of interactions at the intersection of economics, social systems, and the disease itself. The goal is to try to attain some lucidity in the face of innumerable …
Just as so many of us know the story of Frankenstein’s Monster without having read the novel that birthed him, so too we know the story of Lionel Verney, the last man on earth. The fear of being left totally alone and the sorrow of loss are powerfully depicted in Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The …
Today we offer a repeat of our interview with Rebekah Sheldon, author of The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe. This was a live show recorded in our studios. I have taken the opportunity to update our underwriting as well as adjust the sound mix. The TOPICS discussed in the program might now …
We open with the first movement of Beethoven’s “Tempest,” or Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor, composed in 1802, performed here by Glen Gould on March 19, 1967 on the television program “Music For a Sunday Afternoon.” We read ourselves in Shakespeare’s Tempest – not only can we chart our sociological course by surveying …
As we face a pandemic that has created a kind of general strike we need to think about organizing our lives differently. Today’s Interchange offers a class perspective to stand against the capitalism that offers only destruction for so many of us. *** We begin with exploitation and expropriation: Capitalism’s twin pillars of abuse and …
Carol Gilligan is very well-known for having authored the influential feminist classic In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development published in 1982. This centered on a critique of the then current theories of moral development which literally excluded the study of girls and women and simply assumed studying boys and men would suffice to give …
Today we look at the local effects of COVID-19 in and around the major cities of Italy and then we’ll widen our view to try to see the socio-political impacts of governmentality in the face of a crisis like a pandemic. Using both lenses we hope to find a focus that often escapes us when …
Today we begin to take some kind of measure of the impacts of the so-called novel coronavirus or COVID-19 in our communities. Throughout, we’ll be accompanied by “Love” and “Compassion,” two tracks from John Coltrane’s last recordings with McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, Jimmy Garrison. Recorded on September 2, 1965 and released in 1977 on the …
Over the past decade, academic labor has become increasingly precarious, with tenure track positions diminishing rapidly and the pool of adjunct lecturers growing intensely. Compensation for graduate students who double as Teaching Assistants (or TAs) has dropped significantly or stagnated while tuition and additional fees, as well as general class sizes and teaching responsibilities, have …
Today we repeat our interview with Michael Burawoy on the “CEO Spiralists” in Public Universities from April 10, 2018, as a kind of preparation for next week’s show on the wildcat strike by graduate students at the University of California Santa Cruz. The University pays its administrators handsomely while bankrupting its working class – teachers. …
Our show is about the French Gilets jaunes Movement, or Yellow Vests Movement. For more than a year, protestors have donned yellow safety vests and taken to the streets to decry the police, centrist French President Emmanuel Macron, and his attempted austerity reforms. The reflective vests worn by protesters are required for all French motorists …
In the August 1897 Atlantic Monthly W. E. B. Du Bois published “Strivings of the Negro People” in which he introduced the term double-consciousness: …this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. …
This episode originally aired on January 8, 2019. In November 2016 today’s guest, Bruce Laurie, published an essay called ‘”Chaotic Freedom” in Civil War Louisiana: The Origins of an Iconic Image.’ This image is of a badly abused enslaved man called variously “A Typical Negro,” “The Scourged Back,” “Gordon the Slave,” or “Poor Peter,” who …
Today’s show is about understanding the need for a new social and political vision in the face of climate catastrophe, ecological collapse, and species extinction. New technologies must spring out of new ways to organize living if we’re not to repeat the same mistakes of humans devoted to the attempt at dominating and subduing all …
Throughout 2019, an unprecedented amount of massive protests, marches, and strikes occurred in various countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, all commonly giving voice to the sharp inequality throughout these societies that has been produced by the increasing austerity of economic policy modeled on neoliberalism. While similar to these examples, Colombia nevertheless offers a …
For our music today we’ll bookend the program with songs by Henry Threadgill coming on the heels of the Reagan era in the United States, and in between offer Sun Ra & His Myth Science Arkestra from the 1960 release Angels and Demons at Play. From an era of collective hope to one of individual …
On April 22nd 1970, Democratic Senator Garland Nelson, originator of the idea of Earth Day, proclaimed: Winning the environmental war is a whole lot tougher challenge by far than winning any other war in the history of Man. It will take $20 to $25 billion more a year in Federal money than we are spending …
For today’s episode producer Bella Bravo spoke with poet Juliana Spahr about her book, Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment. This close study of how state interests have shaped contemporary U.S. literature was published by Harvard University Press in 2018. In Du Bois’s Telegram, Spahr investigates the relationship between politics and art. Her …
Today we highlight exemplars: A. J. Muste, Mister Rogers, and Benjamin Lay. These were men who lived lives that challenged the expectations of their time and culture. These are peacemakers; but they bring the fire of justice in both word and deed. These men fought for the lives of the oppressed. Perhaps the parable of …
Today Bruce Franklin will be trying to connect lots of dots. He’lll argue, among other things, that we need to learn what three particular dead white guys are still trying to teach us. Two were bombardiers in WWII: Joseph Heller and Howard Zinn. One was bombed in WWII: Kurt Vonnegut. All three raised this question: …
Starting with real estate reforms in the 1970s supposedly instituted to open a path to the American Dream for Black citizens, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s new book, Race for Profit, a study of Black home ownership, argues that the turn from exclusion to inclusion was just another, less explicit, but equally damaging form of systemic racism. By …
Since the 1970’s, environmentalists have framed our epoch as the “Anthropocene,” a period defined by man’s — and often specifically men’s — unidirectional impact on a quickly heating planet Earth. The so-called Anthropocene continues to be caused by only a small portion of the people on the planet, following hierarchies of race, gender, class, and …
Where once solidarity referred to a workers’ movement against authoritarian controls by the state and capitalist economies and the shared sense of identity that Labor gave in the struggle against class hierarchies, today’s movements against oppression require envisioning and committing to new ways to share the political strength to stand up and say NO. Today, …
Today’s show is a special 90-minute episode. Around the world, as governments tell people to cut back and pay more to cover basic needs, the people have responded with explosive refusal and chaos. Two weeks ago the Chilean people woke up, “chile despertó!” They are calling it a social explosion, which could equally be due …
In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s central and influential essay “Self-Reliance” (a document that might be said to lie at the heart of liberalism the United States of American) he writes: “do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor?” No, …
Today’s show is a discussion of how seven million ordinary people are standing against the most powerful surveillance state on planet earth. Episode producer Sean Milligan talks to two activists who spent time in Hong Kong during the height of the protests in the summer of 2019. Facing eventual reunification with mainland China, the citizens …
Let’s cut to the chase, in their book, Climate Leviathan, importantly subtitled A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright posit that it’s very likely that we face a future organized by a planetary sovereign which asserts the right to decide what parties, and what peoples, will have to sacrifice (or …
Today’s show focuses on the history of radio in Angola – as an instrument for Portuguese settlers, the colonial state, African nationalists, and the postcolonial state to project power and challenge empire. Marissa Moorman calls these distinct and sometimes overlapping interests Powerful Frequencies, the title of her new book, published by Ohio University Press. Its …
In the middle of complexity there is also simplicity – sometimes what is good and what is evil is evident. Today’s interview delves into the Turkish invasion into autonomously governed areas of Northeastern Syria and the history of the Kurdish resistance in this region. On October 6, the Trump administration announced it was withdrawing US …
It’s Fall Fund Drive at WFHB when we invite you to become contributing members. This is very literally YOUR community radio station when you become a contributing or sustaining member. We’ll talk more about this throughout the show, but let’s get to it. Today we’ll highlight four previous programs which focus on Climate Change, or …
Our conversation with Jasper Bernes, recorded in May of last year, might be called a delayed Part II or even Part III as it features a previous guest extending the parameters of a previous conversation and begins with a consideration of the artist, activist, and social and political critic, photographer and filmmaker, Allan Sekula, who …
In the liner notes to the album Pithecanthropus Erectus, Charles Mingus calls the title song “his conception of the modern counterpart of the first man to stand erect – how proud he was, considering himself the “first” to ascend from all fours, pounding his chest and preaching his superiority over the animals still in a …
Today’s show “The Disaster of Development: On Biodiversity and Species Extinction” with guest Eduardo Brodizio will forgo our usual format of segments and music breaks in favor of bringing you as much conversation as possible in the time allotted to us. Our single musical selection today is McCoy Tyner’s “Utopia” off of the 1968 album …
Dockworkers have power: workers in the world’s ports can harness their role, at a strategic choke point, to promote their labor rights and social justice causes. Our guest Peter Cole brings such experiences to light in a comparative study of Durban, South Africa, and the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Cole’s research reveals how unions …
Our guest is Vivien Fryd, Professor of Art History at Vanderbilt University, and author of Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970, published by Penn State University Press. As part of the feminist movement of the 1970s, female artists began consciously using their works to challenge social conceptions and the legal definitions …
In her new book, Carceral Capitalism, poet and scholar Jackie Wang confronts mass incarceration in the US by delving into the processes that feed into and maintain the prison system: anti-black racism, predatory lending, algorithmic policing, privatized prisons, credit scams, data analytics and histories of exclusion. The so-called ‘race-neutral’ technologies like credit scoring, data mining, …
In Red Meat Republic author Joshua Specht brings to life a turbulent era marked by Indian wars, Cowboy myths, Chicago labor unrest, and food riots in the streets of New York. He shows how the enduring success of the cattle-beef complex—centralized, low cost, and meatpacker dominated—was a consequence of the meatpackers’ ability to make their …
Let’s begin with Emerson’s 1870 lecture “The Natural History of the Intellect.” What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the …
We fight over beliefs because we truly do not believe, or are not certain. And this is one tenet of the so-called enlightenment, when industrial age philosophers taught us that we cannot be certain of anything, specifically the cause of an effect. And that observable repetition is not proof of continued repetition…because the sun shines …
Today’s show, “Radicals and Reactionaries,” is a 90-minute special with journalist and novelist Tony McKenna. Tony McKenna’s new book is Angels and Demons: A Radical Anthology of Political Lives, published by Zero Books. In it he offers a series of essays about historical figures using a Marxist analysis, showing with each of the figures examined …
Recently a criminal investigation into fraud in the testing regimes for college entry revealed that wealthy people buy advantages; many of us surely simply shrugged. What’s new? Folks with money look to buy the path they and their children tread. We seem to accept this even if we are, on occasion, outraged. And it can’t …
Our opening song is “Lucky Day.” This is Judy Garland’s version from the London sessions of 1960. The first performance of the song was by Harry Richman in a 1926 Broadway revue. “Lucky Day” became a theme song for the 1940s NBC radio show Your Hit Parade which was sponsored by Lucky Strike cigarettes. Sponsoring …
In the U.S., death and injury on the job are considered to be a condition of doing business, a necessary evil that is often said to come about because of “operator error” — everyone makes mistakes after all, why should an employer or corporation bear the burden of what is surely just a fact of …
In his essential essay, “Fate,” published in 1860 in the book The Conduct of Life, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns the gigantic pages, –leaf after leaf,–never returning one. One leaf she lays down, a floor of granite; then a thousand ages, and a bed of …
In keeping with its mission of promoting and protecting a free press, the Indiana Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists has awarded 4 members of the WFHB news department in their “Best of Indiana Journalism” 2018 contest. Sarah Vaughan was awarded in the category of Radio Feature Story for her piece, “Prosecutors, Paramedics Training …
On March 30 this year, WFHB partnered with several local businesses, the Ryder Magazine and Film series, the Burroughs Century, the Debs Foundation, and Indiana University, to bring Paul Buhle to Bloomington to talk about his new graphic biography of Eugene V. Debs (drawn by Noah Van Sciver and published by Verso) and the necessity …
Taking a close, insider’s, look at Chicago’s industrial Southeast Side in the 1970’s and early 1980’s offers us lessons of a period brought forward to our current moment, when talking heads and politicians spout off about middle class values and middle class jobs and the way to make America great…again. What today’s show makes clear …
Tim Brennan joined me in the WFHB studio when he was in Bloomington to deliver the lecture “Biopolitics: The Limits of the Liberal Imagination” as a guest of the Contemporary Africa Seminar Speaker Series. The conversation ranged from the aforementioned biopolitics to seeing the state as a precious and necessary form of human freedom even …
Today independent producer and Interchange contributor Dan Young interviews Don Fitz and Stan Cox, two long-time environmental activists and writers. For many years both Fitz and Cox have advocated that solving not just global warming but other major environmental crises will require an overall reduction in the size of economy and industrial production. Now they …
Our opening song is “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” – and its history alone illustrates the difficulties of centering anything black in this white capitalist country. We’re listening to Hank Crawford and Jimmy McGriff’s version off of their 1987 album, Steppin’ Up. Dubbed in 1919 by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, …
It’s become increasingly clear that the American Dream is dead. Good riddance. Long ago Friedrich Engels identified economic mobility (said “dream” of wealth) in the US as a key barrier to class consciousness. Welcome to your waking hours, America. Today we explore the question, “Can Electoral politics lead the way to Revolution?” Marx, Engels, and …
Francisco Ferrer, whom the New York Times called a “philosophical anarchist,” was executed in Spain in 1909 for suspicion of insurrection against the Spanish King and he quickly became an international martyr to the cause of free thought in opposition to religious dogma and compulsory education at the hands of the state and the church. …
The public school exists to make automatons and to reproduce class hierarchies and authoritarian power dynamics. How different is 2019 from 1906 when Emma Goldman was writing in “The Child and Its Enemies” that schools drive children to become foreign to themselves and to each other, arranged into files, classified, and numbered with quality giving …
Today Interchange and WFHB mourn the passing of our friend and colleague, Rob Schoon. Rob was an assistant producer and editor for Interchange from May 2016 through August 2018. Rob’s favorite work was mixing the program–cutting music into the interview for breaks in particular. You may never notice it but Rob was always mindful of …
With Covington Catholic High School students offering a fresh examples of the embodied ideologies of Capitalism like racism, patriarchy and ecological destruction – we turn to theories of working class solidarity. If we want a social system that is not alienating—with meaningful labor, with equality in all spheres of life, with true, substantive democracy, with …
Today’s show seeks to strike through the mask of the normative history of so-called progress as it’s been written and taught to children. A tale told in which the struggles of the workers of the USA are nearly disappeared. The working class not only toils for the profit of the owning class, it has to …
Barbara Hammer has been making films for over 40 years but it is highly unlikely that you’ve ever seen them and are now asking “Who”? Born in 1939 in Hollywood, California, a kind of cosmic irony, Barbara Hammer is an American feminist filmmaker known for being one of the pioneers of lesbian film. Hammer is …
We open with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” performed by Odetta off of the 1959 album My Eyes Have Seen. The “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” also known as “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory,” is a lyric by the American writer Julia Ward Howe using the music from the song “John Brown’s Body.” …
In a piece called “Jazz Democracy,” a Slate review of The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, January 1965-June 1968, Adam Shatz writes: It’s a commonplace that jazz is the musical expression of American democracy. The unfortunate truth is that jazz more often resembles the daytime talk show: Everyone gets his or her …
Our opening song is, rather mischievously, “Snowflakes and Sunshine,” from the Ornette Coleman Trio, live in Stockholm in 1965…they got there before the neoliberal economists. Last week’s show with Rob Larson on the Intellectual opportunism of libertarians who sing holy praise to Capitalism pointed out the ways in which actually existing capitalism keeps most of us …
In his new book Capitalism vs. Freedom, Rob Larson goes after the high priests of Capitalism, those deep thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand. But more directly and pointedly, Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize Winning economist, and debate society pugilist who did the heavy PR work for Reagan era deregulation …
Next time on Interchange, For Love of Money: or Libertarian Intellectuals. In his new book, Capitalism Vs Freedom, Rob Larson puts on display the words of such deep thinkers as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand in order to expose them as simply a defense of cruel power systems. Intellectuals such as …
The title of our show, “Just a Spoonful of America – Prescribing American Studies to Fight Fascism,” might be more than a little ironic given that fascism currently stands astride the planet once again. Perhaps our music tonight would offer a better chance at a cure. It comes from James Booker’s album Let’s Make a …
Today’s show is “Whiteness Is As Whiteness Does: On the Typologies of Whiteness” with guest Heath Schultz, self-described as a “white, anti-racist, political activist.” Our opening song is already illustrative of the discussion to follow–Eric Clapton erasing Robert Johnson with his version of “HellHound On My Trail.” I’ll begin with Melville’s Moby Dick, because all …
Our last show highlighted the “lost” Orson Welles film It’s All True with filming taking place in 1942; and today we offer a bookend. Netflix has just released a version of another Welles project that was never completed, though this one was not so much lost as held hostage. It’s called The Other Side of …
Today’s show is a kind of extension of our program Big Oil, Mickey Mouse and Fascism in Latin America with Tango Wars author Mary Jo McConahay. That show detailed the fight between Axis and Allied powers over the hearts and minds AND most importantly, the natural resources of Latin America. At that time Brazil was …
Let’s start with the fact that what we don’t know keeps on hurting us. Mary Jo McConahay’s The Tango War fills an important gap in U.S. awareness of World War II history. Beginning in the thirties, both the Allied and Axis powers were well aware of the need to control not just the hearts and …
Our opening song is “I’ve Grown So Ugly” by Robert Pete Williams, who was imprisoned in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in the mid 1950s. The rest of our music is by women prisoners and will come from field recordings taken in the 1930s and 40s from such plantation prisons as Parchman in Mississippi and Angola …
We begin with the theme song from the wildly popular 1953 television program, Dragnet; I’m sure most of you recognized it. I’ve chosen to begin with it because what we’ll hear today about policing in America (and as an import/export business) reveals the still prevalent attitudes borne of the Cold War and that challenges any …
The view that capitalism is an inherently flawed, exploitative, crisis-prone, oppressive system is not new. But the dangers we face due to its operating procedures are increasing daily as corporations enjoy greater influence over governments and the endless pursuit of profits pushes our climate to the breaking point. Today we try to understand those operating …
We open with Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock with “The Star Spangled Banner.” While there are any number of powerful songs we might use tonight, especially from the late 1960s and protests against the Vietnam War, this one seems to me most necessary. A black man, a trained paratrooper of the US Army, on a right-handed …
Today’s show is “Driving the Peace Train.” And perhaps unsurprisingly our opening song tonight is Richie Havens’ version of Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train.” And while this song asks us to ride the peace train, our show today asserts the need for engineers of peace. Our GUEST today, Eric Dawson, is one of those engineers, and …
Our opening song is “The Day After the Revolution” by Pulp…The Revolution begins and ends with you. Today we highlight four past programs on Revolution. This is our Fund Drive Show. Please support Interchange: call us at 812.323.1200 or make a secure online pledge. Thanks! SEGMENT ONE: France (The Terror and the Revolution) Our first …
In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist; in such a world a non-revolutionary pacifist is a contradiction in terms, a monstrosity.* A.J. Muste was referred to throughout the world as the “American Gandhi,” and he’s probably best known, if at all, for his leadership of …
In the late 60s, one man imagined creating a place that would radically undermine the societal values of his time—an alternative space that subverted color lines, gender norms, and war. That man was Fred Rogers and that place was Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Our opening song is, of course, “Won’t you be my neighbor?” Composed by …
Today we explore the menace of secrecy with Bloomington’s own Eisner- and National Book Award-winning writer/artist, Nate Powell. Powell’s newest book, Come Again, is both dream and nightmare set in the ’70s on a commune in the Ozarks. In our conversation we also explore the didactic nature of his work nicely exemplified in his collection …
While citizens are encouraged to fear and blame so called outside agitators the real menace lies within…A business community committed to the rancor of class and racial divisions with the intent to keeping labor powerless and in the chains of wage slavery. In our two previous programs we’ve detailed a kind of localized “Mccarthyism” BEFORE …
We’ll say goodbye to the “Red Scare Next Door” in Evansville, Indiana and travel East to the Green Mountains of Vermont where it turns out that even Republicans can be Red-Baited. We can turn the page in the anti-labor playbook but all we’ll find is the same old story featuring Henry Wallace, the Communist Party, …
The “Red Scare,” often called McCarthyism, went much deeper than what was directed by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s and had, even as early as the late 1940s, a broad reach into the states. Local “scares” were often instigated by individuals, mini-McCarthys, who would red-bait state and city politics. But this “fear of …
We open with the jazz tune, “Epistrophy,” from Eric Dolphy’s Last Date recorded in Holland in 1964. Epistrophe, from the Greek, means “a turning about” – and applied to The Young One, a constant shift of moral perspective with no settled view. As with our recent show on the 1954 Salt of the Earth, here …
This is the special 90-minute finale for our series A Targeted Divide. It’s called “What Bullets do to Bodies and Lives: Structural Violence, Firearms, and Surviving Gunshot Wounds.” We know a lot about gun homicide, much less about what life is like for the wounded living: What happens to those who get shot, but live? …
For our second show in our three-part series, A Targeted Divide, we bring you “Crime, Decline, and the Rise of the Citizen-Protector: How the Meaning of Citizenship Is Changing in a Nation Awash in Firearms.” In response to economic decline and reductions in services provided by the state, some men are taking the role of …
Today we begin a series of three programs on Guns in the USA we’re calling a A Targeted Divide. Our first show is “Gunning Down the Bill of Rights,” how the 2nd Amendment trumps the 1st. After a Supreme Court decision in 2008, the most ambiguous and poorly written of our constitutional amendments now means …
We open with music composed by Sol Kaplan for the film Salt of the Earth. Kaplan was blacklisted in the 1950s for being “uncooperative” to HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee. The rest of our music will feature the work of other blacklisted artists and performers; Hazel Scott, Yip Harburg, Marc Blitzstein, and Lena Horne. …
In the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh rejects the grain offering of the farmer, Cain, while accepting the flesh offering of his brother, the shepherd Abel. Cain, wounded by this rejection, murders his brother. The consequence is banishment to the Land of Nod, which appears to be more a state of being …
In his most famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote perhaps his most famous sentences: “Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.” …
For this first Tuesday of LGBT Pride Month we bring you, “Straightening Gayness: Mainstream Representation Under the Male Gaze” about television’s role in winning same-sex marriage. We open with Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell In Love.” All of the music was chosen by our Guest, Cory Albertson, author of A Perfect Union? Published by …
Today we pledge allegiance to what Ralph Ellison called a sorrowful laughter for all, and we open with “Waitin’ for Benny” a jam session from 1941 featuring jazz and swing guitarist Charlie Christian, an artist who, like Ellison, discovered the New World of Jazz in Oklahoma City. In Ellison’s 1958 Saturday Review essay “The Charlie …
In 1884 Parsons wrote in her well-known essay, “To Tramps”: …can you not see that the “good boss” or the “bad boss” cuts no figure whatever? that you are the common prey of both, and that their mission is simply robbery? Can you not see that it is the INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM and not the “boss” …
Best known for his path-breaking work on the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, published in 1938, Trinidadian C.L.R. James was often at the center of revolutionary politics and theory in the 20th century; a one-time Trotskyist and fully informed by a study of Marx, James’s greatest work extends from beyond the boundaries of politics and …
Our opening song, “Civilization’s Dying,” features our guest on vocals. Our show today is a brief course, though a long Interchange, on the History of Punk Rock. This is a special 90-minute program detailing some of the greatest rock bands of the last 50 years. We’ll travel from Indianapolis, Indiana to Lima, Peru, by way …
We open with “Ça ira” (the Sans-culottes version) performed by Edith Piaf. “Ça ira” is an emblematic song of the French Revolution, first heard in May 1790. The title and theme of the refrain were inspired by Benjamin Franklin, in France as a representative of the Continental Congress, who was apparently quite popular among the …
Provenance refers to the origins of an object or work of art. Historically it’s been used to describe the process of validating authorship— is this really a Picasso or a forgery? But since 1933, it has also referred to establishing rightful ownership of a work. From 1933 until the end of World War II, a …
In March of 2014 it was reported that the National Security Agency had aggressively accelerated its hacking initiatives – codenamed TURBINE – to “allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually.” Much of this done via …
What shall it profit a university to gain valuable endowments or private partnerships, if it should lose its soul? The public University as we know it is in crisis, as business prerogatives overtake its values and executive-style leadership eats away at its budgets. The number university administrators has grown over 350% since 1976, while faculty …
Our show today is Anarchy is Intersectional: Learning from Emma Goldman. Goldman, a feminist anarchist, was disdainful of what is now called “Lean In” feminism saying, in a letter written 99 years ago on April 3, 1919, that “…the feminists foolishly believe that having a man’s job, or professions, makes them free.” Emma Goldman was …
Today we show our support for women as we ask you to show your support for Interchange. We’ll hear clips that highlight the fight for women’s rights in the country where 77% percent of women polled will not identify as feminist but believe men and women should be equal socially, politically and economically. Those are …
March 27 is our Spring Fund Drive show! We’ll ask you to show your support for Interchange and WFHB while we show our support for women. We’ll hear clips that highlight the fight for women’s rights in the country where 77% percent of women polled will not identify as feminist but believe men and women …
What is identity and why is it political? In the wake of gender identity politics what has happened to the political category of Woman? **Gender says that men are inherently violent, aggressive, independent, assertive, and rational. Whereas women are inherently passive, delicate, nurturing, irrational and emotional. These ideas have been disproved thanks in large part …
“[Burnett] really invites us, the viewer to, not take a position, but to say, this is what it is, do you wanna do anything about it?…In the banality of oppression, the every day reality of oppression, a toll, a profoundly tragic toll, is demanded of black people.” – Michael Martin “His filmmaking is so quiet. …
Our guest is the founding headmaster of The Boston Arts Academy, Boston’s first public high school for the visual and performing arts, Linda Nathan. Nathan has written When Grit Isn’t Enough, a strong critique of the concept of inculcating “grit” in education as well as of its proselytizers and proponents. It’s published by Beacon Press. …
This is the final Tuesday in February and so also our last show dedicated to highlighting our past programs detailing key figures and moments in Black History in the United States. So far this month we’ve heard Gerald Horne proclaim that the American Revolution was guided by a backlash to England’s abolitionism; that the US …
Our opening song is “Inflated Tear” by Roland Kirk performed in Prague in 1967…a prelude of sorts of what was to come. Across the globe it was a year of countless uprisings. In the US it was the year of police violence against protesters at the Chicago Democratic Convention; it saw the Vietnam War’s Tet …
Today we discuss the ideology of market egalitarianism and versions of libertarianism from the Levellers in 17th century England through Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” and Tom Paine’s Rights of Man and on to Lincoln’s political argument to poor whites that wage labor was slave labor and a man should instead stand on his own two …
“You have done nothing wrong — though to be honest perhaps that’s a matter of perspective. You marched in a demonstration, or you attended a meeting, or you wrote an essay that appeared in an underground journal, or you merely possessed a copy of that journal. Or maybe you really did break the law. You …
EXTENDED TAKE (Radio Cut below) Today’s show is Storied States and is something of “counter-companion” to last week’s program, Storied Into Being, with Anthology Editor and Literature professor Martin Puchner. That show followed the stories which accompanied writing technology on its roughly 5,000 year journey from the accountants of ancient Mesopotamia (which means between two …
From Alexander the Great’s “pillow book” (The Iliad) to the Mayan Popul Vuh; from Gilgamesh to Harry Potter by way of Goethe and the notion of “world literature”–tonight we contemplate The Written World. World Literature is a concept first expressed by Johann Wolfgang Goethe in 1827: If we Germans do not look beyond the narrow …
Today we’ll excerpt a 1999 Interchange episode in which host Shana Ritter interviews Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, and Hazel Bryan Massery, the white student made infamous in photographs which capture her hatefully screaming at Eckford. The two are joined by the man who took those photos, Will Counts. Captured in Count’s …
Or Big History, or, Epic Science, or Religion 2.0…Today’s show is kin to last week’s, Honey From a Weed…but instead of seeing the human as capable of flourishing in concert with the natural, in this story, humanity sings itself beyond limitation. “[T]he new cosmologists attempt to recast the universe as a distinctly human drama, a …
As we’re in the midst of a holiday season that can so often feel like merely a smattering of one-off charitable acts and token expressions of fellow-feeling paired with culturally enforced gluttony, it seemed appropriate to turn to a different kind of life, one which defines fasting and feasting in much different terms. As the …
Interchange took a break this week. As a substitute, here’s a conversation with Christoph Irmscher about Louis Agassiz for your edification and your listening pleasure. This first aired on June 8, 2013 as part of the summer series The Custom House. Louis Agassiz, born in 1807 in Fribourg, Switzerland, came to the US in 1846 …
“Censorship and Sensibility” features local author and film scholar Joan Hawkins in conversation with writer Laurie Stone. Stone was in town to read from her latest book as part of the Player’s Pub Spoken Word series organized by the Writers Guild at Bloomington. A longtime writer for the Village Voice, theater critic for The Nation …
EXTENDED VERSION: “Censorship and Sensibility” features local author and film scholar Joan Hawkins in conversation with writer Laurie Stone. Stone was in town to read from her latest book as part of the Player’s Pub Spoken Word series organized by the Writers Guild at Bloomington. A longtime writer for the Village Voice, theater critic for The …
From the Ukrainian Pale to Bridgeport, Connecticut. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Radicalized by deplorable labor conditions for immigrants in America, Matilda Rabinowitz became one of the only women to organize for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Rabinowitz immigrated to the United States from Ukraine …
Our show today is another in our series on the Russian Revolution of 1917. This time our focus is on Leon Trotsky. Our music throughout is by the 80s English, socialist, skinhead, soul, punk group, The Redskins. We open with “Lev Bronstein.” The dream of socialism as an organizing principle has been deemed an inevitable …
In the conclusion of Hiroaki Kuromiya’s 1991 short biography of Stalin, he tells us what might be all we need to know of Stalin’s worldview: first, Stalin underlined the following passage in Trotsky’s 1920 Terrorism and Communism, “If human life in general is sacred and inviolable, we must deny ourselves not only the use of …
It’s October 24th 2017, nearly 100 years ago to the day in 1917*, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov became Chairman of the Council of People’s Commisars in Russia. Ulanov is better known to us as Lenin. Michel Foucault said in 1977 that “It is the desirability of the revolution which causes a problem today.” Well, that today …
Today, the curious case of Benjamin Lay: Englishman, Quaker, cobbler, sailor, cultural shock firebrand, cave dweller, autodidact, animal liberationist, and outspoken critic of the hypocrisy of slave-owning Quakers in 18th century Pennsylvania. He would become known as one of the last radicals of the English revolution — an uprising in the mid 17th century against …
Our opening song is surely well-known–this is “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay” performed here by Elsa Lanchester, which Chebutykin, the doctor in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, periodically, perhaps pointedly, hums. Believe it or not, the lyrics from this 1891 minstrel farce variety show called Tuxedo do apply here. It may also be of interest that Henry Sayers, credited with …
For our Fall Fund Drive show we offer some program highlights from the last several months to show, not tell, how deserving we are of your financial support. And we open the show with The Who’s “Eminence Front”…it’s a favorite of mine. We used this in the show with Thomas Frank, “It Takes a Democrat.” …
Human hands unwittingly unleashed the AIDS epidemic and can now overcome it, if we learn the lessons of the past. This week on Interchange guest host Joan Hawkins welcomes James Kelly of IU’s Media School discuss the evolution of AIDS, from its origins in the equatorial forests of Cameroon to its outbreak in the 1980s …
We’re joined by James Naremore to discuss the cinema of Charles Burnett, who’s been called the nation’s least-known great filmmaker and the country’s most important African-American director. His major works, such as Killer of Sheep, To Sleep with Anger, The Glass Shield, and Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property explore history’s effect on the structure of …
The “father of the modern welfare state” is said to be Lester Frank Ward, an American sociologist who published his major work in the midst of what is called the Gilded Age, 1870-1900 (which incidentally also dovetails with the end of Reconstruction and the inception of Jim Crow Laws). He believed “A sociology which intelligently …
Our topic today is Shulamith Firestone’s radical feminist book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, published in 1970. But first a brief note on the death of Kate Millett, last Wednesday, September 6th. Listeners of Interchange will know we discussed Millett’s own radical feminist book, Sexual Politics, back in May with Maggie …
Tricky Dick started out that way… Today’s show is about knowing and believing. And our key players are Alger Hiss, Richard Nixon, and Whittaker Chambers. Behind the scenes lurks the military industrial complex as fronted by the Dulles brothers, in particular John Foster, and corporate collaboration with Hitler’s Third Reich. But there is also in …
The idea of what it means to be human is changing. With countless catastrophic events looming, from climate instability to biotechnology and wars of autonomous machines, we center our fears and our hopes for a better future on the child to come, the survival of the next generation. But should we? Life is also outside …
Today on Interchange we confront the insidious myth of individualism with a contrasting scientific doctrine of interconnectedness. Much like the male brain and thoughts of sex, in the USA hardly a moment goes by without some commercial or institutional message encouraging us to “follow our dreams” and be true to ourselves. And it’s assumed we …
A mass of torches in the darkness reveal faces full of rage — white, (mostly male) faces. Public violence and intimidation unmasking raw hateful prejudice and resurgent white supremacy. Is this the deep south of the 1920’s? No, it happened in a college town last weekend: Charlottesville, Virginia. Our show is about the Reactionary Right in …
For this 90-minute special, our guest is Nancy MacLean, Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University and author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. This book has the Koch cadre at the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, The American Enterprise Institute, and George Mason …
Today’s show, “Farewell Transmission: The Live and Music of Jason Molina” opens with “Not Just a Ghost’s Heart” from Songs: Ohia’s album Ghost Tropic released in November of 2000. Jason Molina was a prolific songwriter and bandleader who released music under the names Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Company from 1997 through 2009. A Secretly …
Cynthia Wolfe joins us to discuss her “Platinum” ranked audio program “Nuclear Nightingales” which consists of readings from the oral history Voices from Chernobyl by 2015 Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich. With the troupe of local readers, Cricket’s Bone Caravan, Wolfe and company produce stories, literary and historical with national, global, and collective significance. 2016 marked …
July 12th marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Henry David Thoreau. We like anniversaries and birthdays in particular…we like to mark time, to celebrate occasions. And in fact, like most words, “occasion”* holds an etymological tension within it by meaning both a downfall and a falling together–which seems only right for a term …
Our opening song is “Lagi” by Aziza Brahim, and she provides all the music for the program. Lagi is Arabic and means Refugee–the song’s opening line is “Ever since I arrived in this world I have lived as a refugee.” In our show today with Sara Farris we’ll ask, what’s behind the right-wing demand for …
Today on Independence Day, your independent, community radio station in Bloomington, Indiana presents “Pete Seeger: Plain and Complicated.” It’s hard to know where to begin but let’s start with one of the most popular songs of the mid-20th century, The Weavers rendition of “Goodnight Irene” by Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly. This is a …
Our program today is about the problem of work. In “Life Without Principle” Henry David Thoreau, our great American guide to “getting a life,” wrote of Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood…are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I …
In a piece called “Jazz Democracy,” a Slate review of The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, January 1965-June 1968, Adam Shatz writes: It’s a commonplace that jazz is the musical expression of American democracy. The unfortunate truth is that jazz more often resembles the daytime talk show: Everyone gets his or …
Regardless of your politics, regardless of her politics, it’s hard to argue that Hillary Clinton hasn’t been on the receiving end of a constant and deep misogyny from across the political spectrum, Left, Right, and Center. And when it comes to the media, it’s a frozen narrative–Hillary Clinton’s negative press is nearly always focused on the …
We’ll open with “Tensions” by Charles Mingus, recorded in 1959 and released in 1960 on the album Blues & Roots. About the album Mingus wrote that it’s “unusual” presenting only one aspect of his musical world, the blues. “Some people, particularly critics, were saying I didn’t swing enough. [The record’s producer] wanted to give them …
We open the show with Bobbi Martin’s “For the Love of Him.” All the music played is from the 1970 Billboard Top 100, extending the discussion from last week’s show on the political power of music. Kate Millett’s 1970 book, Sexual Politics, is a classic text of Second Wave Feminism, finding sexism and subjection inherent …
We’re joined by guitarist, producer, composer and author Dave Randall. His book, Sound System, newly out from Pluto Press, is an insider’s view of the music industry, shedding light on the secrets of celebrity, commodification, and culture, and the system of music serving them. And yet music can be a force for social change, sounds …
This is a special 90-minute show, live from The Atlas Bar, featuring the music and protest politics of Fela Kuti, the Nigerian multi-instrumentalist, musician, composer, pioneer of the Afrobeat music genre, and human rights activist. Fela Kuti died of complications from AIDS in 1997 at the age of 58 but his music has seen a …
Next time on Interchange: Becoming African in America We’ll be live from The Atlas Bar for a 90-minute special featuring the music and protest politics of Fela Kuti, the Nigerian multi-instrumentalist, musician, composer, pioneer of the Afrobeat music genre, and human rights activist. Fela Kuti died 1997 at the age of 58 but his music …
We open with “Little Girl Blue,” written by Rodgers and Hart in 1935, and here performed by Nina Simone. The song counsels the “little girl” to simply surrender because All you can count on is the raindrops That fall on little girl blue. That Little Girl Blue comes tonight in the form Offred, the protagonist …
Today’s show is about for-profit colleges and universities–or the Predatory Education Business. If you’re surprised to hear predatory and for-profit used interchangeably to describe this industry, you won’t be at the end of the show. Two things must spring to mind when one says “for profit” education: University of Phoenix and Trump University. The first …
Direct action and reform politics meet in Apartheid South Africa in playwright Athol Fugard’s 1989 play My Children! My Africa! Within the ruling class, apartheid violence of white South Africa sits a play with a seeming taste for moderation and order in debate, and the recognition of the political uses of speech. But the debate …
Next time on Interchange: “The Stones of Reason” Direct action and reform politics meet in Apartheid South Africa in playwright Athol Fugard’s 1989 My Children! My Africa! Within the ruling class apartheid violence of white South Africa sits a play with a taste for moderation and order in debate, and the recognition of the political …
We open with “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye because it is the title track from his 1971 album–one that for me expresses both the popular awareness of the catastrophic actions of Western Militarism and Capitalism–but as well seems a kind of funeral dirge on the capability of protest movements to make real difference as …
What happened to the American left after the Sixties? This the question L.A. Kauffman seeks to answer in her book, Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism. The book examines how movements from ACT UP to Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter have used disruptive tactics to catalyze change against long odds, …
Historian and bestselling author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank, came to Bloomington on March 24th promoting his latest attempt at diagnosing our decades-long liberal malaise and ineptitude in the Democratic Party. While he was here he stopped in to chat with Interchange Assistant Producer Rob Schoon about his new book: Listen, Liberal …
Next time on Interchange, “It Takes a Democrat: Selling Out Solidarity.” We’re joined by Thomas Frank, bestselling author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, whose latest book Listen, Liberal asks the question, “Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?” With a focus on the metamorphosis of the Democratic Party from New Deal to New …
Our show today, “Entertainment Inaction,” is in two parts and is a special for our Spring Fund Drive. Cast a glance up and to the right of the page (right next to Phil’s head)…see that big red “Donate” button? You know what to to. PART ONE: Listen, Liberal Assistant Producer Rob Schoon sat down in …
Next time on Interchange, a special show and a unique opportunity for our local listeners. This will be a 90-minute program featuring an interview with Thomas Frank, author of the bestselling What’s the Matter with Kansas?, and most recently, Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?; and a second installment of …
Our show is Cuba in Africa, or what my guest today has called “Castro’s Worldview: Foreign Policy in a Hostile World.” Our music throughout also reflects the influence of Cuba in Africa and the struggle for independence by African nations. Our opening song, “Valodia” by Santocas, released shortly after Angolan independence is in praise of …
Cuba in Africa We’re joined by Piero Gleijeses whose book, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976, “bluntly contradicts the Congressional testimony of the era and the memoirs of Henry A. Kissinger.” The work sheds new light on U.S. foreign policy and CIA covert operations and revolutionizes our view of Cuba’s international role, challenges conventional …
Today, politicians and intellectuals warn that we face a crisis of civility and a veritable war of words polluting our public sphere. In liberal democracies committed to tolerating diversity as well as active, often heated disagreement, the loss of this conversational virtue appears critical. But is civility really a virtue? Or is it, as critics …
Next time on Interchange: “Do you bite your thumb at us, Sir?” What is Civil Discourse and why do politicians and pundits seem to resort to admonishment when discourse gets messy and less than civil. Also, what is civility in the first place and who gets to define it? I’ll talk with author Teresa Bejan …
Our opening song is “Sophisticated Lady,” the Duke Ellington jazz standard, performed by Ella Fitzgerald, speaking of disillusionment and loss. There’s plenty of that to around in the life of Eleanor Roosevelt and her circle of family and friends. Our show today is “Eleanor in Love and Politics.” In the first part of the show …
Susan Quinn joins us to discuss her “biography of love,” Eleanor & Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady. Eleanor Roosevelt has recently been christened the “First Lady of Gay” and in Quinn’s new book we’re introduced to the woman who was likely Roosevelt’s first, and deepest, love, the journalist and writer Lorena …
This is a special 90-minute Interchange focusing on Orson Welles in his less-appreciated role as an innovator in the WWII-era radio feature, a genre of radio mixing fact and drama that is a (largely forgotten and unacknowledged) forerunner of the radio documentary, as we know it now. (Think Ira Glass and This American Life.) We’ll …
Our March 7 episode will be special 90-minute Interchange focusing on Orson Welles in his less-appreciated role as an innovator in the WWII-era radio feature, a genre of radio mixing fact and drama that is a (largely forgotten and unacknowledged) forerunner of the radio documentary, as we know it now. (Think Ira Glass and This …
Our show tonight features two well-known Cuban artists: contemporary novelist, Leonardo Padura, whose fictional detective Mario Conde has been introduced to an even wider audience now through the Netflix miniseries Four Seasons in Havana. As it was shot on location it gives viewers a feel for what our guest Anke Birkenmaier terms the “actually existing …
If we are such stuff as dreams are made on…is anything real outside the mind? Henry Woronicz, the Director of IU Theatre’s production of The Tempest, attempts an answer. This weekend IU Theatre will open the production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest which will feature acrobatic aerial silk work and a female actor playing the “Salvage” …
Born out of necessity, out of self-protection and preservation, Black Populism’s story is equal parts inspiring and heartbreaking. Last week Thea Riofrancos joined us to try to distinguish Populism in terms of its political character–on the Left and on the Right. Today, we’ll take a look at the development and destruction of Black Populism in …
Today our guest, Thea Riofrancos, suggests populism is the not the problem, as so many in the “center” (left and right) fear, but the answer to the decades-long program of neoliberal policies that have created a politically disengaged citizenry. But what flavor of populism? On the left, populism lays bare the class antagonisms that already …
As a follow-up to last week’s program, “The Elected Coup,” tonight we confront The Authoritarian Creep. I should note that I spoke with both of our guests last Thursday (2/2) and as mindless speed seems to be the name of Donald Trump’s game (a la Italian Futurism), this show may already be behind the times! …
Our latest President tweets out “policy” and executive orders and his national security advice is coming from Breitbart blogger, Steve Bannon. This morning’s tweets: ‘Nancy Pelosi and Fake Tears Chuck Schumer held a rally at the steps of The Supreme Court and mic did not work (a mess)-just like Dem party!’ ‘When will the Democrats …
This is our first show under the Trump Administration and it seems appropriate as we’ve discovered President Trump wants to wall out the world, heighten police powers, and restrict or eliminate altogether arts funding. This is relevant here as The Quilts of Southwest China received some of its funding from the National Endowment for the …
As we head into the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, a local group says “NO, in Thunder”: No to the erosion of civil liberties and the end of any semblance of a democratic society. We welcome organizers of Inaugurate the Revolution, a group seeking to transfer power into the hands of the disenfranchised, and to …
We begin with “My Old Kentucky Home” by 19th century songwriter Stephen Foster, performed by Paul Robeson. Sung like a love song to the state of Kentucky by the Derby crowd at Churchill Downs, its real historical meaning is bleaker. The lyrics portray heartbreak: A man, sold down the river to work at a sugar …
“Protest or Pose” begins a series of programs under the heading The Sound of Resistance. Joining me in the studio is Rasul Mowatt, associate professor in The School of Public Health and the American Studies Department at Indiana University. We’ll look at three songs: “Strange Fruit” sung by Billie Holiday (and recently sampled by Kanye …
Have feminists always been pro-prostitution? Since when has supporting pornography been considered a pro-sex feminist position? And why has feminism seemingly become a catch-all for any and all gender equality issues? Meghan Murphy, the founder and editor of the online feminist media outlet Feminist Current, leads us through the re-radicalizing of feminism: starting with a …
With President-elect Trump soon to take office, America is faced with a grim irony: many voters with economic grievances about a “rigged system” helped Trump win office, and yet given his major appointments so far, it seems unlikely that our next president will do anything to fundamentally address those problems — and it seems likely …
Mary Shelley’s novel of 1818, Frankenstein, Or, the Modern Prometheus, seems to me to clang like a hammer blow against a bell that tolls our self-inflicted doom. To quote Victor Frankenstein– None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science. In other studies you go as far as others have …
Even elementary schools are now teaching what was always factual about the conquest of this land mass–Northern Europeans came and murdered as many indigenous people as possible. Treaties were made to be broken. Herded onto desolate reservations, dying by the thousands en route, the native people of this land were treated as one race of …
Think of it this way, W. E. B. Du Bois, born in February 1868, that’s 3 years after the end of the American Civil War, two years after Melville’s volume of Civil War poetry, Battle Pieces, died in August 1963, at 95, the year John F. Kennedy is assassinated, the year Medgar Evers is assassinated, and the day …
Blue dots in a sea of red. The electoral map presents a distorted picture belying where most of the country’s population lives, and where the most privation occurs. A survey of the landscape in the wake of Donald Trump’s election reveals that America’s urban/rural drift has cemented into a chasm. Though commonly conflated with only …
Happiness. We all want it. But what can that word mean? What do we imagine we’re seeking as we spend much of our time and effort in pursuit of happiness? Happiness has become the biggest idea of our age, a new religion dedicated to well-being. Political economist Will Davies shows how this philosophy, first pronounced …
Free speech is not the norm, and even in a country that explicitly protects speech in its foundational documents, censorship can still creep into our lives in unexpected ways. On this election night, “Selling Censorship,” another episode in our series The Way of Neoliberalism, about our current cultural environment that dominates our society, politics, and …
First corporations became people. Now people are becoming businesses. That’s the logic of the marketplace applied to employment. Tonight, the third episode in our series “The Way of Neoliberalism”: Selling Me, Inc. In our last two episodes we spoke with Wendy Brown and Philip Mirowski to get a sense of where Neoliberal ideas came from, …
“Which is the merchant here, and which is the Jew?” Portia asks as she begins her performance as Antonio’s lawyer (and as a man) in opposition to Shylock’s suit for a pound of flesh. This is the soul of the play. What difference: usury or finance? What difference: Christian or Jew? How are we trapped …
We don’t know. In fact we can’t know. That’s a core tenet of the neoliberal project, which puts faith in markets instead of people. Tonight we’re speaking with Philip Mirowski, historian and philosopher of economic thought at the University of Notre Dame, and author of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste and Machine …
What follows is an unedited conversation with actress Abby Lee who will be performing the role of Masha in IU Theatre’s production of the 2013 Tony Award winning play by Christopher Durang, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. Durang’s play revolves around the relationships of three middle-aged single siblings, two of whom live together, …
It’s the water we swim in, the air we breathe. It’s all around us – yet we hardly it notice most of the time. It’s a matrix of ideas, incentives, and assumptions that shape our politics, our economy, and our lives. Today we kick off the first show in a four-part series we’re calling “The …
“Doing no violence to living things, not even a single one of them, wander alone like a rhinoceros.”* All of our songs tonight feature the whirlwind as a kind of tribute to a central essay called “The Vortex,” written by our guest Eliot Weinberger and found in his serial essay begun in 2007 called An …
We’re joined in the studio by Jon Kay to discuss his recent book Folk Art & Aging: Life-Story Objects and Their Makers. Kay makes the strong point that Growing old doesn’t have to be seen as an eventual failure but rather as an important developmental stage of creativity. Offering an absorbing and fresh perspective on …
A better title for this show might be “Screening Women,” suggested by tonight’s guest, Janet Bergstrom, in an essay on Akerman for Sight and Sound. Or perhaps we might call it “Look what I’ve done with your name” a response by Akerman to her father’s disappointment that she had no children. This comes directly from …
1976, the Bicentennial year of The United States of America. What else? Apple Computer Company is formed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; NASA Unviels first space shuttle, the Enterprise; It’s reported that CFCs, or Chlorofluorocarbons, used in aerosol cans damage the ozone layer; The Olympics, broadcast from Montreal, Canada, draw an estimated one billion viewers worldwide. Nadia …
Amy Rose Spiegel joins us to talk about talking about sex, Helen Gurley Brown, and her favorite episode of The Golden Girls. Marvin Gaye writes in the liner notes to his 1973 classic Let’s Get It On: I can’t see anything wrong with sex between consenting anybodies. I think we make far too much of …
WFHB’s longest-running public affairs program, Interchange, wants to talk about everything, any topic, in a desire to make connections across the categorical. Our feelings and opinions about Macbeth, and college students, and guns, and dying, and movies, and Moby Dick…do speak to and for each other. Looking closely at one illuminates all the others also. …
Just a moment of watching the daily activities of our national public life reveals that ‘performance’ is consequential — far beyond the confines of the playhouse. In fact, ritual, performance, and theater foster and embody the myths of our culture, the assumptions we hold — often without even being aware of it — and have …
Our opening song is by Taylor Swift featuring The Civil Wars off of The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond. This is “Safe and Sound” which claims “Even if we’re six feet underground, I know that we’ll be safe and sound.” We’ll challenge even that “safety” for hunted girls in today’s program. Kelly …
We announced an interview with historian Douglas Harvey about his book Theater of Empire which juxtaposes the colonizing, mercantile worldview of the English invaders of the Americas with the embodied and ecological perspective of this land’s indigenous cultures in the 18th and 19th century America via forms of performance like ritual ceremony, circuses, and minstrel …
For “Unfounded America” we’re joined by Nancy Isenberg author of the popular and provocative new book, White Trash: The 400-year Untold Story of Class in America. Laura Miller writes of the book in Salon: Tapping into scores of sources, Isenberg traces the emergence of the white-trash stereotype from its roots in British beliefs that the …
Interchange offers a no-frills, 80-minute conversation with White Trash author Nancy Isenberg–just she and I talking on the telephone. In this extended episode you’ll hear Isenberg’s take on the Broadway sensation Hamilton as well as more about the necessity of education to “unfound” our national myths to create a citizen properly skeptical of political and …
In 2008 Susan Gubar was diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer which means that the cancer had metastasized beyond the ovaries into the abdomen or nearby lymph nodes. The statistical prognosis for life expectancy when ovarian cancer is diagnosed in this stage is 3-5 years. In 2012, Gubar became a participant in a Phase One …
Courtney Baker on the double-edged power of images of black suffering and death. For “Lynchings on Loop” Courtney Baker, author of Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death joins us to talk about the history of images of black pain, the malleable and incomplete nature of the image, and how to …
As a photographer for Life and Fortune magazines, Margaret Bourke-White traveled to Russia in the 1930s, photographed the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1938, recorded the liberation of Buchenwald a the end of World War II, and documented “Calcutta streets strewn with putrefying corpses decaying in the heat and being consumed by bloated vultures” in …
The law is a kind of haunting. In single words the history of slavery and denigration can be discovered. And it’s through these words, through the retention of their meaning in their original application, through that first life where they did their original work, that they haunt us. Our program is a conversation with Colin …
We’re joined by four professional actors who will appear courtesy of the Actors’ Equity Association in these two productions which are running on alternating nights from July 8 through the 23rd. They are David Kortemeier, Amanda Catania, Grant Goodman, and Jenny McKnight. I’ll warn you that the conversation is very fluid, alternating focus from Midsummer …
Tonight in lieu of Interchange we’re going to share another special episode of the local podcast The Hijabi Diaries. This one is called Redneck Muslim and explores one woman’s lifelong attraction to organized Religion. Host Aubrey Seader offers the life story of one woman, her name is Dawn, a member of the Bloomington Muslim community, …
For today’s Interchange we bring you a special anthology episode of the local podcast “The Hijabi Diaries” which is a joint production of the Islamic Center of Bloomington and friends Aubrey Seader and Anna Maidi. Seader writes of the project on her website that she and Maidi, started hearing more and more anti-Muslim rhetoric coming …
Our music tonight, at the suggestion of our guest, comes from The Fugs, formed in 1963 by the poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg and Ken Weaver. And we open with, “Here Comes the Levellers,” which is from the Reagan Era release No More Slavery. Our guest is Paul Buhle, one of the foremost historians …
What may seem surprising as you listen is the way in which Thoreau’s understanding of death and life can inform our own considerations of what it means to live by an ethics of inclusion and acceptance of differences and to eschew what is given to us politically and socially as measured, hierarchical, and standardized forms …
Host Doug Storm is joined by Myke Luurtsema, the Hoosier Forest Watch Coordinator for the Indiana Forest Alliance (IFA), and Ron Kerner, a mushroom expert who runs the website Indiana Mushrooms. This is Part II of our discussion about commercial logging and forest health in the Indiana state forests. Part I was a conversation that …
Hosts Doug Storm and Trish Kerle’ are joined by historian Jim Madison to discuss the Hoosier through history. Madison has just published a new book, Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana, published by Indiana University Press. Our three segments cover the origin and cultural identity embodied in the very word “Hoosier,” the geographical make-up of …
Host Doug Storm is joined by William Morris and Joe Varga to discuss the genesis of the Moral Mondays Movement in North Carolina and how it has begun to form a broad coalition here in Indiana. A Mother Jones article from April, 2014 describes the impetus for Moral Mondays as being political action against a …
Host Doug Storm is joined by John Seifert, Indiana’s State Forester. We discuss logging in Yellowwood State Forest and the management of public forest lands. Other topics include the marked increase in commercial logging since 2002; invasive plant species in clear-cut land; the science of carbon sequestration; and the politics of resource management. Credits: Producer …
Hosts Doug Storm and Trish Kerle’ explore some of the nuances, complexities and limitations of marriage for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community – the LGBT community – from a decidedly left of center – some might even say, radical – political and cultural perspective. This is not an anti-marriage or anti-marriage equality show. …
Do you think Darwin’s Origin of Species undermines a belief in the veracity of the creation as told in Genesis? If you think so, what does that say about your worldview? Will your politics be revealed? Does your belief in Yahweh or any other god, or lack of belief in such constructs, really matter in …
Host Lisa-Marie Napoli interviews Mike Potts, Teacher, and Taylor Roberts, Student, both at Brown County Jr. High School, to discuss their recent statewide championship in the “We the People” competition. The guests discuss the details of the “We the People” national educational program and how it enhances young peoples’ knowledge of the constitution and develops …
Tonight on Interchange host Doug Storm is joined by Jason Baird Jackson, Director of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures at Indiana University and Eric Sandweiss a professor in the Department of History at Indiana University to try to answer the question “What are museums for?” by examining the ways these institutions work to create …
Host Alycin Bektesh speaks with Police Chief Mike Diekoff, Forest Gilmore of the Shalom Center and Elaine Guinn of New Hope Family Shelter about options for warm shelter in Bloomington.