Interviews By Topic

a row of housing in blue

David Harvey’s work over the years has looked at the economy in radical ways, linking how we earn and spend with, say, geography. Among his fresh frameworks is something called "spatial justice." Steve Paulson asked Harvey what he means by that.More

a girl walks down a broken sidewalk

As a journalist, Bobbi Dempsey exposes an often hidden world of constant insecurity that isn’t quite homelessness — she specializes in writing about issues that have affected working-class women like herself.More

These are tough times for people who care about insects. Roughly 40 percent of insect species face extinction. Poet Heather Swan is haunted by this specter of ecosystem collapse, but she’s also determined to live with love and even hope in a perilous time.More

Biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber says life is all about eating and being eaten, which may sound gruesome, but to him, it’s a miraculous process. He’s the author of “Being Edible: Toward a Mystical Biology.”More

Physicist Carlo Rovelli travels to the core of a black hole, where the arrow of time reverses and a white hole is born.   More

Marjolijn van Heemstra is the poet laureate of Amsterdam. As her anxiety about climate change and other problems ratcheted up, she found solace in the larger cosmos and became a "dark sky" activist.More

Time may be a fundamental quality of the universe, but physicists still can't explain what time is. That hasn't stopped theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser from devoting much of his life to studying the origins of time and the formation of the cosmos.More

David Treuer

Ojibwe historian David Treuer thinks it’s time for a new kind of Native American narrative, with fewer stories of hardship and what he calls “trauma porn.” Treuer has written a sweeping counter-narrative of Native American history, “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee.”More

Blackjack, slots, roulette, and sports betting are legal on Native-owned land because that’s where tribes have sovereignty. But what exactly does that mean? It’s complicated, says tribal gaming expert Steven Andrew Light.More

“Bad River” is Mary Mazzio’s documentary about a small tribe, the Bad River band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and their legal battle to get rid of an oil pipeline. She examines the conflicting ideas we have about how to live on the land and even whether it can be owned.More

Quannah Rose Chasinghorse-Potts in a black jacket riding a white horse in a desert landscape.

Quannah ChasingHorse is both a Native American activist and a supermodel in the fashion industry. In her early twenties, she represents the next generation of activists working to protect Native land rights.More

Maria Sabina

The story of Mazotec healer Maria Sabina is a notorious example of how psychedelic enthusiasts have exploited the knowledge of Indigenous cultures they don’t really understand.More

Rachel Fernandez

Sutton King wants to change the culture around psychedelic medicines by confronting historical wrongs and getting Indigenous people into key decision-making roles in the psychedelic industry. More

A mushroom

Pharmaceutical companies have a long history of hunting for medicinal drugs, often in Indigenous cultures. Historian Lucas Richert tells the story of how one company went bioprospecting for peyote.More

Nancy Fraser

Hinge points are moments of crisis where a new system can be made. Philosopher Nancy Fraser believes the particular crises we face today are so severe they actually present an opportunity.More

Nancy Fraser

Over four decades, philosopher Nancy Fraser has worked to expose the deep roots that connect all the crises of our time: racial violence, environmental devastation, the impoverishment of families, challenges to democracy. Think of each as the toxic byproducts of capitalism.More

19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels scroll on their smartphones

China Mieville is a writer best known for speculative fiction, but he's also written a lot about Marxism, most recently in a history of the Communist Manifesto called “A Spectre, Haunting."More

Jim Thorpe and his fellow players in a snowstorm

Jim Thorpe was stripped of the Olympic gold medals awarded to him in 1912, but activists finally got them back in 2022. Today, Thorpe's legacy is about more than medals or even correcting historic wrongs — young Native Americans are looking to him for inspiration.More

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