Best of: Samuel Miller McDonald on The Political Economy of Energy

Samuel Miller McDonald is an editor at The Trouble and Epilogue, a doctoral researcher at University of Oxford, and graduate of the Yale School of the Environment and College of the Atlantic. His writing has appeared in Current Affairs, The New Republic, and The Guardian, among other publications. He is working on a book called PROGRESS about the history and future of progress, for William Collins and St. Martin's Press.

Photo by Patrick Federi on Unsplash

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A note from Lev:

I am a high school teacher of history and economics at a public high school in NYC, and began the podcast to help demystify political economy for teachers.  The podcast is now within the top 2% of podcasts worldwide in terms of listeners (per Listen Notes) and individual episodes are frequently listed by The Syllabus (the-syllabus.com) as among the 10 best political economy podcasts of a particular week.  The podcast is reaching thousands of listeners each month.  

The podcast seeks to provide a substantive alternative to mainstream economics media; to communicate information and ideas that contribute to equitable and peaceful solutions to political and economic issues; and to improve the teaching of high school and university political economy.  

Best,

Lev

Best of: Stefan Ouma on How Economics Would Change if Racism Was Taken Seriously

Stefan Ouma holds the Chair of Economic Geography at the Department of Geography at the University of Bayreuth. Before that he worked as Doc and Post-Doc at Goethe-University, Frankfurt. His research interests lies in a theoretically and empirically informed economic geography of globalization and development, drawing primarily on insights from heterodox economics, political ecology, and post- and decolonial work. His overriding research goal is to rematerialize “the economy” in times of seemingly unbounded economic relations and to open it up for political debate regarding the more sustainable and just pathways and forms of economy-making. His current research on the political economy and ecology of global supply chains, the financialization of land and agriculture, the digital transformation of labor, and on “African Futures” reflect this orientation and complement existing foci of the Bayreuth Department of Geography.

He a member of the Editorial Collective of Antipode.

Photo by Thomas de LUZE on Unsplash

Photo by Thomas de LUZE on Unsplash

Best of: Juan Cole on Israel and Palestine (a primer)

Juan R. I. Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three and a half decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context. His most recent book is Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires. He is also the author of The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East (2014); Engaging the Muslim World (2009); Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (2007); and many other books. He has translated works of Lebanese-American author Kahlil Gibran and has appeared on PBS’s Lehrer News Hour, ABC World News Tonight, Nightline, The Today Show, Charlie Rose, Anderson Cooper 360, The Rachel Maddow Show, All In With Chris Hayes, The Colbert Report, Democracy Now!, and many others. He has given many radio and press interviews. He has written widely about Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and South Asia. He has written about the upheavals in the Arab World since 2011, including about Sunni extremist groups and Shiite politics. Cole commands Arabic, Persian, and Urdu and reads Turkish, and knows both Middle Eastern and South Asian Islam. He lived in various parts of the Muslim world for more than a decade, and continues to travel widely there.

Photo by Robert Bye on Unsplash

Photo by Robert Bye on Unsplash

A note from Lev:

I am a high school teacher of history and economics at a public high school in NYC, and began the podcast to help demystify political economy for teachers.  The podcast is now within the top 2% of podcasts worldwide in terms of listeners (per Listen Notes) and individual episodes are frequently listed by The Syllabus (the-syllabus.com) as among the 10 best political economy podcasts of a particular week.  The podcast is reaching thousands of listeners each month.  

The podcast seeks to provide a substantive alternative to mainstream economics media; to communicate information and ideas that contribute to equitable and peaceful solutions to political and economic issues; and to improve the teaching of high school and university political economy.  

Best,

Lev

Best of: Srishti Yadav on the Agrarian Question in India

Dr. Srishti Yadav is an Instructor for the Economics & Society stream in the Department of Economics at the University of Manitoba. She has a PhD in Economics from The New School in New York. Her dissertation research focuses on the political economy of development in India, investing the relationship between agrarian change and structural transformation through the framework of the Agrarian Question. Her ongoing research examines changing agrarian class relations in the face of growing rural-urban migration and the caste- and gender-based dynamics of this process through fieldwork. Her teaching interests are in Marxian Political Economy and Development Economics.

A note from Lev:

I am a high school teacher of history and economics at a public high school in NYC, and began the podcast to help demystify economics for teachers.  The podcast is now within the top 2.5% of podcasts worldwide in terms of listeners (per Listen Notes) and individual episodes are frequently listed by The Syllabus (the-syllabus.com) as among the 10 best political economy podcasts of a particular week.  The podcast is reaching thousands of listeners each month.  

The podcast seeks to provide a substantive alternative to mainstream economics media; to communicate information and ideas that contribute to equitable and peaceful solutions to political and economic issues; and to improve the teaching of high school and university political economy.  

I am looking to be able to raise money in order to improve the technical quality of the podcast and website and to further expand the audience through professionally designed social media outreach. I am also hoping to hire an editor. 

Best,

Lev

DONATE TODAY

Teddy Wayne on Class in America (and his new book The Winner)

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels The Winner (coming May 2024), The Great Man Theory, Apartment, Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A former columnist for the New York Times and McSweeney’s and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. He has developed films and series from his novels with Columbia Pictures, HBO, MGM Television, and others. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the writer Kate Greathead, and their children.

A note from Lev:

I am a high school teacher of history and economics at a public high school in NYC, and began the podcast to help demystify economics for teachers.  The podcast is now within the top 2% of podcasts worldwide in terms of listeners (per Listen Notes) and individual episodes are frequently listed by The Syllabus (the-syllabus.com) as among the 10 best political economy podcasts of a particular week.  The podcast is reaching thousands of listeners each month.  

The podcast seeks to provide a substantive alternative to mainstream economics media; to communicate information and ideas that contribute to equitable and peaceful solutions to political and economic issues; and to improve the teaching of high school and university political economy.  

Best,

Lev

Delton Best of: Chen on The Carbon Coin (If you read The Ministry for the Future this episode is for you!)

Delton Chen is a geo-hydrologist and civil engineer. Delton holds a Ph.D. in engineering from the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Queensland, Australia. Delton has 20 years of combined experience in groundwater management, environmental impact assessments, mining, geothermal energy and climate mitigation; and he analyzed the mitigation potential of fly-ash cement and low-flow water taps for Project Drawdown. Delton is a thought-leader in the development of new public policies based on Central Bank Digital Currencies, and he is a member of the Blockchain Climate Institute. Delton founded the Global Carbon Reward Initiative in 2013.

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Best of: Samuel Hughes on Ugly Buildings, Beautiful Cities and How to Build Better Suburbs

Samuel Hughes is a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and Head of Research at the Office for Place within the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.

His education was primarily at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. At the former he took an MA in Philosophy Politics and Economics (2013) and a B.Phil. in Philosophy (2015); at the latter he completed his PhD in Philosophy (2020). He is interested in architecture and urbanism, both on a philosophical level and at the level of policy. He is now beginning a book on philosophical approaches to artistic modernism, a subject on which immense quantities have been written, but which has almost never been systematically investigated using the tools of analytical philosophy.

CONTRIBUTE

A note from Lev:

I am a high school teacher of history and economics at a public high school in NYC, and began the podcast to help demystify economics for teachers.  The podcast is now within the top 2% of podcasts worldwide in terms of listeners (per Listen Notes) and individual episodes are frequently listed by The Syllabus (the-syllabus.com) as among the 10 best political economy podcasts of a particular week.  The podcast is reaching thousands of listeners each month.  

The podcast seeks to provide a substantive alternative to mainstream economics media; to communicate information and ideas that contribute to equitable and peaceful solutions to political and economic issues; and to improve the teaching of high school and university political economy.  

Best,

Lev

Dennis O. Flynn on The World that Silver Created

Dennis O. Flynn is the Alexander R. Heron Professor of Economics at the University of the Pacific. He has published since 1978 dozens of essays on global monetary history, fifteen of which have been reproduced in World Silver and Monetary History in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Variorum, 1996). He has co-edited Metals and Monies in an Emerging Global Economy (Variorum 1997), Studies in the Economic History of the Pacific Rim (Routledge, 1998), Pacific Centuries: Pacific and Pacific Rim History Since the 16th Century (Routledge, 1999), European Entry into the Pacific: Spain and the Acapulco-Manila Galleons (Variorum, 2001), Studies in Pacific History: Economics, Politics, and Migration (Ashgate, 2002), and Studies in Global Monetary History, 1470–1800 (Ashgate, 2002). He is co-General Editor of a 19-volume series, The Pacific World: Lands, Peoples, and History of the Pacific, 1500–1900 (Variorum/Ashgate, 2001–2004). His collaborative research with Arturo Giráldez has been featured in the New York Times (2 December 2000) and The Economist (25 August 2001).

DONATE TODAY

A note from Lev:

I am a high school teacher of history and economics at a public high school in NYC, and began the podcast to help demystify economics for teachers.  The podcast is now within the top 2.5% of podcasts worldwide in terms of listeners (per Listen Notes) and individual episodes are frequently listed by The Syllabus (the-syllabus.com) as among the 10 best political economy podcasts of a particular week.  The podcast is reaching thousands of listeners each month.  

The podcast seeks to provide a substantive alternative to mainstream economics media; to communicate information and ideas that contribute to equitable and peaceful solutions to political and economic issues; and to improve the teaching of high school and university political economy.  

Best,

Lev