Best of: Lauren Sandler on Homelessness

Lauren Sandler is an award-winning journalist and author based in Brooklyn. Her most recent book is the bestselling This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home, a work narrative nonfiction about a young homeless mother in New York. It was named a Notable book of 2020 by the New York Times. Lauren is the author of two previous books, the bestselling One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One and Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement.  

Lauren's essays and features have appeared in dozens of publications including Time, The New York Times, Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The Guardian, New York Magazine, and Elle.  She has been on staff at Salon and at NPR, where she worked on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and the Cultural Desk. 

In addition to her journalism, Lauren has lead the OpEd Project’s Public Voices Fellowships at Yale, Columbia, UVA, and Dartmouth, and has taught in the graduate journalism program at NYU, where she has also been Visiting Scholar. She was a regular commentator for the BBC and has been interviewed nationally and internationally on many networks including CNN, PBS, CBS, NBC, and throughout public radio.

Best of: Arun Kumar on Philanthrocapitalism

Arun Kumar is a Lecturer in International Management at the University of York.

Previously trained in architecture and development management, he worked for a number of years as an independent researcher and consultant/advisor with leading aid agencies, NGOs, independent research centres, policy think-tanks, and human rights activists in South Asia. Tired of travelling and writing reports, he returned to academia in 2012. After completing his PhD at the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology at Lancaster University and working, briefly, in France, he joined the University of York in 2016 as a Lecturer. He is also involved with the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre at York.

Photo by Peggy Anke on Unsplash

Photo by Peggy Anke on Unsplash

Best of: Fiori Berhane on the Mediterranean Sea as A Nowhere Space

We talk with Fiori Berhane about migration. Fiori Berhane broadly researches the ways in which African refugees challenge discursive and legal-juridical frameworks that undergird the Central Mediterranean crossing. In particular, she studies the ways in which Eritrean refugee activists engage with colonial, post-colonial and neo-colonial policies and embedded histories in Italy within efforts to redress multi-modal violence– that which takes place in their country of origin, transit and settlement. She is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at USC.

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Best of: Nathan Nunn on The Roots of Global Inequality

We speak with Nathan Nunn about the historical origins of inequality. Nathan Nunn is Frederic E. Abbe Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Professor Nunn’s primary research interests are in political economy, economic history, economic development, cultural economics, and international trade.

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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 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.  

I am looking to be able to raise money in order to improve the technical quality of the podcast and maintain the website. I am also hoping to hire an editor, buy books and subscribe to digital libraries. 

Best,

Lev

DONATE TODAY

Joseph Margulies Has a Plan to Stop Gentrification

Joseph Margulies is Professor of Law and Government at Cornell University. He was Counsel of Record in Rasul v. Bush (2004), involving detentions at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station, and in Geren v. Omar and Munaf v. Geren (2008), involving detentions at Camp Cropper in Iraq. His books include Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power and What Changed When Everything Changed: 9/11 and the Making of National Identity.

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.  

I am looking to be able to raise money in order to improve the technical quality of the podcast and maintain the website. I am also hoping to hire an editor, buy books and subscribe to digital libraries. 

Best,

Lev

DONATE TODAY

Best Of: Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on Racial Capitalism

This episode was originally released in September 2020.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He completed his PhD at University of California, Los Angeles. Before that, he completed BAs in Philosophy and Political Science at Indiana University.

His theoretical work draws liberally from German transcendental philosophy, contemporary philosophy of language, contemporary social science, histories of activism and activist thinkers, and the Black radical tradition.

His public philosophy, including articles exploring intersections of climate justice and colonialism, has been featured in The New YorkerThe NationBoston ReviewDissentThe AppealSlateAl JazeeraThe New RepublicAeon, and Foreign Policy.

He is the author of
Elite Capture and Reconsidering Reparations.

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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 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.  

I am looking to be able to raise money in order to improve the technical quality of the podcast and maintain the website. I am also hoping to hire an editor, buy books and subscribe to digital libraries. 

Best,

Lev

DONATE TODAY

Pablo Pryluka on Juan Peron and The Legacy of Peronism

Pablo Pryluka is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History. Prior to Princeton, he did his undergraduate studies at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and earned a master’s in History at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. He has received grants from the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (Argentina) and the Fulbright Commission. At the same time, he was an exchange student at the Freie Universität in 2019 and took part in different collaborative projects: he was involved in the Princeton-Humboldt Collaborative project “Contesting and Converging Stories of Global Order: Regional and National Narratives” between 2018 and 2019 and the Global History Summer Schools hosted in Berlin (2017) and Tokio (2019).

Pryluka’s main fields of interest are modern Latin American History and Global History, with a focus on social and economic history. His dissertation aims to provide a comparative analysis of patterns of consumption and inequality in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile during the state-led industrialization years (1930s-1970s). The dissertation addresses the social performance of state-led industrialization and its impact on inequality, looking at patterns of consumption of three specific consumer goods: refrigerators, automobiles, and televisions. He is interested not only in who had access to these goods, but also both the meanings involved in their consumption and the expectations of consumers in terms of socioeconomic status.