KPFA - Against the Grain

Food affects all of us — but while it’s a necessity for our survival, it’s also a vast, sprawling industry spanning the globe, which generates enormous profits as well as significant damage to public health and the environment. Nutritionist and molecular biologist Marion Nestle sheds light on the choices we all must navigate when we enter the grocery store.
Marion Nestle, What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters North Point Press, 2025
The post Marion Nestle on Food Choices and Food Politics appeared first on KPFA.

Our modern world was born from destruction — and no more so than in North America, which historian Clifton Crais describes as the most violent place on the planet in the 18th and 19th centuries. Crais describes what he calls the Mortecene against humans and the rest of nature.
Clifton Crais, The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World University of Chicago Press, 2025
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The global rise of the authoritarian right has confounded classification and led to contentious debates on the left. Do politicians like Modi, Bolsonaro, Orban, and Trump represent an extreme form of right-wing populism? Or are they fascists, as some claim? Historian and scholar of populism and fascism Federico Finchelstein argues that we’re seeing something new — a phenomenon that blurs the lines between the two. (Encore presentation.)
Federico Finchelstein, The Wannabe Fascists: A Guide to Understanding the Greatest Threat to Democracy UC Press, 2024
The post The Populist-Fascist Hybrid appeared first on KPFA.

For as long as we’ve known, humans have revered ancient trees. We have also destroyed them, especially since the advent of colonialism and fossil fuel capitalism. Historian Jared Farmer reflects on what trees illuminate about our past and potential future.
The post Fund Drive Special: Humans and Ancient Trees appeared first on KPFA.

It’s been called a new gold rush, but not of our external environment, which continues to be plundered, but of our internal environment — of our psyches. Historian of science D. Graham Burnett, one of the Friends of Attention, lays out what’s at stake — and how they’re organizing a movement to reclaim our attention.
Please donate in support of KPFA and Against the Grain — which celebrates its 23rd birthday today!
The post Fund Drive Special: Fighting the Fracking of Our Attention appeared first on KPFA.