KPFA - Against the Grain

Some of the most important struggles for health justice have taken place in New York City — from the Young Lords to ACT UP, from battles to make school lunches free to the Fight for $15 for low wage workers. Public health scholar Nicholas Freudenberg discusses the lessons he’s gleaned from fifty years of activism, including the need to start with people’s daily living conditions.
Nicholas Freudenberg, Fighting for New York: Activism for Health and Social Justice Since the 1960s Columbia University Press, 2026
Photo by CDC on Unsplash
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We live our lives often through the things we buy — presuming the more we have, the happier we’ll be. Have we always thought this way? Economist Mark Joseph Stelzner examines the need for ever more consumption under capitalism — and reflects on what our lives might be like if we exchanged the quest for goods for more leisure.
Mark Joseph Stelzner, Growth Machines: On the Hollow Joys of Consumption in the Desert of Economic Life University of Chicago Press, 2026
Photo by Obi on Unsplash
The post All Consuming appeared first on KPFA.

Almost 98% of all state executions in the U.S. are conducted by lethal injection, purportedly a quick and painless death. Corinna Barrett Lain states nothing could be further from the truth — but that it’s in the interests of the killing state that we imagine it that way.
Corinna Barrett Lain, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection NYU Press, 2025
Photo by Raghavendra V. Konkathi on Unsplash
The post When the State Kills by Lethal Injection appeared first on KPFA.

Why do poor, often sick, rural people vote for Republicans even after they slash funding for Medicaid and close rural hospitals? Michael Shepherd describes how conservative politicians and media have successfully built support for those cuts by claiming programs like Medicaid only help city dwellers, people of color, and immigrants.
Michael E. Shepherd, Rural Pain, Republican Gain: How the Republican Party Is Killing Rural America and Why Democrats Are Blamed University of Chicago Press, 2026
Photo by Engin Akyurt on Unsplash
The post Why Do Rural Poor People Support the GOP? appeared first on KPFA.

When we think of world makers, we’re unlikely to picture a flower. Yet flowers completely transformed our planet, giving us rain forests, altering coastlines, producing the food we eat, and enticing our pre-human ancestors to climb down from the trees. And they did that partially through reshaping the formerly adversarial relationship between plants and insects into one of mutual aid and cooperation most of the time. Biologist David George Haskell enumerates our debt to flowers. (Full-length presentation.)
David George Haskell, How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries Viking, 2026
Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash
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