What happens when tech workers challenge the companies they once believed in?

This week Writer’s Voice talks with Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan about Against Tech Oligarchy. They helped build the tech worker movement, and they’re candid about both its victories and the limits of its organizing strategies. We talk about Google’s Project Maven, the Kickstarter union drive, and why winning union recognition doesn’t automatically give workers the leverage they need.

“The only way to hold our bosses and our companies and institutions accountable is by having pressure from below.” — Clarissa Redwine

Then I revisit my conversation with Noam Scheiber about Hollywood writers, AI and the growing solidarity among college-educated workers. He also recommends Redwine and Tan’s book.

“Their book is called Against Tech Oligarchy, Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry. And I learned a lot from reading a galley of that book and I’ve learned a lot from the work over the years.” — Noam Scheiber

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Noam Scheiber on the Mutiny of the New Working Class, Maria Adelmann on Adjunct Labor

Read The Trancript

Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan, Against Tech Oligarchy

Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan talk about Against Tech Oligarchy and the movement they helped organize.

Drawing on their experiences at Kickstarter and Microsoft, they explain how tech workers’ belief in their employers’ missions gave way to conflict over the companies’ actions.

We discuss Google’s Project Maven, public pressure campaigns, retaliation, and the turn toward legally recognized unions.

Redwine and Tan also examine the limits of strategies they once championed. When software keeps generating revenue without workers at their desks, a strike requires a different understanding of leverage.

Our conversation asks how workers can test their power, defend their wins, and connect workplace organizing to larger questions about AI and corporate control.

Key topics:

• Tech companies’ democratic promises and workers’ disillusionment
• Google Project Maven and employee opposition to military AI
• Kickstarter organizing and management resistance
• Public pressure campaigns and union recognition
• Why tech strikes pose different challenges
• Finding leverage across jobs, teams and business models
• AI, solidarity and defending organizing victories

Noam Scheiber, Mutiny

In this archived excerpt, I talk with Noam Scheiber about Mutiny and the insecurity facing college-educated workers. We begin with Hollywood writers, whose once-stable careers became more precarious as streaming shortened employment and disrupted established paths into the profession.

Scheiber explains how that insecurity, combined with fears of AI replacement, helped sustain the writers’ strike. We then explore growing worker consciousness in the tech industry and the possibility of solidarity between workers with and without college degrees.

He closes by recommending Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan’s Against Tech Oligarchy, connecting this discussion of economic insecurity to the first segment’s examination of organizing and worker power.

Listen to the full interview

What do we learn to live with, and when do we decide we can’t accept it anymore?

This week, we talk with Tom Lin about his novel, Babylon, South Dakota. It follows a Chinese immigrant family whose new home shares its landscape with a nuclear missile silo. We talk about magical realism, family stories, belonging, dementia, and the relationship between science fiction and the weapons people build.

I think the power of magical realism is to introduce amazing things which are treated as totally ordinary, which I hope encourages people to think, ‘what about my life that I actually do live is amazing and magical and lucky that I’ve gotten used to?’ — Tom Lin

Then, on the third anniversary of the horrific Hamas attack on Israel and the beginning of Israel’s genocide of Gaza, we revisit our March 2025 conversation with Omar El Akkad about One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. In this selected excerpt, we discuss the genocide in Gaza, Western complicity, and his argument that people will eventually claim they always opposed an atrocity they tolerated while it was happening.

Our conversation explores language that sanitizes violence, restrictions on dissent, and the failures of mainstream liberalism. El Akkad also explains why genocide became an absolute moral boundary for him.

It just seemed to me a particularly self-evident thing that when it’s too late to do anything about any of this, it’ll just be acceptable…to talk about how you’ve always been against it. — Omar El Akkad

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: U.S. Media’s Gaza Failure with Robin Andersen, Daniel Ellsberg, THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE

Read The Transcript

Tom Lin on Babylon, South Dakota

KEY TOPICS

• Babylon, South Dakota and Chinese immigrant family life
• Family stories as material for fiction
• Magical realism and everyday wonder
• Chrysanthemums, inheritance, and putting down roots
• Aging, dementia, and the limits of shared experience
• Nuclear missile silos and ordinary life on the Great Plains
• Science fiction’s influence on technological development
• Imagining futures beyond familiar dystopias

Omar El Akkad on Gaza and Western Complicity

KEY TOPICS:

• Historical hindsight and the rewriting of moral positions
• Gaza and personal complicity
• Western liberalism and the gap between words and actions
• Generational differences in the costs and rewards of conformity
• Media pressure and language that sanitizes violence
• Boycotts, dissent, and restrictions on rights
• Democratic Party failures and lesser-of-two-evils voting
• Genocide as an absolute moral boundary

What happens when the old rules stop working?

This week, two works of fiction look at the relationships that shape us, and the systems of power we often carry within ourselves.

First, Malavika Kannan talks about Unprecedented Times, her coming-of-age novel about Rishi, a queer Indian American student whose arrival at Stanford coincides with a crisis of faith in activism, institutions and the American promise itself.

As 2020 transforms the world around her, Rishi wrestles with family expectations, friendship, sex, consent, political disillusionment and her desire to become a writer. Kannan talks about Gen Z’s growing refusal to follow rules that no longer seem to deliver what they promise.

“One of the main themes that I was trying to explore in this book and that I think about a lot as a person is the question of agency.” — Malavika Kannan

Then Lauren Acampora talks about The Animal Room, her connected collection of stories about the many ways human beings love, use, protect, fear and exploit animals.

But these stories are also mirrors. They ask us to look at ourselves, and at what care, empathy and responsibility mean in our relationships with other people.

“The dominance isn’t working out so well.” — Lauren Acampora

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Short Stories by George Saunders & Jennifer Haigh, Vauhini Vara, THIS IS SALVAGED

Tags: Malavika Kannan, Unprecedented Times, Lauren Acampora, The Animal Room, Writer’s Voice, Gen Z fiction, queer fiction, Indian American fiction, coming of age novel, human animal relationships, Francesca Rheannon

Read The Transcript

Malavika Kannan, Unprecedented Times

Malavika Kannan talks about Unprecedented Times, her funny, searching novel about Gen Z, climate anxiety, queer identity and finding your own way.

Key Topics

• Gen Z and political disillusionment
• climate activism
• queer identity
• Indian American families
• immigration
• friendship and romantic boundaries
• utopian communities
• sexual consent and agency

Lauren Acampora, The Animal Room

Lauren Acampora talks about The Animal Room, interconnected stories exploring what our relationships with animals reveal about care, power, privilege and empathy.

Key Topics

• human-animal relationships,
• animal rights
• mental health
• dominance versus collaboration
• conservation
• animal exploitation

When the state comes for your neighbors, what can you do?

In Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism, journalist Sonali Kolhatkar looks at communities that aren’t waiting for someone else to answer that question.

“Nobody is coming to save us from this machinery. We have to do it ourselves.” — Sonali Kolhatkar

Kolhatkar tells us about ordinary people who have organized patrols to document ICE operations, created rapid-response networks, warned vulnerable neighbors and provided food, rent money, childcare and transportation to families affected by detention and deportation.

We also talk about why she connects immigrant rights with labor rights and Black struggles against policing and state violence, and why she believes mutual aid can build political solidarity across unexpected divides.

Finally, we discuss electoral politics. Kolhatkar argues that movements shouldn’t organize themselves around politicians. Instead, elected officials should be treated as public servants accountable to organized communities.

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Lauren Markham, The Far Away Brothers, ILLEGALIZED: Rafael Martinez on Undocumented Youth Movements

Topics covered:

• immigration enforcement and due process, community defense,
• documenting ICE operations,
• mutual aid,
• immigrant labor,
• organized labor,
• Black abolitionist thought,
• policing and state power,
• multiracial solidarity,
• electoral politics

About the Author

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host, and executive producer of Rising Up With Sonali and the author of Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism (Seven Stories, 2026), Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World is Possible(Seven Stories, 2025), and Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice(City Lights, 2023). Her first book, co-authored with James Ingalls, is Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2006, Seven Stories).

READ THE TRANSCRIPT

SCAM ALERT: Someone is impersonating Francesca Rheannon and Writer’s Voice using thewritersvoicepodcast@gmail.com to solicit authors for fraudulent interviews and request payment. Writer’s Voice never charges authors or publishers for interviews. [Read the full scam alert.]

James Baldwin believed that love could be terrifying, but also our only hope. For Keith Haring, hope lay in art.

This week, I talk with Nicholas Boggs about Baldwin: A Love Story, his biography of James Baldwin told through four relationships that shaped Baldwin’s life and art. Boggs describes love as central not only to Baldwin’s novels but to his political writing, and traces his journey from a difficult Harlem childhood and the Black church to his role as a writer, messenger and witness.

All of Baldwin’s work was about love. All of his novels were love stories… And his nonfiction writings, political writings, were also about love.” — Nicholas Boggs

Then, I revisit part of my 2024 conversation with Brad Gooch about Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring. Haring challenged the boundary between high and popular art, from his subway drawings to the Pop Shop. Gooch talks about Haring’s collaborations, his determination to communicate across class and cultural lines, and the legacy of his belief in “art for everybody.”

“Keith did everything that he could do to blow that system [the art market] apart.” — Brad Gooch

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: DaMaris Hill, A BOUND WOMAN IS A DANGEROUS THING, Ta-Nahisi Coates, THE BEAUTIFUL STRUGGLE

Tags: Black history, James Baldwin, queer artists, Keith Haring, Brad Gooch, Nicholas Bogss, queer writers, Writer’s Voice

Read The Transcript

Nicholas Boggs, Baldwin: A Love Story

James Baldwin wrote about race, sexuality and America with a piercing clarity. But beneath all of those subjects was another one, love. In Baldwin: A Love Story, Nicholas Boggs tells Baldwin’s life through four relationships that shaped both the man and the writer.

We talk about Baldwin’s difficult journey toward self-love, his bond with the painter Beauford Delaney, the lovers who influenced novels like Giovanni’s Room and If Beale Street Could Talk, and the complicated relationship between Baldwin’s private life and his public role as a witness to America.

We also talk about why Baldwin’s later work matters, and why, as Boggs says, we don’t have to imagine what Baldwin might say about many of the questions confronting us now. He was already writing about them. Baldwin A Love Story is Nicholas Boggs’ first book — and a New York Times bestseller.

Read Little Man, Little Man

Brad Gooch, Radiant

Keith Haring wanted art to belong to everybody. He drew in the New York subway, collaborated with graffiti artists and sold T-shirts and pins at his Pop Shop. And for that, much of the established art world treated him with suspicion.

In this excerpt from my 2024 conversation with Brad Gooch about his biography Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring, we talk about Haring’s determination to break down the boundary between high art and popular culture, his collaborations with the teenage graffiti artist LA2, and the ideas behind Haring’s instantly recognizable visual language.

We also talk about Haring’s legacy, as an artist, an activist and an influence on later generations who share his belief in bringing art out of elite institutions and into public life. 

Listen to the full interview with Brad Gooch

Extraction Built Our World. Now Comes the Reckoning.

What do we do when the systems that created modern prosperity begin to undermine the conditions for life itself?

I talk with James Crawford about The Vanishing Earth: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction. Crawford grew up in a family shaped by coal, copper and North Sea oil. Now he’s asking what that history means in a world where extraction reaches into virtually everything we do.

We talk about lithium mining in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the limits of a purely technological green transition, the rights of nature, climate litigation and the poisoned landscape of Butte, Montana, where environmental repair will have to continue indefinitely.

“The repair isn’t about returning us to what we were, it’s about facing what we are now.” — James Crawford

Then, to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we return to my 2009 interview with Max Page about The City’s End. Page traces two centuries of imagined catastrophes in New York, from political and economic collapse to nuclear annihilation and climate disaster.

His surprising argument is that destroying New York in our imagination isn’t only an expression of fear. It can also reveal how deeply we value the city and what we fear losing.

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Richard Heinberg, SNAKE OIL & Bill McKibben, OIL AND HONEY, Hope For The Climate Crisis: Michael Mann, OUR FRAGILE MOMENT

Tags: extraction, economic growth, rights of nature, public trust doctrine, James Crawford, The Vanishing Earth, green energy, lithium, 9/11, New York City, World Trade Center, Max Page, The City’s End

Read The Transcript

Segment One: James Crawford

James Crawford traces extraction from his own family history in North Sea oil to the global economy. He argues that replacing fossil fuels with new technologies won’t be enough if we leave the underlying logic of extraction untouched. We talk about lithium mining, Indigenous rights, the public trust doctrine, successful youth climate litigation in Montana and the poisoned legacy of copper mining in Butte. Crawford finds hope not in returning to an untouched past, but in accepting our responsibility for repair.

Before Al Qaeda’s jets crashed into the twin towers in the real world, millions of players of the software game Flight Simulator had crashed their fantasy jets into the same towers for years. Before that, King Kong threatened the Empire State Building. New York has been destroyed by flood, a sudden ice age, aliens from other planets, anarchists and immigrants and nuclear war — all in the imagination of American writers, filmmakers, and artists. What is it about the New York that excites such fantasies of destruction?

Max Page explores that question in THE CITY’S END: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction. Page teaches history and architecture at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Listen to the full interview with Max Page

There comes a moment in many families when the people who once took care of us begin to need our care.

This week on Writer’s Voice, two writers explore that profound reversal, and the practical, emotional and even spiritual challenges it brings.

First, personal finance journalist Beth Pinsker talks about My Mother’s Money. When her fiercely independent mother became ill, Pinsker suddenly found herself managing everything from bank accounts and bills to the staggering costs of long-term care. And despite decades of expertise in personal finance, she discovered just how unprepared most of us are.

“We make it so hard for everybody. Oh, my gosh, it is just a morass of red tape out there.” — Beth Pinsker

Then, an interview from our archives: novelist L. Annette Binder talks about Child of Earth and Starry Heaven, her memoir of caring for her mother through Alzheimer’s disease. Binder writes about grief and memory, but also about something unexpected, the moments of love, presence and even grace she found as her mother’s world grew smaller.

“The love that my mom was capable of feeling and that I felt for her survived her cognitive decline.” L. Annette Binder

Two daughters, two different journeys, and one question many of us will face. How do we care for the people who once cared for us?

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: L. Annette Binder on Child of Earth & Starry Heaven, Caring for Elders: Susan Jacoby, NEVER SAY DIE & Allan Teel: ALONE & INVISIBLE NO MORE

Tags: caring for aging parents, elder care, Beth Pinsker, My Mother’s Money, L. Annette Binder, Child of Earth and Starry Heaven, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, financial caregiving, long-term care, Medicare, memory care, aging parents, Writer’s Voice, podcast,

Read The Transcript

Segment One: Beth Pinsker

Pinsker talks about the hidden labor of financial caregiving, why power of attorney is only the beginning, and how quickly long-term care can consume a lifetime of savings.

Key Topics

• financial caregiving,
• power of attorney,
• long-term care,
• Medicare and Medicaid,
• family responsibility, elder care costs

Segment Two: L. Annette Binder

Binder reflects on her mother’s Alzheimer’s, the mystery of consciousness, and what living alongside dementia taught her about memory, love and being fully present.

Key topics:

• Alzheimer’s,
• dementia,
• memory,
• memory care,
• grief,
• mother-daughter relationships.

American fascism didn’t begin with Donald Trump, or even with the rise of fascism in Europe. Its roots reach deep into our own history.

America’s road to fascism began with a big lie about who counts as fully human. That’s what historian Joseph Kelly reveals in his book, The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818–1915. Kelly traces a long struggle between two visions of the country. One rests on the Declaration’s promise of equality. The other claims that people aren’t equal, that white people are superior to Black people and therefore have the right to dominate them.

We follow that ideology from the Missouri crisis through pseudoscientific racism, Indian removal, slavery and the violent overthrow of Reconstruction. Kelly explains how the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts, Jim Crow and The Birth of a Nation used fear, myth and racialized sexual panic to defend white rule.

We also look at a road not taken, multiracial democracy and class-based political cooperation. Those possibilities were repeatedly attacked by elites who weaponized fears of replacement and Black political power.

Kelly connects domestic white supremacy to American empire in Cuba and the Philippines. He argues that fascism is a corruption of democracy, built when dissent is silenced, violence is celebrated and allegiance to the tribe and its leader replaces truth. That history, he says, can help us understand the battle over democracy today.

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Aran Shetterly on The Greensboro Massacre, Paul Kix on the fight to end Jim Crow

Tags: Joseph Kelly, The Biggest Lie, American fascism, white supremacy, racism, slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, replacement theory, multiracial democracy

Read The Transcript

Joseph Kelly, THE BIGGEST LIE

Key topics:

• The conflict between equality and white supremacy
• The Missouri crisis and the defense of slavery
• Pseudoscientific racism
• Andrew Jackson and Indian removal
• The destruction of Reconstruction
• The Ku Klux Klan and the Red Shirts
• Racial and sexual panic
• Ida B. Wells and the truth about lynching
• American imperialism in Cuba and the Philippines
• The Birth of a Nation
• Fascism, political lies and loyalty to the leader

A machine that never judges us may also teach us to forget how human relationships work.

Writer’s Voice talks with Victoria Hetherington about The Friend Machine, her investigation into people who seek friendship, therapy and love from AI. We explore loneliness, simulated care, privacy, emotional dependence and the extraordinary power of the corporations building these systems.

“That’s probably my primary concern, that moral de-skilling might occur.” — Victoria Hetherington

Then, we revisit our 2025 conversation with Silvia Park about her sci-fi novel Luminous. Set in a reunified future Korea, the novel follows a family whose estranged siblings include two humans and a robot.

“What I really question is, if robots exist in this world, would they serve as an outlet or would they amplify our dark urges?” — Silvia Park

Together, these books grapple with salient questions arising from AI and monopoly corporate power. Can programmed affection become love? And what does how we treat A.I. entities say about ourselves?

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Bruce Holsinger on AI’s Moral Dilemmas, Ray Nayler on AI and Autocracy

Tags: Victoria Hetherington, The Friend Machine, Silvia Park, Luminous, AI companions, artificial intelligence, AI friendship, AI therapy, sentient robots, AI ethics, AI privacy, Writer’s Voice

Read The Transcript

Victoria Hetherington, The Friend Machine

What happens when an AI companion becomes your closest friend, your therapist, or even your romantic partner?

Victoria Hetherington’s The Friend Machine: On the Trail of AI Companionship investigates why people form powerful emotional bonds with chatbots.

Hetherington finds that the real story isn’t whether AI is conscious. It’s why so many of us are ready to treat it as if it were.

In our conversation, We talk about loneliness, simulated care, AI therapy, privacy, and the risks of replacing difficult human relationships with frictionless digital ones. We also ask what guardrails are needed when a handful of enormously powerful companies control technologies that can learn our most intimate secrets.

Victoria Hetherington is a journalist, broadcaster, and author whose work explores technology, intimacy, and what it means to be human in an AI-driven world.

Silvia Park, Luminous (re-air)

Set in a reunified Korea, Luminous follows a family with a unique dynamic: two human siblings and their robot brother Yo-Yo.

The novel explores complex relationships between humans and robots, examining questions of love, memory, and what constitutes consciousness.

Silvia Park Interview: Key Topics

• How AI and robotics shape a reunified Korea post-war
• The role of robots in family structures—caretakers, siblings, even romantic partners
• The central mystery of Yo-Yo, a robot who defies expectations and may possess a soul
• The ethical dilemmas of AI companionship and whether love can be programmed
• Morgan’s struggle with creating a robotic boyfriend who loves her—but is he real?
• Jun’s identity as a transgender war veteran and his struggle with his cybernetic body
• How society’s treatment of robots reflects historical patterns of oppression and dehumanization
• The dark undercurrent of ritualized violence against AI and its parallels to human history
• The philosophical question: If AI surpasses us in intelligence and empathy, what happens next?

What does it take to win back a democracy, and who is our government really supposed to serve?

This week on Writer’s Voice, I talk with anthropologist Ida Susser about her book, The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy. She tells the story of a movement in France that began with anger over a diesel tax and grew into a much deeper defense of public services, economic dignity, and democratic power.

“There is no other thing to do for democracy, but fight for your rights every single way and day that you can.” – Ida Susser

Then, following Abdul El Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, we return to my 2021 conversation with him about the book he co-wrote, Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide. El-Sayed explains why American healthcare costs so much, how private insurance drives those costs higher, and how Medicare for All could cover everyone while giving the public real power over prices.

“Under Medicare for All, we would pay for the system far more progressively to cover everyone.” – Dr. Abdul El Sayed

Two movements, one fundamental question, can ordinary people reclaim the institutions meant to serve them?

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You may also like: Abdul El Sayed & Micah Johnson, MEDICARE FOR ALL: A Citizen’s Guide, Remembering The Revolutions of 2011

Tags: Ida Susser, Abdul El-Sayed, Yellow Vests, Medicare for All, Michigan Senate primary, democracy, healthcare reform, single-payer healthcare, neoliberalism, social movements, corporate power, Writer’s Voice

Read the Transcript

Ida Susser, The Yellow Vests

Democracy isn’t something we inherit once and keep forever. It has to be defended, rebuilt, and often reclaimed from those who’ve taken it away.

In her book, The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy, Ida Susser tells the thrilling story of how the Yellow Vest movement erupted in France in 2018, after the Macron government imposed a diesel tax that hit working people already struggling with disappearing hospitals, schools, transit, and public services.

But, as Susser explains, this wasn’t simply an anti-tax movement. On roundabouts and in public squares, people began talking across political divisions. They connected the end of the month with the end of the world, economic survival with the climate crisis.

Susser tells us what the Yellow Vests can teach us about solidarity, state violence, and the long struggle to protect democracy.

Ida Susser is a South African-born American anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

DOWNLOAD THE YELLOW VESTS FOR FREE

Abdul El Sayed on Medicare For All

On August 5, Abdul El-Sayed was declared the winner of Michigan’s Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. He won it with a clear message: get money out of politics, put money in people’s pockets, and pass Medicare for All.

We take up the last demand as we return to an excerpt from my 2021 interview with El-Sayed and physician Micah Johnson about their book, Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed explains why American healthcare costs so much, how a single public insurer could negotiate lower prices, and why paying for Medicare for All is ultimately a question of whose budget matters most.

Can science fiction help us imagine a way through climate crisis, runaway corporate power, and the rise of AI?

This week, we talk with John Feffer about Songlands and Portia Elan about Homebound, two speculative novels that ask how we can make a livable future in an age of crisis.

Songlands, the final novel in Feffer’s Splinterlands trilogy, takes us into a climate-ravaged world where nations have fractured and a biotech corporation holds enormous power. Yet poetry, collective action, and a conscious, caring AI offer another way forward.

“Love is an important kind of operating system, if you will, to define one’s relations with the world.” — John Feffer

Portia Elan’s Homebound travels across 600 years, connecting a queer coder in 1985 with a smuggler in 2585. Their stories come together through grief, a mysterious video game, found family, and the moral choices that shape history.

“[AI] is a reflection of the values of the creators. I’m afraid of the human choices, not so much of the LLM choices.” — Portia Elan

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

[Episode 1036]

Read The Transcript

Segment One, John Feffer on Songlands

John Feffer’s Songlands is the third novel in his Splinterlands trilogy. It takes place in a climate-ravaged future, where the all-powerful CRISPR Corporation offers survival only to a privileged few.

A reluctant poet, Aurora, becomes part of the struggle against it, aided by Karen, the first conscious AI — an AI with a conscience. Writer’s Voice talks with Feffer about climate justice, dangerous feedback loops, geoengineering, corporate oligarchy, and our tendency to project human drives for domination onto AI. We also explore poetry as a force for political resistance, and why we still need to create in the middle of catastrophe.

Segment Two, Portia Elan on Homebound

Portia Elan’s Homebound spans 600 years, linking Bex, a queer coder grieving her uncle in 1985, with Yeshiko, a smuggler fighting to preserve her independence in 2585.

Between them lies a mysterious video game, generations of stories, and Haya, a conscious automaton created to care for damaged ecosystems. I talk with Portia about transforming grief through creativity, finding home in chosen family, and the values humans build into technology.

We explore how stories invite the reader to participate, why everyday kindness matters, and what it means to choose hope as a moral action rather than a comforting feeling.

Read an excerpt from Homebound

The Cuban Revolution transformed a nation. It also ended the Mob’s dream of turning Havana into the center of a global criminal empire. And it divided families.

Writer’s Voice talks with Cuban American historian Ada Ferrer about her memoir, Keeper of My Kin. When Ferrer was ten months old, her mother carried her out of Cuba without saying goodbye to Ferrer’s nine-year-old half-brother, Poli. The separation was supposed to be temporary. It lasted seventeen years.

“We tend to think that history happens up here or something, but all these historical events, their geopolitical decisions, they reverberate in individual lives, at the heart of families, in these really intimate spaces, in the space between people, family members who are separated, right?” — Ada Ferrer

Then Writer’s Voice returns to a 2008 interview with journalist T.J. English about Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution. English describes how Meyer Lansky and other American mobsters allied themselves with dictator Fulgencio Batista, turning Havana into a glittering marketplace of casinos, nightclubs, prostitution, political corruption, and corporate profit.

“In that period, Havana became a kind of a paradise, a mobster’s paradise.” — T.J.English

The Mob hoped Cuba would become the base of a multinational empire. Instead, its exploitation of the island became a powerful symbol for the revolution that swept Batista and the gangsters from power.

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

[Episode 1035]

Tags: Keeper of My Kin, Ada Ferrer, T.J. English, Havana Nocturne, Cuban Revolution, Cuba, Cuban history, Cuban exile, Cuban immigration, Mariel boatlift, Mafia in Cuba, Meyer Lansky, Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro, Writer’s Voice, Francesca Rheannon,

Read The Transcript

Episode Topics

• The Cuban Revolution and family separation
• Cuban migration to the United States
• The Mariel boatlift
• Childhood abandonment and intergenerational trauma
• Letters as historical evidence
• Cuban exile communities
• Ordinary people as historical actorsThe United States embargo against Cuba
• Political repression and economic policy in Cuba
• Fulgencio Batista and political corruption
• Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, and Santo Trafficante
• Organized crime in pre-revolutionary Havana
• Casinos, nightclubs, prostitution, and tourism
• American corporate interests in Cuba
• Capitalism and organized crime
• The Mob’s role in fueling revolutionary opposition

Economic insecurity is reshaping America’s workforce. Will that bring college-educated and non-college educated workers together?

For decades, Americans were told that education was the pathway to the middle class. Get a degree, work hard, and professional success would follow. But that promise has weakened.

In Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber argues that millions of college graduates increasingly face the same insecurity that has long confronted blue-collar workers. They carry heavy student debt, struggle to find stable careers, and often discover that professional jobs offer less autonomy and dignity than previous generations enjoyed.

Writer’s Voice talks with Scheiber about the organizing drives at Starbucks, Apple, Amazon, and among Hollywood writers, along with the changing realities facing doctors, graduate students, and other professionals. He explains why so many workers who once imagined themselves as future managers or professionals are instead embracing unions and collective action.

The conversation explores how corporate restructuring, the aftermath of the Great Recession, streaming media, and artificial intelligence are reshaping work across industries. Scheiber argues that the traditional divide between college-educated and non-college-educated workers is narrowing as economic precarity spreads throughout the labor force.

The result, he suggests, may be a new politics of work, one in which people who once saw themselves as members of different social classes increasingly recognize common interests.

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

Tags: Noam Scheiber, Mutiny, Starbucks Workers United, Amazon Labor Union, Apple union, Hollywood writers strike, college graduates, economic inequality, AI and work, worker organizing, precarity, corporate power, Writer’s Voice podcast

You might also like: Maria Adelmann on Adjunct Labor, Cory Doctorow on Big Tech’s “Enshittification”

Read the Transcript

Noam Scheiber, MUTINY: Key Topics

• – The emergence of the college-educated working class
• – Why college no longer guarantees economic security
• – Starbucks and the Red Cup union campaign
• – Amazon Labor Union and Chris Smalls
• – Apple workers and changing professional expectations
• – Hollywood writers, streaming, and AI
• – Worker dignity and professional autonomy
• – Growing worker consciousness across occupations
• – How AI could reshape labor politics

Read an Excerpt

What does courage demand when freedom is threatened?

This week on Writer’s Voice, two conversations ask one of the hardest questions any of us can face. What does it really mean to resist?

First, journalist Gal Beckerman joins Writer’s Voice to talk about his book How to Be a Dissident. Drawing on figures from Hannah Arendt to Alexei Navalny, Osip Mandelstam and Etty Hillesum, he argues that dissidents aren’t superheroes. They’re ordinary people who decide they can no longer live with inaction.

“I really have come to understand those choices as not only burdensome, but actually the substance from which a real meaningful life is made.”

Then Writer’s Voice revisits a conversation with novelist Buzzy Jackson about To Die Beautiful, her novel inspired by Dutch resistance fighter Hannie Schaft. Through Schaft’s story, Jackson explores how ordinary people become extraordinary when injustice closes in, and why even for any of us, small acts of courage matter.

“I really started to understand that a refugee crisis in a country is a little bit of like a canary in a coal mine.”

Two conversations, one enduring question. How do we prepare ourselves to choose courage when the moment arrives?

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Tags: How to Be a Dissident, Gal Beckerman interview, Writer’s Voice podcast, Hannie Schaft, To Die Beautiful, Dutch Resistance, World War II resistance, Alexei Navalny, Hannah Arendt, Osip Mandelstam, Etty Hillesum, Buzzy Jackson interview,

You might also like: Buzzy Jackson, TO DIE BEAUTIFUL, Robert Matzen, DUTCH GIRL

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

Gal Beckerman, How to Be a Dissident

Gal Beckerman’s How to Be a Dissident begins with a question that many Americans are asking themselves today: What would I actually do if confronted with injustice? That question came to him in a recurring dream in which he faced an interrogator and had to decide whether to compromise or stand by his principles. The dream became the starting point for an exploration of the people throughout history who refused to surrender their moral agency.

Rather than treating dissidents as extraordinary heroes, Beckerman argues that they are ordinary people who develop habits of conscience long before history demands them. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s reflections on those who resisted Nazism, he suggests that the defining question is not ideological but deeply personal: “Can I live with myself?” That question links the lives of very different people across time and political systems.

The conversation explores Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam, who refused to deny a poem criticizing Stalin, even though it led to imprisonment and ultimately death in a labor camp. Beckerman discusses why truth telling became inseparable from Mandelstam’s identity as a poet, and how his wife preserved his work entirely through memory.

Beckerman also reflects on Alexei Navalny’s decision to return to Russia after surviving an assassination attempt. Navalny understood the likely consequences, yet believed he could not abandon the people whose freedom he defended. The discussion explores courage, martyrdom, humor as resistance, and the difficult relationship between hope and sacrifice.

One of the book’s most provocative ideas is Beckerman’s defense of what he calls “hopeful pessimism.” Rather than assuming history inevitably bends toward justice, he argues that recognizing the possibility of failure creates urgency and invites action. He illustrates this through the writings of Dutch Jewish diarist Etty Hillesum, whose remarkable spiritual outlook during the Holocaust demonstrated that dignity and compassion could survive even under the worst imaginable circumstances.

The interview concludes by exploring loyalty, community, protest, and the importance of creating spaces where people see one another publicly living according to shared values, such as neighborhood networks and No Kings demonstrations, and why the value of protest often lies less in immediate political victories than in helping people develop the habits of citizenship that sustain democracy over time. Ultimately, he argues that meaningful lives are built through countless moral choices, each one another brushstroke in the portrait of who we become.

READ THE TRANSCRIPT

Buzzy Jackson, TO DIE BEAUTIFUL

Writer’s Voice revisits a conversation with novelist Buzzy Jackson about To Die Beautiful, inspired by the life of Hannie Schaft, one of the Netherlands’ most celebrated resistance fighters during World War II.

Jackson begins by introducing Hannie as an ambitious nineteen-year-old law student whose dream was to become an international human rights lawyer. Quiet, studious, and protected by her parents after the death of her older sister, she seemed an unlikely resistance fighter. Yet the German occupation gradually transformed both her world and her sense of responsibility.

The interview explores Hannie’s friendship with two Jewish classmates, Sonia Frank and Phileen Polak, and how the slow tightening of anti-Jewish persecution forced ordinary Dutch citizens to confront impossible moral choices. Jackson describes fascism not as something that arrives all at once, but as a gradual erosion of everyday life until injustice becomes impossible to ignore.

Jackson also reflects on her own research into resistance, noting that many Dutch resistance fighters began simply by helping refugees and people in danger. She draws connections between those historical experiences and contemporary debates about refugees, human rights, and civic responsibility, arguing that humanitarian crises often warn of broader threats to democracy.

Finally, the discussion turns to the difficult moral landscape of occupied Holland. Jackson distinguishes committed collaborators, active resistance fighters, and the far larger number of ordinary citizens who occupied the space between them. She emphasizes that even modest acts of solidarity, refusing to report a hidden neighbor, quietly supplying ration cards, or publicly standing against injustice, can have profound consequences. Writing the novel ultimately inspired her own civic engagement, reinforcing her belief that meaningful resistance begins with ordinary people deciding to act.

READ THE TRANSCRIPT

Patriotism demands more than pride, it demands moral courage.

This Independence Day episode of Writer’s Voice explores two remarkable women who believed loving America meant challenging it to live up to its highest ideals.

First, filmmaker, author and activist John de Graaf discusses From Sea to Shining Sea, his documentary about Katharine Lee Bates, author of America the Beautiful. Far from writing a triumphal anthem, Bates created what de Graaf calls a patriotic prayer, a vision of a nation grounded in justice, equality, stewardship of the land, and compassion for all.

“She saw it as a country filled with flaws but with great promise that she wanted to reform.” — John de Graaf

Then novelists Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie talk about A Founding Mother, their richly researched novel told in the voice of Abigail Adams.

Drawing from her letters and historical record, they reveal a woman whose intelligence, independence, and moral clarity shaped both her family and the new republic. Abigail advocated for women’s rights, condemned slavery, built financial independence through her own business ventures, and understood that democracy depends on the participation of every generation.

Together, these conversations remind us that “a more perfect union” was never a description of America. It was, and remains, an aspiration. Katharine Lee Bates and Abigail Adams each understood that patriotism isn’t blind celebration. It’s the willingness to participate fully in the project to create an America that works for all, not just the one percent.

Watch From Sea To Shining Sea

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Tags: America the Beautiful, Katharine Lee Bates, John de Graaf, From Sea to Shining Sea, Abigail Adams, Stephanie Dray, Laura Kamoie, A Founding Mother, American history podcast, Fourth of July, American Revolution, women founders, slavery, historical fiction, Writer’s Voice podcast

You might also like: Stewart Udall and The Politics of Beauty with John de Graaf, What’s An Economy For, Anyway?

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

John de Graaf: From Sea To Shining Sea

John de Graaf explores the extraordinary life of Katharine Lee Bates, whose poem America the Beautiful was inspired not only by the grandeur of Pikes Peak but also by the poverty, environmental destruction, and inequality she witnessed across America. Bates believed love of country required moral courage, social reform, and stewardship of both democracy and the land. De Graaf explains why her vision feels remarkably contemporary more than a century later.

Read the transcript

Episode Topics

• Katharine Lee Bates
• America the Beautiful
• Patriotism versus nationalism
• Democracy as an ongoing project
• Abigail Adams
• The American founding
• Women’s rights
• Slavery and abolition
• Civic responsibility
• Environmental stewardship
• Historical fiction
• American history
• The Declaration of Independence
• Social reform
• Equality

Stephanie Dray & Laura Kamoie: A Founding Mother

Abigail Adams helped shape America long before women had political power.

Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie discuss their novel, which draws on more than a thousand surviving letters to recreate Abigail’s voice. They explore her partnership with John Adams, her call to “remember the ladies,” her opposition to slavery, her entrepreneurial spirit, and her belief that each generation must continue the work of building democracy. The conversation reveals Abigail Adams as both a founder and a visionary whose ideas remain deeply relevant today.

Who gets to tell the story, and who gets erased?

This week on Writer’s Voice, we talk with media scholar Robin Andersen about her book The Complicit Lens: U.S. Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza. Andersen’s argument is blunt: the American press didn’t just fail to report accurately on Gaza. Through what she calls “the complicit lens,” it helped make the genocide possible.

“It’s no small charge to say that establishment media is complicit in a genocide. And I do believe that they know what they’re doing. They know exactly what’s happening there.”

We discuss media framing, censorship, language, competing narratives about October 7, and why independent journalism has become increasingly important.

Then we revisit part of my 2025 conversation with journalist Nico Lang about American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era. Lang traveled across the country to meet trans young people and their families, documenting not only the challenges posed by anti-trans legislation, but also the resilience, humor, and humanity that rarely make headlines.

“They treat these kids like they’re like monsters and aliens rather than human beings who have the same kinds of human being experiences that they do.”

Both conversations ask a similar question: What happens when people are represented through narratives created by others rather than being allowed to tell their own stories? Whether it’s Palestinians documenting life under bombardment or trans teenagers fighting to define themselves in a hostile political climate, these interviews explore the establishment structures that keep the truth from the public — and how those who are being silenced are fighting back.

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Tags: Gaza media coverage, U.S. media bias, Robin Andersen, Complicit Lens, Israel Palestine journalism, media censorship, Palestinian journalists, media criticism, FAIR media, trans youth, transgender teenagers, Nico Lang, American Teenager, Pride Month, anti-trans legislation, trans kids resilience, Writer’s Voice podcast

You might also like: Nico Lang, AMERICAN TEENAGER, Omar Zahzah, GAZA

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

Segment One: Robin Andersen — Complicit Lens

Robin Andersen examines the editorial and structural forces that shaped U.S. media coverage of Gaza from October 7, 2023, onward.

She details the internal CNN memos directing journalists to avoid terms like “genocide,” “massacre,” and “refugee camp,” and describes how the New York Times followed similar editorial directives shaped by Israeli military talking points.

Andersen traces how two distinct realities emerged: the ground-level documentation by Palestinian journalists using cell phones and Arab-language press, and the highly constructed version published by U.S. establishment outlets.

She also examines atrocity propaganda surrounding October 7, the Hannibal Directive, competing narratives about systematic sexual violence, and the structural ties between corporate media boards, fossil fuel interests, and the military-industrial complex. Andersen’s conclusion: American media’s complicity in the Gaza genocide was not accidental. It was chosen.

Read An Excerpt

Segment Two: Nico Lang — American Teenager

Award-winning journalist Nico Lang (they/them) traveled to seven states to spend extended time with seven trans youth for their book American Teenager.

Lang discusses their approach to individual storytelling and why they refused to flatten their subjects into a single thesis, letting the particularity of each story carry the universal meaning.

The conversation covers gender dysphoria and non-binary identity, the devastating psychological toll of fighting anti-trans legislation as a teenager, and specific subjects including Micah, a Black gender-fluid teenager in West Virginia who shows up to the state legislature to oppose anti-trans bills and is told by a Republican lobbyist that it doesn’t matter how many kids protest.

Lang reflects on what it means to write about joy under those conditions.

The stories we tell can change how we live.

This week on Writer’s Voice, a novel about what happens when we lose our connection to the living systems that sustain us.

Songwriter and author Alex Woodard joins us to talk about Ordinary Soil, a multigenerational saga of a Choctaw farming family in the Oklahoma Panhandle that traces the intertwined health of land, food, and people across more than a century.

“The simplified message of this book is that you get out what you put in. And that goes for the dirt, that goes for your stomach, that goes for your mind, that goes for your spirit, that goes for everything.”

Then, we revisit our 2019 conversation conversation with environmental journalist Carey Gillam about her book The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption, and One Man’s Search for Justice. It’s about the groundbreaking case of school groundskeeper Lee Johnson—how he sued Monsanto and won.

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Tags: Alex Woodard, Ordinary Soil, regenerative agriculture, soil health, glyphosate, Roundup, Indigenous farming, environmental fiction, Carey Gillam, Monsanto

You might also like: Exposing Hidden Agendas: Will Potter on Factory Farm Secrecy, Carey Gillam, WHITEWASH

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

Alex Woodard, ORDINARY SOIL

Alex Woodard’s Ordinary Soil follows six generations of a Choctaw farming family living on the same Oklahoma Panhandle land from the late nineteenth century to the present. At its center is Jake, a struggling modern farmer whose physical and emotional health reflect the accumulated effects of generational trauma, environmental degradation, and the transformation of American agriculture.

In our conversation, Woodard discusses the novel’s roots in both family history and contemporary concerns about industrial agriculture. The book contrasts Indigenous farming traditions, particularly the “Three Sisters” method of planting corn, beans, and squash together, with the rise of chemical-intensive monoculture farming. Through the family’s story, Woodard explores how changes in the soil affect not only ecosystems but human health as well.

We also talk about glyphosate, gut health, regenerative agriculture, and the growing scientific understanding of epigenetics. The novel suggests that both physical and emotional trauma can accumulate across generations, shaping the lives of descendants long after the original wounds occurred. At the same time, Woodard emphasizes that healing is possible, for individuals, communities, and the land itself.

Listen to or Read a Sample from Ordinary Soil

Anand Gopal on Syria’s Lost Democratic Revolution

What really happened in Syria?

In this episode of Writer’s Voice, we talk with journalist Anand Gopal about his extraordinary book Days of Love and Rage. Drawing on years of reporting and hundreds of interviews, Gopal reconstructs the story of ordinary Syrians who rose up against dictatorship and attempted to build a democratic society in the city of Manbij during the Arab Spring.

“In these complex scenarios, you usually hear about devastation, not about acts of construction.”

We discuss the social contract that sustained the Assad regime for decades, the impact of neoliberal economic reforms and climate-driven drought, and the revolutionary awakening that swept through Syria in 2011. Gopal describes how citizens with no prior experience of democracy organized councils, newspapers, political assemblies, and public debates, creating a vibrant experiment in self-government under impossible conditions.

The conversation also explores the class divisions, economic crises, and political struggles that contributed to the rise of Islamist movements and eventually ISIS. Yet Gopal argues that the democratic experiment was real, meaningful, and not doomed to fail.

In the final part of our conversation, we examine hope, not as a feeling but as a practice, a willingness to remain open to possibility even in dark times.

Tags: Anand Gopal, Days of Love and Rage, Syria, Syrian Revolution, Arab Spring, Assad regime, Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, Middle East politics, Writer’s Voice Podcast

You Might Also Like: Remembering The Revolutions of 2011, Deborah Campbell, A DISAPPEARANCE IN DAMASCUS & Melissa Fleming, A HOPE MORE POWERFUL THAN THE SEA

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

More on “Days of Love & Rage”

Anand Gopal’s Days of Love and Rage is a sweeping account of Syria’s revolution through the lives of ordinary people in Manbij and the Euphrates countryside.

Beginning with the agrarian world of Ibrahim Qasim and the village of Little Hyena, Gopal traces the transformation of Syrian society under the Ba’ath Party, the erosion of economic security through neoliberal reforms, and the environmental pressures that helped fuel the Arab Spring.

The conversation examines how Syrians who had lived for decades under dictatorship discovered collective political power through protest and democratic organizing. Gopal describes the emergence of the Revolutionary Council and Revolutionary Youth Movement, which attempted to govern Manbij through public participation, debate, elections, and accountability.

We also explore how economic inequality, class conflict, and insecurity opened space for Islamist movements and eventually ISIS. Finally, Gopal reflects on historical contingency, revolutionary tradition, and the meaning of hope in times of uncertainty.

Key Topics

• Syria before the Arab Spring
• The Assad regime and the Ba’ath Party
• Neoliberalism in the Middle East
• Climate change and drought in Syria
• The Arab Spring
• Democratic self-government in Manbij
• The Revolutionary Youth Movement
• Class conflict and political transformation
• The rise of Islamist movements
• ISIS and revolutionary collapse
• Historical contingency
• Revolutionary traditions
• Hope as political practice

Listen to or read an excerpt

Episode Summary

What if the story we tell about civilization is wrong?

What if human history isn’t a steady march from “primitive” hunter-gatherers to ever more advanced societies, but something far messier, more inventive, and more fragile — a long experiment of adaptation, collapse, reinvention, and survival?

Our guest, historian and podcaster Patrick Wyman takes readers deep into that story in his new book, Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World.

“Our human past is infinitely bigger than we generally tend to think it is.”

Drawing on breakthroughs in archaeology, ancient DNA, isotope analysis, and climate science, Wyman takes us from Ice Age North America to Bronze Age cities and forgotten civilizations across Europe and the Mediterranean. Along the way, he challenges the idea that history follows a single path toward “civilization.” Instead, he reveals a human story filled with experimentation, adaptation, migration, collapse, and renewal.

At a moment when many people feel trapped by crises that seem beyond our control, Lost Worlds offers a powerful reminder that history is full of alternatives, and that the future remains unwritten. One thing is clear: we’ve always had more choices than we thought.

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Tags: Patrick Wyman, Lost Worlds, Bronze Age collapse, Göbekli Tepe, Trypillia, Mycenaean Greece, Sea Peoples, hunter-gatherers, ancient DNA, archaeology, migration history, collapse and renewal, human prehistory, Writer’s Voice podcast, 

You Might Also Like: David Wengrow, THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING, Lizzie Wade on APOCALYPSE: What Collapse Reveals About Human Possibility

Patrick Wyman, LOST WORLDS

Segment Summary

The scale of the human past — Wyman opens by making the case that even people who love history dramatically underestimate how much of it there is, how many societies have existed, and how different they were from each other and from our assumptions.

Why civilization didn’t unfold in a straight line — Agriculture was independently invented multiple times, in places that look nothing like each other. The “package” of traits we associate with civilization — farming, cities, hierarchy, writing — didn’t arrive together, and they weren’t inevitable.

Migration as humanity’s oldest survival tool — Wyman pushes back on the idea that people are supposed to be rooted in place. Over long periods of time, moving is the baseline human response to pressure, and new tools like ancient DNA are letting us see those movements more clearly than ever before.

New archaeology and what it reveals — The Kosice mass grave in Poland, the Anzick child burial in Montana, the antler frontlets at Starcar in England: Wyman shows how new scientific methods are turning what used to be anonymous fragments into intimate human stories.

Göbekli Tepe, Trypillia, and the problem with “civilization” — Wyman is skeptical of checklists that define which societies “count” as civilizations. He argues those checklists exclude extraordinary experiments in human organization, and he makes the case for taking the Trypillia megacities seriously on their own terms.

The Bronze Age collapse — Around 1200 BC, one of the most prosperous and interconnected worlds in ancient history fell apart in a cascading systems failure. Wyman argues the same interconnections that made it successful made it fragile — and draws explicit parallels to disruptions in global supply chains today.

Collapse and renewal — Wyman pushes back on apocalyptic collapse narratives. Even the worst collapses left survivors with knowledge, agency, and choices. The end is never the end.

About the Author

Patrick Wyman is the host of The Tides of History and The Fall of Rome podcasts, author of several books, and creator of the Substack Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future, 

Read a Sample from Lost Worlds

In this episode of Writer’s Voice, Francesca speaks with Omar Zahzah, Palestinian-American scholar, activist, journalist, and author of Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle.

“There’s never been a moment in time where Palestinians did not resist their dispossession. And consequently, there is not going to be a moment in time where Palestinians begin to cease resisting.”

Zahzah offers the first book-length analysis of how major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok, systematically suppress Palestinian content, and how that suppression is structurally connected to the financial, ideological, and political ties between Silicon Valley and the Israeli state.

The conversation covers the history of Palestinian resistance to silencing, the specific mechanics of digital censorship, the TikTok ban, the No Tech for Apartheid campaign, and the forms of resistance that Zahzah believes can still make a difference.

Then we revisit part of Francesca’s 2025 conversation with Omar El Akkad, about his book, One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This. 

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Tags: Omar Zahzah, Terms of Servitude, Palestinian censorship, social media censorship Palestine, digital settler colonialism, Silicon Valley Israel, TikTok ban Palestine, big tech censorship, AI warfare Palestine, Palestinian liberation, Writer’s Voice podcast, Omar El Akkad

You Might Also Like: Omar El Akkad on Empire, Liberalism & Bearing Witness, Omar El Akkad, WHAT STRANGE PARADISE

Omar Zahzah, Terms of Servitude

Zahzah opens by explaining his title: “Terms of Servitude” is a pun on “terms of service,” meant to expose the broader social vision behind the platforms we use daily.

He traces his own path from UCLA activist facing doxxing and blacklisting to journalist and author, and frames Palestinian history as what he calls “a series of failed silencings,” a story not of passive victimhood but of continuous, defiant resistance.

He describes in detail the two-tier content system that operates on major platforms: posts that present Palestinians as depoliticized victims, with grief but no named culprit, tend to spread freely, while posts that name Israel, Zionism, or the colonial roots of Palestinian dispossession are flagged, removed, shadowbanned, or suppressed. He gives specific examples: posts by Palestinian journalists flagged as pornographic, accounts shadowbanned in real time, activists forced to use “algo-speak” and emojis to evade automated censorship.

Zahzah addresses the TikTok story in depth, arguing that the platform became a target precisely because it was so effective at spreading pro-Palestinian content and helping younger generations break from legacy media narratives. He connects the TikTok ban and its acquisition by the Ellison family to a broader consolidation of media control in explicitly pro-Israel hands.

On the question of resistance, Zahzah highlights the No Tech for Apartheid campaign among Google and Amazon workers, the importance of whistleblowing (including his own Electronic Intifada reporting on Dell Technologies’ hardware role in AI targeting systems), and the continued importance of posting and speaking out even under censorship. He ends with a reminder that even as the odds are stacked, people are not powerless.