Start Making Sense

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For our last podcast of 2021, we want to remember two people who died in the past year, and listen again to our interviews with them. Rennie Davis was probably the New Left’s most talented organizer, best known for the trial of the Chicago 7. He died on February 2 at his home outside Boulder, Colorado. He was 80. We spoke at an event for The Nation magazine in October, 2020.

Also: Joan Didion died December 23—she was 87. She wrote personal essays about California in the sixties and seventies, collected in books like Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album, and then about politics and history, especially her reports in Salvador and Miami. We spoke in October, 2003, at KPFK in Los Angeles, when her book about her family’s California, Where I Was From had just been published.  12-30-2021

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Revelations about the January 6 insurrection include striking new information about the Trump kids that day: Who did what, and also who didn’t do anything. Amy Wilentz reports.

Also: A report from Kwajalein, one of the Marshall islands in the Pacific that’s a major US military base. Tom Lutz says it’s completely paved over, and the only greenery is the golf course. The runway is one foot above sea level. The island will be under water by about 2035. Tom also describes life in some other places—his new book is The Kindness of Strangers. 12-23-2021

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Trump is going to be indicted for racketeering and fraud, because of his financial crimes, and that will prevent him from being the Republican candidate: that’s what David Cay Johnston says—he’s an award-winning investigative reporter, and his new book is The Big Cheat: How Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family.

Also: Eric Foner and Henry Louis Gates talk about W.E.B. DuBois, the Black historian and activist of the first part of the 20th century, and his book Black Reconstruction 1860-1880—published originally in 1935, and out now in a new edition from the Library of America, edited by Foner and Gates.  12-16-2021

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How will global warming change the world’s systems of power? Alfred McCoy argues that American global hegemony will end around 2030, replaced by China as world leader, but Chinese hegemony will last only for about 20 years—and that by 2050, climate change will have brought environmental catastrophe to both countries, and the rest of the world, with consequences that are almost unimaginable. His new book is To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.

Also: Mutual aid and racial justice during the year of Covid: Kristina Wong explains how, in the darkest days of the pandemic, she started the Auntie Sewing Squad to make masks for the most vulnerable communities—and how she became, in her words, a sweatshop overlord. Her new co-edited book is The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice.  12-9-2021

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The new Omicron variant of Covid-19: Gregg Gonsalves argues that it serves as a reminder of how little we’re doing on pandemic prevention. We need government action to address the inequalities in power, resources, and information that leave some people at far greater risk. Meanwhile, Republicans are describing Omicron as a Democratic plot to bring back mail-in voting.

Also: being Black in America, and being Black in France: Gary Younge talks about Josephine Baker, the Black American dancer who went to Paris in the twenties and later renounced her American citizenship. She’s being interred at the Pantheon, alongside Voltaire and Rousseau, this week.  12-2-2021

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We’re still thinking about the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict in Kenosha, where Republicans have been celebrating the “not guilty” verdict in the trial of a 17-year-old who shot three people, killing two, during the street protests over the police shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake. John Nichols comments on the threat from white vigilantes to Black protest, and on the broader anti-democratic moves by Republicans in Wisconsin and nationally.

Also: Racism in America for decades led to strict housing segregation. But historians are now showing that that wasn’t simply the result of white people refusing to live near Blacks—segregated housing was the result of a carefully organized, long-term effort to establish a legal basis for systematic racial discrimination. And the groups that succeeded were not the KKK or White Power groups. It was realtors’ organizations. Eric Foner reviews that history.  11-24-2021

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Republicans continue to work to ban teaching about Black Americans’ place in our history – their legislation, proposed in 27 states, would prohibit teaching the 1619 Project, which has just published a book offering what the authors call “a new origin story” about the United States. Martha Jones, a historian at Johns Hopkins University, and one of the contributors, talks about the battle, the book, and the larger project.

Plus: Father Greg Boyle is the founder of Homebody Industries, the largest gang-intervention, rehabilitation, and reentry program on the planet. He’s got a new book out now, it’s about “the power of extravagant tenderness” and it’s called “The Whole Language.”  11-18-2021

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The Democrats need to do big things fast if they want to have a chance of winning in 2022 and 2024. John Nichols says that Trump will be a “lousy candidate” then—but he will still pose an even greater threat to American democracy than he did in 2020.

Plus: Rebecca Solnit talks about politics and pleasure, about knowing your enemies, and about joy as an act of resistance to authoritarianism—on the right, and on the left. Her new book is Orwell’s Roses.  11-11-2021

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The Debt Collective has a new project: Cancelling probation debt of formerly incarcerated people. They’re actually doing it, for tens of thousands of people—and setting out to abolish bail debt completely in California. Astra Taylor explains how they’re going about it, and reports on the continuing campaign to get Joe Biden to use executive action to cancel student debt.                                                                   Plus: John Coltrane was the tenor player who started out with Miles Davis in the fifties and then in the mid-sixties set out to pursue music as a quest for spiritual enlightenment. His most popular work was “A Love Supreme.” Now, a live performance from 1965 has been discovered and released—and Coltrane people are calling it “nothing short of a revelation.” We’ll talk about Coltrane’s place in Black culture with Adam Shatz.  11-4-2021

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Who really runs Haiti—the government, or the gangs? The kidnappings suggest it’s the gangs – and the leader of the gang that kidnapped 16 Americans has openly expressed political ambitions. Amy Wilentz explains.

Plus: Colin Kaepernick’s silent protest, taking a knee, became the symbol of resistance to racial injustice in America. Dave Zirin talks about how that political movement has swept through college and high school sports. His new book is  “The Kaepernick Effect.”  10-28-2021