Featuring Bassam Haddad on the historical and geopolitical origins of Assad’s rise and fall—and what might happen next. We think through the contradictions: honoring the joy felt by Syrians at Assad’s ouster while simultaneously taking stock of a truly bad geopolitical outcome.

Want to learn more? Listen to Thawra, our series on the 20th century political history of the Arab East thedigradio.com/Thawra

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Buy Palestine in a World on Fire at Haymarketbooks.com

Buy Against the Crisis at Versobooks.com

Featuring Patrick Blanchfield on assassination and political violence: from the routine to the extraordinary; authored by the state, capital, the left, the right, the unwell and alienated; as an anxiety, in our fantasies, as a morbid symptom and repetition compulsion; and as expressing distinctively American logics of domination and human disposability.

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Listen to the Ordinary Unhappiness podcast at ordinaryunhappiness.buzzsprout.com/

Read Patrick’s essay on the death drive late-light.com/issues/issue-1/death-drive-nation

Buy China in Global Capitalism at Haymarketbooks.com

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Featuring Quinn Slobodian and Wendy Brown on Trump’s triumphant return to power and the freakish, obscene, billionaire-dominated, capitalist reactionary, Christian nationalist, contradiction-ridden MAGA movement that surrounds him. A comprehensive early assessment of what is going on, where it’s coming from, and where it all might be heading.

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Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin

Featuring Hilary Goodfriend and Jorge Cuéllar in the final installment of a three-part series on Central America. This episode picks up with Nayib Bukele’s authoritarian crypto enthusiasm in El Salvador; Daniel Ortega’s perversion of Sandinismo’s revolutionary legacy in Nicaragua; anti-mining movements in Panama; Honduras and Guatemala, where popular social movements have elected left presidents to confront entrenched power structures. We conclude by discussing mass migration from the region that’s taken on a mystified form in US politics as the MAGA far right’s principal scapegoat.

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Share Thawra with a friend thedigradio.com/Thawra

Check out nacla.org for in-depth coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean

Buy Defund: Conversations Toward Abolition at haymarketbooks.com

Featuring Hilary Goodfriend & Jorge Cuéllar in the second of a three (not two!) part series on the history and present of Central America. This interview picks up our discussion of revolutionary armed struggles against brutal US-backed military-oligarchic regimes in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Then, the peace accords and postwar transitions accompanied by the imposition of neoliberal economic restructuring. Finally, the rise of mass migration, new transnational gangs, and the regime of El Salvador’s authoritarian Bitcoin enthusiast Nayib Bukele. And more.

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Want to learn more? Greg Grandin on The Dig: thedigradio.com/podcast/empires-workshop-with-greg-grandin

We now have a special feed dedicated entirely to our Thawra series. Listen and spread the word: thedigradio.com/Thawra

Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin

Buy Abolish Rent at Haymarketbooks.com

Featuring Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on Trump’s decisive victory, Harris’s catastrophic loss, multi-racial working-class dealignment, and where the left might go from here.

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We now have a special feed dedicated entirely to our Thawra series. Listen and spread the word: thedigradio.com/Thawra

Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin

Buy Solidarity is the Political Version of Love at haymarketbooks.com

Featuring Hilary Goodfriend and Jorge Cuéllar on the history of Central America. This is the first episode in a two-part series covering the late-19th and early-20th century rise of export-crop oligarchies and constant US intervention, the US-backed separation of Panama from Colombia to take control of the Canal, the CIA’s 1954 Guatemala coup, the rise of armed revolutionary movements in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador, and the US-backed dirty wars that were prosecuted in response—that and so much more.

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Want to learn more? Greg Grandin on The Dig: thedigradio.com/podcast/empires-workshop-with-greg-grandin

We now have a special feed dedicated entirely to our Thawra series. Listen and spread the word: thedigradio.com/Thawra

Buy Mastering the Universe at haymarketbooks.com

Buy Disaster Nationalism at versobooks.com

Featuring Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix on their book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea. Guest hosted by Micah Uetricht.

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Get 40% off The Years of Theory with code “DIG” at Versobooks.com

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Featuring Naomi Klein on how the pandemic turbocharged a far-right conspiracist politics that’s sweeping into power. This strange new world, however, is a product of an old contradiction: the need to disavow and deny a long history and awful present; the inability to make sense of the extreme violence and oppression that makes everyday Western capitalist society possible.

We discuss Klein’s book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World and her Guardian essay “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war”: theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/oct/05/israel-gaza-october-7-memorials
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Subscribe to Dissent magazine at Dissentmagazine.org/subscribe

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Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the third and final part of the epilogue to Thawra (Revolution), our epic series on the history of revolutionary Arab politics. This episode takes us from Hamas’s victory in the 2006 legislative elections, through the siege on Gaza, to October 7, the Gaza genocide, the Axis of Resistance, and Israel’s attempt to draw Iran into a massive regional war with the US.

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Buy The Wannabe Fascists at UCPress.edu

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Featuring Jake Werner on how the US and China entered into a New Cold War and why the whole world urgently needs an alternative international order that fosters great power cooperation. Read Jake’s report A Program for Progressive China Policy quincyinst.org/research/a-program-for-progressive-china-policy/#executive-summary Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Our History is the Future at Haymarketbooks.com Use code "DIG" for 30% off a subscription to The-Syllabus.com