Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

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

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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

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

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

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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

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

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

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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

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

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).

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

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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

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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

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

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.

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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

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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.

Max Page

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

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

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,

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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.

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

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

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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

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

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

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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?

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

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?

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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

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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.

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

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

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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]

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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