A Public Affair

From the murder of Charlie Kirk to the fatal shooting at a Colorado high school this week, political violence is front and center in the news and today’s conversation. In this two-part show, host Esty Dinur discusses the state of the US with Leader Stacey Abrams and reflects on the life of the peacemaker U Thant with his grandson Thant Myint-U. 

Stacey Abrams says that “violence has become a tool of communication for too many” and in this “faltering democracy” we need to reject the use of violence toward political ends. Her recent work shines light on the rise of autocracy in the US, by naming the 10 steps that lead to authoritarianism. Those steps include the normalization of violence, the expansion of executive power, and attacks on the media. Abrams also shares her 10 Steps to Freedom and Power which you can learn more about on her website. 

Our second guest, Thant Myint-U grew up knowing that his grandfather, U Thant, served as the Secretary-General of the UN. In Myint-U’s new book, he uncovers his grandfather’s peacemaking legacy. When U Thant was almost 40, he made a major career change from being a small-town school teacher in Burma to becoming an ambassador and then the leader of the United Nations. 

As the world came out of an age of empire, young nations had hope that the world could be better and were full of faith in the UN, says Myint-U. But that is not the case today. He discusses how Congo was a litmus test for independence, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and what role the UN could take in the years to come, saying “ we can’t throw away the only global body of peace.”

Stacey Abrams is a New York Times bestselling author, business owner and political leader whose innovative approach has continued to break barriers and support transformational progress. A prolific author, she has written award-winning political thrillers, children’s books, romantic suspense novels, and non-fiction books. She previously served as Minority Leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, and she was the first Black woman to become the gubernatorial nominee for a major party in United States history. Abrams has launched multiple nonprofit organizations devoted to democracy protection, voting rights, tackling policy issues and building a more equitable future. She is also a serial entrepreneur and business advisor. In 2020, Abrams founded Sage Works Productions, Inc., a media company dedicated to leveraging the power of storytelling to craft creative solutions and engage. 

Thant Myint-U is an acclaimed historian, author, and former diplomat, educated at Harvard, Johns Hopkins SAIS, and Cambridge University, where he earned his PhD in History. A veteran of three UN peacekeeping missions in Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia, he also served in senior roles at the UN Secretariat in New York, including as Chief of the Policy Planning Unit in the Department of Political Affairs. He has been a visiting fellow at Harvard, Cambridge, and leading international institutes, and has advised the Myanmar government, the Myanmar Peace Center, and global organizations on peace processes, humanitarian issues, and development. He is the author of four books. 

Featured image: of “LIBERACIÓN A TRAVÉS DEL CONOCIMIENTO” (LIBERATION THROUGH KNOWLEDGE) by Aurelio Diaz Tekpankalli via UCCS Kraemer Family Library (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

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In the US, Albert Einstein isn’t well known for his views on socialism. But in 1949, he wrote a salient essay for the inaugural issue of the Monthly Review called “Why Socialism.” Today’s guest, John Bellamy Foster, tells host Allen Ruff about Einstein’s essay and his legacy as a socialist.

Einstein’s essay was written in defiance of the McCarthy era. And Foster says that’s timely to return to this article on its 75th anniversary in the context of the MAGA movement and neofascism in the US that is causing many people to feel a similar sense of despair as at the time Monthly Review’s beginning.

Foster describes Einstein’s commitment to socialism as something that went hand in hand with his commitment to science. He adds that Einstein was committed to many progressive causes including opposition nuclear weapons and critiquing Zionism. Foster says that Einstein believed we need socialism because we can only develop as “social individuals.”

John Bellamy Foster is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon. He has published numerous critiques of capitalism, written about ecosocialism and Marxist theory, and is the editor of the independent socialist magazine, Monthly Review. 

Featured image of a photo of Albert Einstein via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE).

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On October 6th, 1978, the Argentine junta kidnapped Patricia Roisinblit. She was a young medical student and activist, and she was eight-months pregnant. After she was abducted, she gave birth to her son, and was never heard from again. Journalist Haley Cohen Gilliland wrote a book about the intrepid grandmothers who took great risk to fight to find their missing daughters and grandchildren in the face of the brutal dictatorship that destroyed all records of these political disappearances. She joins host Ali Muldrow to talk about A Flower Traveled In My Blood and discuss the lessons we can still learn from these unrelenting women.

Cohen Gilliland learned about the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo while working in Argentina. At the time there was only one book in English on the subject. Human rights groups estimate about 30,000 people were disappeared, and Cohen Gilliland says that it’s a testament to the success of the military government in disappearing people and covering it up that we don’t have concrete numbers. She describes her reporting process and the importance of narrative nonfiction in communicating dark moments in history with honesty and humanity. 

Despite the real risk to their lives, the abuelas–women without money, power, or a platform–recognized that they could successfully stand up to a brutal dictatorship and demand truth and demand their stolen grandchildren. They rewrote international law and pioneered genetic testing to do so. But they didn’t all find happy reunions with their grandchildren who had been raised in military and police families. 

Cohen Gilliland also reflects on how this dark time in Argentine history is a warning for the US today. As unidentified ICE officers abduct people off the streets and Trump orders the military takeover of Washington D.C., there are reasons we should be alarmed at the authoritarian erosion of civil liberties. 

Haley Cohen Gilliland is a journalist and the director of the Yale Journalism Initiative. She previously worked at The Economist for seven years, four of which were spent in Buenos Aires as the paper’s Argentina correspondent. Following her time at The Economist, she has focused on narrative nonfiction—bringing history and current events to life through fact-based storytelling. She has published long-form feature articles in The New York Times, National Geographic, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Vanity Fair, among other publications.

Featured image of the cover of A Flower Traveled In My Blood.

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On today’s show we highlight the joy of reading with Rowan Childs of the Madison Reading Project. Host Dana Pellebon wanted to focus her premier show as the new host of Tuesday’s A Public Affair around literacy and feature an organization that’s working to get new and engaging books to kids in Dane County. 

Childs says that she started the Madison Reading Project after realizing that her son was learning how to read but not how to love reading. At that time the Race to Equity report was also released, showing what many people already knew: that Black kids were falling behind in education in Madison. After a 3 month pilot program to get new books to kids at the Salvation Army, Childs says she knew there was a need to create a permanent program. And now the Madison Reading Project has been going for 11 years.

The Madison Reading project serves more than over 12,000 kids in a year, getting them more than 140K books last year with diverse main characters that represent them. Their main fundraiser is a fashion show in which participants make dresses out of paper, like the garment on the cover of July’s Umoja Magazine that features legendary Black women in Madison. Childs also shares the challenges of book censorship and attacks on DEI. She also celebrates coming Banned Books week by highlighting one of the books from her childhood, The Rabbit’s Wedding, in which a black and a white rabbit get married. 

Rowan Childs is the founder and co-executive director of the Madison Reading Project. Previously, she worked for the Village of Mount Horeb and was recently named to InBusiness’s Power 100 list. 

Featured image of Rowan Childs and Dana Pellebon in the WORT studio. Photo courtesy of Sara Gabler/WORT.

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Learning about your local environment is a great way to feel more at home. That’s the message that Madison Public Library’s latest Naturalist in Residence Andrea Debbink wants folks to understand.  Debbink tells host Douglas Haynes about her love of black walnut trees and Starkweather Creek, recommends children’s nature books, and advises listeners on how to get to know your local birds. 

The Naturalist in Residence program is an inventive and creative approach to connecting residents of Dane County with the diverse ecologies of the county. Debbink themed her residency as “At Home in Nature.” That focus came from her passion for city wildlife and city nature. Growing up in suburban Minneapolis and now living in suburban Madison, Debbink has learned to notice and appreciate the biodiversity in populated areas. She says the easiest way to feel more at home in your local environment is to learn the names of local plants and birds. 

Debbink is the author of many books, including the new Urban Trails: Madison and the Wild World Handbook, a book about environmental stewardship and nature exploration for middle-grade readers. You can find Debbink’s books and her reading list that includes field guides and poetry at the Madison Public Library.

Andrea Debbink is a writer and suburban naturalist who has called Madison home for more than two decades. A former magazine editor, she now writes books for children and adults. Although Andrea writes across genres, her books nearly always include the themes of nature exploration and environmental stewardship. Her upbringing in the Minneapolis suburbs taught her to seek nature in unexpected places and her more recent training as a Wisconsin Master Naturalist have fueled Andrea’s enthusiasm for connecting people to nature in her community, especially parts of it that are underappreciated or overlooked.

Featured image of a bee on a thistle flower, a native plant to Wisconsin. Photo by Greg Emmerich on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).

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On today’s show, host Esty Dinur is joined by Norma Wong to talk about her new book, When No Thing Works. Wong says that it’s not true that nothing works, but it is true that there are many things that aren’t working. She wants people practice what she calls “collective acceleration” to counteract how everything is moving faster and faster toward devolution. This could look like envisioning better forms of governance (not governments), learning from the knowledge of Indigenous peoples, and creating circles of mutuality and support.

Wong reflects on Hawaii’s early response to the COVID pandemic, in which the people of the islands overwhelming supported mask mandates and social distancing because they understood that strict safety measures were good for their communities. She says that the strong sense of liberty–of people doing whatever they want whenever they want–in the American psyche runs contrary to the needs of people living with and supporting each other.

Wong also tells listeners about a 100 hours of science livestream that started after the Trump administration fired scientists from the NOAA and other agencies. She advises that people do small things to create a better world rather than fighting everything that you are ideologically opposed to.

Norma Wong, a life-long resident of Hawaiʻi, is a descendant of Native Hawaiians and Hakka Chinese immigrants. She has decades of experience in organizing, policy, strategy, and politics in Hawaiʻi, particularly in the area of Native Hawaiian issues, serving in the Hawaii State Legislature and as a policy lead and negotiator for Governor John Waiheʻe, Hawaiʻi’s first Native governor. Norma began her spiritual practice at the same time as her political life unfolded. These days, it is the intertwined application of Zen practice and an Indigenous worldview that Norma brings to provoke practical inquiry and redirect work. She is a thought partner, a strategist, and a teacher.

Featured image of the cover of Norma Wong’s book, When No Thing Works.

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Today we welcome Oswaldo Zavala back to the show. He speaks with guest host Carlos Dávalos about the myth of drug cartels, the US’s military occupation of Mexico, and his study of the Latin American author, Roberto Bolaño.

Zavala says that we need to reassess the US’s entire national security agenda. That includes rejecting the language of “cartels” and the “War on Drugs,” as Zavala does in his book, Drug Cartels Do Not Exist.  He says that drug cartels don’t exist as mafia-like organizations, but are embedded in the military and policing of the US itself. Zavala comments on Seth Harp’s new book, saying that it productively dislocates cartels from a mythology of organizations operating south of the border, to entities operating within the heart of military institutions. 

Zavala also analyses how resource extraction and national security are linked. He says there’s not enough discussion of how militarized Mexico has become as US energy companies seek access to Mexico’s natural resources like oil.

Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño picks up the themes of the drug trade and violence in his novels. Zavala says that unlike other authors of the Latin American Boom era who depicted the region as “magical” and epic, Bolaño focuses on dispossession, marginality, migration, and exile. He is attuned to the failures of neoliberal governments across the continent. Zalvala says that Bolaño humanizes the people caught up in the drug trade and shows how the drug trade isn’t something to be eradicated with state violence.

Oswaldo Zavala is a journalist and professor of contemporary Latin American literature and culture at the College of Staten Island and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include La modernidad insufrible and Drug Cartels Do Not Exist. Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture. 

Featured image: a remix of a photo of Oswaldo Zavala, the cover of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, and the cover of the Spanish-language version of Zavala’s book, Los cárteles no exiten (Sara Gabler/WORT).

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On today’s show, host Ali Muldrow welcomes Steven Olikara back to WORT to talk about building narratives with the power to unify the US political terrain. Olikara has roots in Wisconsin and ran for Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2022. He is now working to reinvent political media through storytelling.

Olikara says that music is a good metaphor for how to engage in the political sphere. He says we should be like jazz musicians because they’re expert listeners, skilled improvisers, and actively engaged in call and response. In the face of the fear, hostility, and dysfunction that the federal government is sowing, Olikara advocates for listening to people with different views (when it’s safe to do so) and finding ways to connect with people across differences, like with music. 

Steven Olikara is a nationally recognized changemaker working at the intersection of media, politics, and culture. He is the CEO of Bridge Entertainment Labs (BEL), an organization leveraging the power of entertainment to help transform America’s deep divisions. He also founded Future Caucus (formerly Millennial Action Project), the largest cross-partisan network of young elected officials in the United States. Steven currently serves as Senior Fellow for Political Transformation at the USC Schwarzenegger Institute. A frequent political commentator on national and Wisconsin media, he has been a leading voice for bridging divides and renewing American democracy. In 2022, he made history as the first South Asian candidate for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin, earning national recognition for his unifying approach to politics. His story is featured in the documentary film The Reunited States (Amazon Prime and PBS), and he is the co-author of JFK: The Last Speech. A proud Wisconsin native and former radio DJ, Steven is a Truman Scholar and has been honored as a Forbes 30 Under 30 leader and a World Economic Forum Global Shaper.

Featured image of Ali Muldrow and Steven Olikara in conversation.

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When we talk about public education, we’re talking about the heart of democracy, says today’s guest Heather DuBois Bourenane, the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Public Education Network. She tells guest host Bert Zipperer that we need to start funding public education right in the state of Wisconsin, and that could change today if there was the political will to do so. She wants to restore public schools as sites of joy and welcoming, where the promise of democracy can be fulfilled. 

Wisconsin has a constitutional obligation to public education, but more and more state money is being funneled into voucher schools and that’s because current state law allows for school funding to be allocated to voucher schools before public schools. The Wisconsin Public Education Network is working to make voucher funding transparent to taxpayers. 

DuBois Bourenane says that in the past 15 years, public education funding has reached crisis levels. This year kids are going back to school with less state aid than they received the previous year; and this is the 18th year in a row this has happened. The way the state has made up for funding shortfalls is through local ballot referendums (over 400 in the last two years), but too many communities can’t raise taxes to address state shortfalls.

Heather DuBois Bourenane is passionate about ensuring our public schools are places of joy for all students. She is a proud public school parent, a founding member of Support Sun Prairie Schools and the Sun Prairie Action Resource Coalition, and an active member of many state and national partnerships and committees. She taught college English and literature, and worked in K-12 outreach at UW-Madison before devoting herself full time to putting our Network vision and values into action. She also serves as Executive Director of the Wisconsin Public Education Action Fund.

Featured image of the logo of the Wisconsin Public Education Network.

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Farmworker Justice estimates that 45% of farm workers are undocumented immigrants, and these workers, along with other immigrant farm workers, make up the backbone of our food system. Yet the Trump administration is cracking down on immigrant laborers, resulting in 1.2 million immigrants leaving the labor force this year. Our two guests today, Alba Velasquez and Darin Von Ruden are experts in the US food system, and they tell host Douglas Haynes that they’re concerned about the rising fear they see in immigrant communities in California and Wisconsin. 

As a new wave of ICE raids rocks Los Angeles and southern California, Velasquez says that immigrant parents are afraid to let their kids walk to school, afraid to go to the grocery store, and even afraid to go to work in local restaurants and farms. Von Ruden has also noticed the growing sense of fear in Wisconsin’s dairy industry, and says that fear of detention or deportation is driving workers to stay home. Wisconsin’s small dairy farms aren’t in a position to absorb the losses when workers don’t show up. Both notice the rippling effects of ICE raids on the mental health of workers and their communities to the entire food system.

The repression of immigrants is magnified by the cuts to federal food programs like SNAP, making hunger a growing concern for the very workers who grow the US’s food. Now, 23,000 non citizens are losing access to these benefits. Just last week, a Monroe cheesemaker was bought out by a company that will use the error-ridden E-Verify system to confirm the immigration status of its employees. In response, dozens of workers walked out in protest of what this could mean for immigrant workers.

Velasquez and Von Ruden share their advice for supporting immigrant workers, like supporting policy changes that keep more family farms in operation and creating pathways to citizenship for immigrant workers that aren’t tied to employment. 

Alba Velasquez leads the Los Angeles Food Policy Council (LAFPC) as the Executive Director, bringing a robust background in program leadership and food justice advocacy. Joining LAFPC in 2017, she has significantly contributed to the growth and impact of the Healthy Neighborhood Market Network program and has played a pivotal role in strategic partnership development. Alba served as the Interim Executive Director and led the team through a leadership shift in 2020. Prior to LAFPC, Alba managed key initiatives at the National Health Foundation and contributed to urban agriculture research at UCLA. Holding a BA in Sociology from UC Santa Barbara and a Master’s in Urban Regional Planning from UCLA, her expertise is grounded in her personal experiences as a Salvadoran refugee and community advocate, driving her commitment to creating equitable and sustainable food systems.

Wisconsin Farmers Union President Darin Von Ruden has served as the organization’s District 5 director since 2008, representing Crawford, Grant, Green, Iowa, Lafayette, Richland, Rock, and Vernon counties. He also leads the WFU Foundation Board of Directors, the WFU Service Association, and serves as secretary on the National Farmers Union Board of Directors. Von Ruden and his wife, JoAnn, live in Westby. In the last several years, Von Ruden transitioned the farm to the fourth generation, when son Brett purchased the machinery and 50-cow dairy herd.

Featured image of a small family farm in Wisconsin. 

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