Show Summary: “Book of the Unnamed Midwife”, acclaimed in its 2014 release, is out in an updated version, with eerily appropriate timing. Americans awaiting their new president may find the plot description unnerving: When she fell asleep, the world was doomed. When she awoke, it was dead. In the wake of a fever that decimated the earth’s population—killing women and children and making childbirth deadly for the mother and infant—the midwife must pick her way through the bones of the world she once knew to find her place in this dangerous new one. Gone are the pillars of civilization. All that remains is power—and the strong who possess it. A few women like her survived, though they are scarce. Even fewer are safe from the clans of men, who, driven by fear, seek to control those remaining. To preserve her freedom, she dons men’s clothing, goes by false names, and avoids as many people as possible. But as the world continues to grapple with its terrible circumstances, she’ll discover a role greater than chasing a pale imitation of independence.

Show Summary: From longtime activist Cleve Jones comes a sweeping, beautifully written memoir about a full and remarkable American life. Jones brings to life the magnetic spell cast by 1970’s San Francisco, the drama and heartbreak of the AIDS crisis and the vibrant generation of gay men lost to it, and his activist work on labor, immigration, and gay rights, which continues today.

Show Summary: Leland Faust unmasks Wall Street’s unsavory tactics in powerful detail by giving readers a high-level view of how the financial services industry misleads them, overcharges them, and exposes them to needless risk. He documents the financial industry’s alluring come-ons, airbrushed risks, high-stakes gambling, half-truths, misleading statements, outlandish predictions, tricks to overcharge customers, bad deals, and outright fraud by the most prominent and renowned of Wall Street’s players. A Capitalist’s Lament is about what happens when financial firms and their employees forget whose interest they are supposed to protect. It shows how making foolish or wrong predictions is of no consequence to those who make them and how Wall Street luminaries with poor track records still garner celebrity status. Most of all, it spotlights how Wall Street manipulates the system and furthers its own interests at its customers’ expense and puts us all at great risk. Here is what you need to know to protect yourself from “business as usual” and get ahead—instead of getting taken.

Show Summary: An examination of what makes us laugh in even the darkest times. Delving with us into what’s funny, what’s not, when, and why.

Show Summary: Before Buffy, before Twilight, before Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, there was The Gilda Stories, Jewelle Gomez’s sexy vampire novel. This remarkable novel begins in 1850s Louisiana, where Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who “shares the blood” by two women there, Gilda spends the next two hundred years searching for a place to call home. An instant lesbian classic when it was first published in 1991, The Gilda Stories has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of blackness, radical ecology, re-definitions of family, and yes, the erotic potential of the vampire story. The winner of two Lambda Literary Awards (fiction and science fiction) THE GILDA STORIES is a very American odyssey. The 2016 anniversary edition has a new forward by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, one of UTNE Reader’s 50 Visionaries Transforming the World, a Reproductive Reality Check Shero, a Black Woman Rising nominee, and winner of one of the first-ever “Too Sexy for 501c3” trophies.

Show Summary: In Deep’s first show after the election was about venting feelings, and ways to cope and conquer. You can listen or download to either version of our post-election show. The Radio cut is just as it was heard on our stations and streams. The audio has been trimmed to fit the stations’ broadcast clocks, and several profanities have been bleeped over. The Raw cut has been left as close as possible to what our live audience experienced, with only minor technical adjustments. It includes profanities and listener discretion is advised.

Show Summary: he once free-spirited city of San Francisco is now a “Company Town,” a playground for tech moguls of the “sharing economy.” Airbnb is the biggest hotel. Uber privatizes transit. And now these companies want political power as well. Meanwhile, middle class and ethnic communities are driven out by skyrocketing rents and evictions–sparking a grassroots backlash that challenges the oligarchy of tech. Is this the future of cities around the world? The feature-length documentary, “Company Town,” is the story of an intense election campaign to determine the fate of the city at the epicenter of the digital revolution. Produced and directed by Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow.

Show Summary: Dan Levitin: A Field Guide To Lies. The New York Times bestselling author of The Organized Mind and This Is Your Brain on Music brings us a primer to the critical thinking that is more important and necessary now than ever. There’s no more perfect time than election season to join us for an event that asks us not to passively accept statistical data and faulty arguments, not to dangerously repeat it, and certainly not to make decisions based upon it without first checking the plausibility and reasoning of the information.

Show Summary: We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation – Jeff Chang in conversation with Angie Coiro. In these provocative, powerful essays, acclaimed writer/journalist Jeff Chang takes an incisive and wide-ranging look at the recent tragedies and widespread protests that have shaken the country. Through deep reporting with key activists and thinkers, passionately personal writing, and distinguished cultural criticism, We Gon’ Be Alright links #BlackLivesMatter to #OscarsSoWhite, Ferguson to Washington D.C., the Great Migration to resurgent nativism. Chang explores the rise and fall of the idea of “diversity,” the roots of student protest, changing ideas about Asian Americanness, and the impact of a century of racial separation in housing. Throughout these essays, Chang includes the voices of many leading activists from around the country as he charts how popular voices on the ground and in social media have been the main catalyst for protest and change.

Show Summary: The Department of Justice is detaching from contracts with private incarceration companies. Prison activists laud the beginning of the end of prison profitization – but of course the practice isn’t restricted to the federal government. States and counties guarantee up to 90% capacity in the contracts they sign with private companies. When is a profit-centered model appropriate in a given market – and who gets to make that call? Is that a strictly philosophical consideration, or should it have real-world impact on market regulation? How do the answers play out in other democracies?