Today I have the immense pleasure of talking with Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at the University of Oxford, about her new book, Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future—from Ancient Oracles to AI.  Linking this work to her previous book, Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data, Véliz writes: “ surveillance and prediction are digital technology’s original sins.”

In our wide-ranging discussion, we talk about how both massive and intrusive invasions of privacy at all levels of society and false claims to be able to predict the future erode democracy, are corrosive to ethics, and undermine people’s ability to think for themselves.  Instead, we are conditioned to trust an unregulated band of “effective altruists” who claim to know better than we what kinds of lives we should prefer and the choices we should make.  Véliz argues instead that we should embrace the uncertain to build resilience, to prepare for contingency but not be determined by what we cannot see, and to foster curiosity and imagination.

Carissa Véliz is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI, and a Fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford. She is the recipient of the 2021 Herbert A. Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy. She is a member of UNESCO’s Women 4 Ethical AI. She advises companies and policymakers around the world on privacy and the ethics of AI. She is a board member of the Proton Foundation, along with Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Proton’s CEO Andy Yen. She is the author of the highly-acclaimed Privacy Is Power (an Economist book of the year, 2020) and the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics. Her new book Prophecy was described as “The most important book you will read for years” by Roger McNamee, the tech investor and best selling author.

Today it gives me special pleasure to speak with Helen Whybrow about her book, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life.  Besides being a detailed account of the day to day, season by season life on her farm, where she and her family raise sheep, build a broad community, and maintain Knoll Farm, a center for activists, writers, artists and others to share ideas on how to promote healthier and more just ways of living together and in the environment, The Salt Stones is at base about the ways we are losing a sense of belonging, not only with others and with other forms of life on this planet, but also with the cycles of existence, of life and of death. Whybrow shows time and again that it is mostly a matter of developing ways of seeing and noticing what is all around us, and learning about and respecting the ways that generations of people and non-human animals have existed together in sustainable and mutually-dependent ways.

Helen Whybrow is a writer, editor and organic farmer whose book about shepherding, land and belonging, The Salt Stones, was longlisted for the National Book Award and chosen as a New Yorker Best Book of 2025. Her other titles include Dead Reckoning (W. W. Norton, 2001) and A Man Apart (Chelsea Green, 2015). She has a master’s in journalism and has taught writing at Middlebury College and the Breadloaf Environmental Writer’s Conference. She and her family farm and steward a refuge for land justice at Knoll Farm in Fayston, Vermont.

Today I am deeply honored to spend time with poet, activist, and scholar Jamaica Osorio. Shortly after October 7, 2023, she began to write a series of astonishing poems about the war in Gaza and the genocide. Osorio graces us with readings of some of those poems, and engages in a rich, complex, and deeply moving discussion of what went into their composition. Throughout, we talk about the power of poetry to suspend time and allow us the space to contemplate the impossible.  We talk about the nature of not knowing, of the inexpressible, and the ways certain poems can give us the strength, energy, and commitment to persist in working for the liberation of all peoples, even when dwelling in grief.

Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio is a Kanaka Maoli wahine artist / activist / scholar / storyteller born and raised in Pālolo Valley to parents Jonathan and Mary Osorio. Jamaica earned her PhD in English (Hawaiian literature) in 2018 from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Currently, Jamaica is an Associate Professor of Indigenous and Native Hawaiian Politics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. In 2020 her poetry and activism were the subject of an award-winning film, This is the Way we Rise which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2021.  In 2022 she was a lead artist and Co-writer of the revolutionary VR Documentary, On the Morning You Wake (To the end of the world),  that premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2022 and won the XR experience Jury award at SXSW 2022. She is a proud past Kaiāpuni student, Ford Dissertation (2017) and Post Doctoral (2022) Fellow, and a graduate of Kamehameha, Stanford University (BA) and New York University (MA). She is the author of the award winning book Remembering our Intimacies: Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea which was published in 2021 by The University of Minnesota Press. She believes in the power of aloha ʻāina and collective action to pursue liberatory, decolonial, and abolitionist futures of abundance.

 Starting in the autumn of 2025, the US began attacking small civilian boats in or near Venezuelan waters, summarily executing over 126 people. January, 2026 began with it kidnapping Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and bringing them to the US. This month, just weeks after the kidnapping, Haymarket Books published the immensely useful and urgent book, Venezuela in Crisis. The historical range of the book begins with the regime of Hugo Chavez and ends with the 2024 elections in Venezuela.

We are immensely fortunate to be able to speak with the editor and translator of this collection of essays, Anderson Bean, and two of its contributors, Emiliano Terán and Simón Rodríguez.  The key argument of the book is that, even by his own admission, Chavez was not able to completely transform Venezuela into a socialist state. The book explains the roots of this failure, despite the inspiring successes of Chavismo. It then tracks an ever-increasing neoliberal and oppressive trend carried forward by Maduro, which is characterized by burgeoning extractivism, corruption, and suppression of human rights.  We end by calling on socialists and progressives everywhere to resist the tendency to side with Maduro’s false claims to socialism, and to focus instead on building solidarity with the people of Venezuela.

Anderson Bean is a sociology professor at North Carolina A&T State University, a member of the Tempest Collective, and a North Carolina–based activist and editor. He is a contributor to Venezuela in Crisis: Socialist Perspectives (Haymarket Books) and the author of Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis (Lexington Books).

Simón Rodríguez is a Venezuelan socialist writer and journalist. He was a student organizer and later became professor at the Universidad de los Andes. When he was a member of the national leadership of the Socialism and Freedom Party, he ran as a candidate for the National Assembly in 2015. He is a founding member of Laclase.info and Venezuelanvoices.org and has published articles in Humania del Sur, NACLA Report on the Americas, The New Arab, and Rebelión and on dozens of electronic outlets, and his articles have been translated into six languages. He has given talks and lectures in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. He is coauthor with Miguel Sorans of the book Why Did Chavismo Fail? A Left-Opposition Balance Sheet.

Emiliano Terán is a sociologist from the Central University of Venezuela and has a master’s degree in ecological economics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is a PhD candidate in environmental science and technology at the same institution. He is also an associate researcher at the Center for Development Studies in Venezuela and a member of the Observatory of Political Ecology of Venezuela  

Today I am deeply honored to speak with novelist, essayist, and scholar Yuri Herrera about his new novel, Season of the Swamp, which is a deeply researched and dazzlingly imagined account of Benito Juarez’s time spent in exile in New Orleans.  We talk about what that time and place offered to Juarez’s understanding of a world coming into being—one of créolité and carnival, of mixedness and multiplicity, and what these sometimes hallucinatory moments offered his political vision.  We talk about what kinds of new visions of freedom are discovered in the midst of forms of slavery that horrify Juarez.  Very importantly, we relate all of this to the present day—to the genocide in Gaza, the violent ICE attacks in the United States, and the descent into unbridled, and unmasked fascism. We are especially grateful to Yuri for reading from his novel, and talking in depth about the importance of mixed languages and the new social worlds they reflect.

Bio

Yuri Herrera (Actopan, México, 1970). His first three novels have been translated into several languages: Kingdom Cons, Signs Preceding the End of the World, and Transmigration of Bodies. In 2016 he shared with translator Lisa Dillman the Best translated Book Award for the translation of Signs Preceding the End of the World. That same year he received the Anna Seghers Prize at the Academy of Arts of Berlin, for the body of his work. His latest books are A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire, Ten Planets, and Season of the Swamp. He is a professor of creative writing and literature at Tulane University, in New Orleans.

Today I am delighted to speak with Andrew Ross about his new book, The Weather Report: A Journey Through Unsettled Climates. In this study, Ross revisits areas of the world that he has written about before—Palestine, the United Arab Emirates, Phoenix, Arizona, and China. While he found no absolute correlates, he did discover that what he calls a “subterranean current of thought” emerged as he spoke with former interviewees and new ones, and visited old sites that became familiar in a different way. In particular, we follow up Andrew’s claim that in Palestine we find a “grisly future arriving there sooner than elsewhere.”  The book focusses on the idea of population and scarcity, and argues that much of the policies that are based on the presumption of scarce resources are actually predicated on what Ross calls “bogus scarcity,” drawn upon to drive capitalist and genocidal and ecocidal violence. This is a violence that awaits us all unless we can find a better way of living together in the world.

Andrew Ross is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, where he is director of the Prison Research Lab. A contributor to The Guardian, the New York Times, The Nation, New York Review of Books, and Al Jazeera, he is the author or editor of about 30 books, including Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel (which won a Palestine Book Prize), and, most recently, The Weather Report: A Journey Through Unsettled Climates. He is the co-founder of several movement groups, and currently is serving on the national steering committee of the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine network.

Today I am happy to speak with Ananya Roy and Veronika Zablotsky about their co-edited volume, Beyond Sanctuary: The Humanism of a World in Motion, which was based on a Sawyer Seminar they convened at UCLA. The essays collected in this book are international in scope and interdisciplinary in nature. What links them is a commitment to show that the idea of sanctuary all too often forgets its radical histories and possibilities, and lapses into a liberal humanism that not only does not solve the problems of refugees, migrants, and exiles, but even form obstacles to real and just solutions. Importantly, the many of the essays put the idea of “humanism” into question.  Most impressively, we find case histories of ordinary people building sanctuary spaces organically well outside, and even in defiance of, liberal sanctuary structures and practices. 

The book is accompanied by digital materials on the Sanctuary Spaces website which are designed for classroom use and self-study: https://challengeinequality.luskin.ucla.edu/sanctuary-spaces/ 

Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and the Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the founding Faculty Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA, which advances research and scholarship concerned with displacement and dispossession in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the world. Working with social movements, the Institute seeks to build power and abolish structures of inequality, within and beyond the university. A scholar of global racial capitalism, Ananya’s research has focused on urban transformations and land grabs, global circuits of financialization, postcolonial development and projects of poverty management, and most recently the problem and promise of sanctuary. In comradeship with unhoused communities, her current research is concerned with racial banishment and counter-geographies of refusal and rebellion in Los Angeles.

Veronika Zablotsky is a political theorist with an interest in interconnected histories of migration and empire; feminist and postcolonial studies; transnational social movements; Armenian diaspora studies; and postsocialism in the SWANA region. She teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and held visiting professorships in politics and gender studies at universities in Germany. Previously she served as Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Sawyer Seminar “Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism” at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. She holds a PhD in feminist studies, politics, critical race and ethnic studies, and history of consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Among her co-edited publications are the anthologies Decolonize the City! (Unrast, 2017) and Transforming Solidarities (Adocs, 2025). At the University of Pennsylvania she co-founded the Critical Armenian Studies Collective. She also organizes with the scholar activist collective Abolition Beyond Borders (www.abolitionismus.org). 

I am delighted to talk with scholar, journalist, and activist Thea Riofrancos about her new book, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.  She takes us deep into the mining of lithium and the production of lithium batteries, which have been welcomed as a key element in our transition from fossil fuels.  Traveling widely through Latin America to see lithium extraction at work, Thea brings us stories of how this industry has disrupted lives, changed local and national economies, and devastated the environment. On the other hand, she gives us an unflinching glimpse into the alternatives. The book wrestles with these and other issues, tracing the contradictions of things like on-shoring back to the 1970s. While not arriving at an unproblematic “solution” to extraction, Thea nonetheless outlines a critical set of best practices and imaginative alternatives to the bleak offerings of capitalism, green or not.

Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, a Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a fellow at the Transnational Institute. Her research focuses on resource extraction, renewable energy, climate change, the global lithium sector, green technologies, social movements, and the Latin American left. She is the author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 2025) and Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020), and the coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019). Her publications have appeared in scholarly journals such as Global Environmental Politics, World Politics, and Perspectives on Politics, as well as in media outlets including The New York Times, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, n+1, Dissent, and more.

Today I am delighted to talk with Roderick Ferguson about his provocative and much-needed intervention, “An Interruption in Our Cowardice.”  Initially driven by his deep disappointment in some Black intellectuals’ compliance and even assistance with reactionary forces, this essay opens onto profound issues of institutionalization, professionalization, and the deadening and repressive mental, social, and intellectual habits being “accepted” create. In our conversation we spend some time talking about alternative, and very real counterexamples to cowardice, such as the fearless examples of the encampments of the Student Intifada. We note that such alternative sites have always been there historically, and that it is crucial to turn our eyes to those spaces, if we are going to preserve the promise of liberatory education.

Roderick A. Ferguson is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale University. He is also faculty in the Yale Prison Education Initiative as well as the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute/Yale National Initiative. He is the author of One-Dimensional Queer (Polity, 2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California, 2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (University of Minnesota, 2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique(University of Minnesota, 2004). He is the co-editor with Grace Hong of the anthology Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke University, 2011). He is also co-editor with Erica Edwards and Jeffrey Ogbar of Keywords of African American Studies (NYU, 2018). He is the 2020 recipient of the Kessler Award from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS). His book In View of the Tradition: Black Art and Radical Thought will be released Fall 2026. 

Today I have the true honor of speaking with journalist, storyteller, historical researcher, and Native American ceremonial dancer Julian Brave Noisecat about his book, We Survived the Night.  This highly original book blends many voices and registers, from both well-known but also buried and purposefully obscured historical archives, to tribal and family stories.  Foremost are the legends and adaptations of the Coyote figure—which haunts, inspires, deceives, and, yes, teaches lessons that help Indigenous peoples survive the night. We spend some time talking about how Coyote is many things at once, but not all the time, we discuss notions of purity and mixedness, multiplicity and singularity, truth and lies, and come out on the side of generosity, love, and creativity, to make worlds that deserve not only to survive, but also to thrive.

Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, champion powwow dancer and student of Salish art and history. His first documentary, Sugarcane, directed alongside Emily Kassie, follows an investigation into abuse and missing children at the Indian residential school NoiseCat’s family was sent to near Williams Lake, British Columbia. Sugarcane premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival where NoiseCat and Kassie won the Directing Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition. The film was recognized with dozens of awards including Best Documentary from the National Board of Review and was nominated for an Academy Award. A proud member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen and descendant of the Lil'Wat Nation of Mount Currie, NoiseCat’s first book, We Survived the Night, was published by Alfred A. Knopf, Penguin Random House Canada, and Profile Books in October 2025 and was an instant national bestseller in Canada with translations forthcoming from Albin Michel in France, Aufbau Verlag in Germany, Iperborea in Italy, and Libros del Asteroide in Spain.

NoiseCat’s journalism has appeared in dozens of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Yorker and has been recognized with many awards including the 2022 American Mosaic Journalism Prize, which honors "excellence in long-form, narrative or deep reporting on stories about underrepresented and/or misrepresented groups in the present American landscape." In 2021, NoiseCat was named to the TIME100 Next list of emerging leaders alongside the starting point guard of his fantasy basketball team, Luka Doncic.