The Chatterbox

In this episode we welcome anthropologist Raja Swamy (University of Tennessee), author of Capitalism and Catastrophe. Swamy argues that “disaster” is flexible and is often misframed as a discrete event rather than a long process, urging disaster studies to interrogate the boundary between disaster and “normal” conditions. He emphasizes how pre-disaster struggles—poverty, eviction, austerity, displacement, war—shape impacts and recovery, and uses Marxism to foreground capitalism’s role in producing vulnerability and enabling “disaster capitalism.” Addressing critiques of Eurocentrism, he contends that modernity and Marxism have global, anti-colonial histories. He highlights resistance and solidarity through examples including Rana Plaza, Hurricane Katrina, Puerto Rico, and Gaza, and calls for politicized, movement-aligned scholarship that rejects false neutrality.

The allegations are explosive: that the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia set up a secret fund for Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, to finance proxy wars hidden from democratic oversight. Journalist Matthew Cole delineates his claims involving, among others, autocratic Gulf leaders, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, and the disgraced mercenary Erik Prince.

Matthew Cole, Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2026

Photo by Ryan Johnson CC BY-SA 2.0

The post Jared Kushner and the Reshaping of the Middle East appeared first on KPFA.

On this special All Saints edition of the podcast, we talk Halloween and hypostition and then (14:34) welcome William Callison and Jacob McLean of The Zetkin Collective to talk about their brilliant new book, The Great Driving Right Show: Cars, Crisis and the Rise of Fossil Fascism (Verso, 2026). We start with the rise of fossil populism in the 2020s and the role that the pandemic played in supercharging conspiracy theories related to climate action and left environmentalism. We ask why cars are such an apt vehicle for the white masculinist overtures of the fossil fascist movement. From there, we turn to what the collective calls the "inverted crisis" proposed by fossil fascism (e.g., that climate action is itself the crisis rather than climate change) and how we might shortcircuit their moral panics through socialist politics aimed at addressing underlying existential concerns. Then Jacob and William introduce us to their concept of the "fossilized petty bourgeoisie" which plays a significant role, hand in glove with the bourgeois of Big Oil, in driving denialist protests like the so-called "freedom convoys." We close on militarization and the politics of remigration and also don't forget the metabolic grifters—the MAHA-style far right health insurgency—and how their project dovetails with that of fossil fascism via "corporeal anti-globalism". Hang in there, everyone, peace and love!

The AI boom is not the investment boom we wanted. Can we make it work for us better?

The issues raised by AI are daunting, and are a potentially dangerous distraction from other challenges facing humanity.

We’ll look at AI as a site of geopolitical rivalry, as a source of new military systems and as a climate threat. Will AI be good for development? Will it be an engine for economic prosperity or a dangerous financial bubble?

Episodes released weekly from Wednesday, October 28. 

Hosted by energy and climate finance expert Kate MacKenzie, and Tim Sahay from the net zero industrial policy lab at Johns Hopkins University. They co-author The Polycrisis newsletter, which explores connections between energy, geopolitics, climate change, finance and industry. 

• Produced by Sarah Allely
• Original music by Russell Stapleton
• Mixed by Bethany Stewart

Nicholas Humphrey is a  fellow at Darwin College at Cambridge University, and the author of many books. His latest works are titled, Why Is the World So Beautiful?: Our Minds in Search of Nature's Rhymes and The Mind Made Flesh: Frontiers of Psychology and Evolution.

Greg and Nicholas discuss why humans uniquely among all creatures seek and feel aesthetic emotion, especially toward “pointless” natural beauty like sunsets and rainbows, which seems puzzling for Darwinian adaptation. Nicholas gives evolutionary explanations for beauty in bodies, landscapes, and also design, and then unifies them through Gerard Manley Hopkins’s idea that beauty is “rhyme,” defined as likeness tempered with difference across sensory and abstract domains. 

Nicholas argues the world is full of “rhyming” categories because enduring kinds of things persist, and humans use rhyme to build world models from infancy, with culture shaping which rhymes we notice. Their discussion covers ugliness as category confusion, connoisseurship and collecting, superstimuli, beauty’s growth through expanded understanding, and the Earth’s unique richness of life.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

• 00:00 Meet Nick Humphrey
• 01:17 Why Beauty Exists
• 03:19 Humans and Aesthetic Emotion
• 04:26 Darwinian Puzzle of Beauty
• 05:39 Evolutionary Explanations
• 06:45 Rhyme as Beauty Key
• 08:40 Rhyme Built Into Reality
• 09:56 Training Minds With Rhymes
• 11:58 Hopkins Chestnut Example
• 13:39 Culture Shapes What Rhymes
• 15:54 Learning Deepens Appreciation
• 18:02 When Rhyme Turns Obsessive
• 21:20 Ugliness and Category Threats
• 23:23 Adapting to Anomalies
• 25:21 Splitters and Joiners
• 26:58 Earth as Rhyme Hotspot
• 27:17 Life Makes Rhymes
• 27:36 Why Mars Disappoints
• 28:32 Beauty as Social Emotion
• 32:30 Scientists Chase Beauty
• 35:30 Is Beauty Increasing
• 39:50 Training Taste Transfers
• 43:05 Inequality of Beauty
• 45:47 Truth Beauty Rhyme
• 47:49 Pregnant Uncertainty
• 49:20 Blindsight for Beauty
• 51:33 Closing Thoughts

How we learn to recognize beauty

15:17: You don't find rhyme mentioned in textbooks of developmental psychology, and yet all mothers know that the kids love rhyme, whether it's in nursery rhymes or songs or picture books or whatever it maybe. So we all know how to take advantage of it. And then, as we say, it branches out. As we grow up, we become interested, become connoisseurs of different parts of the world, and we say we look for different levels of rhyme. And I think that's one of the great things that makes me so optimistic in a way about the possibilities for the world we live in and finding new kinds of beauty is that we can always look deeper.

What makes things beautiful 

06:28:  We notice that the very same principle applies to what we like about human bodies as what we like about buildings and what we like about  the flower meadows and so on. We like rhyme. We like this relationship where things belong together in particular categories and contrast with other categories.

And I picked that out as the central theme of the human response to beauty.

Why life makes Earth special

26:56: I'm not shy of saying that the Earth is a very unique and probably an isolated example of how things could develop. There's more rhyme here because, really because of the evolution of life. Life gave rise to new kinds of rhymes, which gave rise to animals such as ourselves who could make things which rhymed to people like us. So we'd use language to find new kinds of rhymes and so on, and we go on doing it. Now, if and when some of our human explorers go to visit other planets in the universe, the one thing they shouldn't hope for is to find a place as beautiful as the Earth. 

Recommended Resources:

• Spandrel
• Gerard Manley Hopkins
• ON THE ORIGIN OF BEAUTY
• Rhyme
• Rupert Sheldrake
• Mary Douglas
• Thomas Reid
• Ernst Gombrich
• David Hume
• Rhyme-as-reason effect
• Howards End Chapter 5

Guest Profile:

• Personal Website
• Wikipedia Profile
• CARTA Profile

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Why Is the World So Beautiful?: Our Minds in Search of Nature's Rhymes
• The Mind Made Flesh: Frontiers of Psychology and Evolution
• The Inner Eye
• In a Dark Time
• Leaps of Faith:Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation
• Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness
• Seeing Red: a Study in Consciousness
• Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness
• A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness
• Google Scholar Page

If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like:

• Mark Johnson
• César Hidalgo
• Nicholas Humphrey
• Alva Noë

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The supply and control of "critical mineral" supply chains is now a defining political issue, as the pace of the energy transition collides with rising militarism, geopolitical fragmentation and the AI boom, all of which are driving demand for extraction.
In the process, contradictions have emerged, particularly as the pursuit of clean energy alternatives places pressures on both communities and ecosystems on the frontlines of extractive industry.
In this conversation, recorded as a live episode of The Break—Down at the 2026 Partners for a New Economy conference in Bonn, Adrienne speaks to Isabel Estevez and Emily Iona Stewart about the present and future of critical minerals, and what it all means for people and planet.

This conversation was recorded live at Partners for a New Economy (P4NE)'s 𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐄𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐆𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 on 13th October 2026 in Bonn.