The Chatterbox

The year was 1984, "The Year of the Yuppie," according to Newsweek magazine. Yuppies may have been a classic 1980s stereotype, but they were also a very real demographic as revealed in this month's episode featuring our very own Dylan Gottlieb. Gottlieb explains how hundreds of thousands of highly-educated, young, urban professionals flocked to New York and other cities during the 1980s, transforming the US economy in the process. Yuppies, Gottlieb argues, were the footsoldiers of late twentieth-century financialization, writing the legal briefs and crunching the numbers for the corporate takeovers that fueled Wall Street's rise and the growing inequality that accompanied it. They were also some of financialization's primary beneficiaries. As other Americans saw their wages stagnate and opportunities dwindle, yuppies—and the high salaries they earned—stood out as a lone bright spot in the broader downward 1980s economy, attracting attention from retailers, developers, city officials, and national politicians.

State-owned enterprises have long been viewed by economists as a bad idea due to proven inefficiencies and mismanagement. But is handing over key resources and industries to the private sector really the answer? Economic historian Nicholas Mulder says, with all the geopolitical risks in the world of late, governments are looking for ways to keep essential resources under their control. Mulder is a professor of history at Cornell University. His article The New Wave of Nationalization was published in the June issue of Finance & Development magazine. In this podcast, Rhoda Metcalfe and Nicholas Mulder discuss the potential and risks of rising government ownership.

Transcript: https://bit.ly/4wYy0R0

Read the article in Finance & Development magazine: IMF.org/fandd

Over the past four centuries, owners have sought to wrest control of the labor process away from the workers in plantations, factories, and warehouse. Ideas about labor management, dressed up as a science, have often failed on the shop floor, but they have served a broader purpose. Labor historian Henry Snow interrogates how theories of discipline and management — from the Bentham brothers’ panopticon to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ideas of labor optimization to General Electric’s propaganda campaign featuring actor Ronald Reagan — have perennially reinforced the notion that there is no alternative to capitalism.

Henry Snow, Control Science: How Management Made the Modern World Verso, 2026

The post Controlling Workers appeared first on KPFA.

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Danny and Derek speak with Roland Betancourt, Chancellor's Professor of Art History at UC Irvine, about Disneyland and the rise of automation in the U.S. They talk about Walt Disney’s move from animation to theme parks, the relationship between amusement parks and industrial production, Cold War technology and Southern California, Disney’s use of automation and control, labor in the theme park, Disney World and Epcot, and more.

Grab your copy of Roland’s book Disneyland and the Rise of Automation: How Technology Created the Happiest Place on Earth.

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Sex in the distant past is often thought about with all the fun taken out of it.

Pleasure must have been a part of the sex lives of women and men in the past, so what evidence do we have to back this up? What evidence of queer sex and attraction is there? And how did the Victorians try to cover up sex and pleasure in Ancient Greece and Rome?

Joining Kate today is the wonderful historian and author Jean Menzies, whose new book explores all of this and more.

*TW: sexual violence discussed at the start of the episode*

Edited by Hannah Feodorov. Producer by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.

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Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast.

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From formidable overseas leaders to vicious internecine conflict, Cleopatra’s rise to the top was bloody and brutal. So what personal qualities did she draw upon to navigate these shifting sands? And should her success mean we see her in a new light? In the second episode of our four-part Sunday Series on the ancient queen’s life and world, Islam Issa – professor of public humanities at Birmingham City University – tells Matt Elton about the truth behind the myth.

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Captivated by Cleopatra? Matt Elton has curated a collection of essential reading, listening and viewing from the HistoryExtra vaults to help bring the ancient queen to life: https://bit.ly/3Pgs3hv

And don’t miss our HistoryExtra Academy, Royal Women with Professor Kate Williams, for more on some of the past’s most powerful female leaders – from Cleopatra to Elizabeth II: https://bit.ly/3PRpwue

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‘Human life is not more interesting or worthwhile because it occurs in the centers of capitalism.’ That’s the tagline of Peripheries, the online journal co-run by Katja Perat, who joined us for the 40th edition of the Versopolis Podcast. Katja’s early poetry collections, which earned her a cult following, were written against the backdrop of the 2008 global financial crisis and captured a specific moment: Slovenia drifting into neoliberalism under the cover of liberal democracy. Her relationship with poetry at the time was, she says, fraught, shaped by a tendency to hyper-intellectualize rather than feel.

After earning her PhD in 2022 into a brutal humanities job market, she took a position teaching English at a communitycollege in northern Alaska, the northernmost in North America. The move tied together her longstanding fascination with the Far North and her commitment to minor languages: teaching in a community where Iñupiaq is spoken, she draws a quiet parallel to her grandmother’s work with Slovene as a minority language. ‘There’s an untapped wealth of literary inspiration in these spaces where the rural collides with the urban,’ Katja says, ‘the literary markets just isn’t as interested in covering peripheral knowledge. And I think, just from an epistemological perspective, that’s a huge loss.’

Katja Perat is a Slovenian poet, novelist, essayist and journalist whose work spans multiple literary forms and languages. She published her first poems in 2007 in the Slovene literary magazine Literatura andthe bilingual Slovenian Bosnian magazine Dignimo pero/Dvignimo pero. Her debut poetry collection, The Best Have Fallen (Najboljši so padli, 2011), received the Best Debut Award and the Kritiško sito Award from the Slovenian Literary Critics’ Association. Her second collection, Value-Added Tax (Davek na dodano vrednost, 2014), was nominated for both the Jenko Award and the Veronika Award. That same year, her work appeared alongside Eileen Myles in Fear of Language, the third issue of Sternberg Press’s Poetic Series. 

Her novel The Masochist (Mazohistka), translated into English by Michael Biggins and published by Istros Books in 2020, has taken on an international life of its own in translation, earning a nomination for the Dublin Literary Award. In 2019, she published the essay collection Make America Graspable Again. A Slovene immigrant and minor language speaker, Perat holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. As a scholar, author and teacher, she explores the relationship between complexity and accessibility, and brings her transcultural, multilingual background to the writing classroom.

The Hotel Lutetia in central Paris lived several lives in the tortured times of the 1930s and 1940s. Before the war, it was the hub of dissenting activity from anti-Nazi German exiles. During the war, it was the HQ for German military intelligence – and after the war, it was a deportee relocation centre. Jane Rogoyska, author of Hotel Exile, talks to David Musgrove about what we can learn about the remarkable story of the this ever-evolving building.

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Don't miss our six-part HistoryExtra Academy course with Laurence Rees on Nazi Germany: https://bit.ly/4aB46ba

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