The Chatterbox

Our friend Hassan joins us to discuss the devastating civil war in Sudan, the geopolitical strategy of the United Arab Emirates, and US counter-rationality as a hegemon in decline. Check out Hassan's 2022 piece on the Sudanese revolution, Where is Sudan? Refracting the Globe Through Bilad al-Dahab.

If you are able, please consider donating to one of the following fundraisers to support relief efforts in Sudan:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/fight-hunger-in-sudan-the-khartoum-kitchen-appeal

https://sudanfunds.com/

https://www.sudansolidarity.com/

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Theme: Eye for an Eye, Haram (2017)

Art: Vivek Venkatraman

Mix: Jasper Saba

Zohran Mamdani’s decisive mayoral victory was powered by a coalition of tenants, immigrants, and workers. Suzi talks to Alina Shen, organizing director of CAAAV Voice, Jagpreet Singh, political director of DRUM Beats (Desis Rising Up and Moving), and Alicé Nascimento, political director of NYCC (New York Communities for Change) — representatives of three organizations that, along with the New York City branch of the Democratic Socialists of America, helped make this victory possible.

They discuss how grassroots groups expanded the electorate and built the People’s Majority Alliance, a movement for housing, justice, and democracy.

Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman features conversations with leading thinkers and activists, with a focus on labor, the economy, and protest movements.

Scholar Marie Robin investigates military brothels in the French empire.

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How much energy will AI really burn? Climate writer and activist Ketan Joshi joins Burning Platforms to chat AI and Climate: what we know, what we don’t know and what data centres have to do with yogurt tubs.

Regular panellists Digital Rights Watch Chair Lizzie O’Shea, Health Engine CEO Dan Stinton and Per Capita’s Peter Lewis also discuss:

Meta’s sloppy business model

Apple’s arranged AI marriage with Google

The Federal Government’s AI mission

To find out more about Ketan’s work, go to: https://ketanjoshi.co/blog/

To discuss the issues raised in this episode join us in the Democracy Sandpit - https://civility.bettermode.io/welcome

The number of billionaires is growing. So is the call to abolish them.

This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Adriene Lilly and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King.

A protest sign in Washington, DC. Photo by Eric Lee/Getty Images.

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Danny and Derek speak with political theorist and author Lea Ypi about her new book Indignity: A Life Reimagined, which explores how personal memory intersects with imperial collapse, nationalism, and the surveillance state. They discuss her grandmother’s journey from Ottoman Salonika to Albania amid the rise of competing political projects; archives and the stories they erase; the challenge for universalist ideals in a capitalist world; the parallels between the 1930s and today’s anti-migrant politics; and whether collective political action remains possible as we’re shaped by platforms, algorithms, and anonymous economic power.

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The path to climate justice is local.

In this episode of A People’s Climate, host Shilpi Chhotray sits down with Elizabeth Yeampierre, veteran organizer and executive director of UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization, to explore how frontline communities are taking climate action into their own hands.

In a capitalist world that prioritizes bigger, faster, and more, Elizabeth’s work takes a different path. Small, hyper-local solutions like a community-owned solar grid have huge impacts. Residents of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, where UPROSE focuses its work, are seeing lower energy costs, good green jobs, and local ownership. All while creating a blueprint for other communities to follow.

Elizabeth also takes us beyond the buzzwords of “green economy" and “clean energy” to show what a Just Transition really looks like. Mainstream environmental efforts often focus on the end goal: shifting to renewable energy. But they fail to ask “at what cost and to whom?” Elizabeth’s work ensures community members aren’t left behind.

This episode is a masterclass in how grassroots power can transition us to a just future.

Key Topics

• A Just Transition: Shifting to renewable energy while protecting workers and communities historically harmed by pollution
• The community-led renewable energy GRID Project
• Resisting extractive economies and reclaiming industrial spaces without displacement or gentrification.
• The importance of building an intergenerational movement
• How Trump-era policies have dismantled climate protections and undermined renewable energy incentives
• How disaster capitalism exploits crises and how community-led responses offer real solutions

Resources

UPROSE

The GRID 

Sunset Park Solar

A new solar project in Brooklyn could offer a model for climate justice

US Spending On Climate Damage Nears $1 Trillion Per Year

The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein)

Learn more at apeoplesclimate.org

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Find us instagram: @counterstream_media

What is the opposite of “big” data? In a society where households commonly store personal archives of photos, financial records, and other documents, the “little” database—the personal data collection that is stored and backed up and not accessed frequently—deserves a category of its own. In The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats, Daniel Scott Snelson examines globally accessible little databases, such as Textz, Eclipse, and UbuWeb, explores how digital archives dramatically transform the artifacts they host, and asks how they might help us better understand our own private collections in turn. Snelson is joined in conversation with Vicki Bennett, Craig Dworkin, and Luca Messarra. Access a transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/d0afdbc0 

Daniel Scott Snelson is a writer, editor, archivist, and assistant professor in the departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, where he also serves as faculty with the Digital Humanities Program, the UCLA Game Lab, and the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies. He is author of multiple volumes of experimental poetry and poetics, including Elden Poem, Apocalypse Reliquary, and EXE TXT.

Vicki Bennett is a multidisciplinary British artist working under the name People Like Us. 

Craig Dworkin is professor of English at the University of Utah.

Luca Messarra is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University, and founder of Undocumented Press.

EPISODE REFERENCES:
Alan Liu, Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database

Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels, “Deformance and Interpretation" (chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl800/Deformance.pdf)

We Edit Life, film (People Like Us/Vicki Bennett; partnership with Lovebytes)

Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (Internet Archive, 2024, eds. Luca Messarra, Chris Freeland, Juliya Ziskina)

Eclipse, an image-based archive of small press poetry books and magazines

PennSound, a site distributing audio recordings of poetry readings

UbuWeb, a collection of experimental film and video art

Allen Institute for AI

C4/Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus

Christopher Kelty, "The Internet We Could Have Had"

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine (ed. Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews)
L≠A≠N≠G≠U≠A≠G≠E magazine (ed. Danny Snelson)

Christian Marclay, The Clock

Johanna Drucker

Memory of the World archive

Future Knowledge podcast
Rory McCartney and Charlie Morgan, Heated Words: Searching for a Mysterious Typeface 

Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying 

Praise for the book:
“The Little Database is an incredibly powerful intervention into twenty-first-century experimental poetics and avant-garde media practices.”
—Stephanie Boluk

“The Little Database opens new ground for close reading in an environment that heavily promotes big data techniques and the neoliberal ideologies that accompany it in the new economy of attention.”
—Leonardo Reviews

“Snelson targets the fundamental assumption underlying much of contemporary DH work: that meaningful interpretation necessarily depends on the deployment of massive amounts of data.”
—Oxford's Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

“This book, while short in length, is certain to be long in influence, as it lays groundwork for future scholars, artists, readers, website makers, and archivists. The twists and turns, both in methodology and in specific analyses, are far more exciting than any summary, or even multiple readings of them, could serve.”
—Digital Humanities Quarterly

The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats by Daniel Scott Snelson is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available at Manifold. 

Actor and author Ben McKenzie didn’t set out to become one of crypto’s fiercest critics—but when the pandemic hit and Hollywood shut down, his curiosity turned into a full-blown investigation. The result was the bestselling book, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, a blistering exposé of the crypto craze as “casino capitalism” at its dumbest.

In this episode, McKenzie joins Nick and Goldy to explain how the industry turned hype and libertarian fantasy into a trillion-dollar bubble, why the true believers won’t let go, and how fake “innovation” and corporate lobbying are putting the entire financial system at risk. They dig into the cult psychology of crypto, the rise of legalized gambling as an addiction economy, and why letting corporations issue their own “money” could end in disaster.

Ben McKenzie is an actor, author, and director best known for his roles on The O.C., Southland, and Gotham. He holds a degree in economics and foreign affairs from the University of Virginia. McKenzie has become one of the most prominent critics of the cryptocurrency industry, co-authoring the book Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud with journalist Jacob Silverman.

The premiere of Everyone is Lying to You For Money is on Sunday, November 16, 2025, in New York City. Get tickets at DOCNYC.net.

Social Media:

@benmckenzie.bsky.social

mrbenmckenzie

@ben_mckenzie

Further reading: 

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud

When Prophecy Fails

Mistakes Were Made (but Not By Me)

New York Magazine: ⁠Congress Just Injected Crypto Directly Into the Most Stable Part of the Economy What could go wrong?

Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com

Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics

Threads: pitchforkeconomics

Bluesky: @pitchforkeconomics.bsky.social

Twitter: @PitchforkEcon, @NickHanauer

YouTube: @pitchforkeconomics

LinkedIn: Pitchfork Economics

Substack: ⁠The Pitch⁠