The Chatterbox

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we're joined by Yale's Karen Seto and University of Connecticut's Zhe Zhu to talk about their study: The Urban Pulse. We talk about using frequent time series satellite data to measure change in cities and the processes of urbanization.

The Urban Pulse - Yale School for the Environment

The Urban Pulse: Diagnosing the urbanization process as spiky, cyclical, and asynchronous - PNAS

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The Trump administration has justified the mass incarceration and deportation of immigrants by asserting that it’s going after the most violent offenders. Scholars of law and punishment, Keramet Reiter and Joshua Page, delve into the designation of the worst of the worse — from Three Strikes laws to longterm solitary confinement to mass detention under inhumane conditions and the transfer of immigrants to foreign prisons like CECOT in El Salvador.

Joshua Page and Keramet Reiter, The Uses and Abuses of the “Worst of the Worst” Dissent July 8, 2026

The post Immigrant Detention and the “Worst of the Worst” appeared first on KPFA.

Dystopia or utopia? How do you imagine the future? In films and books, the future is often filled with alien invasions, nuclear war or the zombie apocalypse. But a movement of Indigenous storytellers is reshaping traditional science fiction tropes based on their own storytelling cultures and experiences.

This event was recorded at the Melbourne Writers Festival on 10 May 2026.

Speakers:

Chelsea VowelCandian Metis language instructor, public intellectual, writer, and activist educatorAuthor, Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis & Inuit in Canada and the short-story collection Buffalo is the New BuffaloCo-host, Métis in Space podcast

Mykaela SaundersKoori and Lebanese award-winning writerAuthor of Always Will BePost-doctoral research fellow on First Nations speculative fiction at Macquarie University

By the early 1980s Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were the richest, best-known filmmakers in the world, with an empire of their own. Coppola had directed The Godfather, then the highest-grossing film of all-time, until Spielberg surpassed it with Jaws — whose record Lucas broke with Star Wars, which Spielberg surpassed again with E.T.

In a new book, The Last Kings of Hollywood, Paul Fischer charts their rise from young, ambitious filmmakers in the 1960s to the dominant creative forces of 1970s and 80s American cinema.

In this episode, he joins Anna Bogutskaya to examine how these three era-defining filmmakers rivalled and supported each other, fell out and reconciled, and struggled to reinvent popular American cinema.

Paul Fischer is an author, screenwriter and filmmaker. The Last Kings of Hollywood: The Battle for the Soul of American Cinema is available online and in bookstores now.

Anna Bogutskaya is a film critic, programmer and author of Feeding The Monster.

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How did far-right politics go mainstream so quickly? Pundits frequently cite distrust of elites, concerns about migration, and economic anxieties. But these factors alone don't adequately explain how illiberalism and identitarianism spread so rapidly and take hold so firmly. More plausibly, the far right's rise isn't really about people suddenly changing their minds. Rather the velocity of extremism down to people who already held these views, and who've lost their shame about saying so out loud once a skilled politician shows them it's safe to do it. That's the argument of a book called The Normalization of the Radical Right by political scientist Vicente Valentim. We're re-running that conversation now because far-right insurgents still are making significant gains. In Germany, Alice Weidel's AfD party has been polling at more than 40 percent; a win in Saxony Anhalt on September 6 would make the AfD the first far-right party to govern a German state since the end of the Second World War. In Italy, Roberto Vannacci's Futuro Nazionale has already polled ahead of Lega, the far right party he formerly was part of; Vannacci's is pushing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, herself a post-fascist politician, even further to the right ahead of national elections expected in Spring. In Spain, the Vox leader Santiago Abascal could be something of a kingmaker in a future rightwing national government; four Spanish regions are already governed by coalitions that include Vox, and national elections are due within the next year. Vicente also discusses the phenomenon of feminationalism in light of the earlier rise of Giorgia Meloni and of Marine Le Pen, who heads the French National Rally and is a candidate in presidential elections in Spring. These leaders cultivate what Vicente calls an aura of ambiguity to gain mainstream acceptance and to continue to connect with their more extreme bases.

Support the show

Jonathan White on the Future as a Political Idea 

Find us on: www.futurehistories-lab.com 

Follow us on: Instagram, Bluesky

https://www.lse.ac.uk/people/jonathan-white

https://profilebooks.com/work/in-the-long-run/ 

https://www.dtv.de/buch/am-ende-des-fortschritts-28534

White, J. (2015). Emergency Europe. Political studies, 63(2), 300-318.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9248.12072

White, J. (2023) Constitutionalizing the EU in an Age of Emergencies. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 61: 781–796. 

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcms.1341

https://eooh.eu/articles/great-replacement-fringe-conspiracy-mainstream-narrative

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit

https://www.ippr.org/articles/forbidden-fruit-the-neglected-economic-possibilities-of-lexi

https://www.counterfire.org/article/the-austrian-revolution-book-review/

https://jbi.or.at/otto-bauer-utopie-und-wirklichkeit/

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674298019

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill

Malm, A., & Carton, W. (2025). The long heat: Climate politics when it’s too late. Verso Books.

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3317-the-long-heat?srsltid=AfmBOoo_4whHho3ZrpGFZrLclb06yfTMCwMCDuQiPTBpfSwMDjWE2-y-

https://www.isepglobal.org/articles/net-zero-by-2050-too-little-too-late-scientists-warn

https://global-tipping-points.org/earth-system-tipping-points/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_mitigation

https://rebellion.global/about-us/

https://www.lse.ac.uk/asset-library/rftw/how-ideas-of-the-future-can-help-us-find-time-for-democracy.pdf

Clark, C. (2013). The sleepwalkers: How europe went to war in 1914. Harper Collins.

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-sleepwalkers-christopher-clark

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_adaptation

https://climatepromise.undp.org/news-and-stories/what-climate-change-adaptation-and-why-it-crucial

Amorim-Maia, A. T., & Olazabal, M. (2025). Beyond adjustment: A new paradigm for climate change adaptation in a complex world. Global Environmental Change, 93, 103027.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378025000640

on collapse and climate movements:

https://taz.de/Kollapsbewegung-in-der-Klimakrise/!6110821/

https://www.collapseclub.com/about/

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/26/andy-burnham-keir-starmer-leadership-styles-compare 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_mitigation

Sorg, C. & Groos, J. (2026). Creative Construction. Demokratische Planung im 21. Jahrhundert. Brumaire. 

https://brumaireverlag.myshopify.com/products/creative-construction

Sintomer, Y., Herzberg, C., & Röcke, A. (2008). Participatory budgeting in Europe: Potentials and challenges. International journal of urban and regional research, 32(1), 164-178.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2008.00777.x

https://communia.de/oeffentlicher-luxus-fuer-alle-mamdani-zeigt-wie-es-geht/

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czd782pjgq3o 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/#Bib

on economic Liberalism:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/economic-liberalism

https://www.exploring-economics.org/de/entdecken/joseph-stiglitz-trickle-down-economics-is-absolute/

Beckert, J. (2020). The exhausted futures of neoliberalism: from promissory legitimacy to social anomy. Journal of Cultural Economy, 13(3), 318–330.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2019.1574867

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postliberalism 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Corbyn_2015_Labour_Party_leadership_campaign

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_war_protests

S04E10 | Christine Hentschel zu Sicherheit und Aktivismus in katastrophischen Zeiten

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s04/e10-christine-hentschel-zu-sicherheit-und-aktivismus-in-katastrophischen-zeiten/

S04E07 | Kohei Saito, Christoph Sorg and Jan Groos on Creative Construction and the Struggle over Progress

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s04/e07-creative-construction-and-the-struggle-over-progress/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e46-rahel-jaeggi-zur-krise-des-liberalismus-fortschritt-als-prozess-und-sozialistischem-utopisieren/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e33-tadzio-mueller-zu-solidarischem-preppen-im-kollaps/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e32-jacob-blumenfeld-on-climate-barbarism-and-managing-decline/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e23-andreas-malm-on-overshooting-into-climate-breakdown/

If you like Future Histories, please consider supporting us on Patreon:

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Mastodon: https://mstdn.social/@FutureHistories

English webpage: https://futurehistories-international.com

Future Histories Podcast is produced by Future Histories LAB:

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Episode Keywords

#JonathanWhite #JanGroos, #Interview, #LSE, #FutureHistoriesInternational, #FutureHistories, #Future, #PoliticalIdeas, #Liberalism, #Capitalism, #Democracy, #ClimateCrisis, #Postliberalism, #DesirableFutures, #Neoliberalism, #DemocraticPlanning, #AlternativeFutures 

“[This weather] is a new norm, and we need to make sure that we are prepared to deal with that…these extreme wildfires put more responsibility onto improving our forecasting tools to support the brigades, to support communities.”

Victoria Gill speaks to Professor Celeste Saulo, head of the World Meteorological Organisation, about the extreme weather events making headlines in recent months. She says the wildfires, heatwaves, droughts and flooding are the new normal and the ability to forecast these events are more important than ever.

The WMO helps countries build resilience to weather, climate and water related hazards by monitoring conditions, improving forecasts and the global sharing of data and information.

Saulo took office in 2024, becoming the first woman and South American to lead the UN agency. She explains how climate change is one of the biggest threats facing the world today.

The Interview brings you conversations with people shaping our world, from all over the world. The best interviews from the BBC, including episodes with Sumant Sinha the founder of India’s renewable energy company ReNew, executive director of Unicef Catherine Russell, and film director Rohan Kanawada. You can listen on the BBC World Service on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 0800 GMT. Or you can listen to The Interview as a podcast, out three times a week on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presenter: Victoria Gill

Get in touch with us on email [email protected] and use the hashtag #TheInterviewBBC on social media.

(Image: Celeste Saulo. Credit: Photo by World Meteorological Organization)