The Chatterbox

From true crime pamphlets to reports from the scaffold, early modern Britain was gripped by tales of women who killed. But were these cases as common as they seemed, or was something else at play? Speaking to Lauren Good, historian Blessin Adams explores the obsession with female murderers in this period, and what this tells us about historical attitudes to gender, justice and power.

(Ad) Blessin Adams is the author of Thou Savage Woman: Female Killers in Early Modern Britain (Harper Collins, 2025). Buy it now from Waterstones: https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-histboty&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fthou-savage-woman%2Fblessin-adams%2F9780008500177.

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Mass layoffs have become a routine corporate strategy—not because companies are struggling, but because Wall Street demands it. In Wall Street’s War on Workers, labor educator and author Les Leopold exposes how stock buybacks, deregulation, and financialized capitalism have made job cuts a tool for enriching CEOs and hedge funds at the expense of workers and communities. He joins Nick and Goldy this week to explain how this happened, why both political parties have failed to stop it, and what we can do to fight back.

Les Leopold is a labor educator, author, and co-founder of the Labor Institute, where he has spent decades advocating for economic justice and worker rights. He is the author of several books, including Runaway Inequality and Wall Street’s War on Workers, which exposes how financial elites have rigged the economy in their favor.

Social Media:

@les_leopold

Further reading: 

Wall Street's War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do about It

Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America

Les Leopold’s Substack

Civic Ventures Produced Comic on Stock Buybacks: Trillion Dollar Heist

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Twitter: @PitchforkEcon, @NickHanauer, @civicaction

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Author Teke Wiggin discusses the article, "Weaponizing the Workplace: How Algorithmic Management Shaped Amazon's Antiunion Campaign in Bessemer, Alabama" published in Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World.

This episode is part of our Think&Drink Series in collaboration with the Georg-Simmel-Centre for Urban Studies working with the Humboldt University Berlin. Today’s speaker is Andrei Semenov, an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan.

On today’s show we travel back in time with Dr. Julia Palacios, a scholar of Mexican music from the 50s and 60s. She joins host Carlos Dȧvalos to talk about the influence of US rock and roll on Mexican culture between 1955-1965.

They talk about the bracero program that sent Mexican workers to the US, a program that started during WWII and continued until 1965. It was this labor program that helped ignite a cultural revolution in Mexican music. As Mexican workers returned to the country, they brought with them rock and roll, clothes, dance styles, and more. At the same time, the affluence of the post-war boom in the US was desirable to Mexicans, and they were eager for American movies, music, and other forms of consumption. 

Palacios describes how commercial television and radio also helped bring rock and roll music in English to Mexican audiences. The big bands at the time mainly played calypso, mambo, cha cha cha and other Caribbean rhythms, but they started incorporating rock and roll rhythms because of the genre’s growing popularity. Many bands simply translated from English directly into Spanish.

We hear several examples of this cultural transformation starting with Little Richard’s hit, “Good Golly Miss Molly” which was translated three years later as “La Plaga” by Los Teen Tops. Palacios explains the music industry’s awareness of rock and roll as a lucrative business, and how rock and roll eventually declined in the late 60s as the student movement came to see it as a symbol of US imperialism.

Listen to the full playlist of Mexican rock and roll alongside each song’s US counterpart. 

Julia Palacios is a sociologist and historian specializing in pop culture and popular music. She was a professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City from 1983 to 2023. She has been a media anchor and producer for national radio and television since 1990. In 2003, she founded Ibero 90.9 (the radio station at the Universidad Iberoamericana) and has been an anchor there since. 

Featured image of the album cover of Los Locos del Ritmo.

The post The History of Mexican Rock and Roll appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.

Today I talked to Mark Neocleous about his new book Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police (Verso, 2025).

For more than two decades, Neocleous has been a pioneer in the radical critique of policing, security, and warfare. Today we will discuss his newest work on the theory and practice of pacification, which, he argues, is “social warfare carried out through the ideology of peace.” Pacification not only aims to counter resistance to capitalist exploitation, dispossession, and displacement, but it aims to prevent such resistance from emerging in the first place by constructing social institutions and the built environment. Pacification is a totalizing process by which states deploy social policies, symbolic practices, and coercive operations in order to produce cooperative – or at least acquiescent – subjects. However, pacification never succeeds in obscuring the antagonistic nature of capitalist social relations. Consequently, pacification becomes an endless social war for peace.

Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University in London. His previous books include A Critical Theory of Police Power (reissued by Verso in 2021), The Politics of Immunity (Verso, 2022), and War Power, Police Power (Edinburgh 2014). As a member of the Anti-Security Collective, he co-authored the Security Abolition Manifesto, which is available at anti-security.org. 

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On cities and the politics of development.

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Ben Bradlow, assistant professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton, talks to Alex about his book Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg.

If our future is urban – and it is – why is it different to what we imagined?

Are Johannesburg and São Paulo representative of what is going on in cities?

How did democratic promise and neoliberal disappointment go together in the 1990s, through to today?

What has been the role of social movements (e.g. for housing) in transforming cities and municipal government?

Is the radical right in the global North and South fundamentally different? What is the urban dimension?

What does China's lead in industries like electric vehicles mean for countries like Brazil?

Is industrial upgrading possible under post-neoliberalism?

Links:

Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow, Princeton UP

A processual framework for understanding the rise of the populist right: the case of Brazil (2013–2018), Tomás Gold and Benjamin Bradlow, Social Forces

Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation, Peter Evans, Princeton UP

In episode 86 of the Podcast for Social Research, live-recorded at BISR Central, BISR's Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Danya Glabau sat down with fellow faculty Nafis Hasan to celebrate the launch of his new book, Metastasis: The Rise of the Cancer-Industrial Complex and the Horizons of Care. Nafis kicks off the discussion with a briefing on the successful cultivation of cancer cures for mice, but not humans, fundamental failures at the clinical level, the rise of cancer as a household name, and the blockbuster drug moving for $500,000 a shot. The three then discuss the primacy placed, among researchers, on genetic mutations above environmental causes, the notion of "financial toxicity," and what it means to critique medical research at a moment of widespread cuts to public health institutions. Key questions arise along the way: why—despite the allocation of so many resources—are we not winning the war on cancer? Why has an entire political economy developed around genetic mutations, at the expense of public health campaigns—a more proven mitigator of cancer-related deaths? Why is capitalism so embedded in efforts to defeat cancer, and is there any alternative?

Note: The Novartis drug with a half-million dollar price tag mentioned at the top of the podcast is Kymriah, not Keytruda.

The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini.

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In this episode, Saeed Khan and Chella Ward sat down with Dr Aliyah Khan to discuss Muslimness in the Caribbean, drawing on Aliyah’s book Far From Mecca and ongoing important work in this area. This wide-ranging conversation covers decolonial solidarities and neglected histories, and is part of our Forgotten Ummah series, where we investigate Muslimness in places outside of the Middle East and North Africa region in an attempt to ReOrient the normative geography of Muslimness.

Travel back to post-WW1 London, when sex, drugs and music was exploding in Soho... causing a national moral panic.

The drugs of choice? Cocaine and morphine. Still used by doctors for questionable medicinal reasons (cough syrup anyone?!) but now also taken in nightclubs and opium dens by socialites around Soho.

This week, Kate is Betwixt the Sheets with Professor Toby Seddon to talk about the history of drugs, the people who were selling and taking them, and how the government attempted to crack down.

Historic Soho has been brought to life in the new BBC show Dope Girls, which tells the story of Soho when female gangs ran the nightclubs after the First World War. You can watch it on BBC iPlayer now.

All music from Epidemic Sounds.

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

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