The Chatterbox

A world without climate barbarism is no longer on the table, says Japanese Marxist philosopher Kohei Saito. In his latest groundbreaking book "Dark Socialism" Saito argues that we need to face head-on a future of disastrous climate overshoot – and develop a socialist project that can deliver hope in times of natural disasters, permanent scarcity and end-time fascism. Kohei Saito joins Dissens to talk about the exhaustion of liberal democracies, capitalist elites aligning more and more with fascists and what a socialist vision for dark times might look like.

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Kohei Saito, born in 1987, is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tokyo. He is famous for his best-selling book “Slow Down” (dt. ”Systemsturz”), where he argued for a post-capitalist democracy to prevent climate breakdown. In his lates book "Dark Socialism" (dt. "Am Ende des Fortschritts") Saito grapples with the reality, that climate action failed and ecological collapse is inevitable - he envisions a socialism that is suitable to face a future not being shaped by abundance and emancipation, but rather by natural disasters and permanent scarcity.

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Alle Infos zum Dissens Podcast auf www.dissenspodcast.de

Mach Dissens möglich! Werde jetzt Fördermitglied auf Steady und unterstütze damit die Arbeit von Dissens-Host Lukas sowie Inken und Valentin von der "Was Tun?"-Crew.

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Dissens verlost ein Exemplar von Kohei Saitos "Am Ende des Fortschritts:

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Musik

DOS-88 – City Lights: https://youtu.be/egKdVELkKVI

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Dissens Creative Commons License

**Classic episode re-release! Originally published Sept, 21, 2019**

Legal scholar Rohan Grey knows how to use analogies to give shape to an idea. He illustrates his points with references to popular films, folklore and lyrical poets. With experience in the realms of music, early childhood education, political economy, and jurisprudence, he brings Modern Monetary Theory to life in unexpected ways. Throughout this conversation with Steve, he connects economics and the law by illustrating subtle conceptual parallels.

The episode begins where any discussion of macroeconomics should begin — talking about money. Instead of thinking of it as a “thing,” or a store of value, Rohan asks us to think of money as a series of relationships, structured by law. He calls it a web of invisible filaments. The MMT story starts with state-created money. While the original logic had to do with tax obligations, the desire for money takes on a life of its own. We don’t wake up thinking about wanting money to pay taxes. We want it for all those other goods and services we need and desire.

Steve asks Rohan to discuss talk about the Federal Reserve, an institution often misunderstood by even the sharpest political minds. The rest of this episode takes us through its history and before, beginning with the earliest years of the American colonies, when states were developing their own economies. This was a time when local governments were still relatively accountable to their constituents and the democratic process was vibrant. The constitution was designed in large part to move monetary powers from the state level up to the federal level. In fact, Rohan says that, in contrast to the American revolution, the creation of the US Constitution was a counter-revolution.

There’s far too much history to recount here. Rohan takes us through Lincoln’s creation of greenback dollars, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, FDR, and the decades-long bitter political battle for supremacy between the Department of Treasury and the Fed culminating in the Treasury-Fed Accord of 1951.

The struggle to create a central bank was basically a power grab by the capitalist class. Throughout its history, the Fed has zealously guarded its autonomy just as the Supreme Court has done; each determined to remain unaccountable to democratic forces. Both institutions employ the same tactic, convincing the public that they alone have the unique expertise to deal with complex matters. Ultimately Rohan maintains that the Federal Reserve adds no real value to the government or the economy. Our listeners will surely agree.

Rohan Grey is an assistant professor at Willamette University College of Law, where he teaches contracts, business associations, financial institutions, and a seminar on law, money and technology.

Find his work and an expanded bio at rohangrey.net

@rohangrey on Twitter

It’s where our ancient instincts to travel, to trade, to reunite with family and explore meet modern technology and innovation. From muddy airfields to gleaming cathedrals of designer shopping, fancy restaurants and even botanical gardens- the airport has become this weird and wonderful place that tells the story of the modern world. For the 80th birthday of Heathrow - one of the world’s pioneering and most connected airports - Dan explores the curious history of the airport from the earliest versions back in the 1920s, through the luxurious golden age of travel to the revolution of the jet age and beyond. 

To find out more, head to Heathrow.com/80

Thanks to Alastair Gordon, author of ‘Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure’, as well as Alan Smilie, Ady Dolan, Zulfikar and Joseph Gregory at Heathrow.

Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.

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Sentient Seas: Archaeologies of Seascapes and Maritime Rituals (UP Florida, 2026), published by University Press of Florida (2026), offers a global perspective on maritime cultures, examining how societies across time and space have understood and interacted with the sea. Synthesizing archaeological evidence, historical documents, and ethnographic accounts, Ian McNiven explores maritime traditions from ancient civilizations in the Middle East and Mediterranean to medieval Europe and Scandinavia to contemporary Indigenous communities in the South Pacific.

McNiven investigates diverse cultural practices including shipbuilding, the treatment of shipwrecks and shipwreck victims, and maritime resource use, interpreting the evidence through the perspectives of mariners who understood the seas to be sentient and capable of acting with intentionality. He introduces the concepts of “terrestrial seascapes” and “ontological switching” to illustrate how land-based shrines and votive offerings extend maritime cosmologies and maintain a liminal transition from land to sea. By bridging anthropological and archaeological research with transdisciplinary blue humanities scholarship, Sentient Seas approaches seas as spiritscapes, recontextualizing folkloric beliefs about maritime superstitions.

Ian J. McNiven is Research Professor of Indigenous archaeology at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre at Monash University in Melbourne, and a Chief Investigator with the Australian research Council Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures. He is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea.

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Brian Eno’s music opens up worlds I love to step into during trying times. And this conversation with Eno did the same thing.

Eno is a trailblazing musician and producer who’s worked on seminal records by U2, David Bowie, the Talking Heads and Coldplay, among others. But Eno isn’t just a great collaborator with other artists; he’s also a great collaborator with machines. He’s been experimenting with music technology for decades. Long before we started worrying about ChatGPT replacing human creativity, Eno was tinkering with generative systems to pioneer ambient music – a genre that has deeply influenced how we listen to music today. Eno’s use (and playful misuse) of technology has expanded the possibilities of what music and sound can be.

Many of you emailed in asking for a break from the news. Here it is.

This episode contains strong language.

Mentioned:

What Art Does by Brian Eno and Bette Adriaanse

East West Street by Philippe Sands

Silence by John Cage

Book Recommendations:

Printing and the Mind of Man edited by John Carter and Percy H. Muir

A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

Naples ’44 by Norman Lewis

Music Recommendations:

The Rural Blues

“The Velvet Underground” by the Velvet Underground

The Consolers

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker, Kate Sinclair and Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. Transcript editing by Sarah Murphy. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Geeta Dayal, Jack Hamilton, Victor Szabo and Sophie Abramowitz.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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Reggae has never been a boys-only story, so why do women keep getting filed under “backup,” “footnote,” or “first female to…”?  Mikelah Malcolm from Style and Vibes guest hosts a Breadfruit Media crossover and sits down with me to talk about my dissertation on women in reggae, what pushed me to spend years on the research, and what I found when I went looking for women in the archive.

We get into the real mechanics of the reggae industry and Jamaican music history: who controls rhythms, who gets paid, and why royalty splits and copyright enforcement become uniquely brutal for women. We also name the hard realities that shape careers, including sexual harassment, intimidation in studio spaces, and how relationships and childcare labor can derail momentum in ways male artists rarely face. At the same time, we talk solutions that actually move the needle: ownership, independent labels, business literacy, and women building networks that make leadership possible behind the scenes, not just on stage.

Then we zoom out to method and memory. I share how I used archival research in Kingston, oral history interviews with pioneers, and close reading of reggae lyrics as historical texts to map themes like violence, belonging, and resistance across generations. We also grapple with femininity, dancehall’s influence, Rastafari, and how respectability politics shape what the culture celebrates or hides.

This first of many conversations on the topic so if this conversation shifts how you hear reggae, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners find the stories women have always carried.

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Hosts and Commonweal contributors Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Nick Tabor chat with historian Greg Grandin about his new book, America, América: A New History of the New World (Penguin Press), and his recent essay, “The Education of Pope Leo XIV,” which ran in the New York Review of Books. 

Following one thread through the book, they discuss Catholicism in the New World—how the conquest carried “the terms of its own negation”; Bartolomé de las Casas and the roots of a universalist humanism; Octavio Paz on the “place in the cosmos” that colonial Catholicism offered the conquered; liberation theology as “a reaction to a reaction,” and why the Catholic Church under Pope Leo XIV may be the only global force capable of offering a moral challenge to Trumpism.

Episode production by Seven Morris. Original music by Joel Myers.

In this episode, hosts Sertaç Sehlikoglu and Meryem Zişan Köker are joined by Maureen Freely, the novelist, journalist, and translator who has brought Orhan Pamuk, Sabahattin Ali, and many other Turkish writers to English-speaking readers. Freely reflects on growing up in 1960s Istanbul, where she first learned Turkish by listening rather than studying, and on how translation has entered in to her life. The conversation moves between fiction and ethnography, the histories that are erased or told differently in Turkish, Greek, and Armenian accounts, and the difficulty of carrying Turkish emotion, sound, and rhythm into English. She also speaks about the women writers she has recently translated, including Sevgi Soysal, Tezer Özlü, and Suat Derviş, the unexpected success of her translation of Madonna in a Fur Coat, and why she still finds reason for optimism in the work of Turkey's intellectual diaspora.

 Date of episode recording: 2026-01-14
 Language of episode: English
 Presenter:Sertaç Sehlikoglu; Meryem Zisan Koker
 Guests: Maureen Freely
 Producer: Hazal Aydin, Sertaç Sehlikoglu, Meryem Zisan Koker