Featuring Danielle Carr on the history and present state of American unwellness and how that’s been shaped by psychiatry, prescription drugs, neuroscience, popular culture, smartphones and social media. We trace the rise of psychiatry as a Gilded Age human science, the disastrous contradictions of asylum deinstitutionalization, the invention of neuroscience and deep brain stimulation, Elon Musk’s Neuralink fraudulence, how Adderall made the Internet run, the liberal gospel of traumatic literalism recounted in The Body Keeps the Score, and the scientific Bonapartism of RFK Jr.’s medical freedom movement.

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Featuring Chris Newman on Trump’s far-right anti-migrant agenda and Democrats’ cruel and stupid complicity.

Read All-American Nativism versobooks.com/products/704-all-american-nativism

Read Dan’s essay on Gaza and migration politics in n+1 nplusonemag.com/issue-48/politics/do-border

Trump’s immigration executive orders propublica.org/article/donald-trump-immigration-executive-orders

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Featuring Hannah Srajer on building tenant unions by applying labor organizing models. The Connecticut Tenants Union is partnered with SEIU 1199NE to organize fighting super majority tenant unions that win collectively bargained leases and wield working class political power. It’s a model that’s spreading nationwide.

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Featuring Leonardo Vilchis and Tracy Rosenthal on their book Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. Tenant unions fighting to transform Los Angeles, the country, and the world.

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Featuring Michael Denning on Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, collectively authored by Stuart Hall and his colleagues at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Hall’s method of Marxist conjunctural analysis applied to the generalized crisis that paved the way for neoliberalism’s rise; a model for how we should ask questions about our world that will provide us with knowledge we need to change it.

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Featuring Michael Denning on Stuart Hall’s Marxism—a Marxism without guarantees. This is a comprehensive introduction to Marxism as a method to analyze historically specific, complex and contradictory capitalist social formations, and what that means for making, rather than assuming the existence of, a working-class socialist politics. Next week Dan interviews Denning on Policing the Crisis, a 1978 book collectively authored by Hall and his colleagues; it’s a remarkable project that anticipates today’s politics around anti-immigrant xenophobia, mass incarceration, and Trumpism.

Listen to Hall’s full 1983 Inaugural Karl Marx Memorial Lecture in Sheffield youtube.com/watch?v=IP_OWahR-Gc

Our two-part series on Gramsci with Denning:

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Featuring Bassam Haddad on the historical and geopolitical origins of Assad’s rise and fall—and what might happen next. We think through the contradictions: honoring the joy felt by Syrians at Assad’s ouster while simultaneously taking stock of a truly bad geopolitical outcome.

Want to learn more? Listen to Thawra, our series on the 20th century political history of the Arab East thedigradio.com/Thawra

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Featuring Patrick Blanchfield on assassination and political violence: from the routine to the extraordinary; authored by the state, capital, the left, the right, the unwell and alienated; as an anxiety, in our fantasies, as a morbid symptom and repetition compulsion; and as expressing distinctively American logics of domination and human disposability.

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Listen to the Ordinary Unhappiness podcast at ordinaryunhappiness.buzzsprout.com/

Read Patrick’s essay on the death drive late-light.com/issues/issue-1/death-drive-nation

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Featuring Quinn Slobodian and Wendy Brown on Trump’s triumphant return to power and the freakish, obscene, billionaire-dominated, capitalist reactionary, Christian nationalist, contradiction-ridden MAGA movement that surrounds him. A comprehensive early assessment of what is going on, where it’s coming from, and where it all might be heading.

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Featuring Hilary Goodfriend and Jorge Cuéllar in the final installment of a three-part series on Central America. This episode picks up with Nayib Bukele’s authoritarian crypto enthusiasm in El Salvador; Daniel Ortega’s perversion of Sandinismo’s revolutionary legacy in Nicaragua; anti-mining movements in Panama; Honduras and Guatemala, where popular social movements have elected left presidents to confront entrenched power structures. We conclude by discussing mass migration from the region that’s taken on a mystified form in US politics as the MAGA far right’s principal scapegoat.

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Check out nacla.org for in-depth coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean

Buy Defund: Conversations Toward Abolition at haymarketbooks.com