The Intellectual

West Coast hip hop means much more than LA, argues Dr. Daudi Abe, a professor of humanities at Seattle Central College. In Emerald Street: A History of Hip Hop in Seattle (University of Washington Press, 2020), Abe argues that Seattle deserves an honored spot in the cultural geography of hip hop in the United States. Although less well known than Los Angeles, New York, or even Atlanta and New Orleans, Seattle has spawned two Grammy-award winning artists (Sir Mix-a-Lot and Macklemore) and has had an active hip hop, graffiti, and breaking scene since the early 1980s. Hip Hop, as Abe argues in the book, is all about making yourself known and representing where you're from as a means of communicating to others what it's like being from that place. In that regard, Seattle has consistently been a loud and proud voice in that regard, with the city's hip hop sitting alongside grunge and indie rock as parts of the musical landscape of the Pacific Northwest.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Pascal, Stefan, and Marcus speak with Anton Jäger about his latest article “From Post-Politics to Hyper-Politics”. https://jacobinmag.com/2022/02/from-p...

Anton Jäger is a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, working on the history of populism in the United States. Together with Daniel Zamora, he is currently working on an intellectual history of basic income.

In today’s episode, I chat with author John Grindrod.  John’s work explores Britain’s post-war and contemporary architecture from a personal and sociohistorical perspective. John describes his books as being for those of us who are fascinated by the modern histories of our towns, cities, and suburbs - but also aren’t quite sure what to make of them.

John has published four books: Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain (2013), Outskirts: Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt (2017), How to Love Brutalism (2018), and Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain (2022).

In my conversation with John, we learn about the key characteristics of post-war architecture, and what got John particularly interested in this era of construction. We also explore what the greenbelt is and the issues surrounding it, as well as John’s self-professed love of Brutalism. Finally, we take a look at John's new book, Iconicon, and ponder the ups and downs of our mutual home town, Croydon.

NOTE: Please excuse the poor audio at times in this episode. Someone commented it sounded like I was eating a bag of crisps. The rustling was coming from John's mic as he spoke. I was unable to edit it out as it would have lost John's speech all together. Apologies in advance!

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo adored adventure. In November, 1930, she was thrilled to realize her dream of traveling to the United States to live in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York. Still, leaving her family and her country for the first time was monumental.

Only twenty-three and newly married to the already world-famous forty-three-year-old Diego Rivera, she was at a crossroads in her life and this new place, one filled with magnificent beauty, horrific poverty, racial tension, anti-Semitism, ethnic diversity, bland Midwestern food, and a thriving music scene, pushed Frida in unexpected directions. Shifts in her style of painting began to appear, cracks in her marriage widened, and tragedy struck, twice while she was living in Detroit.

Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist (St. Martin's Press, 2020) is the first in-depth biography of these formative years spent in Gringolandia, a place Frida couldn’t always understand. But it’s precisely her feelings of being a stranger in a strange land that fueled her creative passions and an even stronger sense of Mexican identity. With vivid detail, Frida in America recreates the pivotal journey that made Senora Rivera the world famous Frida Kahlo.

Jonathan Najarian is Lecturer of Rhetoric in the College of General Studies at Boston University. He is the editor of Comics and Modernism: History, Form, Culture, a collection of essays exploring the connections between avant-garde art and comics. He is also at work on a biography of the visual artist Lynd Ward, titled The Many Lives of Lynd Ward. He can be reached at [email protected].

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It's been 60 years since French thinker Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space made its English-language debut. It’s a hard-to-define book — part architecture, philosophy, psychoanalysis, memoir. And it continues to feed our ongoing need for purposeful solitude and wide-open fields for our imagination.*This episode originally aired on March 7, 2022.