This Is Hell!

Elyas Nawandish is on to talk about his article at The Intercept, “I Watched the Afghan Government Collapse Under the Weight of Its Own Greed: Our leaders failed to give Afghan soldiers the food, tools, and respect they needed to defeat a brutal insurgency.” Elyas is an Afghanistan Observatory Scholar at New America. Since 2014, he has worked with the Kabul-based Etilaat Roz daily newspaper, where he is currently the online chief editor, supervising a team of 20 journalists. Previously, he served as news manager, investigative reporter, and text editor for Etilaat Roz. He has produced around 160 reports and editorials, including 12 major investigations on politics, security, human rights, rule of law, corruption, and abuse of state resources by former Afghan government officials.

We speak with Fatema Ahmad, co-author, along with Azadeh Shahshahani, of a new article at The Progressive, “The Surveillance State Can’t Solve White Supremacy: After the January 6 attack, federal surveillance programs expanded to counter white supremacist violence have made Black and brown communities their main target.” Fatema is executive director of the Muslim Justice League.

Sophie Lewis returns to This Is Hell on Tuesday, October 4th to speak with host Chuck Mertz about her new book, Abolish the Family, out on Verso, October 2022.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/4075-abolish-the-family

Sophie Lewis is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019), hailed by Donna Haraway as “the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for.” Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso, 2022) is her second book. As a member of the faculty of Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, Sophie teaches courses on feminist, trans and queer politics and philosophy, including family abolitionism, Shulamith Firestone, and Kathi Weeks. With the Out of the Woods writing collective, Lewis contributed to the collection Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis (Common Notions, 2020). With Blind Field Journal, she has helped foster communities of Marxist-feminist cultural criticism. Previously, Dr. Lewis studied English Literature (BA) and Nature, Society and Environmental Policy (MSc) at Oxford University; Politics (MA) at the New School for Social Research; and Geography (PhD) at Manchester University. Her doctoral dissertation, “Cyborg Labor: Exploring Surrogacy as Gestational Work,” sought to reframe the political economy of contract pregnancy for the purposes of an antiwork polymaternalist utopianism. Sophie’s essays and commentaries appear in venues such as n+1, Boston Review, The Nation, The Baffler, Mal, e-flux, the New York Times and London Review of Books; her papers appear in, e.g., Signs, Paragraph, and Feminist Theory. A Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research on Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies, Sophie is nevertheless a freelance writer dependent on public speaking and Patreon (patreon.com/reproutopia). Her lectures are archived at lasophielle.org.

It's Chuck's Birthday! Jubilations all around!

We welcome writer, researcher, and oral historian Lyndsie Bourgon to talk about her book "Tree Thieves - Crime and Survival in North America's Woods." We also present your Hangover Cure for this Monday, and have a new Question from Hell! for the week. Also producer Sebastian talks immigration history in another installment of The Past Inside the Present.

Journalist Kari Lydersen is an author and assistant professor of journalism at Northwestern University. She's on to discuss her article at The New Republic, "Can Liberal Evanston, Illinois, Atone for Its Racist Past?"

Hadas Thier returns to This is Hell! to discuss her In These Times Article "A Left Answer to Inflation." Producer Alex returns for one show. We have new answers to this week's Question from Hell!, and This Week in Rotten History.

Chuck talks to cultural anthropologist Andrea Vetter and economic historian Matthias Schmelzer about their new book "The Future is Degrowth - A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism. https://www.versobooks.com/books/3989-the-future-is-degrowth We also have your hangover cure for this Monday, and this week's new Question from Hell!

Investigative journalist Boyce Upholt wrote The New Republic article, "Will the Next Pandemic Start With Chickens?: This spring, a virulent strain of bird flu ripped through U.S. farms. The public hardly noticed. That we could ignore the disease shows just how little we’ve learned about the origin of new viruses."

Host Chuck Mertz speaks with with Geographer Matthew Huber to discuss how individualized focus on the purification of consumer choices divides the working class and depletes energy for collective organizing against the the Capitalist culprits profiting off the extraction of environmental resources. Matthew T. Huber is Professor of Geography in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet published May 2022 on Verso. https://www.versobooks.com/books/3973-climate-change-as-class-war

Chuck also discusses the 26th Anniversary Listener Appreciation Party, reads this week in Rotten History, and new responses to the Question from Hell.

Legal scholar Daniel Medwed talks about his book "Barred: Why the Innocent Can't Get Out of Prison." We present your Hangover Cure, talk about the weekend's Listener Appreciation Party, and present this week's Question from Hell!.