When Hurricane Katrina roared up the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the Coast in August, 2005, the devastation was just beginning. The government was murderously unprepared—when the levees failed, 80% of New Orleans was underwater, 1500 people lost their lives, thousand more were injured, and property losses were estimated at $125 billion. The capitalist media consistently smacked its lips over suffering and offered an upside down world where victims became criminals, and mutual aid was portrayed as theft.  The afterlife—the trauma, waste. and wreckage—of the catastrophe is ongoing and includes displacement, corporate theft, privatization of public goods, educide, and cultural sacking.   We’re joined on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina by Kristin Buras, an anti-racist activist, teacher, and researcher who is the director of the New Orleans–based Urban South Grass-roots Research Collective, a coalition with African American community groups that combines research and grass-roots organizing for racial equity. She is the author, most recently, of What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans High School.

The speed at which a fascist government can disrupt, dismantle, and destroy on its way to building a full-blown fascist society is breathtaking. Resistance is scattered, and anyone looking to the Democratic Party to offer guidance or leadership should remember that we came to this point on bipartisan rails, that is, the ruling class and the political establishment has agreed for decades on every major issue: unqualified support for Israel’s murderous and illegal actions; the militarization of domestic police forces and policing as the ready-answer to every social problems; mass incarceration as a defining feature of society; the frantic privatization of public goods and services. And underlying it all, the tenacious and deadly legacy of the culture and structures of white supremacy. We’re joined in conversation with the activist, organizer, and writer Emile Suotonye DeWeaver, author most recently of Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine: Reform, White Supremacy, and an Abolitionist Future.

Just as the US Department of Defense should change its name back to the more accurate and honest War Department—its true function and its title from 1789 until 1947 when it morphed into the National Military Establishment (NME), and then, with mad-help from a PR offensive in 1949, the DoD—state and city organizations with names such as “child welfare” and “family services” should stop air-brushing their true functions—the Departments of Family Policing. We’re joined in conversation today with Erin Miles Cloud, the mother of two dazzling kids, a civil rights attorney, and co-editor of a new book from  Haymarket called  How to End Family Policing: From outrage to action. 

The severe challenges and unforeseen possibilities facing humanity today cry out for clarity. We need it all: poetry and politics, art and the people’s army, agitation and organization, theory and practice, deep study and sustained action, joy and justice, both the moments of quiet contemplation and the times of swift, sharp thrusts, dreams as well as deeds. We’re delighted to be joined from Santiago, Chile by Vijay Prashad, a preeminent Marxist theorist and activist intellectual. His work continues the initiative of the Tricontinental Conference in Cuba which brought together revolutionary movements from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Today Vijay is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, and an advisory board member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. Vijay is refreshingly dialectical in his thinking and writing—witness a dangerous mind in ongoing argument with itself.

In 1922 a commission made up of prominent citizens—six Black men and six white men appointed by the governor of Illinois—issued a report about the 1919 Race Riot entitled The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot. Eve Ewing’s dazzling poetry collection, 1919, excerpts small bits from the report as epigraphs for each poem, comments like “…the presence of Negroes in large  numbers in our great cities is not a menace in itself,” and “the sentiment was expressed that Negro invasion of the district was the worst calamity that had struck the city since the Great Fire.” Today the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project (CRR19) aims to ignite conversations about white supremacy in Chicago and around the country and the world. Formally launched on the 100th anniversary of the riot, CRR19 remembers the worst incident of racial violence in the city’s history, and the events that swept the city and set the framework for racial segregation to this very day. We’re joined by Franklin Cosey Gay and Peter Cole, co-directors of CRR19 on the eve of their annual commemoration and slow-rolling south-side bike tour. 

If you were ever an enthusiastic reader of “Calvin and Hobbes,” “Peanuts,” “Blondie,” “Doonesbury,” or the “Boondocks,” you have a treat coming your way: “Mafalda,” a six-year-old comic book character created by the artist Quino in Argentina, is now available in English in a dazzling translation by Frank Wynne. Mafalda is a precocious kid—Frank describes her as “six going on sixty”—who observes the world around her with fresh eyes, and then asks the kind of queer questions that the grown-ups in her life can’t or won’t answer. Mafalda’s concerns focus on humanity and world peace, and her innocence shines a bright light on the conflict between what adults claim to value, and how they actually live. Think of her as a socialist “Nancy.”  We’re joined from London by Frank Wynne, a former Chair of the Judging Panel of the International Booker Prize and the award-winning author, translator, and editor of two major anthologies, Found in Translation: 100 of the finest stories every translated, and QUEER: LGBTQ Writing from Ancient Times to Yesterday.

Big time college sports have distorted the intellectual mission of colleges and universities for decades—and we’re in a particularly volatile period as athletes organize themselves into unions and demand a share of the riches that they’ve created with their labor, as well as the fashioning of a system that makes intercollegiate athletics increasingly indistinguishable from professional sports. The “Transfer Portal,” the “Name/Image/Likeness” deals that athletes sign with third parties, and now direct payments to athletes on top of their scholarships (which typically cover tuition, housing, and health care) create a Brave New World for universities, perhaps a kind of crossing-the-Rubicon moment. We’re joined by Rus Bradburd, a writer who spent 14 seasons coaching college basketball, followed by16 years as a university professor, in conversation about his subversive and hilarious novel, Big Time, as well as the state of the field.

The mass incarceration system has been dubbed “the new Jim Crow”—there are now more Black men in prison or on probation or parole than there were living in bondage as chattel slaves in 1850. There are significantly more people caught up in the system of incarceration and supervision in America today—over six million—than inhabited Stalin’s gulag at its height. And while the United States constitutes less than 5 percent of the world’s people, it holds over 25 percent of the world’s combined prison population. There’s more, of course, but you get the idea—the tentacles of the criminal legal system touch us all, coming down with especially lethal force against poor and marginalized people who are increasingly deemed disposable in the eyes of the powerful. We’re joined in conversation with Patrick Hoffman, a writer and private investigator based in Brooklyn whose latest novel, Friends Helping Friends, is a dazzling triller and a portrait of two young men living on the borderland of society. Their unwanted contact with a corrupt legal system drags them into a frightening brush with a white nationalist group that tests the redemptive power of friendship.

Thomas Jefferson was the masterly author of the ringing and rousing Declaration of Independence as well as a human trafficker and serial rapist. The second president  embodies James Baldwin’s observation that “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” The US is a settler-colonial colossus whose founders committed one of the most massive genocides in the history of the world—violence in the service of wealth accumulation has been a national calling card from the start. It’s also the birthplace of Harriett Tubman, John Brown, Geronimo, Malcolm X, Grace Lee Boggs, and generations of freedom-fighters. The wealth and the power of the US derives from armed robbery, serial murder, stolen land, and forced labor—that’s legacy. And we cannot be free without facing the complexity and the hard truth. We’re joined in conversation with Jesse Hagopian, one of the most brilliant contemporary voices in education, and author, most recently, of Teach Truth : The Struggle for Antiracist Education, an essential text for these troubled times.

The Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) led by Karen Lewis, a charismatic high school chemistry teacher, was elected to lead the Chicago Teachers Union in 2010.  Lewis was a brilliant, transformational labor leader, and CORE developed a forceful form of social justice union organizing they called “organizing for the common good.” They foregrounded the best interests of the child, and they insisted on raising issues beyond wages and benefits, standing up for the arts, libraries, and nurses in every school as well as for the rights of families and the broader community. Among CORE’s early initiatives were starting a research department, and moving staff away from exclusively servicing the contract toward ongoing organizing of parents, community members, and teachers together. We’re joined by Elizabeth Todd-Breland, an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of both the award winning A Political Education: Black Politics and EducationReform in Chicago Since the 1960s and the recently released memoir, I Didn’t Come Here to Lie,  written with the late Karen Lewis and published by Haymarket Press.