Writer's Voice

We talk with Ray Nayler about Palaces of the Crow, a WWII novel exploring survival, animal intelligence, memory, and the power of mutual care.

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

This week Writer’s Voice talks with Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan about Against Tech Oligarchy. They helped build the tech worker movement, and they’re candid about both its victories and the limits of its organizing strategies. We talk about Google’s Project Maven, the Kickstarter union drive, and why winning union recognition doesn’t automatically give workers the leverage they need.

“The only way to hold our bosses and our companies and institutions accountable is by having pressure from below.” — Clarissa Redwine

Then I revisit my conversation with Noam Scheiber about Hollywood writers, AI and the growing solidarity among college-educated workers. He also recommends Redwine and Tan’s book.

“Their book is called Against Tech Oligarchy, Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry. And I learned a lot from reading a galley of that book and I’ve learned a lot from the work over the years.” — Noam Scheiber

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Noam Scheiber on the Mutiny of the New Working Class, Maria Adelmann on Adjunct Labor

Read The Trancript

Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan talk about Against Tech Oligarchy and the movement they helped organize.

Drawing on their experiences at Kickstarter and Microsoft, they explain how tech workers’ belief in their employers’ missions gave way to conflict over the companies’ actions.

We discuss Google’s Project Maven, public pressure campaigns, retaliation, and the turn toward legally recognized unions.

Redwine and Tan also examine the limits of strategies they once championed. When software keeps generating revenue without workers at their desks, a strike requires a different understanding of leverage.

Our conversation asks how workers can test their power, defend their wins, and connect workplace organizing to larger questions about AI and corporate control.

Key topics:

In this archived excerpt, I talk with Noam Scheiber about Mutiny and the insecurity facing college-educated workers. We begin with Hollywood writers, whose once-stable careers became more precarious as streaming shortened employment and disrupted established paths into the profession.

Scheiber explains how that insecurity, combined with fears of AI replacement, helped sustain the writers’ strike. We then explore growing worker consciousness in the tech industry and the possibility of solidarity between workers with and without college degrees.

He closes by recommending Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan’s Against Tech Oligarchy, connecting this discussion of economic insecurity to the first segment’s examination of organizing and worker power.

Listen to the full interview

We talk with Tom Lin about Babylon, South Dakota, then revisit Omar El Akkad on Gaza, complicity, and One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

This week, two works of fiction look at the relationships that shape us, and the systems of power we often carry within ourselves.

First, Malavika Kannan talks about Unprecedented Times, her coming-of-age novel about Rishi, a queer Indian American student whose arrival at Stanford coincides with a crisis of faith in activism, institutions and the American promise itself.

As 2020 transforms the world around her, Rishi wrestles with family expectations, friendship, sex, consent, political disillusionment and her desire to become a writer. Kannan talks about Gen Z’s growing refusal to follow rules that no longer seem to deliver what they promise.

“One of the main themes that I was trying to explore in this book and that I think about a lot as a person is the question of agency.” — Malavika Kannan

Then Lauren Acampora talks about The Animal Room, her connected collection of stories about the many ways human beings love, use, protect, fear and exploit animals.

But these stories are also mirrors. They ask us to look at ourselves, and at what care, empathy and responsibility mean in our relationships with other people.

“The dominance isn’t working out so well.” — Lauren Acampora

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Short Stories by George Saunders & Jennifer Haigh, Vauhini Vara, THIS IS SALVAGED

Tags: Malavika Kannan, Unprecedented Times, Lauren Acampora, The Animal Room, Writer’s Voice, Gen Z fiction, queer fiction, Indian American fiction, coming of age novel, human animal relationships, Francesca Rheannon

Read The Transcript

Malavika Kannan talks about Unprecedented Times, her funny, searching novel about Gen Z, climate anxiety, queer identity and finding your own way.

Key Topics

Lauren Acampora talks about The Animal Room, interconnected stories exploring what our relationships with animals reveal about care, power, privilege and empathy.

Key Topics

Journalist Sonali Kolhatkar discusses Breaking ICE, community resistance to immigration enforcement, mutual aid, labor rights, abolition and the defense of democracy.

James Baldwin made love central to his art and his vision of America. Keith Haring believed in “art for everybody.”

James Crawford explores extraction, climate change and planetary repair in The Vanishing Earth. Plus, for the 25th anniversary of 9/11, an archival conversation with Max Page about The City’s End and our long fascination with imagining New York destroyed.

Beth Pinsker and L. Annette Binder explore caring for aging parents, from the financial realities of elder care to Alzheimer’s, memory, love and loss.

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

America’s road to fascism began with a big lie about who counts as fully human. That’s what historian Joseph Kelly reveals in his book, The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818–1915. Kelly traces a long struggle between two visions of the country. One rests on the Declaration’s promise of equality. The other claims that people aren’t equal, that white people are superior to Black people and therefore have the right to dominate them.

We follow that ideology from the Missouri crisis through pseudoscientific racism, Indian removal, slavery and the violent overthrow of Reconstruction. Kelly explains how the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts, Jim Crow and The Birth of a Nation used fear, myth and racialized sexual panic to defend white rule.

We also look at a road not taken, multiracial democracy and class-based political cooperation. Those possibilities were repeatedly attacked by elites who weaponized fears of replacement and Black political power.

Kelly connects domestic white supremacy to American empire in Cuba and the Philippines. He argues that fascism is a corruption of democracy, built when dissent is silenced, violence is celebrated and allegiance to the tribe and its leader replaces truth. That history, he says, can help us understand the battle over democracy today.

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Aran Shetterly on The Greensboro Massacre, Paul Kix on the fight to end Jim Crow

Tags: Joseph Kelly, The Biggest Lie, American fascism, white supremacy, racism, slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, replacement theory, multiracial democracy

Read The Transcript

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

A machine that never judges us may also teach us to forget how human relationships work.

Writer’s Voice talks with Victoria Hetherington about The Friend Machine, her investigation into people who seek friendship, therapy and love from AI. We explore loneliness, simulated care, privacy, emotional dependence and the extraordinary power of the corporations building these systems.

“That’s probably my primary concern, that moral de-skilling might occur.” — Victoria Hetherington

Then, we revisit our 2025 conversation with Silvia Park about her sci-fi novel Luminous. Set in a reunified future Korea, the novel follows a family whose estranged siblings include two humans and a robot.

“What I really question is, if robots exist in this world, would they serve as an outlet or would they amplify our dark urges?” — Silvia Park

Together, these books grapple with salient questions arising from AI and monopoly corporate power. Can programmed affection become love? And what does how we treat A.I. entities say about ourselves?

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Bruce Holsinger on AI’s Moral Dilemmas, Ray Nayler on AI and Autocracy

Tags: Victoria Hetherington, The Friend Machine, Silvia Park, Luminous, AI companions, artificial intelligence, AI friendship, AI therapy, sentient robots, AI ethics, AI privacy, Writer’s Voice

Read The Transcript

What happens when an AI companion becomes your closest friend, your therapist, or even your romantic partner?

Victoria Hetherington’s The Friend Machine: On the Trail of AI Companionship investigates why people form powerful emotional bonds with chatbots.

Hetherington finds that the real story isn’t whether AI is conscious. It’s why so many of us are ready to treat it as if it were.

In our conversation, We talk about loneliness, simulated care, AI therapy, privacy, and the risks of replacing difficult human relationships with frictionless digital ones. We also ask what guardrails are needed when a handful of enormously powerful companies control technologies that can learn our most intimate secrets.

Victoria Hetherington is a journalist, broadcaster, and author whose work explores technology, intimacy, and what it means to be human in an AI-driven world.

Set in a reunified Korea, Luminous follows a family with a unique dynamic: two human siblings and their robot brother Yo-Yo.

The novel explores complex relationships between humans and robots, examining questions of love, memory, and what constitutes consciousness.