Following his detention by Chinese authorities, outspoken artist/activist Ai Weiwei transformed the former island penitentiary of Alcatraz into an artistic platform. The exhibition engaged 900,000 visitors about the plight of prisoners of conscience around the world.
Yours Truly, a piece in the exhibit, invited visitors to compose messages of hope on postcards to prisoners incarcerated or exiled due to their beliefs, affiliations, and nonviolent expressions of dissent. The film follows these postcards around the globe as director Cheryl Haines meets with former prisoners of conscience and their families to discuss their impossible choices and the comfort they found in messages sent by people they would never meet. The film explores Ai Weiwei’s inspiration for the project. Interviews with the artist, his mother, and lifelong friends uncover the touching story of a childhood spent in exile. Ultimately, the film is a call to action, extending the reach of Ai Weiwei’s art by asking viewers to take to heart the issue of global human rights. In Mandarin and English with English subtitles.
More than 50,000 postcards were written by visitors and sent to prisoners of conscience, displaying the national flower or bird of their country.
Michael Kaufman is the co-founder of the WHITE RIBBON CAMPAIGN, the largest international effort of men working to end violence against women. He has worked across North America and in 50 countries with the United Nations, governments, NGOs and businesses, as an adviser and speaker. He is a senior fellow with Promundo, based in Washington, D. C. He is the author, or editor, of 8 books, including CRACKING THE ARMOUR: POWER, PAIN AND THE LIVES OF MEN, and BEYOND PATRIARCHY: ESSAYS BY MEN ON PLEASURE, POWER, AND CHANGE. His latest book is THE TIME HAS COME: WHY MEN MUST JOIN THE GENDER EQUALITY REVOLUTION, published by Counterpoint Press.
In addition we hear from Carey Gillam, author of WHITE WASH: THE STORY OF A WEED KILLER, CANCER, AND THE CORRUPTION OF SCIENCE, to report on the unanimous SF Federal Court jury verdict just yesterday afternoon, on March 19, 2019, determining that Monsanto’s glyphosate based weed-killer, Round-up, was a “substantial factor” in former Gualalla resident Edwin Hardeman’s developing Non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
David Treuer is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. The author of four previous novels, most recently Prudence, and two books of nonfiction, he has also written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Slate, and The Washington Post, among others. He has a Ph.D. in anthropology and teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.
David Treuer’s latest book, THE HEARTBEAT OF WOUNDED KNEE: NATIVE AMERICA FROM 1890 TO THE PRESENT, is published by Riverhead Books.
Here is an edited extract from The Heartbeat at Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, referenced in this interview, which was published in The Guardian.
Julian Brave NoiseCat is an enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen in British Columbia. He is a graduate of Columbia University, and received a Clarendon Scholarship to study global and imperial history at the University of Oxford. He was formerly the native issues fellow at The Huffington Post. He writes for The Guardian, The Nation, The Paris Review, CBC, Vice, Pacific Standard, Dissent, Jacobin, Fusion, Indian Country Today, Salon, High Country News, Canadian Geographic, Frontier Magazine, World Policy Journal as well as other publications.
Julian Brave NoiseCat, a contributing editor of the newly unveiled Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada, points on a giant map at a launch event in Toronto, Wednesday August 29, 2018. The Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada includes a four volume print atlas, an online atlas, an app, and a giant floor map. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Mark Blinch)
We first had Dahr Jamail on Forthright Radio in March, 2005 with Mark Manning, to discuss what was going on with the U.S.’s Second Siege of Fallujah, Iraq. He courageously went there un-embedded and defied the military information blockade to report what had actually happened there. Since then he has been our guest five times over the years.
For the past few years, he has been focusing on Climate Disruption in various journals, including truthout.org, where he had been publishing monthly Climate Dispatches.
And now his book, THE END OF ICE: BEARING WITNESS AND FINDING MEANING IN THE PATH OF CLIMATE DISRUPTION has been published by The New Press. He goes to many places around the world and speaks with indigenous people and scientists on the front lines of what can only be described as an accelerating global disaster of human caused climate disruption, geological change and mass extinction. Unlike most other narratives of climate disruption, not only does he document the science, but he also addresses the emotional, psychological, philosophical and ethical dimensions.
I was struck by a simple observation he makes between the outlook of dominant settler colonialist cultures, which speak of rights, and of most indigenous cultures, which emphasize obligations. That lead to what one of your interviewees called “the con job of hope and hopelessness,” and what you say is “the necessity of unblocking grief.”
“It is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and the crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.” from A Democracy in Exile Fights Against Fascism
In this edition of Forthright Radio, we welcome back Professor Henry Giroux, who holds the McMaster University’s Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department, and who is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. He is a prolific author and journalist. His books -more than 65 – include AMERICA AT WAR WITH ITSELF; DISPOSABLE FUTURES: VIOLENCE IN THE AGE OF SPECTACLE; HEARTS OF DARKNESS: TORTURING CHILDREN IN THE WAR ON TERROR; ZOMBIE POLITICS AND CULTURE IN THE AGE OF CASINO CAPITALISM, and THE VIOLENCE OF ORGANIZED FORGETTING.
Articles by Professor Giroux cited in this interview include:
In her latest book, FEMINISM’S FORGOTTEN FIGHT: THE UNFINISHED STRUGGLE FOR WORK AND FAMILY, Fordham University Associate Professor of History, Kirsten Swinth, corrects many myths and misconceptions about Second Wave Feminism, demonstrating that it isn’t feminism that has betrayed women, but the society that failed to make the far-reaching changes for which feminists fought in the period 1963 to 1978.
Given the unauthorized release of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center on May 2, 2022, we revisited this interview from October, 2018. Rebecca Traister joined us again to update us on the evolving situation, which can be heard at the end of the archived interview.
Rebecca Traister is writer at large for New York magazine, whose latest book is GOOD AND MAD: THE REVOLUTIONARY POWER OF WOMEN’S ANGER, published by Simon & Schuster. . Her earlier books include ALL THE SINGLE LADIES, and the award winning BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY. Her work has been published in The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the New York Observer among other publications.
Dean Baker co-founded The Center for Economic and Policy Research in 1999. His areas of expertise include housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, Social Security, Medicare and European labor markets. Before that, he worked as a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, and was an assistant professor at Bucknell University. He has also worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, and the OECD’s Trade Union Advisory Council. He is frequently cited in economics reporting in major media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, and NPR. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian Unlimited (UK), the Huffington Post, TruthOut, and his blog, Beat the Press, features commentary on economic reporting.
He is the author of several books, includingRigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer; Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People; The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive; and The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer. He was last our guest on Nov. 15, 2017.
Publications mentioned in this edition of Forthright Radio include:
Our guest on this edition of Forthright Radio is award winning investigative journalist, Mary Beth Pfeiffer. Her latest book is LYME: THE FIRST EPIDEMIC OF CLIMATE CHANGE (Island Press, 2018). Over the years, we have interviewed numerous guests on different aspects of Lyme Disease. None of them has gone into such depth, nor been so global in scope, nor addressed so critically and effectively the issues of, not only Lyme Disease, but other tick-borne diseases, of which there are an ever expanding number recognized – but as importantly, investigating the politics and economics of the science and medical guidelines, which have defied logic, common sense, medical ethics or compassion. As you will hear, there are elements of a darker age – some say, An Inquisition, in the current state of governmental, university and medical research, funding and protocols.
Mary Beth Pfeiffer has been an award-winning investigative journalist for three decades, who has specialized in social justice, environmental and health issues. In addition to her latest book, LYME: THE FIRST EPIDEMIC OF CLIMATE CHANGE, she is also author of Crazy in America: The Hidden Tragedy of Our Criminalized Mentally Ill, which is a critically acclaimed look at treatment of the mentally ill in prisons and jails in the United States.
Borrelia burgdorferii’s corkscrew shape allows it to penetrate into heart muscle and to cross the blood-brain barrier, as well as other organs. Lyme carditis can be deadly, as are deaths by suicide of some Lyme sufferers. And like that other “Great Imitator” spirochete, Syphilis, it can cross the placenta to infect the fetus, causing miscarriage and congenital health problems.
Ixodes scapularis, the host of the Lyme spirochete, thrives in modern human altered environments and the warming, more humid weather patterns of climate change.
Tick-borne diseases are on the rise in many parts of the world.
Long lived for an arachnid, ticks need only feed once during each of their life cycles, which may span 3 years. The Lyme spirochete actually increases the fertility, viability and longevity of the ticks. At least one tick species can reproduce without fertilization from males.
Although the “bulls eye” rash, erythema migrans, is the only definitive symptom considered diagnostic for Lyme Disease, according to a CDC study of 150,000 cases, it appeared in only 69.2% of patients. What about the other 30%?
It is published by Harvard University Press.
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