Podcasts about mellon foundation

What's the episode about? In this episode, hear Ruth E. Toulson on the necropolitics of the ordinary, dying and death in Singapore, anthropology, burials, funeral directors and morticiansWho is Ruth?At Johns Hopkins, Ruth E. Toulson is a lecturer for the Master of Arts in Museum Studies program. Toulson is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the dead body, and death's material culture in Southeast and East Asia. Trained at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Toulson brings to Johns Hopkins a multi-sited collaborative international research agenda that combines long-term ethnographic fieldwork and in-depthwork in museum collections. Toulson brings significant teaching and advising experience at the graduate level in anthropology, material culture studies, and critical museum studies.As a whole, Toulson's scholarship explores the intersection ofdeath and the state, particularly in moments of sociopolitical transition.Toulson probes this intersection by focusing particularly on the dead body as a form of highly politicized material culture. Supported through numerous external grants, including those from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hong Kong Research Council, thisresearch program has resulted in published work, including a book and numerous book chapters and peer-reviewed articles, including in Journal of Material Culture.Toulson recently delivered the keynote address at University ofMelbourne, Redesigning Deathcare Conference, and has given invited lectures at the Gatty Lecture Series (Cornell), The Centre for the Study of Death and Society (University of Bath), The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies (Harvard), and at the Council for Southeast Asia (Yale), among otherinvitations. Toulson is associate editor of the journal Anthropology and Humanism.How do I cite the episode in my research and reading lists?To cite this episode, you can use the following citation: Toulson, R. (2026) Interview on The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R. Published 1 May 2026. Available at: www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.32143756 Check out more episodes or find out more about the hosts! Gota question? Get in touch.

Elizabeth Alexander, president of The Mellon Foundation, poet, educator, memoirist and scholar and the author of The Trayvon Generation (Grand Central Publishing, 2022), talks about the latest cohort of the Mellon Foundation's (in partnership with the Jazz Foundation of America) jazz legacies fellows, and the importance of the genre. Also in this segment, saxophonist Gary Bartz reflects on his long career in jazz. Photo: An alto saxophone. (Credit: Rama via Wikimedia Commons CC 2.0)

The hallmarks of high conflict include a narrowing middle ground, the growing sense of a binary "us vs. them" narrative—and absolute clarity that "we" are the good guys in the story, and "they" are the black hats. Some of this might feel a little new to us, but this accelerating vicious cycle of conflict is how most of human history has unfolded. Before there was a Magna Carta and Constitution, life was a Manichaean cosmic struggle between good and evil and (retroactive spoiler alert) it wasn't pretty. After all, if you're convinced you're fighting on the side of "good," what wouldn't you do to defeat "evil?" This will be a wide-ranging discussion encompassing all of human history and a full study of human nature. Please reserve 3 full days. (Naw, God Squad stars that they are, they'll do it in an hour.) Check out the panel and more info about this program here. Catch up on past God Squad programs here. __________   Village SquareCast is funded in part by the Federation of State Humanities Councils with support from the Mellon Foundation and Florida Humanities. 

Over the last several years, I have been thinking about food waste and food loss a lot. It's been a topic that we've seen in many spaces in the US and around the world. And it's interesting to compare how the US handles food waste with other countries. To that end, we will learn more about how Belgium addresses food waste in a conversation with an anthropologist and journalist, Dr. Kelly Alexander from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book, Truffles and Trash: Recirculating Food in a Social Welfare State, explores community driven solutions and policy around food waste. And Belgium's capital city of Brussells. Interview Transcript Let's start with your research in Brussels at a high end truffle restaurant... but you ended up in food banks and social restaurants and community kitchens. Tell us a little bit about the evolution. How did this project evolve to finding yourself in these new places? Yeah, it's a, a strange trajectory. I did not start out to be a food waste researcher. But how it started and how it's going, you know, that meme from 2018? This is like what I love to talk about when I talk to my food study students, because I started out, as a researcher, very interested in the development of haut cuisine. I had worked in a lot of restaurants. I had worked as a journalist for several food magazines. And the question that really animated me was how a truffle, this little spore on a fungus, has become one of the world's most expensive ingredients. And so I was doing ethnographic research in the kitchen of a Michelin starred truffle restaurant. And there is not that many of those, and one of them happens to be in Brussels, Belgium. And I'm in the kitchen there and I'm working on the line. And I usually have to specify to my students like it wasn't a stunt. Like you can't write to a Michelin star restaurant and say, 'Hey, can I come on in and work in your kitchen?' I had a lot of credentials as a journalist and as a chef first. What I did have going for me is that I was in a funded doctoral dissertation program, actually the anthropology program at Duke. So, I had funding to go and do that research in this kitchen. And there's probably no restaurant in the world, no matter how high end, that is not willing to accept some free labor. So, I'm working in that kitchen. I'm working with fantastic chefs. And what happens when you work at a super high-end restaurant is that is aesthetics are valued above all else. The food has to be really, really beautiful. And this restaurant charges extraordinarily. It's called La Truffe Noire. It's still in Brussels now. It's a truffle restaurant. The black truffle. Super high prices for very, very refined food. And in order to do that, a large part of my job was brushing priceless truffles, throwing away an unbelievable amount of very beautiful produce that would otherwise have been exceptionally valued in other contexts. And I come from a background - my grandmother was a Russian Jewish woman. She grew up in Brooklyn. She moved to Atlanta, Georgia after World War II. She taught me to cook, and she never threw anything away. And when I say that to people, I think they're like, oh yeah, I have a grandmother like that. But she really never threw anything away, like can of grease under the sink. The whole thing. Every little butt of a vegetable was saved for stock for later. And I was throwing away so much good food working in La Truffe Noire just making beautiful garnishes and vegetable carvings and things like that, that I started following the food waste around the city. I was wondering where all of this went. And I actually asked the chef in the restaurant, you know, we throw away so much food, would it be possible to give some of it to people who could really use it? And his response really interested me and changed the whole course of my research because he said, I am really willing to do that. However, I pay chefs to cook food and not to give it away. So, if somebody was willing to come here and pick it up, I'd happily give it to him. But I'm not going to pay people to go and do that. And I thought, well, I wonder what else is going on in this city in terms of this. Like where does all this food go? And I discovered I was doing this research at a fortuitous moment in the EU when the EU had just made this compulsory policy aimed at supermarkets. So, all large scale supermarkets across the EU were suddenly required to donate all edible but unsellable food. And the EU didn't give a lot of direction about how they could do that, and also didn't give the supermarkets any money. So, what happened as a result of that? Well, there were lots of local grassroots efforts communicating directly with supermarkets who were like, 'Hey, we're over here. We'll come pick up the food that you don't want to sell that's still good to eat. And we'll use it in our food banks and in our zero food waste popup restaurants.' And all the supermarkets had to do was get the food waste off their books. So, while I was there working in this truffle restaurant, all this other food waste activity was going on. And I discovered that's really what I wanted to be doing. I loved working as a chef, but I wanted to see what the possibilities were for recuperating food around the city. So, I changed. I changed everything I was doing pretty quickly. Oh, this is really fascinating. Thank you for sharing that. I know that the field of anthropology and other fields, you can start off on one project and discover that there's this whole new world that you didn't even realize until you started down the path. This is fascinating and I'm sure your advisor was thrilled to know that you wanted to change topic midstream. But it worked out. It worked out beautifully, it seems. It is true. I couldn't look away from the food waste to the point where I was taking pictures of the garbage can in the restaurant every day. And this big industrial garbage can filled with like priceless wild mushrooms. And a big part of my job is the restaurant made this dish. This is what changed my life. There's like a series of food journalists who talk about the dish that changed my life and what they're talking about is when you eat something super delicious and you have some kind of awakening, this is like the opposite of what happened to me. I am making this dish called Salad Stephanie. It's like a 40-euro salad that has a lobster tail in it and all these beautiful wild mushrooms, and it has eight spinach leaves. So, a big part of my job when I worked at La Truffe Noire was to hold up individual spinach leaves up to the light, and if they had any blemish or like a broken vein in them to throw it away. So, this is beautiful, this is like the best spinach that you could get. The best produce in all of Europe was coming to this restaurant and I was throwing it away. And I started taking photographs just to document all the food I was throwing away. And I couldn't look away. And actually my advisor, Dr. Anne Allison, in cultural anthropology at Duke, was really excited because I had been doing a project on aesthetics and now I was proposing a total change to do this much more political project about where food waste goes. So, she was like, yes, let us follow the food waste. This is so much more interesting. So that was kind of a nice nod that I was thinking in the right anthropological direction about food and value. Thank you. This is such an important uncovering that, you know, research isn't static. It's not linear. It takes deviations and it's in those deviations that you find the real truths. The real exciting things. Let's continue the conversation because I think there's so much more to uncover. In your book, Truffles and Trash, you describe a particular day of field work at a Brussels food pantry. It was a really powerful moment. And I will say, having worked at food pantries in different parts of the US, I recognize this story in a serious way. You mentioned that this moment turned into a tense moment around fish and pork. Can you describe this to our listeners and why did this experience stick with you? What did it teach you about the hidden social politics of food waste and redistribution? Yeah. I often frame, you know, I did this work back and forth to Brussels for about six years and certain moments just absolutely have stayed with me and haunted me in a lot of ways. And one of them was working at this food bank in a former hospital. So, there's a former hospital that had shut down. It was still like a hospital with rooms for sick people in a giant sick bay. And it had been turned into a kind of community residential center where people could rent rooms, they could use the kitchen to prepare their food. That had been the hospital's kitchen. And the bottom floor of it, which had been the whole emergency triage center, was turned into a thrice weekly food bank. So, I'm volunteering at this food bank and there's tons of food coming in from grocery stores. And this is Brussels in the summer. It's pretty hot outside. A lot of people go on vacation. There's a lot of expensive food coming in, including fish and pork, fresh fish and fresh pork. I am assigned to work on this station. The person who usually runs the station, who is my boss, is an older Vietnamese woman who's an immigrant herself to Brussels. And she is kind of giving me the ropes. And she has figured something out where she says, you know, we have to give equal things to equal people, right? And she's telling me this before anybody comes in the food bank. Yes, sure. We will give one to one to each person as the people are coming through the food bank. Brussels has a very high population of Moroccan immigrants, and this is due to historical factors. The Nation of Belgium invited Moroccan immigrants to help them build their subways in the '50s and '60s with the promise of citizenship, including they have an amazing educational system. It's a whole social welfare state, healthcare, everything. So, this is guaranteed to those Moroccan immigrants. What the Belgian government didn't do, and has been pretty clear on admitting, is create any social programming around those assimilation efforts. So, the generations of those people who came to build the subways are now a lot of them living on social assistance. That is who is coming through. A lot of Moroccan people who are Muslim, into this food bank. Muslim people typically have prohibitions against eating pork. So, we have fresh fish and fresh pork. There are women coming through, they're in hijabs, they're obviously presenting as Muslim and they are asking, could I have the fish please? And we were told to give the pork first and then the fish, because the fish is considered more valuable. And I am thinking, in my own head, oh, I'll just be an amazing social innovator here. Yes, of course. If you don't eat pork, please let me give you this fish. It is not occurring to me that other people coming through the line are considering this preferential treatment. So, I am giving fish to these Muslim women. One of them sees me in line and says, my friend is back there. Can you put aside a piece of fish for her? Yes, sure, no problem. I set it aside. A woman who is Flemish is coming through and she's speaking to me in Dutch and I'm handing her pork. Pork is super popular amongst Flemish diners. No problem. And she's pointing down and she had seen me put the fish away and said, can I have that fish? Well that fish is for someone else and she absolutely threw a fit. No, you can't do that. It's not fair. It's not just, you must give me a fish. Long story short, there's a whole tug of war between this package of fish. There's a security person at the food bank, which I had not considered why there would need to be a security person at the food bank who has to come in, break up this fight. It was, it was so humbling. I had not considered these factors. It's really on me. It's like you as a social scientist who's thinking it's not on me to innovate this food bank's pantry. I didn't follow directions. I thought I was doing a good thing. You know, the whole war over this fish. And when you see what it means to someone's culture to eat the foods that are appropriate to your culture, I would fight if someone was like, you can't have that matzo ball soup again. I'm going to take it away from you. There's no telling what I would do to get my hands on it. And I just felt in that moment, like I had done it all wrong. Like I had really misunderstood food waste distribution. But more than that, of course, I'm not the star of this story. If you are at the mercy of what is available and without choice... anthropologists spend a lot of time talking about the good life and what constitutes the good life and studying the good life. I would define the good life as being able to eat the food that you wish when you wish for it. If you don't have that and you are at the mercy of the state to decide what is appropriate for you, then you find yourself in these kinds of conflicts. And you see them, you said you could relate, you see them in food banks playing out all over the world. Yeah. First, Kelly, thank you for sharing that because I know that wasn't a fun story. I mean, I can only imagine the, the, the pain of you watching this scene unfold. I mean, that must have been difficult. Especially when the security guard is called in. Okay, that's tough. And realizing that there were differences in cultures that were clashing. All of that happening at the same time. And one of the things I pick up out of this story is that which is considered food that could be wasted, that could be redistributed, is not acceptable for all people. And like, how do we then make sense of that? Because you're in a culture where something is considered a good product...pork, but it's not considered a good product for other people. And so, you know, our food system, and I always say this about food banking in general, people complain about the foods that show up in food banks, in sort of a traditional sense. But it's just a reflection of the food system of that country, right? It just looks like what we have. And we may think that's not good, but it's, it's what you see in the grocery store often. And for all those reasons, I think there's such a richness to this story. So, thank you for sharing and also the humility it takes for telling that story too. I wanted to not be intrusive like any social scientist. I was there to share my time to do some participant observation research. Suddenly I had ignited this culture war amongst these two women, which is the least population I would want to affect. And you know, the security guard turned to me at the end of it, which is in the book and said, you get what you get. That is the policy. Yeah. If they want to trade when they get outside, you do not decide. You get what you get. That's how we do it. And I saw the wisdom of it in that moment. But at the same time, to your point, you see, sort of, like there have been much bigger tensions in Europe, especially around halal meat. You see it in France all the time, should McDonald's serve halal meat. And there's a certain very conservative contingent of Flemish people who are like, you can't tell us what we can eat. You can't tell us how we have to butcher our meat. And that's what I had seen firsthand happening in a food bank, which you think of as a place of lack where politics don't come, and politics are there. Yes, very much so. And the idea of equitable distribution; it can feel restrictive in some ways, but it serves a purpose. And like I said, I really appreciate you sharing that, and I think it's an important thing for all of us to understand the complexity of those environments. I want to move on and ask about sort of regulatory and legislative realities in Europe. So, Europe, as you mentioned, has this compulsory legislation requiring supermarkets to donate edible but unsellable food. While in the US food redistribution is often framed as charity. How does this policy difference shape what's possible? Yeah. This is the question. So, you know, one of the things I learned, even in that example. I always highlight like my worst, hardest, saddest day of participant observation in six years, which was that one. Which shows a kind of flaw in a food bank model. And sometimes I have students who say, oh, you hate food banks. I don't hate food banks. I think food banks have a lot of flaws. And what they do is continue to reproduce this structure of givers and receivers, right? Like there's, on one hand, one side of the equation are people who are giving food and on the other side who are people who were receiving food. And one thing this policy did this, like compulsory policy of forcing supermarkets... and you can't really force them, you can only levy huge fines with them. Which is... I am a big fan of policy with teeth, not just policy, but policy with teeth. You will have to pay a huge fine as a supermarket if you don't want to do this. And very few supermarkets have had to pay that fine as a result of this. There was massive compliance. But one thing I discovered was really better ways than food bank models, or that I think are better ways. In part because they're more equitable. And one of them is this concept of a social restaurant, which is very European, although you're seeing them spring up in the US more and more. So, a social restaurant, according to this model, is a government institution. It's funded by the government. And it has internship programs that people who are job seekers can apply to. They can learn skills on the job to work in restaurants, to work in the service industry. This is really important in a place like Belgium where there are two official languages, French and Dutch, but most immigrants come with only one, if any. And to be bilingual in a job market makes you far more competitive. So, you can learn this in these restaurants. You have language lessons. And then you also learn how to run a restaurant. The restaurant is entirely powered by this surplus distributed food from supermarkets, which gives you an idea of the scale. In my thinking, I was like, how can a couple of supermarkets possibly be giving an institution so much food that it could run a restaurant? The restaurant where I worked called Bel Mundo had four gigantic rooms of freezers, all of which had been donated, and they were turning away supermarkets. So that's how much food was coming in every day, just to say that. And so my greatest day of field work was called Steak Night. You wouldn't believe that you could find steak that was coming from a supermarket into a zero-food waste restaurant. And by the way, the restaurant sells meals at a lower cost. A lot of the meals were for pensioners. And also sliding scale. So, you know, one day I walked into the kitchen and there were 25 steaks, and they were fresh and they were going to expire in the next couple of days. And we needed to make them. The chefs were so excited. The chef trainees were so excited that diners were so excited about Steak Night. It was easily the happiest day of field work I'd ever had. People were dancing in the kitchen, we're playing music. It felt like we were doing something that was really luxurious and that's what that kind of policy can enable, right? There was a freezer full of unsold Christmas gooses from December that were then served for spring for Easter. That was like amazing. It's just another model. It's another way of doing things, right? That that policy made possible. Yes, and that's a great set of examples of how we can think about new ways of meeting these needs, using the surplus of our food system in creative and innovative spaces. And there's this possibility of training and development. I think there's something valuable there. You report that people in the US who talk with you about food waste, including your students, often ask, why don't we do this here? After everything you've seen, what's one realistic lesson or one small shift that communities in the US could adopt, right here, right now to rethink food waste? This the best question, and it is the number one question I get. Why don't we have this here? And we have seeds of some of it here already. I always point that out. One of the best programs I've ever seen is a program that is associated with the city's abattoir, which is a huge outdoor market that runs only on the weekends. And this grassroots group got together and said, you know, nobody's ever hanging out in this market during the week, we want to revitalize it. And one of the ways that they did it, just to get people to use the space more, was to take all the unsold produce. So instead of having vendors at the end of a market, and I think of my Carborro, NC farmer's market like this, at the end of the market, which is a pretty bougie farmer's market lots of chefs go there and get local produce. But at the end of the market instead of having farmers and produce vendors take home what they couldn't sell, they have an aftermarket. And the aftermarket turns that produce into edible meals. Everybody pays $5. There are people who come and cook the meal. If you cook the meal, you get to work for free, and it's a whole community workforce. It has had a tremendous effect. So, 60% of that market's food waste is now consumed. That's a big shift and it's happening at a local level. So, one thing, I think Michael Pollan's an amazing food journalist, but one of his great conclusions is that people need to grow their own food. And I'm critical of this. I don't think that's appropriate. I don't think that's a sustainable solution for a lot of people. But what I do think is sustainable in a market like that where there's food that doesn't sell, instead of throwing it away or taking it back or letting it rot, we could do something with it on the spot. And that's a little thing that makes a big difference. So, I am a fan of that. Food waste is one of the problems that is actually, in my view, best solved by local efforts because it's there, it's just sitting there. If you can move it around before it spoils you have won. If the ultimate goal is to just not throw away food. Now I do have students, I will say who are brilliant, who say stuff to me like isn't that neoliberalism? Look, yes. The answer's, the answer's yes. The answer's yes. If what your goal is, is to make sure that more edible food is not buried in landfills, which is bad for the environment and is not helping hungry people, it can be really effective. It can be really effective to say we don't actually have to overthrow the whole system while we're looking for better solutions. We can work within it. And that's probably my biggest takeaway is that even within a global industrial food system, there are lots of ways of moving food around from people who choose, who opt, who have the luxury of opting against it to people who would really like to have it. And it actually creates more equity instead of a culture of lack. I love your enthusiasm, and I love your vision of how we can work within the system to make it better for all people. Kelly, thank you so much for this engaging conversation. BIO Dr. Kelly Alexander is an assistant professor and George B. Tindall Fellow of American Studies in the University of North Carolina's College of Arts and Sciences, where she also co-directs the minor in Food Studies. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and a doctorate in cultural anthropology from Duke University. She is a James Beard Award-winning writer and former editor at Saveur and Food & Wine magazines. Dr. Alexander's work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, and O: The Oprah Magazine. She is also co-author of The New York Times best-selling barbecue cookbook Smokin' with Myron Mixon. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the New York Botanical Gardens, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

As we now find ourselves officially in America's 250th anniversary year, we are truly honored to be joined by the legendary scholar Jeffrey Rosen. As the CEO Emeritus of the National Constitution Center and the author of numerous books, Rosen's iconic body of work gives us a richer understanding of the tensions, rivalries, and principles that have shaped the American experiment. His most recent book, "The Pursuit of Liberty," tells the vibrant story of how the tensions in the visions of founders Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton haven't just endured since the founding—they've defined us. Learn more about our guests and find the program online here. This program is part of the series in partnership with Florida Humanities — "UNUM: Democracy Reignited," a multi-year digital offering exploring the past, present and future of the American idea — as it exists on paper, in the hearts of our people, and as it manifests (or sometimes fails to manifest) in our lives. View the full series of programs online here. ———————————————————— The Village Square is a proud member of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what's broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it. UNUM: Democracy Reignited is funded in part by Florida Humanities with support from Federation of State Humanities Councils and the Mellon Foundation. (Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of our funders.) By the People: Conversations Beyond 250 is a series of community-driven programs created by humanities councils in collaboration with local partners. The initiative was developed by the Federation of State Humanities Councils and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.  

On todays Special Edition, managing editor Ari Weitzman interviews staff writer from The Atlantic and former professor at Hamilton College, Tyler Austin Harper about his new story at The Atlantic about the Mellon Foundation and what its doing to higher education. A conversation that spans the bounds from why humanities matter? To Whether or not we should be focusing on them in the first place? All the way to what do we want out of colleges and should we even be learning humanities at these universities?Ad-free podcasts are here!To listen to this podcast ad-free, and to enjoy our subscriber only premium content, go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was hosted by Ari Weitzman and audio edited and mixed by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Lindsey Knuth, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For 15 years now, God Squad has quietly defied the fashion to avoid talking with people who don't look and think like us. From "Ten Paces at High Noon" to "Shut Up and Sing," from abortion to race, The Squad hasn't shied away from much. As we celebrate 15 years of programming, we thought it was high time to get a little meta and talk about what holds us together—year after year after year—when so very much is falling apart. We'll even be joined by two people around at the beginning of God Squad—Liz Joyner and Betsy Ouellette Zierden. Learn more about the program and meet the God Squad here. The Village Square is a proud member of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what's broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it. ——————————————————— Village SquareCast is funded in part by Florida Humanities with support from Federation of State Humanities Councils and the Mellon Foundation. (Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of our funders.) By the People: Conversations Beyond 250 is a series of community-driven programs created by humanities councils in collaboration with local partners. The initiative was developed by the Federation of State Humanities Councils and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.  

The podcast has returned! In this episode, Monica shares what she's been up to since the last episode and talks about the creative residency series, "Here, There, and Everywhere" where she talks and plays with 18 fellow jazz instrumentalist bandleaders who are women. This series is made possible by the Jazz Road Creative Residency grant organized by South Arts with support from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. ___ Brave Musician® is a space for all musicians to share their stories and talk about what it means to be a human making music.  Created and facilitated by Monica Shriver, Brave Musician® includes the Brave Musician® Podcast, various resources for creative confidence and artistic/personal development, and opportunities within the community to connect and support. https://monicashriver.com/bravemusician

In this episode, which is episode 2 in the Creative Residency series where Monica talks and plays with fellow jazz instrumentalist bandleaders who are women, Monica speaks Amina Scott, a bassist and composer based in New Orleans.  This series is made possible by the Jazz Road Creative Residency grant organized by South Arts with support from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.  https://www.aminascott.com  http://instagram.com/aminascottmusic  https://www.facebook.com/aminascottmusic/ ___ Brave Musician® is a space for all musicians to share their stories and talk about what it means to be a human making music.  Created and facilitated by Monica Shriver, Brave Musician® includes the Brave Musician® Podcast, various resources for creative confidence and artistic/personal development, and opportunities within the community to connect and support. https://monicashriver.com/bravemusician  

Navy veteran Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Johnson, his family name a legacy first chosen to honor the new possibilities for Black Americans many presidents ago, writes about a football game when he stood during the National Anthem and his son—on the field as a player—chose to kneel. Both, he argues, are acts of love of country. Ted's life, service and scholarship are a love letter to America—both when he confronts our failure and takes pride in our accomplishments. Now Ted leads New America's Us@250 initiative which "seeks to reimagine the American narrative with a focus on three themes: pride in the nation's progress, reckoning with historical and contemporary wrongs, and aspiration for a better future." Learn more about our guests and find the program online here. This program is part of the series in partnership with Florida Humanities — "UNUM: Democracy Reignited," a multi-year digital offering exploring the past, present and future of the American idea — as it exists on paper, in the hearts of our people, and as it manifests (or sometimes fails to manifest) in our lives. View the full series of programs online here. ———————————————————— The Village Square is a proud member of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what's broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it. UNUM: Democracy Reignited is funded in part by Florida Humanities with support from Federation of State Humanities Councils and the Mellon Foundation. (Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of our funders.) By the People: Conversations Beyond 250 is a series of community-driven programs created by humanities councils in collaboration with local partners. The initiative was developed by the Federation of State Humanities Councils and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.  

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Nikki Grimes discuss excerpts from her memoir in verse, Ordinary Hazards, published in 2019. Ordinary Hazards has been banned, and this episode will touch on that aspect of Grimes’s experience with the book but initially will focus on the book itself, the story Grimes tells, and how she tells it. Born and raised in New York City, Grimes began composing verse at the age of six and has been writing ever since. Grimes’s output is impressive for both its quantity and its quality, but among her notable titles are Bronx Masquerade, Jazmin’s Notebook, Talkin’ About Bessie, Dark Sons, The Road to Paris, Words with Wings, and the New York Times bestseller Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope. Among Grimes’s many notable honors are the Coretta Scott King Award, the Children’s Literature Legacy Award for her “substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children,” the ALAN Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Adolescent Literature, and the Virginia Hamilton Lifetime Achievement Award. Jim Phelan and Nikki Grimes connected through Ashley Hope Pérez, who knows Grimes through the Unite to Read project, a three-year initiative at the Ohio State University funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. “The Unite to Read project seeks to combat book bans, engage the public in defending and reading banned books, and unite diverse stakeholders in amplifying access to literature and ideas.”

Boortz talks about recent college graduates have a hard time finding a job, how the University of Virginia and its association with Mellon Organization are becoming a racially equity-focused university.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Boortz talks about recent college graduates have a hard time finding a job, how the University of Virginia and its association with Mellon Organization are becoming a racially equity-focused university.Atlanta's ONLY All Conservative News & Talk Station.: https://www.xtra1063.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join us as we bring two nationally renowned Black poets conversation with a new generation of Black poets. This episode features former Virginia Poet Laureate and Old Dominion University poetry professor Tim Seibles talking with rising poetry star Ariana Benson about alien life, good grammar, and the dreams of Langston Hughes.  Later in the show: Poets Elizabeth Alexander and Nicole Sealey discuss the treasures of archives, the work of a generation, and the resonant truth you feel in your bones. Former Yale professor Elizabeth Alexander is President of the Mellon Foundation and the author of the New York Times best selling memoir, The Light of the World. Alexander and Tim Seibles are Furious Flower Poetry Lifetime Achievement honorees.

According to a recent study, reading for pleasure has fallen by 40% in the last 20 years, continuing a long-running downward trend. By many measures, reading skills for both students and adults continue to fall. Jeffrey Brown spoke with Elizabeth Alexander of the Mellon Foundation about a new effort to boost the world of words. It's part of our arts and culture series, CANVAS. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

According to a recent study, reading for pleasure has fallen by 40% in the last 20 years, continuing a long-running downward trend. By many measures, reading skills for both students and adults continue to fall. Jeffrey Brown spoke with Elizabeth Alexander of the Mellon Foundation about a new effort to boost the world of words. It's part of our arts and culture series, CANVAS. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

En su conversación sobre Golpe de Agua, (Ediciones Enserio, 2021), un poemario póstumo de Sonia M. (Chiqui) Rosa Vélez, Mariam Ludim Rosa Vélez, Irmarie Cruz, Stacy Hernández y Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera dialogan sobre la capacidad sanadora de las palabras, la cultura de la diáspora puertorriqueña, la poesía como recurso en las humanidades médicas, entre otros temas. Este podcast y el Instituto Nuevos Horizontes han sido patrocinados por la Teagle Foundation, la Mellon Foundation y el Departamento de Humanidades de la Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPR-M). Hermana de Mariam Ludim Rosa Vélez, Sonia M. (Chiqui) Rosa Vélez (1958-2008) fue poeta, autora, profesora, historiadora y egresada de la UPR-M. Mariam Ludim Rosa Vélez es la directora de la Oficina de Prensa de la UPR-M. Irmarie Cruz es profesora en el Departamento de psicología de la UPR-M. Stacy Hernández es estudiante de psicología en la UPR-M. Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera es profesor de Humanidades de la UPR-M. Otros temas de su conversación: Teagle Foundation, STEM to STEAM del Programa Cornerstone Congreso de la William Carlos Williams Society en la UPR-M, febrero de 2024. Palabras como crisol de sanación “El poder que tiene la poesía, que tiene el arte, en unirnos” -Irmarie Cruz “Da cuerpo y alma al libro.” -Stacy Hernández Puertorriqueños en la Carlisle Indian School La poesía puede aportar “nuevas herramientas de autogestión emocional….catarsis (8).” -Mariam Ludim Poesía en la salud mental y física Poesía en la preparación médica Escribir desde el exilio y la diáspora Creatividad y la escritura “es tu propio espacio de liberación.” -Mariam Ludim. Cambios de lengua entre español e inglés, “el lenguaje es vivo.” -Mariam Ludim “Dando terapia, cuando tendemos tocar temas sensibles, hacemos el switch al inglés, para separarnos un poco…[para] hablar de ciertas emociones fuertes…cambiamos al idioma a la lengua que no es tan emocionalmente fuerte.” -Irmarie Cruz Usando español para “darme un break de Estados Unidos.” -Mariam Ludim “Se debe incorporar más las artes a nuestros cursos [en sicología] para que nosotros podamos ayudar a las otras personas pero también ayudar a nosotros mismos…es súper importante hacer una mezcla entre las artes y las otras ramas, como STEM.” -Stacy Hernández “El cuerpo te va a hacer saber.” -Irmarie Cruz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today's show, I have two great guests joining me. The legend Michael Ian Black comes on at about one hour and 12 minutes but before that at 49 minutes, I speak with Venezuela expert and NYU historian Dr. Alejandro Velasco.   Subscribe and Watch Interviews LIVE : On YOUTUBE.com/StandUpWithPete ON SubstackStandUpWithPete   Stand Up is a daily podcast. I book,host,edit, post and promote new episodes with brilliant guests every day. This show is Ad free and fully supported by listeners like you!   Please subscribe now for as little as 5$ and gain access to a community of over 750 awesome, curious, kind, funny, brilliant, generous soul Michael Ian Black is a multi-media talent who's starred in numerous films and TV series, written and/or directed two films, is a prolific author and commentator, and regularly tours the country performing his ribald brand of jokes and observations.  Subscribe to his substack       Support him on Patreon He most recently starred in TVLand's "The Jim Gaffigan Show" and Comedy Central's "Another Period." He also reprised one of his iconic film roles in Netflix's "Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later," and previously in "Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp." His third standup comedy special, "Noted Expert," was released on Epix. Black's authored 11 books, including the recently released best seller, "A Child's First Book of Trump." He's written two well-received memoirs: "Navel Gazing: True Tales of Bodies, Mostly Mine (but also my mom's, which I know sounds weird)", and "You're Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death and Other Humiliations." In 2012, he collaborated with conservative Meghan McCain on "America, You Sexy Bitch: A Love Letter to Freedom." He's the author of "My Custom Van (and 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays That Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face)," and seven children's books, including "Cock-a-Doodle-Doo-Bop!," "Naked", "Chicken Cheeks," "The Purple Kangaroo," "A Pig Parade Is A Terrible Idea" and "I'm Bored." He also writes book reviews for the New York Times. Previously, Black released two stand-up specials, "Very Famous" and "I Am A Wonderful Man." He and Tom Cavanagh host the popular podcast, "Mike and Tom Eat Snacks." He also writes and hosts a podcast with Michael Showalter, "Topics," and his own interview podcast, "How To Be Amazing." He hosts "Debate Wars" on SeeSo, and he recently hosted "Easiest Game Show Ever" on Pop TV. Sketch comedy fans know Black's work on "The State," "Viva Variety," "Stella" and "Michael and Michael Have Issues" all of which he co-created, wrote and starred in. Other TV credits include quirky bowling alley manager 'Phil' on the NBC series "Ed," and his hilarious commentary on cable's "I Love the..." series. He recently starred in two hit web series that migrated to cable TV: "Burning Love" on E! and "You're Whole" on Adult Swim. Black's movie roles include "Slash," "Smosh: The Movie," "They Came Together," "Hell Baby," "This is 40," "Wet Hot American Summer," "Take Me Home Tonight," "Reno 911!: Miami," "The Ten" and "The Baxter." Black wrote and directed the film "Wedding Daze," starring Jason Biggs and Isla Fisher. He also co-wrote the comedy "Run, Fatboy, Run," directed by David Schwimmer and starring Simon Pegg, Hank Azaria and Thandie Newton.  ___________________________________________________________ Alejandro Velasco holds joint appointments in the Gallatin School and the Department of History, and was Executive Editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas from 2015 to 2021. Before NYU, he taught at Hampshire College, where he was Five College Fellow, and at Duke University. His research in the areas of social movements, urban politics, and democratization has won support from the Social Science Research Council, the Ford and Mellon Foundations, and the American Historical Association, among others, and has appeared in journals including the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Latin American Research Review, Labor, and others. Velasco's first book Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela (University of California Press, 2015), won the 2016 Fernando Coronil Prize for best book on Venezuela, awarded biennially by the Section on Venezuelan Studies of the Latin American Studies Association. His teaching includes interdisciplinary courses on contemporary Latin America, among them seminars on human rights, cultural studies, and urban social movements; historical methods courses on 20th-century revolutions; graduate courses on urban political history and oral history; and workshops with primary and secondary school educators. A frequent media contributor, his editorials and analysis have appeared in NACLA, Nueva Sociedad, The Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Current History, History News Network, BBC History Magazine, and others. Velasco also frequently contributes radio and television commentary in outlets including NPR, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, CBS, France 24, the BBC, and the CBC. On YOUTUBE.com/StandUpWithPete ON SubstackStandUpWithPete Listen rate and review on Apple Podcasts Listen rate and review on Spotify Pete On Instagram Pete on Blue Sky Pete on Threads Pete on Tik Tok Pete on Twitter Pete Personal FB page Stand Up with Pete FB page Gift a Subscription https://www.patreon.com/PeteDominick/gift Send Pete $ Directly on Venmo

Jawhar Aftabachi was enslaved as a child by the Ottomans in the Black Sea region in the early sixteenth century. He was then sold to the Ottoman admiral Selman Reis, who took him with his fleet to Egypt and Yemen during his wars with the Portuguese; carried, after the admiral's death, by the admiral's nephew Mustafa Bayram to Gujarat on the western coast of India; and finally, when the Mughal army invaded Gujarat in 1534, taken into imperial service along with thousands of Eurasian and Abyssinian slaves. Here he rose to the position of water-carrier for the Mughal Emperor Humayun and chronicled this experience in a remarkable , Persian text called Tazkirah-i Vaqi`at or “memoir of events”. In Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s) (Oxford UP, 2025), Ali Anooshahr uses Jawhar's life and memoirs as a unique window into slavery, selfhood, and the rise of the early modern Indian Ocean world. Bringing a micro-historical study to a "subaltern Mughal author" offers the opportunity to reassess the history of slavery in South Asia from an original perspective and to reframe the connected history of the early modern world. Jawhar's life shows in vivid detail the eruption of the Mediterranean and Black Sea cultural regions into the Indian Ocean world, shedding light onto the collapse of older bonds of interdependency in the face of impersonal structures of new centralized states, and bearing witness to the process of individualization of people which was experienced not as a triumphalist "rise of the self" but as alienation. Ali Anooshahr is a historian of Mughal India as well as the "Persianate World" during the early modern era. He received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998, and his M.A. (2002) and Ph.D. (2005) from UCLA. He is a Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. His books include The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Routledge, 2009), Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: A Study of Politics and Invented Traditions (Oxford, 2018), and (edited with Ebba Koch) The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan: Art, Architecture, Politics, Law and Literature (The Marg Foundation, March 2019). His research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hellman Foundations, among others. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Jawhar Aftabachi was enslaved as a child by the Ottomans in the Black Sea region in the early sixteenth century. He was then sold to the Ottoman admiral Selman Reis, who took him with his fleet to Egypt and Yemen during his wars with the Portuguese; carried, after the admiral's death, by the admiral's nephew Mustafa Bayram to Gujarat on the western coast of India; and finally, when the Mughal army invaded Gujarat in 1534, taken into imperial service along with thousands of Eurasian and Abyssinian slaves. Here he rose to the position of water-carrier for the Mughal Emperor Humayun and chronicled this experience in a remarkable , Persian text called Tazkirah-i Vaqi`at or “memoir of events”. In Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s) (Oxford UP, 2025), Ali Anooshahr uses Jawhar's life and memoirs as a unique window into slavery, selfhood, and the rise of the early modern Indian Ocean world. Bringing a micro-historical study to a "subaltern Mughal author" offers the opportunity to reassess the history of slavery in South Asia from an original perspective and to reframe the connected history of the early modern world. Jawhar's life shows in vivid detail the eruption of the Mediterranean and Black Sea cultural regions into the Indian Ocean world, shedding light onto the collapse of older bonds of interdependency in the face of impersonal structures of new centralized states, and bearing witness to the process of individualization of people which was experienced not as a triumphalist "rise of the self" but as alienation. Ali Anooshahr is a historian of Mughal India as well as the "Persianate World" during the early modern era. He received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998, and his M.A. (2002) and Ph.D. (2005) from UCLA. He is a Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. His books include The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Routledge, 2009), Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: A Study of Politics and Invented Traditions (Oxford, 2018), and (edited with Ebba Koch) The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan: Art, Architecture, Politics, Law and Literature (The Marg Foundation, March 2019). His research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hellman Foundations, among others. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Jawhar Aftabachi was enslaved as a child by the Ottomans in the Black Sea region in the early sixteenth century. He was then sold to the Ottoman admiral Selman Reis, who took him with his fleet to Egypt and Yemen during his wars with the Portuguese; carried, after the admiral's death, by the admiral's nephew Mustafa Bayram to Gujarat on the western coast of India; and finally, when the Mughal army invaded Gujarat in 1534, taken into imperial service along with thousands of Eurasian and Abyssinian slaves. Here he rose to the position of water-carrier for the Mughal Emperor Humayun and chronicled this experience in a remarkable , Persian text called Tazkirah-i Vaqi`at or “memoir of events”. In Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s) (Oxford UP, 2025), Ali Anooshahr uses Jawhar's life and memoirs as a unique window into slavery, selfhood, and the rise of the early modern Indian Ocean world. Bringing a micro-historical study to a "subaltern Mughal author" offers the opportunity to reassess the history of slavery in South Asia from an original perspective and to reframe the connected history of the early modern world. Jawhar's life shows in vivid detail the eruption of the Mediterranean and Black Sea cultural regions into the Indian Ocean world, shedding light onto the collapse of older bonds of interdependency in the face of impersonal structures of new centralized states, and bearing witness to the process of individualization of people which was experienced not as a triumphalist "rise of the self" but as alienation. Ali Anooshahr is a historian of Mughal India as well as the "Persianate World" during the early modern era. He received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998, and his M.A. (2002) and Ph.D. (2005) from UCLA. He is a Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. His books include The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Routledge, 2009), Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: A Study of Politics and Invented Traditions (Oxford, 2018), and (edited with Ebba Koch) The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan: Art, Architecture, Politics, Law and Literature (The Marg Foundation, March 2019). His research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hellman Foundations, among others. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Jawhar Aftabachi was enslaved as a child by the Ottomans in the Black Sea region in the early sixteenth century. He was then sold to the Ottoman admiral Selman Reis, who took him with his fleet to Egypt and Yemen during his wars with the Portuguese; carried, after the admiral's death, by the admiral's nephew Mustafa Bayram to Gujarat on the western coast of India; and finally, when the Mughal army invaded Gujarat in 1534, taken into imperial service along with thousands of Eurasian and Abyssinian slaves. Here he rose to the position of water-carrier for the Mughal Emperor Humayun and chronicled this experience in a remarkable , Persian text called Tazkirah-i Vaqi`at or “memoir of events”. In Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s) (Oxford UP, 2025), Ali Anooshahr uses Jawhar's life and memoirs as a unique window into slavery, selfhood, and the rise of the early modern Indian Ocean world. Bringing a micro-historical study to a "subaltern Mughal author" offers the opportunity to reassess the history of slavery in South Asia from an original perspective and to reframe the connected history of the early modern world. Jawhar's life shows in vivid detail the eruption of the Mediterranean and Black Sea cultural regions into the Indian Ocean world, shedding light onto the collapse of older bonds of interdependency in the face of impersonal structures of new centralized states, and bearing witness to the process of individualization of people which was experienced not as a triumphalist "rise of the self" but as alienation. Ali Anooshahr is a historian of Mughal India as well as the "Persianate World" during the early modern era. He received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998, and his M.A. (2002) and Ph.D. (2005) from UCLA. He is a Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. His books include The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Routledge, 2009), Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: A Study of Politics and Invented Traditions (Oxford, 2018), and (edited with Ebba Koch) The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan: Art, Architecture, Politics, Law and Literature (The Marg Foundation, March 2019). His research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hellman Foundations, among others. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Jawhar Aftabachi was enslaved as a child by the Ottomans in the Black Sea region in the early sixteenth century. He was then sold to the Ottoman admiral Selman Reis, who took him with his fleet to Egypt and Yemen during his wars with the Portuguese; carried, after the admiral's death, by the admiral's nephew Mustafa Bayram to Gujarat on the western coast of India; and finally, when the Mughal army invaded Gujarat in 1534, taken into imperial service along with thousands of Eurasian and Abyssinian slaves. Here he rose to the position of water-carrier for the Mughal Emperor Humayun and chronicled this experience in a remarkable , Persian text called Tazkirah-i Vaqi`at or “memoir of events”. In Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s) (Oxford UP, 2025), Ali Anooshahr uses Jawhar's life and memoirs as a unique window into slavery, selfhood, and the rise of the early modern Indian Ocean world. Bringing a micro-historical study to a "subaltern Mughal author" offers the opportunity to reassess the history of slavery in South Asia from an original perspective and to reframe the connected history of the early modern world. Jawhar's life shows in vivid detail the eruption of the Mediterranean and Black Sea cultural regions into the Indian Ocean world, shedding light onto the collapse of older bonds of interdependency in the face of impersonal structures of new centralized states, and bearing witness to the process of individualization of people which was experienced not as a triumphalist "rise of the self" but as alienation. Ali Anooshahr is a historian of Mughal India as well as the "Persianate World" during the early modern era. He received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998, and his M.A. (2002) and Ph.D. (2005) from UCLA. He is a Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. His books include The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Routledge, 2009), Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: A Study of Politics and Invented Traditions (Oxford, 2018), and (edited with Ebba Koch) The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan: Art, Architecture, Politics, Law and Literature (The Marg Foundation, March 2019). His research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hellman Foundations, among others. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Jawhar Aftabachi was enslaved as a child by the Ottomans in the Black Sea region in the early sixteenth century. He was then sold to the Ottoman admiral Selman Reis, who took him with his fleet to Egypt and Yemen during his wars with the Portuguese; carried, after the admiral's death, by the admiral's nephew Mustafa Bayram to Gujarat on the western coast of India; and finally, when the Mughal army invaded Gujarat in 1534, taken into imperial service along with thousands of Eurasian and Abyssinian slaves. Here he rose to the position of water-carrier for the Mughal Emperor Humayun and chronicled this experience in a remarkable , Persian text called Tazkirah-i Vaqi`at or “memoir of events”. In Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s) (Oxford UP, 2025), Ali Anooshahr uses Jawhar's life and memoirs as a unique window into slavery, selfhood, and the rise of the early modern Indian Ocean world. Bringing a micro-historical study to a "subaltern Mughal author" offers the opportunity to reassess the history of slavery in South Asia from an original perspective and to reframe the connected history of the early modern world. Jawhar's life shows in vivid detail the eruption of the Mediterranean and Black Sea cultural regions into the Indian Ocean world, shedding light onto the collapse of older bonds of interdependency in the face of impersonal structures of new centralized states, and bearing witness to the process of individualization of people which was experienced not as a triumphalist "rise of the self" but as alienation. Ali Anooshahr is a historian of Mughal India as well as the "Persianate World" during the early modern era. He received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998, and his M.A. (2002) and Ph.D. (2005) from UCLA. He is a Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. His books include The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Routledge, 2009), Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: A Study of Politics and Invented Traditions (Oxford, 2018), and (edited with Ebba Koch) The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan: Art, Architecture, Politics, Law and Literature (The Marg Foundation, March 2019). His research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hellman Foundations, among others. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I am both excited and frightened to talk with Tamara Kneese and Xiaowei Wang, two individuals whose research, writing, and activism has for years insisted on the materiality of the technologies that have brought us things like artificial intelligence, the Cloud, data centers, and digital agriculture.  They explain why and how these technologies clothe themselves in ethereal garb and notions of a frictionless, beneficent capitalism while diverting attention from the vast natural and human resources they plunder to make a profit, and colonize more and more land, water, and minerals. We move from corrective histories and analyses to case histories that show how  these technologies materialize in settler colonial practices, and end decisively on stories of how people are fighting back, and creating alternate software, hardware, and cultural and social practices that offer a window onto a much less violent and dismal world than the one technofascism wants us to be hypnotized by.  Here, we set to break that spell.Tamara Kneese directs Data & Society Research Institute's Climate, Justice, and Technology program and previously led the Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab. Before joining D&S, she was director of developer engagement on the Green Software team at Intel and assistant professor of Media Studies and director of Gender and Sexualities Studies at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond (Yale University Press, 2023), co-author of Notes Toward a Digital Workers' Inquiry (Common Notions Press, 2025), and the co-editor of The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty-First Century (School for Advanced Research/University of New Mexico Press, 2022). Her work has been published in academic journals including Social Text, Social Media + Society, and the International Journal of Communication and in popular outlets such as Wired, The Verge, and The Baffler. Her research has been supported by the Internet Society Foundation, National Science Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Xiaowei R. Wang is an artist, writer, organizer and coder. They are the author of the book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech In China's Countryside, a 2023 National Book Foundation Science and Literature Award winner. Their multidisciplinary work over the past 15 years sits at the intersection of tech, digital media, art, and environmental justice. Currently, they are a Mancosh Fellow at Northwestern University and one of the stewards of Collective Action School (formerly known as Logic School), an organizing community for tech workers. In 2024 they were a Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellow, which supported their work with forms of soft data storage and transmission using textiles. 

New-to-this-country students are constantly being asked to adapt. And often, their wellbeing is measured almost entirely by their ability to speak English. Alfonzo Perez Acosta (Virginia Humanities K-12 Education Fellow) is an arts educator. In his classroom, he gives students the tools to let their art do the talking. And: Everybody has a story. Not everyone has a place to tell it. Through the Community Media Center, Chioke I'Anson (VCU ICA Community Media Center hopes to solve the problem of the untold story. Later in the show: Education has long been seen as a tool of racial uplift. In the early twentieth century, Phyllis Wheatley YWCA's across the country served young Black girls and women. Cassandra Newby-Alexander (Norfolk State University) fondly recalls her days at the Norfolk YWCA, and is hopeful about what the old facility could become today. Plus: A generous grant from the Mellon Foundation has changed the game for many Richmond area high schoolers. Janelle Marshall (Pathways to the Arts and Humanities) and her team with the Virginia Community College System are helping get students enrolled, and sticking beside them all the way until the finish line.

Elizabeth Alexander, president of The Mellon Foundation, poet, educator, memoirist and scholar and the author of The Trayvon Generation (Grand Central Publishing, 2022), talks about the Mellon Foundation's new grants and funding for literary arts and jazz musicians, and why money for the arts from the nonprofit sector is crucial.

Exploring and Collecting African American History Harriet Tubman is, if surveys are to be trusted, one of the ten most famous Americans ever born. Yet often she's a figure more out of myth than history, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood. Tiya Miles's Night Flyer changes all that, probing the ecological reality of Tubman's surroundings and examining her kinship with other enslaved women who similarly passed through a spiritual wilderness and recorded those travels in profound and moving memoirs. Tiya Miles is the author of eight books, including four prizewinning histories about race and slavery. She is a two-time winner of Yale's Frederick Douglass Prize and a two-time winner of the National Council on Public History Book Award. Her 2021 National Book Award winner, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, was a New York Times bestseller that won eleven historical and literary prizes, including the Cundill History Prize. All That She Carried was named A Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, NPR, Publisher's Weekly, The Atlantic, Time, and more.  Her latest work, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith and Dreams of a Free People, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography.  Her other nonfiction works include Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, The Dawn of Detroit, Tales from the Haunted South, The House on Diamond Hill, and Ties That Bind. Miles publishes essays and reviews in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and other media outlets. Miles is also the author of the novel, The Cherokee Rose, a ghost story set in the Native American plantation South. Check out more books by this author at your library. Miles has consulted with colleagues at historic sites and museums on representations of slavery, African American material culture, and the Black-Indigenous intertwined past, including, most recently, the Fabric of a Nation quilt exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her work has been supported by a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Award, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation.  Miles was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and she is currently the Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University. You can find her online at https://tiyamiles.com/ or on Facebook and Instagram  @TiyaMiles. Interviewer Tammy Cherry has taught at FSCJ as an English professor for 22 years. Along with composition classes, Tammy teaches African American literature and honors classes. She is a lifelong Jacksonville resident and recently served as co-host for the WJCT podcast Bygone Jax. --- Never miss an event! Sign up for email newsletters at https://bit.ly/JaxLibraryUpdates  Jacksonville Public LibraryWebsite: https://jaxpubliclibrary.org/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/jaxlibrary Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JaxLibrary/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jaxlibrary/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/jaxpubliclibraryfl Contact Us: jplpromotions@coj.net 

Today's guest is Jenny Mann, who has a new book titled The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime (Princeton University Press, 2021). Jenny is Professor in both New York University's English Department and the Gallatin School, and her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is the author of the previous monograph, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England (Cornell University Press, 2012) and is the co-editor with Debapriya Sarkar of a special issue of Philological Quarterly on “Imagining Scientific Forms.” Additionally, Jenny works in collaboration with the Public Shakespeare Initiative at the Public Theater in New York. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Today's guest is Jenny Mann, who has a new book titled The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime (Princeton University Press, 2021). Jenny is Professor in both New York University's English Department and the Gallatin School, and her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is the author of the previous monograph, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England (Cornell University Press, 2012) and is the co-editor with Debapriya Sarkar of a special issue of Philological Quarterly on “Imagining Scientific Forms.” Additionally, Jenny works in collaboration with the Public Shakespeare Initiative at the Public Theater in New York. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's guest is Jenny Mann, who has a new book titled The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime (Princeton University Press, 2021). Jenny is Professor in both New York University's English Department and the Gallatin School, and her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is the author of the previous monograph, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England (Cornell University Press, 2012) and is the co-editor with Debapriya Sarkar of a special issue of Philological Quarterly on “Imagining Scientific Forms.” Additionally, Jenny works in collaboration with the Public Shakespeare Initiative at the Public Theater in New York. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

Today's guest is Jenny Mann, who has a new book titled The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime (Princeton University Press, 2021). Jenny is Professor in both New York University's English Department and the Gallatin School, and her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is the author of the previous monograph, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England (Cornell University Press, 2012) and is the co-editor with Debapriya Sarkar of a special issue of Philological Quarterly on “Imagining Scientific Forms.” Additionally, Jenny works in collaboration with the Public Shakespeare Initiative at the Public Theater in New York. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Today's guest is Jenny Mann, who has a new book titled The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime (Princeton University Press, 2021). Jenny is Professor in both New York University's English Department and the Gallatin School, and her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is the author of the previous monograph, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England (Cornell University Press, 2012) and is the co-editor with Debapriya Sarkar of a special issue of Philological Quarterly on “Imagining Scientific Forms.” Additionally, Jenny works in collaboration with the Public Shakespeare Initiative at the Public Theater in New York. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

En su conversación sobre Ultra-Processed People: Why we Can't Stop Eating Food that isn't Food, Herlihy-Mera, Lahie Luna y Bustos Lemus utilizan el texto de van Tulleken para dialogar sobre la comida como una experiencia capitalista, el desarrollo de “Critical Food Studies”, la relación entre el ser humano y sus practicas alimenticias y cómo el diseño de estos productos puede funcionar como sustancias adictivas, entre otros temas. Episodio realizado por Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, Marianne Lahaie Luna, Universidad de Toronto, y Angie Natalia Bustos Lemus, Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. Este podcast y el Instituto Nuevos Horizontes son patrocinados por la Mellon Foundation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Money Tales, our guest is David Adjmi. From childhood, our money stories shape the way we see the world—sometimes with clarity, and sometimes with confusion. For playwright David, growing up in a family and a neighborhood where money was about hustle, performance, and status left him questioning what financial security and self-worth really meant. David Adjmi's plays have been produced at theatres around the world such as Lincoln Center, RSC, Steppenwolf, and Soho Rep--where he was the Mellon Foundation playwright-in-residence for three years. Stereophonic (music by Will Butler of Arcade Fire) is running on London's West End after a successful run on Broadway, where it became the most Tony-nominated play in history. Stereophonic received the 2024 Drama Desk Award, New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, Drama League, and Tony Awards for Best Play. The Stumble was recently excerpted in The Paris Review, and his two-part play The Blind King is currently in development with The Public. Adjmi's controversial hit 3C was selected as one of the top ten plays of the year by the New York Post, Time Out and the Advocate. Elective Affinities premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company and received a sold-out U.S. premiere at Soho Rep starring Zoe Caldwell (Top 10 of the year in Time Out, The New Yorker.) Other plays include Stunning, The Evildoers, and Marie Antoinette. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers' Award, the Kesselring Prize for Drama, and the Steinberg Playwright Award, among others.  He holds commissions from The Public, Playwrights Horizons, Yale Rep, Berkeley Rep, and the Royal Court (UK). His critically acclaimed memoir Lot Six was published by HarperCollins in 2020, and his collected plays are published by TCG.

Voices is a new mini-series from Humanitarian AI Today. In daily five-minute flashpods we pass the mic to humanitarian experts and technology pioneers, to hear about new projects, events, and perspectives on topics of importance to the humanitarian community. In this flashpod, Lindsey Moore, Founder and CEO of DevelopMetrics, joins Humanitarian AI Today producer Brent Phillips to talk about agentic AI and bold new funding initiatives like Humanity AI. According to Humanity AI's website, the coalition is co-chaired by Omidyar Network and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Its founding members include the Doris Duke Foundation, Ford Foundation, Lumina Foundation, Kapor Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Siegel Family Endowment, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Over five-years, the coalition plans to dedicate $500M towards making sure people and communities beyond Silicon Valley have a stake in the future of artificial intelligence establishing an AI future where people and communities can flourish. Lindsey Moore offers a grounded perspective on the current state of AI in the humanitarian sector. She observes that despite industry buzz, most organizations are not yet experimenting with agentic AI. Instead, they are focusing on more foundational challenges, such as organizing their data and building domain-specific large language models that can grasp the unique context and terminology of their work. Discussing the Humanity AI initiative, Lindsey and Brent express hope that such bold new funding can, with an informed understanding of the sector, help offset the destructive impact of recent aid funding cuts. These cuts disrupted foundational AI capacity-building that was being carried out by established organizations with deep domain experience, destroying numerous projects and dismantling teams behind them. They make a compelling case for funders to reinvest in these organizations and their important work to prevent hard-won gains from being lost and to scale their forward momentum. The conversation serves as a call to action, emphasizing that for initiatives like Humanity AI to be truly transformative, they must go beyond traditional philanthropy. This means proactively identifying and engaging with the humanitarian community's own AI leaders, reforming conventional cyclic grant solicitation and grant-making processes that too often overlook real sector innovators and builders, and boldly forming new partnerships that make them accessible and open to input, rather than insulated behind institutional firewalls. Substack notes: https://humanitarianaitoday.substack.com/p/lindsey-moore-from-developmetrics

Amir Moosavi discusses the profound impact of the Iran-Iraq War – the longest two-state war of the 20th century – on the literature of both nations. Through his book "Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War," he explores in this conversation the official state-sanctioned narratives that emerged during and after the war, comparing them with the more nuanced, critical, and often experimental literary responses from writers in Iraq and Iran, including those in the diaspora. The conversation also highlights how these diverse literary works grapple with the war's legacy, from its human and environmental costs to its enduring presence in collective memory. 0:00 The Enduring Legacy of the Iran-Iraq War1:03 Introducing Amir Moosavi's Book3:39 A Historical Primer on the Iran-Iraq War7:16 Shifting Narratives: Qadisiyyat Saddam and Operation Karbala11:49 Bridging Arabic and Persian Literary Worlds15:51 Understanding State Literature and Propaganda20:11 Examples of State Literature and Narrative Shifts29:36 Post-War Writers: Challenging Official Narratives35:26 Warfront Depictions and the Quest for Truth38:31 Artistic Communities and Collective Memory40:41 The Meaning Behind "Dust That Never Settles"43:18 Ecological Damage in War Literature48:22 Misconceptions and Nuances in War Literature50:39 Diaspora Authors and Freedom of Expression Amir Moosavi is an assistant Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University- Newark. He started teaching at Rutgers-Newark in the fall of 2018, following a year-long EUME postdoc funded by the Volkswagenstiftung and Mellon Foundation in Berlin (2016-17) and a visiting assistant professorship in modern Iranian studies at Brown University (2017-18). His research and teaching interests cover modern Arabic and Persian literatures and the cultural history of the Middle East, with an emphasis on Iran, Iraq, and the Levant. At RU-N, he teaches courses on Arabic and Persian fiction and film, world literature, translation studies, and war culture. He is particularly interested in how cultural production deals with violent pasts, wars, notions of transitional justice, representations of urban space, and the climate crisis. He has written a book manuscript titled "Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War."Connect with Amir Moosavi

What if your art could both heal your community & pay your bills? If you're a musician or creative itching to drive real-world change without sacrificing your livelihood, this episode maps a path: how Music to Life evolved from a songwriting contest into a rigorous accelerator that helps artists design, fund, and measure community projects—so you can make change while making a living. Learn how Music To Life helps musicians turn a community cause into a sustainable enterpriseSee real models you can adapt: Vanessa Lively's Home Street Music built 500+ song circles, 230 sessions, & raised ~$200K serving unhoused neighbors in Austin.Learn about proven impact from Benny Esguerra's mobile studio that measured violence reduction to poet-healer Myles Bullen co-facilitating prison education to process tough emotions and build trust.Tune in to hear strategies & stories that helped artists step off the stage and into community change—without abandoning the craft that got them there. Notable MentionsPeopleLiz Sunde – Co-founder and Executive Director of Music to Life, an organization empowering socially conscious musicians to become change agents in their communities .Bill Cleveland – Host of Art Is Change and Director of the Center for the Study of Art & Community, long-time advocate for artists as community leaders .Paul Stookey – Renowned singer-songwriter, member of the legendary folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, and co-founder of Music to Life .Vanessa Lively – Austin-based singer-songwriter and founder of Home Street Music, a program using music circles to support people experiencing homelessness .Dick Crispo – Artist who co-created the longest indoor mural in the world at Soledad Prison, known for his community arts practice .Beny Esguerra – Toronto-based musician and educator, founder of the Mobile Studio Project using music to reduce gang violence through recording sessions .Myles Bullen – Indigenous poet/ rap artist from Maine, who collaborated with University of Maine Augusta faculty on prison-based education blending poetry and Holocaust studies .Barbara Schaffer Bacon – Arts leader and consultant, co-director of Animating Democracy at Americans for the Arts, key in helping Music to Life secure Mellon Foundation support .John Lewis – Late U.S. Congressman and civil rights icon, famous for urging people to make “good trouble” in the fight for justice .EventsKerrville Folk Festival – Long-running Texas festival where Music to Life hosted a 10-year social justice songwriting contest, spotlighting emerging activist musicians .

Suave has been named an Apple Podcasts Series Essential and to celebrate we wanted to bring to the main feed one of our exclusive Futuro+ bonus episodes.In season one, Suave told host Julieta Martinelli about a mixtape he recorded inside his prison cell at SCI Graterford more than three decades ago. It remained a mystery lost to time… until today. In this episode, the making of Suave's long-lost mixtape, the music that inspired it, and liner notes for his favorite 90's hip-hop and reggaeton tracks. Plus, a discussion about the importance of music in prison and the artists Suave and Julieta love.Season 2 of Suave was made possible by The Mellon Foundation. Mellon makes grants to support the visionaries and communities that unlock the power of the arts and humanities to help connect us all. More at mellon.org. Want to support our independent journalism? Join Futuro+ for exclusive episodes, sneak peaks and behind-the-scenes chisme on Suave and all our podcasts. www.futuromediagroup.org/joinplus.

Today, on the Hudson Mohawk Magazine, we bring you a Labor Day special. The following program of oral histories was conducted by undergraduate students in History 263: American Labor History, a course taught by Professor Eric J. Morser at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, as part of The Saratoga Labor History Digital Archive. Project Credits: Project Manager: Professor Eric J. Morser, History Department, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York Audio Editor and Narrator: Emma Gill Project Consultant/Community Producer: Willie Terry The project was produced in collaboration with MDOCS Co-Creation Initiative and Hudson Mohawk Magazine. It was supported by the MDOCS Co-Creation Initiative and funded in part by the Mellon Foundation. Special thanks to Angela Beallor Press.

Michael Clune is the author of the debut novel Pan, available from Penguin Press. It is the official August 2025 pick of the Otherppl Book Club. Clune is the critically acclaimed author of the memoirs Gamelife and White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin. His academic books include A Defense of Judgment, Writing Against Time, and American Literature and the Free Market. Clune's work has appeared in venues ranging from Harper's Magazine, Salon, and Granta to Behavioral and Brain Sciences, PMLA, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His work has been recognized by fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and others. He is currently a professor at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at the Ohio State University and lives in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. *** ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Otherppl with Brad Listi⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, etc. Subscribe to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Brad Listi's email newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Support the show on Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Merch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠proud affiliate partner of Bookshop⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Age, Creativity and Culture: Reconsidering how the Phases of Life Influence Knowledge, Experience, and Creation” by Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera appeared in Nuevos Horizontes in 2024. The article examines age as a dimension of identity, creativity and cognition, and in this episode, Heidi Landecker, Samuel Jay Keyser, and Jenny Wilson consider the importance of age in intergenerational relationships. This is the second episode in a series of conversations about how and ageing influence the academy, knowledge, and culture. The first episode is available here. This conversation includes Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, professor at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez; Heidi Landecker, former Deputy Managing Editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education; Jenny Wilson, a Trustee of the London u3a (university of the 3rd Age) and the Chair of Croydon u3a; and MIT linguist Samuel Jay Keyser; Keyser spent 9 years as associate provost at MIT, and he is the founder and editor of Linguistic Inquiry, housed at MIT Press. This podcast and the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes at the UPR-M have been supported by the Mellon Foundation. Topics mentioned in this conversation include: How are intergenerational relationships important to learning and knowledge? How do these relationships influence cultural transmission, academic institutions, and emotional well-being for both parties? In what ways can institutions of higher education foster more inclusive and respectful intergenerational relationships? Noam Chomsky Mentorship Morris Halle Ivy Cruz Edward Said Teagle Foundation “Cornerstone” STEM to STEAM Essay Contest Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls Anne ("Dusty") Mortimer-Maddox Janet Cook Scandal Technology and intergenerational relationships Listener feedback Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

“I'm hopeful for revolution. I'm optimistic. I want radical change. I think there's such a disinterest in education in America that it is sickening. I think we are repeating history. We are going through a cycle of fascism and greed, and I think we're going to see a lot of states collapse. As a result of that, I think people are going to be forced back to their primal needs and concerns, but I think they're going to be forced to think about what makes us human. How do we become more human? Because we've lost that. We've given it up to technology. How can we figure out what makes us a really powerful species again?”Irvin Weathersby Jr. is a Brooklyn-based writer and professor from New Orleans. He is the author of In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space. His writing has been featured in LitHub, Guernica, Esquire, The Atlantic, EBONY, and elsewhere. He has earned an MFA from The New School, an MA from Morgan State University, and a BA from Morehouse College. He has received fellowships and awards from the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, the Research Foundation of CUNY, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation.Episode Websitewww.creativeprocess.info/podInstagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

In the final episode of Season 2, Suave and the team visit a location in the Bronx with deep significance to Suave— a place where you can say his journey towards freedom began. As Suave takes inventory of the past, and the challenges of the last couple of years in particular, he comes to terms with the weight of institutionalization. And he reveals one surprising and life-changing decision. Season 2 of Suave was made possible by The Mellon Foundation. Mellon makes grants to support the visionaries and communities that unlock the power of the arts and humanities to help connect us all. More at mellon.org. Want to support our independent journalism? Join Futuro+ for exclusive episodes, sneak peaks and behind-the-scenes chisme on Suave and all our podcasts. www.futuromediagroup.org/joinplus.

After the crisis he's been going through, Suave could use a change of scenery, so the whole team decides to go on a trip to Puerto Rico. It's Suave's first time back since he was a child to the island where his mother was born and raised— a moment he used to fantasize about in prison. There he reconnects with family who come from a long lineage of survivors… and of Santería practitioners. A spiritual belief his mother always believed would be linked to his salvation.Season 2 of Suave was made possible by The Mellon Foundation. Mellon makes grants to support the visionaries and communities that unlock the power of the arts and humanities to help connect us all. More at mellon.org. Want to support our independent journalism? Join Futuro+ for exclusive episodes, sneak peaks and behind-the-scenes chisme on Suave and all our podcasts. www.futuromediagroup.org/joinplus.

An unexpected event turns Suave's world on its head, and Suave seems ready to throw it all away. He feels violated, and it triggers a response from Suave we've never seen before. As he grows increasingly agitated and isolated from everyone around him, Suave's actions put everything that he has built at risk.Season 2 of Suave was made possible by The Mellon Foundation. Mellon makes grants to support the visionaries and communities that unlock the power of the arts and humanities to help connect us all. More at mellon.org. Want to support our independent journalism? Join Futuro+ for exclusive episodes, sneak peaks and behind-the-scenes chisme on Suave and all our podcasts. www.futuromediagroup.org/joinplus.

There's one brother behind bars in particular that Suave can't stop thinking about — Frank Ross, his longtime mentor. The man who taught him how to read and write on the inside. Serving a life sentence for more than half a century, the 93-year-old may have a speck of a chance to get out. That is, if he can convince the state to release him to die on the outside.Season 2 of Suave was made possible by The Mellon Foundation. Mellon makes grants to support the visionaries and communities that unlock the power of the arts and humanities to help connect us all. More at mellon.org. Want to support our independent journalism? Join Futuro+ for exclusive episodes, sneak peaks and behind-the-scenes chisme on Suave and all our podcasts. www.futuromediagroup.org/joinplus.

On a trip to Philadelphia, Maria meets Suave's new romantic partner and visits the home they share. He's in a stable, happy relationship…but after three decades behind bars, sometimes a girlfriend can feel like a prison guard, and Suave struggles with the idea of commitment. In fact, relationships in general—romantic and otherwise—have been the hardest part of life on the outside for him. Suave and Maria struggle to find a balance in their own relationship as a growing distance creates new tension. What does a friendship for them look like now that he's no longer locked up and the rules have changed? Season 2 of Suave was made possible by The Mellon Foundation. Mellon makes grants to support the visionaries and communities that unlock the power of the arts and humanities to help connect us all. More at mellon.org. Want to support our independent journalism? Join Futuro+ for exclusive episodes, sneak peaks and behind-the-scenes chisme on Suave and all our podcasts. www.futuromediagroup.org/joinplus.

Suave can't drink. He can't smoke weed. He can't travel. He can't visit old prison friends, or basically have any interaction with the police. And that's because even though he's free, he's on parole for a lifetime. In other words he's just serving his prison sentence on the outside. Sometimes all these rules make Suave ask himself, “Will I ever really be free?”Season 2 of Suave was made possible by The Mellon Foundation. Mellon makes grants to support the visionaries and communities that unlock the power of the arts and humanities to help connect us all. More at mellon.org. Want to support our independent journalism? Join Futuro + for exclusive episodes, sneak peaks and behind-the-scenes chisme on Suave and all our podcasts. www.futuromediagroup.org/joinplus.

Years have passed since Season One, and Suave is thriving. He's got a great job. He's on the news for his work on prison reform. He's even got a new nickname on the block: Mr. Pulitzer. Suave is doing what he always dreamed of – and he's making a real difference. It almost seems like “happily ever after.” Or is it? Season 2 of Suave was made possible by The Mellon Foundation. Mellon makes grants to support the visionaries and communities that unlock the power of the arts and humanities to help connect us all. More at mellon.org.