Writer's Voice with Francesca Rheannon

We talk with journalist and author Dana Thomas about the Young Readers Edition of her book, Fashionopolis. Then, we air some clips from our 2008 interview with energy and security analyst and author Michael Klare, where we speak about Russia as a petro-state, its then-war with Georgia and the geo-politics of energy. The relevance to what’s happening today with Russia’s assault on Ukraine is striking. Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice. Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show. Dana Thomas Did you know that the average number of times people wear a piece of clothing they’ve bought is seven? That’s just one of the many shocking facts behind fast fashion in Dana Thomas’ book Fashionopolis: The Secrets Behind The Clothes We Wear. The original book came out in 2020. The publisher, Penguin Random House asked Thomas to follow up with a version for young readers — middle school to high school. That’s just been published. In addition to Fashionopolis in two versions, for adults and kids, Dana Thomas is the author of Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster and Gods and Kings. She hosts The Green Dream, a podcast focused on sustainability and human rights. Read an excerpt from Fashionopolis (young reader version) Read an excerpt from Fashionopolis Michael Klare The more things change, the more they stay the same. We heard Dana Thomas reference that homily earlier in the show. And it came to mind today while listening back to our interview with security and energy analyst Michael Klare in May 2008 about his book Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy. At the time, Russia was about to go to war on Georgia. In 2008, George W. Bush was president and we were still heavily mired in Iraq. The US was then an energy importer, which is not currently the case, but Klare makes the point that security lies in developing clean renewable energy. Then we turned to Russia as a petro-state, its then war with Georgia and what that meant for democracy and the world. Listen to the full interview  

Whatever happened to public goods? And how do we get them back? That’s the question we ponder this hour with Donald Cohen, talking about his book The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back. We also remember Dr. Paul Farmer who died suddenly this week. Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice. Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show. Donald Cohen It seems like everything is being privatized. Not just public schools—charters, anyone? Not just college loan systems, municipal water systems, public health and fire departments but parking meters and the right to sue in court. Privatized, privatized, privatized. When private interests take over, they strip public goods of their power to lift people up, creating instead a tool to diminish democracy, further inequality, and separate us from each other. Donald Cohen is the founder of In the Public Interest. In his new book The Privatization of Everything, which he co-wrote with Allen Mikaelian, he chronicles the efforts to turn our public goods into private profit centers and how we can take public power back. Dr. Paul Farmer We were terribly saddened this week to learn that Dr. Paul Farmer passed away. He co-founded Partners in Health. In 2010, we spoke to Tracy Kidder about his biography of Farmer, Mountains beyond Mountains, Partners in Health and the work of Partners in Health in Haiti after the earthquake. Read an excerpt from Mountains Beyond Mountains  

We talk with Malinda Lo about her award winning novel, Last Night At The Telegraph Club. It’s a YA historical novel about a Chinese American lesbian. Then Syed Masood tells us about his new novel, The Bad Muslim Discount. It’s a poignant, funny and profoundly human novel about Muslim immigrants finding their way in modern America. Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice. Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show. Malinda Lo It’s 1954 and Lily, a Chinese American teenager in San Francisco, is discovering her sexuality—she likes girls—and her interest in aerospace engineering. Neither interest goes over well with her family. How she navigates the conflicting pulls of her family, a budding romance and her identity as a person is explored in Malinda Lo’s wonderful novel, Last Night At The Telegraph Club. Ms. Magazine called it “the queer romance we’ve been waiting for” but it’s much more than a romance. Lo’s novel is a portrait of a time and place that few people know about: the San Francisco lesbian community in the midst of one of the most repressive eras in American history, told from the Chinese American perspective. Now out in paperback, Last Night At The Telegraph Club won the National Book Award, the Stonewall Book Award, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, among others. Listen to an excerpt from Last Night at the Telegraph Club Syed Masood Following two families from Pakistan and Iraq in the 1990s to San Francisco in 2016, Syed Masood’s new novel The Bad Muslim Discount is a poignant, funny and profoundly human novel about Muslim immigrants finding their way in modern America. It’s also a window into how people in the Muslim world view America; how Americans have little notion of the diversity of views in the Muslim world, and, finally, how we are more like others than different from them. Read an excerpt from The Bad Muslim Discount

Bestselling mystery writer Elizabeth George tackles the horror of FGM. We talk with her about her latest in the Inspector Lynley series, Something To Hide. It explores the practice of female genital mutilation in the Nigerian community in London and the fight to stop it. Then, for Black History Month, we re-air our 2019 interview with DaMaris Hill about her narrative in verse, A Bound Woman Is A Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration Of African-American Women From Harriet Tubman To Sandra Bland. Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice. Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show. Elizabeth George Crime fiction master, Elizabeth George has been writing the Inspector Lynley mysteries since since 1988. Many of the novels in the series explore social issues. That’s no exception in her latest, Something To Hide. It delves into the underworld of genital operations on young girls in the Nigerian community in London, where FGM is illegal but still practiced. The murder at the heart of this story is of a police detective who’d been working on a special task force within North London’s Nigerian community investigating the practice. Moreover, the detective was herself a victim of FGM. In the book, Elizabeth George also tackles the tangled issues that can arise when white Westerners go after a cultural practice of a racial minority. In something to hide, she manages to balance the issue of cultural sensitivity with the human rights of women and girls. Something to Hide is the 21st Inspector Lynley novel. She’s also the author of several other novels, short story collections and two works of nonfiction. Read an excerpt DaMaris Hill We re-air our 2019 interview with DaMaris Hill. From Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland and Black Lives Matter, black women freedom fighters have braved violence, scorn, despair, and isolation to fight for their rights. In A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, DaMaris Hill honors their experiences with responses to her heroes that are both harrowing and hopeful.

For Black History Month, we re-air our conversation with Tamara Payne about her late father Les Payne’s acclaimed biography of Malcolm X, The Dead Are Arising. It won the National Book Award in 2020. Writer’s Voice — in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Rate us on your favorite podcast platform! It really helps others find our show. And like us on Facebook at Writers Voice Radio or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice. Books and movies about Malcolm X abound. There’s the Autobiography of Malcolm X, of course, co-written with Alex Haley—and countless books followed. Denzel Washington played Malcolm X in Spike Lee’s movie about him and there was also a PBS documentary, Malcolm X: Make It Plain, among other films. But Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Les Payne’s new biography of Malcolm X, The Dead Are Arising, goes where none have gone before. With his daughter Tamara, who was his principal researcher and wrote a terrific introduction to the book, Les Payne delved deeply into Malcolm’s background and upbringing. He interviewed his family and many other sources who have never been tapped before. And the depth of research extended to cover the rest of Malcolm’s life—including a never-before detailed description of Malcolm’s meeting with the KKK. The Dead Are Arising not only gives a wealth of detail but also historical context to weave a rich tapestry of the life and times of one of the most important and influential figures in American history. Les Payne died in 2018. His daughter Tamara Payne brought his magnum opus to publication.

We spend the hour with Howard Mansfield, first talking about his new book, Chasing Eden: A Book of Seekers. It’s about those who long to build a better life for themselves and others. Then, we replay our 2019 interview with Mansfield about his book The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down. It’s about how American society treats property rights — and who pays the price. Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon or find us on twitter @WritersVoice. Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show. Chasing Eden It’s a cliché that America is the place where people reinvent themselves, seeking for a better life for themselves and often others. It’s a theme that, in one way or another, runs through many of Howard Mansfield’s wonderful books. But in Chasing Eden, out in October 2021 from Bauhan Press, he drills down into the stories of some quintessential American seekers. They include a young man shepherding the last of the Shakers through their twilight years. An African-American doctor who achieves the American Dream by changing the boundaries of the color line, crossing over and back, rewriting the definition of race. And forty thousand Africans newly freed from slavery in the US, taking possession of the forty acres promised them, only to have their land taken away within months. These and other stories in Chasing Eden take us on a journey through the ways Americans have gone in pursuit of happiness. They prompt us to contemplate our own pursuit of happiness, with its costs and rewards. Howard Mansfield is the author of some ten books. His articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, American Heritage and many other publications. The Habit Of Turning The World Upside Down (Encore) (In 2019 Writer’s Voice spoke with Howard Mansfield about The Habit Of Turning The World Upside Down.) In America, private property is supposed to be sacred. But whose private property is sacred? Is the land of ranchers and farmers on the US southern border sacred when Donald Trump wants it to build his wall? Is the land of West Virginians and Pennsylvanians sacred when gas companies take it to drill and frack gas? How about people in New Hampshire and Massachusetts when oil and gas companies take it for their pipelines? While reporting on citizens fighting natural gas pipelines and transmission towers planned to cut right across their homes, author Howard Mansfield saw the emotional toll of these projects. “They got under the skin,” he writes. “This was about more than kilowatts, power lines, and pipelines. Something in this upheaval felt familiar. I began to realize that I was witnessing an essential American experience: the world turned upside down. And it all turned on one word: property.” Mansfield’s book The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down tells the stories of Americans living in a time in which everything is in motion, in which the world will be turned upside down, again and again.    

Today we have two fascinating interviews, both about how human beings are changing the other species with whom we share the planet. Later in the show, we talk with evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro about how humans deliberately change species. Her book is Life As We Made It: How 50,000 Years Of Human Innovation Refined And Redefined Nature. But first, Thor Hanson tells us about how many species are evolving to adapt to human-caused climate change. His book is Hurricane Lizards And Plastic Squid: The Fraught And Fascinating Biology Of Climate Change. Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice. Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show. Thor Hanson We are in the midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction, thanks to human destruction of habitat through encroachment, pollution and excess carbon emissions. But the news isn’t all bad: Nature is amazingly resilient, thanks to evolution. While not true for all, some species are adapting: grizzlies in Alaska are shifting their diet to include more berries, as salmon stocks are threatened by warming waters. Brown pelicans are moving north, and long-spined sea urchins south, to find cooler homes. Squid are getting smaller as their food supplies shrink. In Hurricane Lizards And Plastic Squid, biologist Thor Hanson explores the ways Nature is adapting to our penchant for destruction. A story of hope, resilience, and risk, the book is a reminder of how unpredictable climate change is as it interacts with the messy lattice of life. Hanson is a biologist and author of several previous books, including Buzz, The Triumph of Seeds and The Impenetrable Forest. Beth Shapiro People have been changing other species for 50,000 years. Human pressure helped drive the mammoths and other large animals of the Pleistocene to extinction, for example. Plant and animal breeding for desired traits is millennia old. But now, with new genetic engineering tools like CRISPR, our power to shape the evolution of other species is practically godlike. We talk with evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro about the benefits–and potential harms–these godlike powers could bring with them. Benefits like making coral reefs more resilient to ocean warming; harms like changing species in ways that don’t anticipate problematic knock-on effects. Beth Shapiro explores these issues in her book, Life As We Made It.

We talk with archeologist David Wengrow about the groundbreaking book he co-authored with the late David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice. Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show. David Wengrow We’ve all grown up thinking that the trajectory of human civilization proceeded from so-called primitive egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies to the invention of agriculture with more and more complex social class structures to the modern era of global capitalism with its inevitable hierarchies. The lesson seems to be: if you want civilization, you just have to put up with inequality and ever more social control by the powers that be. But is that really true? In The Dawn of Everything, David Wengrow and his co-author, the late anthropologist David Graeber, say human beings have been far more creative in their social arrangements than conventional wisdom can fathom. For example, there have been highly complex and technologically advanced hunter-gatherer societies. There have also been radically egalitarian agricultural societies like the ancient Mexican one at Teotihuacán. Others, like those in pre-Columbian North America, have flipped back and forth on a seasonal basis between ceremonial authoritarianism and everyday participatory democracy. Wengrow and Graeber’s groundbreaking book lays out the case in fascinating detail that many other worlds are possible in human society: things don’t have to be the way they are because people are endlessly ingenious in devising the societies they want to live in. And they’ve been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years. “We are projects of self-creation,” they write. “What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such?” One review called The Dawn of Everything a “history book for the 99%”. That was a nod to David Graeber, who was one of the original organizers of Occupy Wall Street, with the slogan “we are the 99 Percent.” Graeber died suddenly in September 2020. David Wengrow is Professor of Comparative Archaeology at University College in London. Read or Listen to an excerpt from The Dawn of Everything  Next week on Writer’s Voice We talk with conservation biologist Thor Hanson about his book Hurricane Lizards And Plastic Squid: The Fraught And Fascinating Biology Of Climate Change. Also, evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro tell us about her book Life As We Made It: How 50,000 Years Of Human Innovation Refined And Redefined Nature.

It’s that time, folks! The time for Ten Best Of The Year lists. We play excerpts from ten of our favorite episodes in 2021: Hugh Raffles, The Book Of Unconformities; Michael Mann, The New Climate War; Heather McGhee, The Sum Of Us; Elizabeth Kolbert, Under A White Sky; Michaeleen Doucleff, Hunt, Gather, Parent; Cal Flynn, Islands of Abandonment; Nina Burleigh, Virus; Elizabeth Hinton, America on Fire; Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois;  and Eyal Press, Dirty Work. Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice. Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show. We start out with our January interview with Hugh Raffles, telling us about The Book Of Unconformities: Speculations On Lost Time. The book was A New York Times Editor’s Choice for 2021. Read an excerpt. Listen to the full interview Next, In a year of escalating climate disasters, we spoke in February with famed climate scientist Michael Mann about The New Climate War. The book won numerous accolades, including being listed by several major publications among the best books of 2021. Listen to the full interview. And also in February, we spoke with Heather McGhee about her groundbreaking book, The Sum Of Us. It was longlisted for the National Book Award. Listen to the full interview.   March saw our interview with New Yorker environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert, talking about her book, Under A White Sky: The Nature of the Future. Read an excerpt and listen to the full interview. In May, we spoke with NPR reporter Michaeleen Doucleff about her parenting self-help book Hunt, Gather, Parent. Watch a video about Hunt Gather Parent and listen to the full interview. In June, Scottish writer Cal Flynn told us about her book, Islands of Abandonment. It was shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize, among other honors. Listen to the full interview.   In July, we caught up with Nina Burleigh to talk about the systemic failures behind the US’s botched response to the COVID pandemic. Her book is Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and The Hijacking Of America’s Response To The Pandemic. Listen to the full interview. The coronavirus, along with the climate crisis, were of course two of the three big issues dominating the news cycle in 2021. The third was police violence after the murder of George Floyd unleashed nationwide ...

Francesca Rheannon reads her story “The Food Philosophe.” It’s about a Winter Solstice feast in Provence that led to some delicious life lessons. Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice. Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show. The Food Philosophe by Francesca Rheannon Twenty years ago, Francesca Rheannon spent several months living in southern France. Soon after her arrival in the Fall of 2001, she became good friends with a couple living in the old Roman town of Apt. She had been introduced to them — Michel, a chef, and his wife, Marie-Jo — by her friend, the writer Fabienne Pasquet. On December 21, Marie Jo and Michel threw a dinner party to celebrate the Winter Solstice. The food was divine, the wine likewise, and the company convivial — and Francesca ended up learning a profound lesson about the French Art of Living. Francesca wrote up her experience in the story, “The Food Philosophe,” part of a longer memoir of her sojourn in Provence, titled Province of the Heart.  

We talk with Ben Sheehan about his book, What Does The Constitution Say? A Kids Guide To How Our Democracy Works. Then we talk with constitutional scholar Noah Feldman about his terrific new history of Lincoln and the civil war from a constitutional perspective, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America. Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice. Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show. Ben Sheehan These days, the signs that the US Constitution is endangered are growing all around us. From voter suppression laws, to measures to outlaw civil rights protests to flaunting the constitutional right to reproductive freedom, the assault on our constitutional rights is terrifying. The checks and balances that keep the our three branches of government in equilibrium is being eroded by the ever-growing power of the executive and the judiciary. Meanwhile, civics seems to have largely been dropped from school curriculums. Ben Sheehan’s book for kids, What Does The Constitution Say? is a welcome corrective to the lack of civic awareness in the US. Featuring fun facts and illustrations, the book is a clear and simple guide to understanding how our American government really works. Ben Sheehan is a former executive producer at Funny Or Die. He’s spearheaded several efforts to boost voting and voting education. Ben Sheehan is also the author of OMG WTF Does the Constitution Actually Say? Fun quizz and study guide to What Does the Constitution Say? Noah Feldman The US Constitution, the document we all revere for its protection of rights, was founded on a terrible compromise —the protection of slavery in order to preserve the Union of states both slave and free. But after the Civil War, the Constitution profoundly changed. It became an Emancipation Constitution with the addition of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. How that happened is at the heart of Noah Feldman’s book, The Broken Constitution. It’s the first book to tell the story of how President Lincoln broke the Constitution in order to remake it. It offers a riveting narrative of his constitutional choices and how he made them. Noah Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Bloomberg. His books include Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Justices and Divided By God: America’s Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It. He’s also the host of the podcast Deep Background with Noah Feldman. Read an Excerpt from The Broken Constitution Read Feldman’s op ed, Lincoln Broke the Constitution. Let’s Finally Fix It 

We talk with Leonard Rubenstein about his book Perilous Medicine: The Struggle to Protect Health Care from the Violence of War. Then, Stan Cox connects the dots between climate chaos, racism and the next pandemic. We talk with him about his book, The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic. Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice. Leonard Rubenstein Military violence against hospitals, patients, and health workers has become a common feature of modern war. Think Kosovo, Yemen, Syria and Occupied Palestine. The attacks destroy lives. They also destroy the capacity of health systems to tend to those in need. Yet little is being done about this abomination. That’s why Leonard Rubenstein wrote the book Perilous Medicine. A human rights lawyer who has investigated atrocities against health workers around the world, Rubenstein tells of the dangers health workers face during conflict and the legal, political, and moral struggle to protect them. Leonard Rubenstein is professor and director of the Program on Human Rights and Health in Conflict at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He founded the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition and is a former president of Physicians for Human Rights. Stan Cox 2020 was a year defined by crisis. For decades, scientists have been sounding the alarm about the urgency of addressing climate change, but it took COVID-19 to show that the future of human life on Earth is interconnected and at risk. While the virus quickly spread across the globe, extreme weather events compounded the suffering and economic fallout. In the U.S., outrage over the murder of George Floyd expanded to include a growing awareness of the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on communities of color. In The Path to a Livable Future, Stan Cox makes plain the connections between the multiple crises facing us today, and provides a vision for how to resolve them. He shows how we can work together to address the climate emergency, white supremacy, and our vulnerability to future pandemics all at once. Our future depends on it. Stan Cox is the author of many books, including The Green New Deal and Beyond. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and more. He works for the Land Institute in Kansas.

We talk with deep sea explorer Edith Widder about Below the Edge of Darkness: A Memoir Of Exploring Light And Life In The Deep Sea. Then, we revisit our 2017 interview with Sy Montgomery about the book she so-authored with Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Tamed And Untamed: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind. Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice. Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show. Edith Widder Fireflies do it. So does the tiny bristle mouth fish and the appropriately named stoplight fish, along with countless other denizens of our deep oceans. Produce light, that is, or bioluminescence. Edith Widder is one of the world’s leading experts on the phenomenon of marine bio-luminescence. She was also the first person to get moving images of the legendary giant squid. In her thrilling memoir, Below the Edge of Darkness, Widder describes the wonders of the deep ocean as she pursues her questions about one of the most important and widely used forms of communication in nature. In the process, she reveals hidden worlds and a dazzling menagerie of behaviors and animals, from microbes to leviathans, many never before seen. Below the Edge of Darkness urges us to pay attention to what we are learning about this least explored part of Earth’s biosphere before it’s too late. Watch Edith Widder’s TED talk about finding the giant squid Sy Montogmery In 2017, we spoke with Sy Montgomery, famed author of The Soul of an Octopus, about a collection of essays she and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas wrote, Tamed and Untamed: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind. Click here to read more about the book.

Who does the dirty work in our society? And who benefits? We talk with Eyal Press about his new book, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America. Then, In the US, more than 23,000 animals, not including fish, are slaughtered for our food every minute. We talk with Melanie Joy about the tenth anniversary of her groundbreaking book, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism. Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice. Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show. Eyal Press The last time we spoke with Eyal Press, it was about his book Beautiful Souls. It was about people who take great risks to oppose unjust orders. Now, he’s back with a book about those who do the “dirty work” that society considers essential but morally compromised. In his book Dirty Work, Press examines the drone pilots who carry out targeted assassinations; the undocumented immigrants who man the “kill floors” of industrial slaughterhouses; the guards who patrol the wards of America’s most violent and abusive prisons and more. But who benefits from this dirty work? And why is it mostly invisible? Press lifts the veil that keeps us shielded from an array of morally questionable activities that other, less privileged people perform in our name. Eyal Press is an author and journalist who writes for The New Yorker, The New York Times and other publications. In addition to Dirty Work, he’s the author of Absolute Convictions and Beautiful Souls. Dirty Work was named one of the 10 best books of 2021 by Publishers Weekly. Melanie Joy When Melanie Joy first published her book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows in 2019, there were far fewer vegans than today. But still, the unbridled slaughter of billions of animals under conditions of the utmost cruelty still goes on every year in the US alone. It’s slaughter that’s kept hidden from us, Joy argues, because if people could see it, they would abandon “carnism” in droves. In our conversation, she tells us about the huge cost, not only to animals, but to the environment, to consumers and to meat industry workers under the industrialized holocaust that is the meat industry. Melanie Joy is a psychologist specializing in relationships, communication, and social transformation. She is the award-winning author of six books. Download the first chapter of Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows

We talk with David Talbot about the book he co-authored with his sister Margaret Talbot, By The Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution. Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice. Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show. David Talbot The 1960s and 70s were a time of political and cultural upheaval. Those who took active part in the  movements of the day were convinced that they would revolutionize America. They would bring about racial justice, end US imperialism, unite the working class and liberate women from their patriarchal chains. But, half a century later, it’s clear the struggle continues—and the threats against social and economic justice are only   multiplying. So, was it all in vain? And what can we learn from the successes and failures of those movements? In By The Light of Burning Dreams, New York Times bestselling author David Talbot and New Yorker journalist Margaret Talbot illuminate “America’s second revolutionary generation” in their gripping history of one of the most dynamic eras of the twentieth century.  By examining seven leaders of the social movements of the time, including Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, Russell Means of the American Indian Movement, Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers, and the women behind the Jane Collective feminist abortion network in Chicago, they reveal the insights that galvanized these modern revolutionaries, leading them to create alliances between individual movements and across race, class, and gender divides.   David Talbot is a journalist, author, activist and independent historian. He is the author of six books including, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years and The Devil’s Chessboard. Margaret Talbot is a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine.  Listen to an audio excerpt from By the Light of Burning Dreams