Beth Pinsker and L. Annette Binder explore caring for aging parents, from the financial realities of elder care to Alzheimer’s, memory, love and loss.
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. American fascism didn’t begin with Donald Trump, or even with the rise of fascism in Europe. Its roots reach deep into our own history. America’s road to fascism began with a big lie about who counts as fully human. That’s what historian Joseph Kelly reveals in his book, The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818–1915. Kelly traces a long struggle between two visions of the country. One rests on the Declaration’s promise of equality. The other claims that people aren’t equal, that white peo
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. A machine that never judges us may also teach us to forget how human relationships work. Writer’s Voice talks with Victoria Hetherington about The Friend Machine, her investigation into people who seek friendship, therapy and love from AI. We explore loneliness, simulated care, privacy, emotional dependence and the extraordinary power of the corporations building these systems. “That’s probably my primary concern, that moral de-skilling might occur.” — Victoria Hetherington Then, we revisit our 2025 conve
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. What does it take to win back a democracy, and who is our government really supposed to serve? This week on Writer’s Voice, I talk with anthropologist Ida Susser about her book, The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy. She tells the story of a movement in France that began with anger over a diesel tax and grew into a much deeper defense of public services, economic dignity, and democratic power. “There is no other thing to do for democracy, but fight for your rights every single way and day that you
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. Can science fiction help us imagine a way through climate crisis, runaway corporate power, and the rise of AI? This week, we talk with John Feffer about Songlands and Portia Elan about Homebound, two speculative novels that ask how we can make a livable future in an age of crisis. Songlands, the final novel in Feffer’s Splinterlands trilogy, takes us into a climate-ravaged world where nations have fractured and a biotech corporation holds enormous power. Yet poetry, collective action, and a conscious, car
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. The Cuban Revolution transformed a nation. It also ended the Mob’s dream of turning Havana into the center of a global criminal empire. And it divided families. Writer’s Voice talks with Cuban American historian Ada Ferrer about her memoir, Keeper of My Kin. When Ferrer was ten months old, her mother carried her out of Cuba without saying goodbye to Ferrer’s nine-year-old half-brother, Poli. The separation was supposed to be temporary. It lasted seventeen years. “We tend to think that history happens up h
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. Economic insecurity is reshaping America’s workforce. Will that bring college-educated and non-college educated workers together? For decades, Americans were told that education was the pathway to the middle class. Get a degree, work hard, and professional success would follow. But that promise has weakened. In Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber argues that millions of college graduates increasingly face the same insecurity that has lon
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. What does courage demand when freedom is threatened? This week on Writer’s Voice, two conversations ask one of the hardest questions any of us can face. What does it really mean to resist? First, journalist Gal Beckerman joins Writer’s Voice to talk about his book How to Be a Dissident. Drawing on figures from Hannah Arendt to Alexei Navalny, Osip Mandelstam and Etty Hillesum, he argues that dissidents aren’t superheroes. They’re ordinary people who decide they can no longer live with inaction. “I really
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. Patriotism demands more than pride, it demands moral courage. This Independence Day episode of Writer’s Voice explores two remarkable women who believed loving America meant challenging it to live up to its highest ideals. First, filmmaker, author and activist John de Graaf discusses From Sea to Shining Sea, his documentary about Katharine Lee Bates, author of America the Beautiful. Far from writing a triumphal anthem, Bates created what de Graaf calls a patriotic prayer, a vision of a nation grounded in
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. Who gets to tell the story, and who gets erased? This week on Writer’s Voice, we talk with media scholar Robin Andersen about her book The Complicit Lens: U.S. Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza. Andersen’s argument is blunt: the American press didn’t just fail to report accurately on Gaza. Through what she calls “the complicit lens,” it helped make the genocide possible. “It’s no small charge to say that establishment media is complicit in a genocide. And I do believe that they know what they’re
For SEO, I’d make it shorter and keyword-rich: Alex Woodard discusses Ordinary Soil, a sweeping multigenerational novel about a Choctaw farming family in the Oklahoma Panhandle, exploring the deep connections between land, food, health, and identity. Then, in an encore interview, environmental journalist Carey Gillam talks about The Monsanto Papers and the landmark lawsuit in which groundskeeper Lee Johnson took on Monsanto and won.
Writer’s Voice talks with journalist Anand Gopal about his remarkable book Days of Love and Rage. It’s a deeply human story of the Syrian revolution, the democratic experiment in Manbij, the forces that undermined it, and what it can teach us about hope today.
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. Episode Summary What if the story we tell about civilization is wrong? What if human history isn’t a steady march from “primitive” hunter-gatherers to ever more advanced societies, but something far messier, more inventive, and more fragile — a long experiment of adaptation, collapse, … Continue reading Lost Worlds: The Untold Story of Human Adaptation →
In this episode of Writer's Voice, Francesca speaks with Omar Zahzah, Palestinian-American scholar, activist, journalist, and author of Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle. Zahzah offers the first book-length analysis of how major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok, systematically suppress Palestinian content, and how that suppression is structurally connected to the financial, ideological, and political ties between Silicon Valley and the Israeli state.
This week on Writer’s Voice: Elizabeth Vartkessian discusses The Undeserving and the human realities behind America’s death penalty system. Plus an excerpt from my 2020 interview with Abdul El-Sayed on “the epidemic of insecurity” shaping American life.
This week on Writer's Voice: Tim Weed explores psychedelics, Mesoamerican mythology, and consciousness in The Gatepost. Farah Naz Rishi talks grief, siblings, humor, and a runaway cockatoo in The Flightless Birds of New Hope.
Caroline Bicks joins Writer’s Voice to talk about Monsters in the Archives, her fascinating exploration of Stephen King’s private papers, creative process, and the deep emotional fears beneath his horror fiction. Then Marie Adelmann discusses Adjunct, her darkly funny and painfully real novel about precarious academic labor, student debt, and the exploitation built into today’s university system. Two compelling conversations about fear, power, and survival in contemporary American life.
This week’s Writer’s Voice: Julia Cooke discusses Starry and Restless, her portrait of Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Emily Hahn, women whose adventurous lives helped transform modern journalism. And Sophie Pavelle talks about To Have or To Hold, a deeply engaging exploration of symbiosis and the astonishing partnerships that make life possible.
For Earth Day on Writer’s Voice, Bill McKibben on why solar may be arriving faster than we realize. Then, Anne Fadiman on frogs, pronouns, and the hidden meanings inside ordinary things.
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. In this episode of Writer’s Voice, Francesca Rheannon speaks with Andy Lee Roth of Project Censored about the State of the Free Press 2026, marking 50 years of tracking underreported stories. Then, Michael Ellsberg discusses Truth and Consequence, a powerful collection of writings by … Continue reading Free Press 2026, Media Censorship & Daniel Ellsberg’s Moral Legacy →
