KPFA - Against the Grain
Against the Grain is a long-running public affairs program from KPFA that explores ideas, in-depth analysis, and commentary on political, economic, social, and cultural issues. The show is aimed at progressive and radical thinking and activism, offering critical perspectives often missing from mainstream media. It is produced and hosted by Sasha Lilley. Each episode features conversations and analysis with writers, scholars, and organizers.
Episodes
Organizing in a Time of Emergency
How should we organize while the planet is burning and authoritarianism is intensifying? Chris Dixon reflects on lessons for the present, drawn from decades of activism on the left – for a moment where interest in left politics has grown significantly, yet while the organizational infrastructures of the left are greatly diminished.
Chris Dixon, For the Long Haul: How to Stay in the Fight for a Bet
The Yellow School Bus
What was the most powerful technology introduced into schools in the past century? You might answer the computer, or something like Zoom, or even the slide projector. But scholar Antero Garcia argues that it was the humble yellow school bus. Buses have been central to the struggle to desegregate education. And school buses are a zone — and mainly an unnoticed one — in which many working class chil
Fund Drive Special: The Power of Protest
Longtime activist Annie Leonard discusses the rich tradition of protest in this country and why we need to defend it, in the face of anti-protest laws, SLAPP suits, and diktats from the Trump administration.
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Fund Drive Special: Building the Repressive Machinery of Immigration Control
Historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez argues that our immigration laws were put in place first to protect enslavers, and later elites more broadly, from the insurgent radicalism of migrants, starting with the Haitian Revolution. She looks at the modern construction of immigration control both as a type of counterinsurgency and labor control.
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Fund Drive Special: The Black Anti-Fascist Tradition
The history of African American antifascism is often overlooked, from Ida B Wells-Barnett’s struggle against lynchings to activism against police violence and the carceral state today. In our increasingly authoritarian times, scholar Jeanelle Hope discusses what we can learn from the black antifascist tradition.
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Fund Drive Special: Erasing the History of Racism
American education has long been a battleground, but struggles over what students learn has become particularly intense right now, when teaching about racism has been prohibited in multiple states. Sociologist Nikki Khanna reflects on what’s missing, including key episodes from US history – from the United States attempts to starve native people, to the massacre of African Americans in Tulsa, Okla
Fund Drive Special: Gabor Mate on Capitalism and Health
Canadian physician Gabor Mate discusses the maladies that are the norm in our society — how stress and trauma, accentuated by the divisions of class, gender, and race, damage our lives and bodies.
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Fund Drive Special: Howard Zinn on His Life and Times
Historian and activist, teacher and playwright — Howard Zinn told a different history of the United States, one of struggle between those on the bottom against those on top.
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Fund Drive Special: Sex and Strength
Are women as strong as men? According to science writer Starre Vartan, in some cases, they are stronger. She argues that scientific research over the last several decades shows that culture shapes strength as much as hormones — and that much of what we presume about sex differences, strength, and athleticism harms all of us.
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Photo by Peter Zhan on Un
Fund Drive Special: The Long Struggle Against Equality
Elites, especially in tech, over at least the last decade have espoused repugnant ideas arguing that extreme social inequality is not only inevitable, but desirable. Acclaimed historian Kim Phillips-Fein argues that there is a long US tradition promoting wealth inequality that has once again moved from the shadows into the mainstream.
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When 911 Calls Go Wrong
Calling 911 can save lives. But all too often phoning the emergency hotline leads to maiming or death at the hands of the police. Rebecca Neusteter describes the origins of the emergency response system as a means of quashing social unrest, out of the urban uprisings of the 1960s.
Rebecca Neusteter, 911, What’s Your Emergency? The Promise and Peril of Crisis Response The New Press, 2026
Photo by Y
New York City and Health Justice
Some of the most important struggles for health justice have taken place in New York City — from the Young Lords to ACT UP, from battles to make school lunches free to the Fight for $15 for low wage workers. Public health scholar Nicholas Freudenberg discusses the lessons he’s gleaned from fifty years of activism, including the need to start with people’s daily living conditions.
Nicholas Freudenb
All Consuming
We live our lives often through the things we buy — presuming the more we have, the happier we’ll be. Have we always thought this way? Economist Mark Joseph Stelzner examines the need for ever more consumption under capitalism — and reflects on what our lives might be like if we exchanged the quest for goods for more leisure.
Mark Joseph Stelzner, Growth Machines: On the Hollow Joys of Consumption
When the State Kills by Lethal Injection
Almost 98% of all state executions in the U.S. are conducted by lethal injection, purportedly a quick and painless death. Corinna Barrett Lain states nothing could be further from the truth — but that it’s in the interests of the killing state that we imagine it that way.
Corinna Barrett Lain, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection NYU Press, 2025
Photo by Raghavendra V
Why Do Rural Poor People Support the GOP?
Why do poor, often sick, rural people vote for Republicans even after they slash funding for Medicaid and close rural hospitals? Michael Shepherd describes how conservative politicians and media have successfully built support for those cuts by claiming programs like Medicaid only help city dwellers, people of color, and immigrants.
Michael E. Shepherd, Rural Pain, Republican Gain: How the Republi
Unlikely World Makers
When we think of world makers, we’re unlikely to picture a flower. Yet flowers completely transformed our planet, giving us rain forests, altering coastlines, producing the food we eat, and enticing our pre-human ancestors to climb down from the trees. And they did that partially through reshaping the formerly adversarial relationship between plants and insects into one of mutual aid and cooperati
The Black Labor Movement
The struggle for labor across the color line has often been credited to white activists. However, as sociologist Cedric de Leon argues, the black labor movement, independently organized outside of the official union movement, propelled such efforts. He discusses the black labor movement’s divisions, including in the face of the state’s attempt to destroy it. (Encore presentation.)
Cedric de Leon,
Queen of the Muckrakers
Jessica Mitford revived muckraking journalism in the United States, shaping generations of investigative writers who followed her. She also lived a committed life on the left, despite her ultra-reactionary English upper class origins. Carla Kaplan argues that Mitford is woman for our times.
Carla Kaplan, Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford Harper, 2025
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Big Tech’s Worldview
Big Tech’s owners see themselves as visionaries — as singularly capable of understanding and shaping the future — in contrast to the rest of us. Adrian Daub explores the worldview of Silicon Valley’s owners.
Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Governing Stanford University Press, 2026
Photo by Igor Shalyminov on Unsplash
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Profiting from Drug Legalization
After a century of drug prohibition, during which the use of many illicit drugs increased, states and countries are moving to decriminalize the usage of certain psychoactive substances. As corporations rush to profit, legal scholar Kojo Koram argues for the legalization of drugs without commercial gain.
Kojo Koram, The Next Fix: The Winners and Losers in the Future of Drugs Verso, 2026
Photo by Fr
U.S. Capitalism, Empire, and Anti-Asian Violence
Recessions, trade wars, labor unrest — in moments of societal crisis in the United States, Asian-Americans have been perennially targeted, from the destruction of Chinatowns by white mobs, to the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during WW2, to attacks against Asians during Covid. Historian Scott Kurashige reflects on more than 175 years of anti-Asian violence and its connection to U.S. empire
Beckert on Global Capitalism
Capitalism has transformed the world like no other force, which historian Sven Beckert calls a fundamental break in human history. Beckert traces the emergence and expansion of capitalism, arguing that we can best understand the present by coming to terms with its past. (Full-length presentation.)
Sven Beckert, Capitalism: A Global History Penguin Press, 2025
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Immigrant Detention and the “Worst of the Worst”
The Trump administration has justified the mass incarceration and deportation of immigrants by asserting that it’s going after the most violent offenders. Scholars of law and punishment, Keramet Reiter and Joshua Page, delve into the designation of the worst of the worse — from Three Strikes laws to longterm solitary confinement to mass detention under inhumane conditions and the transfer of immig
Ancient Trees and Fossil Capitalism
For as long as we’ve known, humans have revered ancient trees. We’ve also destroyed them, especially since the advent of colonialism and fossil fuel capitalism. Environmental historian Jared Farmer reflects on what trees illuminate about our past and potential future. And forest activist and writer Greg King discusses the decimation of the California redwoods and the fight to preserve them.
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What’s Money For?
We all know that we need money to survive, but most of us don’t spend much time considering its form and uses. Debt, interest, GDP, and capital just seem to follow almost natural laws. But J.W. Mason argues that we misunderstand money, and its power over our lives, at our peril.
J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev, Against Money University of Chicago Press, 2026
Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash
