It takes the average Latina, 12 extra months to earn what the average White, non-Hispanic man earns. That is because Latinas are only paid .55 cents to the dollar of […]

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Because of the US’s war with Iran, people around the world are experiencing food and price shocks. On today’s show, guest host Patty Peltekos is in conversation with environmental historian Kate Brown, author of the new book Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City, to talk about how people living in cities can contribute to their own food sovereignty.

Modern zoning laws too often prevent people from creating gardens in cities. Brown talks about how it once was: people farming the commons using what we would now call regenerative agriculture. That was before the invention of private property, consumer culture, and the enclosure movement in Europe that transformed land and labor.

But people are pursuing tiny gardens as an antidote to industrial agriculture. From Washington, DC to Berlin, Brown profiles the ingenious ways people are growing tomatoes instead of turf grass, defying unjust laws, and sharing their bounty with neighbors. And states as different as Maine and Florida are creating legislation to make it easier for people to create their own tiny gardens.

If you want to start gardening, Brown says the first thing to do is find a friend to garden with. They also talk about migrant labor in the US, how Brown decolonized her research, and how industrial equipment, fertilizers, and insecticides are waging war on the environment.

Kate Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of several prize-winning histories, including Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013) and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Harvard 2004). Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton/Penguin Lane, 2019), translated into eight languages, won the Marshall Shulman and Reginald Zelnik Prizes for the best book in East European History, plus the Silver Medal for Laura Shannon Book Prize. It was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pushkin House Award and the Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage. Brown was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2009, a Carnegie Fellow and winner of the American Academy’s Berlin Prize in 2016. Her latest book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past and Present of Urban Self-Provisioning was published by Norton in February 2026. Brown’s work on Tiny Gardens has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. She has published a short segments from this work in the New Yorker, Mother Jones and Lithub.

Featured image of the cover of Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City.

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When Black women mobilize, democracy wins, says Atima Omara. She’s written a new book called The Instigators: How Black Women Have Been Essential to American Democracy (And What We Can Learn from Them) and joins host Ali Muldrow to talk about how Black women have fought against racism and sexism and instigated for a more just society. As voters prepare to cast their ballots in the upcoming state and federal elections, the future of our multi-racial democracy stands in the balance.

Omara says it’s important to work within the Democratic party in order to make it even more inclusive, like Fannie Lou Hamer did. She says the most effective politicians are the ones who stay focused on everyday people.

Omara wrote this book with other Black women and people of color in mind. She wanted to decenter the voices of people who are white, male, cis-gender, wealthy, raised in cultural centers on the coasts, etc. They also talk about the recent wave of democratic socialist candidates, white comfort and patriarchy, and how Black women are to thank for so many intellectual and cultural touchstones.

Atima Omara is the Founder and Chief Strategist of Omara Strategy Group—a progressive political and advocacy consulting firm—and the author of the new book The Instigators: How Black Women Are Essential to American Democracy (And What We Can Learn from Them).

Featured image of the cover of The Instigators: How Black Women Are Essential to American Democracy (And What We Can Learn from Them).

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