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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Arcatao, El Salvador is a small town in the mountains on the border of El Salvador and Honduras. On today’s show, host Bert Zipperer speaks with Barbara Alvarado, TJ Hinds, and Claudia Enz about the Madison Arcatao Sister City Project. They talk about the history of the organization and their upcoming 40th anniversary celebration.

The Madison Arcatao Sister City Project was founded in 1986 during the Salvadoran Civil War by concerned Madisonians in defense of human rights. The relationship continued after the 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords that ended the 12 year war during which an estimated 70,000 people were disappeared.

They discuss the US’s role in the Salvadoran Civil War and how the people of El Salvador were brutally oppressed. The Sister City Project worked with Salvadoran churches that were steeped in liberation theology to support the people of El Salvador to rise up. Alvarado shares a Salvadoran saying, “solo el pueblo, salva el pueblo,” or only the people can save the people.

The current president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has revived the oppression of the Salvadoran people, under the rhetoric of being tough on crime. Alvarado, Hinds, and Enz discuss the lack of due process in El Salvador and how the Bukele is using taking political prisoners and creating industrial-scale prisons like CECOT.

Featured image of a sign outside a church in Arcatao, El Salvador via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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The hot summer months often mean full immersion in the natural world for those who grow their own food. On today’s show, host Douglas Haynes speaks with master gardener and social media star, Toni Farmer, who has made it her life’s work to educate people about the joys of gardening and solutions to the broken food system.

Farmer’s work is deeply personal, and often her videos take place in her own backyard vegetable garden where she shares tips and tricks and invites viewers to commiserate about daily struggles with pests or the weather. Home gardens were once the norm, but went out fashion post WWII when Americans prioritized convenience. “All the skills of growing food went away in a single generation,” says Farmer.

But people want to regain that knowledge, and Farmer showed up at the right time with the right knowledge to feed that hunger. Her social media accounts went viral in January 2025 when the Trump administration first implemented tariffs. Now, her posts educate people about the immediate and long-impacts of policy decisions like tariffs and the war with Iran. Her recent series “The Plan” has garnered hundreds of thousands of views. In it, Farmer prepares her audience for the looming global food crisis and encourages them to work with their neighbors to build food security.

Farmer says she’s alarmed by the possibility of price shocks in the fall and is concerned by a recent social media trend of conflating conventional and organic farming. She also discusses how regenerative agriculture is the antidote to the cruel and extractive aspects of commercial agriculture and how immersion in your home garden is an antidote to the isolation of our digital lives. At the end of the day, it shouldn’t be a privilege to eat healthy food, says Farmer.

Toni Farmer is an adjunct professor at both the University of Pennsylvania and Rowan University in the department of Earth and Environmental Science. At Penn, she teaches Regenerative Agriculture and Integrated Pest Management and at Rowan she teaches The Future of Food, a class about the impact of climate change on agriculture. She holds a Masters of Environmental Science from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master Gardener certification from Rutgers. Toni provides the garden video content for SJMagMedia, winning “best of” for 2021. She appears every Tuesday on Fox29 Philadelphia at 3:30pm helping tri-state regional viewers with garden tips. Learning to grow food is a critical tool for healthy food access. You can find her on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook as ToniFarmersGarden.

Featured image of a community garden via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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For many, parasites elicit feelings of disgust or fear, but today’s guest has developed an affection for these small and mighty creatures. Award winning entomologist and evolutionary biologist Dino Martins joins host Patty Peltekos to discuss his new book, Hidden Creatures: Luscious Leeches, Bashful Botflies, and the Wondrous, History-Shaping World of Parasites.

Martins grew up in rural Kenya where he was surrounded by animal and insect life and cultivated a fascination with mango worms and bot flies. He says we humans are just one of the organisms on this planet and that there’s plenty to learn from parasites because they hold the fabric of life together. They’re present in all areas of the cycle of life, even in our microbiome. He says, “One must truly love and seek to understand all of nature or, alas, you will come to love or understand none of it.”

They discuss the rise of ticks in Wisconsin and around the world, and how these vectors of disease pose serious health problems. Martins says that ticks are resilient and adaptive and they’re simply taking advantage of growth opportunities that humans have created for them through habitat disruptions, loss of biodiversity, and climate change. Invertebrates and insects are in decline all over the world, but parasites are on the rise due to human interference in natural systems.

Martins has a fascination with the minimalist but deeply feeling tapeworm, and describes how some parasites manipulate their hosts and how others are mutualists. Storytelling and art go hand in hand with Martin’s scientific work. He drew the art in Hidden Creatures and asks his students to draw insects when he takes them into the field.

Dino Martins is an award-winning entomologist and evolutionary biologist. A professor at Stony Brook University, he has served as the director of the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya, founded by Dr. Richard Leakey, and previously as the director of the Mpala Research Centre. He holds a PhD in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University. His research and writing have been featured in Smithsonian Magazine, The Guardian, TED, the BBC, Granta, and National Geographic. He lives on Long Island and in Malindi, Kenya.

Featured image of the cover of Hidden Creatures: Luscious Leeches, Bashful Botflies, and the Wondrous, History-Shaping World of Parasites.

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On today’s show, host Ali Muldrow is in conversation with Sophie Lewis about her new book, Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe. Lewis describes her journey from being a “queer runaway” child to a professional writer as an adult. Her writing confronts the white, bourgeois feminist worldview and advocates for a radical embrace of “femme” and a future with abundance for all.

In Femmephilia, Lewis challenges readers to take femme seriously because there’s still a confusion about what femininity means, for anti-feminists and feminists alike. Lewis distinguishes femme from femininity, calling the former a verb and a practice in the service of anti-oppression and anti-fascism. In theorizing femme, Lewis unpacks class and capitalism, rape culture, racial supremacy, and coloniality. Lewis says we shouldn’t turn away from “girly” things because in them we can find joy, pleasure, and excess.

They also discuss the invisibilized labor of care work, the ideology of the nuclear family, and Hilary Clinton and Kamala Harris’s unsuccessful presidential bids. Lewis wants us to move away from anti-utopian compromise and believe that we can have bread and roses and hormones too.

Sophie Lewis is a self-described ex-academic and feminist writer living in Philadelphia. She is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, Enemy Feminisms, and finally Femmephilia, an essay collection which just came out a few weeks ago. Her next book is called The Liberation of Children, and will be out from Penguin in 2027.

Featured image of the cover of Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe.

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With the upcoming Midterm elections and the balance of power in Congress up for grabs, people are concerned that the Trump administration will meddle in election results. On today’s show, guest host Tony Castañeda speaks with election expert Stephen Richer, who says we should have confidence in the free and fair elections process that our local election officials oversee.

In Richer’s recent article for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, he reaffirms the 2020 presidential election results in Wisconsin. There were several post-election audits that found no cheating or mass fraud. But Richer’s criticism of a Trump supporting group’s audit of the 2020 Maricopa County election results earned him the ire of the President and MAGA supporters.

There are real concerns coming from the federal government, from Trump’s executive orders on election administration that are held up in the courts to the scaling back of cyber security services that are provided to election administrators.

Richer says that the success and security of primary elections this year is a good sign, and he encourages listeners to get involved as temporary election workers, share facts with their friends and family, and reach out to election administrators if you have concerns. At the end of the day, election officials are your neighbors, and we should be concerned not only by the lack of trust in free and fair elections but by the lack of trust in our communities.

Stephen Richer is a Fellow and Lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, Legal Fellow at the Cato Institute, former elected Republican in Maricopa County, and former lawyer. He’s also on the board of the Democracy Defenders Action.

Featured image of a ballot machine via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

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