This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with Samuel Miller McDonald, a writer and geographer focusing on human-ecology, theory, and history. He holds a doctorate from Brasenose College, University of Oxford and degrees from Yale University and College of the Atlantic. He has written essays and analysis for The Nation, The Guardian, The New Republic, Current Affairs, and elsewhere, and has contributed interviews to BBC Ideas, VICE News Tonight, and various radio and podcast programs. Progress — the focus of this episode — is his first book.

Progress is power. Narratives of progress, the stories we tell about whether a society is moving in the right or the wrong direction, are immensely potent. Progress has built cities, flattened mountains, charted the globe, delved the oceans and space, created wealth, opportunity, and remarkable innovation, and ushered in a new epoch unique in our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history. But the modern story of progress is also a very dangerous fiction. It shapes our sense of what progress means, and justifies what we will do to achieve it ― no matter the cost. We continue to subscribe to a set of myths, about dominion, growth, extraction, and expansion, that have fueled our success, but now threaten our — and all species’ — existence on a planet in crisis. In Progress, geographer Samuel Miller McDonald offers a radical new perspective on the myths upon which the modern world is built, illuminating its destructive lineage and suggesting an urgent alternative. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across anthropology, history, philosophy and geography, McDonald argues that if humanity is to thrive, then we must dismantle, reimagine, and create anew what progress means.

Grab a copy of Progress by Samuel Miller McDonald here.

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This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with Dr. Elaine Lawless who has devoted her career to ethnographic research in the fields of folklore, religion, and women’s and gender studies. She is the author of ten academic books and numerous articles. Her work has included studies of women’s literature, human rights, social justice and violence against women. Only Girls Bleed, her first novel, and the focus of this episode, draws on women’s storytelling and opposing cultural beliefs to illustrate how the political wars concerning abortion can tragically affect and “limit the free movement” of women and girls in the U.S. today. She has also co-produced two documentary films: Joy Unspeakable and Taking Pinhook. In 2003, she founded and produced the Troubling Violence Performance Project, with Professor Heather Carver of the University of Missouri Theatre Department.

Only Girls Bleed was inspired and informed by Elaine’s many years of ethnographic research on the lives and stories of women facing crisis and discrimination. The novel features the harrowing journey of a Missouri mother and her ten-year-old pregnant daughter seeking an open reproductive clinic following the Supreme Court decision that rescinded the landmark Roe v Wade decision. Gripping and emotionally charged, Only Girls Bleed is a haunting portrait of a mother’s fierce love and the lengths she’ll go to protect her child; a brutal reckoning of the reality of a country which refuses a woman’s right to choose, in even the most harrowing circumstances; and a tribute to community and female solidarity.

Grab a copy of Only Girls Bleed by Dr. Elaine Lawless here.

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This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with writer, editor, and musician Sam Sodomsky. Currently, Sam is a senior editor at Pitchfork. Since 2016, he has worked at the publication in various positions across reviews, news, and video, where he launched the "Shop Talk" series that involves interviewing the staff at record stores. As a freelance writer, Sam’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Rolling Stone, Uncut, Bandcamp, and The Independent. The Bird Calls is the name Sam started using in 2006 to write, record, and perform singer-songwriter music with vocals and guitar. He has made a n abundance of albums since then, but Sam only started counting them officially around 2022 when I started releasing with the label Ruination Record Co. Sam’s latest album, Take Leave, is the focus of this episode.

Listen to, and grab a copy of Take Leave by The Bird Calls here!

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