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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This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with poet and film producer Janet R. Kirchheimer. Janet is the author of How to Spot One of Us, a collection of poems about the Holocaust and her family (Clal, 2007). She is also the producer of the award-winning film AFTER: Poetry Destroys Silence, a cinematic performance documentary in which contemporary poets, both Jewish and non-Jewish, confront the Holocaust and its aftermath and discuss the responsibility of the spoken word to respond. The first of its kind, where poetry and cinema combine and transcend, AFTER is an exploration of poetry written about the Holocaust and unthinkable trauma in general. In it, contemporary poets talk about the importance and necessity for poetry in a world that still grapples with genocide. Rather than seeing the devastation, AFTER shows how poets respond to catastrophe and write in its aftermath. The film is ultimately about human resiliency, the power and courage to forge new lives, and the value of poetry in looking to the past to help create a better future. Named one of the best films of 2024 by Rogerebert.com, AFTER won Best Feature Documentary at the 2025 Montreal Independent Film Festival. It is a film that, dazzlingly, interlaces sequences of music, archival footage, personal photographs, and documents to offer a modern chronicle of poets examining history and the current day. AFTER serves as both a model and a warning for an increasingly divided and violent planet.

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This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with The Baklava Guy (aka Roy Donk), founder and operator of Good Baklava, a business that imports baklava from Turkey, bakes it in The Kingdom of New Jersey, and sells it throughout the tri-state area, and beyond. When the Knicks made their historic playoff run, a guy handing out baklava to fans outside the stadium became one of New York's most unexpected viral personalities. Today you’ll catch him in McCarren Park, Fort Greene Park, Rockaway Beach on the streets of Bushwick slingin’ bak, or even at Coachella Valley Music Festival and on Phish tour.

In this episode host Michael Shields and The Baklava Guy talk about where the love affair with baklava began and how the whole operation got its start. They discuss what makes Good Baklava so delicious and where it is sourced from, how to eat it correctly, and the myriad of places that The Baklava Guy can be found sharing his deliciousness. They also get into what it’s like selling baklava on Phish lot, what it felt like to be in the midst of the Knicks championship run, and so much more.

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This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with internationally-acclaimed pianist and cultural visionary Lara Downes. Recently honored as Classical Woman of the Year by NPR’s Performance Today, Lara is a visionary trailblazer who occupies a unique position of visibility through her dynamic work as a sought-after soloist, a Billboard Chart-topping recording artist, beloved NPR personality as creator and host of the video series Amplify with Lara Downes, and host of “Evening Music” on Classical California. In 2024, Lara launched The Declaration Project, a national initiative marking the 250th anniversary of the United States by gathering together American communities to find common ground in exploring the core essence of our founding promise: the unalienable rights of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Recently, Lara releases Hold These Truths, a new album that carries the same larger idea through American music past and present, which features music stretching from before the nation’s founding to works by composers shaping the sound of America now, with each track introduced by reflections Lara gathered on the road. In this episode you can learn about all this, and more.

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This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with Vincent Doumeizel, Senior Adviser on the oceans to the United Nations Global Compact as well as director of the Food Programme at the Lloyd’s Register Foundation. A self-described optimist and global citizen, Vincent has devoted himself to promoting environmental solutions based on sea resources, especially seaweed. Vincent is the author of The Seaweed Revolution which argues that seaweed is a vital, underutilized resource with the potential to solve major global crises, from Climate Change and food security to plastic pollution. His latest book — The Power of Plankton : How Plankton Made Life on Earth Possible and Why It’s The Key to our Future — is the focus of this episode. The Power of Plankton uncovers the hidden connections between these microscopic organisms and the survival of our planet. Plankton, many will be surprised to learn, represents 90% of ocean biomass and is the source of life on our planet. It is responsible for oxygen, our rains, the rocks, our cliffs, our food, as well as our climate. In The Power of Plankton readers will encounter unforgettable stories such as a scientist who survived 65 days crossing the Atlantic eating only plankton, and the truth behind ancient myths of “blood rain” traced back to plankton blooms. The Power of Plankton is a timely exploration of the smallest life forms with the largest impact — and why the future of our planet may depend on them.

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This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with Bill Morrison who has been called the poet laureate of lost films (New York Times, 9/21/2021), as he often makes films that re-frame long-forgotten moving images. He has premiered feature-length documentary films at the New York, Sundance, Telluride and Venice film festivals. In 2021 Morrison became a member of the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. His found footage opus Decasia (2002) was the first film of the 21st century to be named to the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) was included on over 100 critics' lists of the best films of the year and was later listed as one of the best films of its decade by the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, and Vanity Fair, among others. His most recent film, Incident (2023) won the Best Short Film Award from International Documentary Association in 2023, the Cinema Eye Honors for Outstanding Nonfiction Short, and was nominated for an Academy Award in Documentary Short in 2025. His film, The Great Flood (2013) — the focus of this episode — was recognized with the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award for historical scholarship.

The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in American history. In the spring of 1927, the river broke out of its banks in 145 places and inundated 27,000 square miles to a depth of up to 30 feet. Part of its enduring legacy was the mass exodus of displaced sharecroppers. Musically, the “Great Migration” of rural southern blacks to Northern cities saw the Delta Blues electrified and reinterpreted as the Chicago Blues, Rhythm and Blues, and Rock and Roll. Using minimal text and no spoken dialog, filmmaker Bill Morrison and composer / guitarist Bill Frisell have created with The Great Flood a powerful portrait of a seminal moment in American history through a collection of silent images matched to a searing original soundtrack.

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