RICHARD D. WOLFF

RICHARD D. WOLFF

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Founder of Democracy at Work · Host of Economic Update
Author of The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself

You can criticize many things in the United States, but there are taboos and the number one taboo is that you cannot criticize Capitalism. That is equated with disloyalty…This story about Capitalism being wonderful. This story is fading. You can’t do that anymore. The Right Wing cannot rally its troops around Capitalism. That’s why it doesn’t do it anymore. It rallies the troops around being hateful towards immigrants. It rallies the troops around “fake elections”, around the right to buy a gun, around White Supremacists. Those issues can get some support, but “Let’s get together for Capitalism!” That is bad. They can’t do anything with that. They have to sneak the Capitalism in behind those other issues because otherwise, they have no mass political support.

MERLIN SHELDRAKE

MERLIN SHELDRAKE

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Biologist & Bestselling Author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds,
Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, Winner of the Wainwright Prize 2021

Humans have been partnering with fungi for an unknowably long time, no doubt for longer than we’ve been humans. Whether as foods, eating mushrooms, as medicines, dosing ourselves with moulds and other mushrooms that might help, parasites or others helpers with infection, mushrooms as tinder or ways to carry a spark, this very important thing that humans needed to do for a very long time, and as agents of fermentation, as in yeasts creating alcohol. So humans have partnered with fungi to solve all sorts of problems and so fungi have found themselves enveloped within human societies and cultures for a long time.

JEANNIE VANASCO

JEANNIE VANASCO

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Award-Winning Memoirist, Author & Educator

What interested me about this particular experience is that I didn’t have the language to attach to it in the way I had the language to attach to a later experience that I would have no trouble calling rape, but happened to me and I call Mark in the book. I didn’t know what to call that for the longest time, so I didn’t know what to feel about it, and so as a writer that interests me. When I don’t have the words for something, when I sense that inevitably I’m going to fail.