Latest Content for Old Mole Variety Hour

  Why is it that so many schools fail at teaching their students critical thinking skills that could help them understand the world? Political scientist Agustina Paglayan argues that mass primary education from its origins was set up not to raise children’s prospects — but... Read more

Nimiipuu Mole Julian Ankney hosts this decolonial Thanksgiving Show, which features the following segments: Beginning in grade school, American school children are steeped in the American mythology of Thanksgiving, cosplaying pilgrims and their Wampanoag hosts peacefully... Read more

After years of right-wing assaults on higher education, attacks took a new form in 2023 and 2024 that has been described as the new McCarthyism. As students across the country organize protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, decades-long taboos in academia around criticism o... Read more

What role might be played in political struggle by cultural creations? A new novel, Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad, raises this question doubly: both as a novel set in current struggles and in the story it recounts about the contested effort to mount a theatre production in... Read more

Joe Hill was a beloved member of the IWW, a songwriter and activist who is known for such labor classics as “The Preacher and the Slave,” “There is Power in a Union,” and “Rebel Girl.” In 1914 he was convicted of a murder the evidence suggests he did not commit. Tomorrow ma... Read more

  Patricia Kullberg hosts this episode of the Old Mole, which includes the following segments: The Palestine Exception: After years of right-wing assaults on higher education, attacks took a new form in 2023 and 2024 that has been described as the new McCarthyism. As stud... Read more

    In recognition of Veterans Day, this Old Mole offers a rebroadcast of a 2022 episode of Against the Grain. Sasha Lilley talks with Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early about their book, Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends, and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affai... Read more

If you’re following the polls obsessively, you’re putting your faith in a phenomenon that does more to undermine democracy than enhance it. So argues Samuel Earle in his recent review of a book by G. Elliott Morris, called Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need... Read more

If we are to save our planet from rapidly approaching climate catastrophe, business as usual is no longer an option. Outgrow the System is a new documentary about transitioning to a more sustainable economic system, by co-directors Cecilia Paulsson and Anders Nillson. Extin... Read more

Laurie Mercier speaks with Juan Ricardo Cole about Israel’s wars on Gaza and Lebanon and the response from the Biden administration and American students on college campuses. Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan and s... Read more