Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

In the early twenty-first century Bolivian social movements made streets, plazas, and highways into the decisively important spaces for acting politically, rivaling and at times exceeding voting booths and halls of government. The Sovereign Street documents this important period, showing how indigenous-led mass movements reconfigured the politics and racial order of Bolivia from 1999 to 2011. 

Drawing on interviews with protest participants, on-the-ground observation, and documentary research, activist and scholar Carwil Bjork-James provides an up-close history of the indigenous-led protests that changed Bolivia. At the heart of the study is a new approach to the interaction between protest actions and the parts of the urban landscape they claim. These “space-claiming protests” both communicate a message and exercise practical control over the city. Bjork-James interrogates both protest tactics—as experiences and as tools—and meaning-laden spaces, where meaning is part of the racial and political geography of the city. 

Taking the streets of Cochabamba, Sucre, and La Paz as its vantage point, The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia (U Arizona Press, 2020) offers a rare look at political revolution as it happens. It documents a critical period in Latin American history, when protests made headlines worldwide, where a generation of pro-globalization policies were called into question, and where the indigenous majority stepped into government power for the first time in five centuries.

Brad Wright is a historian of Latin America specializing in postrevolutionary Mexico. He teach world history at Kennesaw State University currently. PhD in Public History with specialization in oral history.

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This week, host Isaac Butler talks to Ali Slagle, a recipe developer for the New York Times cooking section and author of the book I Dream of Dinner (so You Don't Have To). In the interview, Ali shares where her ideas for recipes come from and her trial-and-error process for getting them just right. She also talks about her commitment to convenience and explains what it was like to develop recipes for her book that require only a handful of ingredients and take 45 minutes or less to prepare. 

After the interview, Isaac and co-host Karen Han talk more about recipe development and discuss what it’s like to have too many options in front of you when you’re working on a creative project. 

In the exclusive Slate Plus segment, Ali offers a glimpse into the world of food styling. 

Do you have a question about creative work? Call us and leave a message at (304) 933-9675 or email us at working@slate.com.

Podcast production by Cameron Drews. 

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It’s been two years since the January 6th riot at the US Capitol in Washington DC. Over 900 people have been criminally charged, but political violence continues to be a threat. Well, here at How To!, we are not content to just marinate in fear and blame so we’re dedicating two episodes to see how we can prevent more tragedies like January 6. In our first episode, we bring on Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where she focuses on the intersection of democracy and security. She explains how the US has gotten to this point, how we should productively grapple with January 6, and why we’re not as close to the brink of civil war as it may seem. Next week, we’ll hear from Curtis Toler, a former Chicago gang member who is now a violence interrupter.

If you liked this episode, check out: “How To Get Things Done in a Divided Nation with Samantha Power.”

Do you have a question without an answer? Send us a note at howto@slate.com or leave us a voicemail at 646-495-4001 and we might have you on the show. Subscribe for free on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Podcast production by Derek John, Rosemary Belson, and Kevin Bendis.  

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Want a behind-the-scenes look at how we create the show? Check out Slate's Pocket Collections for research and reading lists, as well as additional insights into how we think about the stories behind the episodes.

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The future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras (Stanford UP, 2022), Christopher A. Loperena examines the Garifuna struggle for life and collective autonomy, and demonstrates how this struggle challenges concerted efforts by the state and multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, to render both their lands and their culture into fungible tourism products. Using a combination of participant observation, courtroom ethnography, and archival research, Loperena reveals how purportedly inclusive tourism projects form part of a larger neoliberal, extractivist development regime, which remakes Black and Indigenous territories into frontiers of progress for the mestizo majority. The book offers a trenchant analysis of the ways Black dispossession and displacement are carried forth through the conferral of individual rights and freedoms, a prerequisite for resource exploitation under contemporary capitalism.

By demanding to be accounted for on their terms, Garifuna anchor Blackness to Central America—a place where Black peoples are presumed to be nonnative inhabitants—and to collective land rights. Steeped in Loperena's long-term activist engagement with Garifuna land defenders, this book is a testament to their struggle and to the promise of "another world" in which Black and Indigenous peoples thrive.

Christopher A. Loperena is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. You can find the article discussed during this conversation, published in American Anthropologist, here.

Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban anthropology, futurity, care, and migration. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican

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A Passage North explores the impact of the vicious Sri Lankan civil war between Tamil and Sinhalese which tore Sri Lanka apart for two and a half decades before a fragile ceasefire was finally reached in 2009. When Krishan learns that his grandmother’s former carer Rani has died he makes the long journey north to attend the funeral across a country still traumatised and scarred by its recent past.

Written with precision and grace, A Passage North is a poignant memorial for the missing and the dead, and an unsettling meditation on what it means to have observed the war from afar rather than to have been personally caught up in its horrors.

(Picture: Anuk Arudpragasam. Photo credit: Ruvin De Silva.)

On this week’s episode of The Waves, Slate science and health editor Shannon Palus is joined by author and co-host of Maintenance Phase, Aubrey Gordon. Shannon and Aubrey discuss Aubrey’s new book, “You Just Need to Lose Weight” and 19 Other Myths About Fat People, the fraught nature of “body positivity” and the insidious goalpost moving of the Dove “Love Your Body” campaign.

In Slate Plus, Aubrey and Shannon discuss the new weight-loss fad, Ozempic. 

Further Reading Recommendations From Aubrey:

Hunger by Roxane Gay

Belly of the Beast by Da’shaun L. Harrison

The Body Is Not An Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor

Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings 

Julie Murphy’s fiction novels like Dumplin’

Check out Shannon’s new Slate Column: Good Fit

Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery.

Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com

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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has always been globally situated, argues Montana State history professor Amanda Hendrix-Komoto in Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific (U Nebraska, 2022). Through mission work, polygamous marriage, and extensive kinship networks, LDS members sought to create Zions - holy Mormon spaces - throughout the world through relationships with Indigenous people from the Intermountain West to Tahiti and the Hawai'ian islands. This process found both successful conversions, as well as pain and violence, since despite LDS insistence that they offered an alternative to American settler colonialism, often church members could be just as imperially-minded as their non-Mormon peers. Nonetheless, Hendrix-Komoto argues that the history of Indigenous people and the LDS Church is complex, and cannot be understood without placing a uniquely Mormon idea of the family at the very center.

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This week, we revisit two of our favorite interviews from 2022. In the first one, Isaac Butler discusses his book The Method: How the 20th Century Learned to Act. After that, Karen Han reveals the process behind her book Bong Joon Ho: Dissident Cinema.

Send your questions about creativity and any other feedback to working@slate.com or give us a call at (304) 933-9675.

Podcast production by Cameron Drews.

If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows—you’ll also be supporting the work we do here on Working. Sign up now at slate.com/workingplus to help support our work.

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In far northeastern Alaska lies one of the most remarkable, and contested, places in North America: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This coastal arctic region is a place of great natural beauty, ecological importance, as well as being home and birthplace of the Gwich'in people. It's also thought to contain massive fossil fuel wealth, making it a site of fifty years and more political contestation. 

In the award-winning book, Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, An Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice (UNC Press: 2021), Finis Dunaway explains how Indigenous people teamed up with the activist, photographer, and jazz drummer Lenny Kohm to build a grassroots movement to protect this sacred place from extractive industry. Using a humble photo slide show, Kohm and other activists, both Native people from the region and outsiders, marshaled the power of everyday people to convince critical and powerful actors that this was a place that deserved federal protection. While this fight is ongoing, Dunaway's book shows that sometimes power can be found in unexpected places, and that environmental history is not a simple story of decline and hopelessness.

Defending the Arctic Refuge website and teaching tools are here.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the generational process of meeting and conquering the supposedly uncivilized western frontier is what forged American identity. In the late twentieth century, “new western” historians dissected the mythologized western histories that Turner and others had long used to embody American triumph and progress. While Turner’s frontier is no more, the West continues to present America with challenging processes to wrestle, navigate, and overcome.

The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (U Nebraska Press, 2022), edited by Brenden W. Rensink, takes stories of the late twentieth-century “modern West” and carefully pulls them toward the present—explicitly tracing continuity with or unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s. Considering a broad range of topics, including environment, Indigenous peoples, geography, migration, and politics, these essays straddle multiple modern frontiers, not least of which is the temporal frontier between our unsettled past and uncertain future. These forays into the twenty-first-century West will inspire more scholars to pull histories to the present and by doing so reinsert scholarly findings into contemporary public awareness.

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