Chef Pyet DeSpain joins the New Books Network to discuss her new cookbook, Rooted in Fire: A Celebration of Native American and Mexican Cooking (HarperOne, 2025). Drawing from her Potawatomi and Mexican heritage, DeSpain shares recipes that connect past and present, including bison meatballs with Wojape BBQ sauce, raspberry mezcal quail, and poblano-corn tamales. Each dish reflects her effort to preserve tradition while creating something new.
In this conversation, Pyet talks about growing up between two cultures and how understanding their shared roots changed her approach to food and identity. She reflects on rediscovering ancestral ingredients, the meaning of her tribe’s “keeper of the fire” role, and the importance of gratitude and ceremony in her cooking.
She also speaks about the family members, chefs, friends and home cooks who inspire her to keep Native American and Mexican foodways alive, ensuring that these traditions continue to be seen, shared, and celebrated.
Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger at here.
Minna Salami is a writer, social critic, and thought leader on feminism, knowledge production, and the aesthetics and structures of power. She formerly served as Programme Chair and Senior Fellow at THE NEW INSTITUTE, where she led the Black Feminism and the Polycrisis programme. Her work sits at the intersection of ideas, culture, and systems thinking, with a commitment to making complex theories accessible through books, essays, public speaking, and creative projects.
She is the author of Can Feminism Be African? (Harper Collins, 2025) and Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone (Bloomsbury, 2020), which has been translated into multiple languages. Her writing also appears in numerous anthologies and educational publications exploring feminism, African philosophy, media, and cultural criticism.
Her work has featured in The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Ideas Letter, Project Syndicate, and The Philosopher, and she has delivered talks at global institutions including TEDx, the Institute of Arts and Ideas, the European Commission, the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, Yale, and Singularity University at NASA.
Salami was the creative director of the short film Black Feminism and the Polycrisis, which won the Silver Award for Public Service and Activism at the 2024 Lovie Awards.
From 2019 to 2022, she co-directed Activate, an intersectional feminist movement that supported minoritised women in politics and community organising through visibility campaigns, mentoring, and fundraising. The initiative played a key role in shifting narratives and resources toward a more inclusive political landscape in the UK.
She has also worked as a Research Associate and Editor at Perspectiva, advised governments on gender equality, developed national school curricula, and curated cultural events at institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
Her blog, MsAfropolitan, launched in 2010, has reached over a million readers and remains a platform for exploring feminist and African-centred approaches to contemporary life.
Salami is a Full Member of the Club of Rome, a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader, and serves on the advisory boards of the African Feminist Initiative at Penn State University and Public Humanities at Cambridge University Press, as well as the council of the British Royal Institute of Philosophy.
Links to References: Apart Together – essay on Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire’s radical vision for the world
For the last two weeks, a critically important climate conference has been taking place in Belem, Brazil. For the first time in 30 years, the United States did not send a delegation to the conference. Outside of the event, massive groups of Indigenous people have gathered to demand that world leaders do something to curtail the effects of climate change, which their communities are already feeling. Somini Sengupta, international climate reporter for the New York Times, joins the show to recap the conference.
And in headlines, Elon Musk predicts a work-less utopia at the Saudi Investment Forum, the Trump Administration comes up with concepts of a plan to end the Russia-Ukraine war, and a federal judge restarts criminal contempt proceedings against the Trump Administration over potentially illegal deportation flights to El Salvador.
We'll tell you who is facing fresh fallout from the Epstein files, even before they're released.
Also, we're talking about American officials' new 28-point plan for peace in Ukraine, just as Russia steps up the attacks.
Plus, why a former Olympic snowboarder is now on the FBI's most wanted list, how a big tech company is calming fears of an AI bubble, and highlights from the biggest night in country music.
Those stories and even more news to know in about 10 minutes!
Join us every Mon-Fri for more daily news roundups!
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People have been talking about how the penny is more trouble than it’s worth for 50 years—so why drop it now? And—other than having nothing to put in our loafers—will it be missed?
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
Tareq Baconi is a Palestinian scholar best known for Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. But in his new memoir Fire in Every Direction, the academic turns to more personal subjects, reflecting on three generations of displacement in his family. In an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition, Baconi speaks with NPR’s Leila Fadel about how silence – around queerness, politics, and shame – has shaped his family’s story.
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Paris Marx is joined by Gil Duran to discuss how Peter Thiel’s bizarre obsession with the antichrist is really a desperate and embarrassing attempt to divert attention from his own misdeeds.
Gil Duran writes The Nerd Reich and is working on his first book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Global Democracy.
Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.
President Trump has signed a bill that gives the US Justice Department thirty days to release its files on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Some of the documents could be withheld or heavily redacted. Also: Silicon Valley's Nvidia sees record earnings amid AI boom; Israel conducts major airstrikes in Gaza despite ceasefire; FBI intensifies search for "modern day Pablo Escobar"; Colombia pushes ahead with controversial airstrikes on rebel groups; Ukrainian suspect faces extradition in Nord Stream investigation; the philanthropists filling the gap left by USAID withdrawal; and Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer goes under the hammer.
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