Kim Stanley Robinson returns to discuss his novel Green Earth, a technothriller about a near future world in which scientists work to solve the global climate crisis. Stan and I discuss how the book went from a trilogy to a single volume, its similarity to The Ministry for the Future, and its place in the genre of naturalism. Plus Emerson and Thoreau!

And yes, I get the title of The Ministry for the Future wrong every time I say it in this episode. Oops.

Mark Bittman returns to Everyday Anarchism to discuss Community Kitchen, his new model for how we can do restaurant food better by running nonprofit restaurants rooted in their communities.

But we also talk about RFK's crusade against seed oils, what's wrong with Pod Save America, why food is so cheap in the US, the recent US presidential election, and whatever else happened to come up.

Find more from Mark at https://bittmanproject.com/

Shawn Vulliez from SRSLY Wrong joins me to discuss the new collection of David Graeber essays, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World. Shawn and I talk about the tyranny of economics and how Graeber gave us permission to reveal that the emperor of economics has no clothes.

Warning: Contains discussion of the recent election. Stay away if you just can't handle it anymore. I understand.

A spectre is haunting the Everyday Anarchism series on the English revolution: the spectre of Christopher Hill's 1972 book The World Turned Upside Down. It turns out most of the ideas I've shared in this series came from Hill's book!

Ann Hughes joins me to discuss the book, and we talk through the following questions:

• Did Hill invent the idea of the English revolution?
• How did the radicalism of the 1960s affect Hill's approach?
• Was Winstanley an anarchist?
• Was the English Revolution the beginning of modernity?

Thanks so much to Ann and all the other guests in this year-long series, now (probably) concluded!

Eleanor Janega, the very first guest on the Graeber's Debt series, comes back on the show to discuss what the middle ages were, how they were a global phenomenon, and why they weren't as bad as you've heard

I'm joined by Karl Gerth, professor of modern Chinese history at the University of California, San Diego, to discuss the Chinese Communist Revolution and how Maoism attempted to avoid the mistakes of the USSR and yet largely repeated them.

In Graeber's middle ages, empires fell apart while temples and monasteries kept everything together with metaphysical debt. Oh, and Europe isn't very important.

Eleanor Janega returns later this month to discuss the chapter in the next Debt discussion!

Following on my discussion with John Weisweiler, more detail on Graeber's account of the Axial Age