Latest Content for Old Mole Variety Hour

Opening in July and extending through November 2022, a special exhibit at the Portland Art Museum presents a series of riveting photographs of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 through the eyes of BIPOC artists in Portland. In their Left & the Law segment, Jan Haaken ... Read more

Laurie Mercier speaks with Miriam Pemberton about her new book, Six Stops on the National Security Tour: Rethinking Warfare Economies. Pemberton has studied the U.S. military economy and the means of shrinking it down to size for decades, first as Director of the National C... Read more

Bill Resnick talks with Jeremy Brecher, labor activist, writer and historian, who has extensively studied popular upheavals through U.S history. In the 1930s and again in the ‘60s very few predicted the explosive uprisings from below, which profoundly changed this country. ... Read more

The rapid, spectacular, entirely unexpected, self-organizing of workers at Amazon, Starbucks, and many other local franchises relying on low wage service workers inspired many observers of the labor scene to what they see as “spontaneous” uprisings as the route to a new lab... Read more

Often missing from the current public debates about assaults on reproductive rights are the workers who put themselves more and more at risk to provide abortion services. Patricia Kullberg speaks with filmmaker and Mole Jan Haaken and reproductive rights activist Sierra Rom... Read more

Jan Haaken and Mike Snedeker pay tribute to Mike Davis, the Southern California based author, activist, urban theorist and historian who is in the late stages of terminal cancer. Davis is  the author of Planet of Slums, City of Quartz, In Praise of Barbarians, and more than... Read more

Jon Nelson hosts this Labor Day episode of the Old Mole, which includes the following segments: Putting the Movement Back into the Labor Movement: The rapid, spectacular, entirely unexpected, self-organizing of workers at Amazon, Starbucks, and many other local franchises ... Read more

Sue Miller’s 2020 novel, Monogamy, displays not only the crystalline writing we are used to from Miller, but an emotional depth that few writers every achieve. As usual, her topic is family life. Book Mole Larry Bowlden offers his take on this portrait of a marriage. Read more

What is it? What can it hope to accomplish? For Another World Is Possible, Norm Diamond interviews Alex Diamond, a sociology grad student at UT, who’s been living in and writing about Colombia for six years. They discuss the significance of the left electoral victory, what ... Read more

Jan Haaken interviews Mole Sharon Grant and her former colleague Judy McFarland. As retired sex educators in Multnomah County middle and high schools for 20 years, they reflect on what it was like, the continued need for comprehensive sex ed in school, particularly given th... Read more