55 Voices for Democracy – The Podcast

The societal state as a crisis of imagination? German climate activist Luisa Neubauer is one of the main organizers of Fridays for Future in Germany, an international student movement demanding political action against climate change. In this episode, Neubauer talks about her activism and the momentum of the movement, climate awareness in the U.S. and Germany, and dreaming as a tool for change.

"On the one side, we have to accept the catastrophes that are going to unravel. But on the other, we need to allow ourselves to dream big."

Neubauer is the co-author of the book Vom Ende der Klimakrise – Eine Geschichte unserer Zukunft (On the End of the Climate Crisis - A History of Our Future).

While politics can involve seemingly abstract decisions, “literature can remind us of the stakes at human level,” argues Boris Dralyuk. In this episode, the translator, author and editor-in-chief of Los Angeles Review of Books talks about translators giving voice to the voiceless, and the raison d’etre of literary criticism in today's fragmented cultural landscape. Boris Dralyuk’s debut poetry collection My Hollywood and Other Poems came out in April 2022 on Paul Dry Books.

This episode focuses on what novelist and writer Rosecrans Baldwin calls "the city state Los Angeles.” In his recent best-selling book Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, the award-winning author shares his thoughts on one of the United States’ most confounding metropolises – "not just a great city, but a full-blown modern city-state.” Together with our hosts, Baldwin addresses issues such as the housing crisis, city planning and what can be learned from comparing L.A.’s infrastructure to another highly fascinating metropolis: Berlin. Baldwin is the winner of the 2022 California Book Award.

David Shimer is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and an Associate Fellow at Yale University. His reporting and analysis have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker and the Washington Post . He is pursuing a doctorate in international relations at the University of Oxford. In this episode, Shimer discusses his book Rigged: America, Russia, and 100 Years of Electoral Interference with Tom Zoellner and talks about what foreign meddling means for the future of democracy in the digital age.

Polymath author of twenty books, writer, historian, essayist, urban geographer and activist Rebecca Solnit is our inaugural guest on 55 Voices for Democracy. The author of, among other books, Men Explain Things to Me, Savage Dreams, Infinite City, A Paradise Built in Hell, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Hope in the Dark, Recollections of My Nonexistence , and her recent The Mother of All Questions, she is a thinker dedicated to furthering radical equality and economic justice, for whom “a commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.” She is interviewed by Tom Zoellner and co-host Amal Khaled (Project Director of Wunderbar Together).