Excavation 1/2025: Reviews and Interviews
A guide to conversations and analysis on Handful of Earth
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As mentioned in my December 2024 Monthly Muse, the first two Fridays this January feature curated guides to the flagship content on Handful of Earth in lieu of standard Weekly Groundings. These Excavations of previously published work can be used however you see fit—as a reminder of content to return to, a prompt to read further, or a document to share with friends and family who may be interested in Handful of Earth.
Whenever I publish an essay, article, review, or interview, my hope is that its value transcends the immediate moment in which it was written. Though I regularly address current events here on Handful of Earth, my intention is to offer grounded thinking with roots strong enough to weather the storm of the news cycle and nourish readers who may discover my writing months or even years after its first appearance.
Last week’s Excavation profiled my essays and articles on Handful of Earth. This week’s Excavation features the reviews and interviews published on Handful of Earth to date. If you appreciate my work, please consider sharing the publication with your friends and family to help ground them in the new year.
Without further ado, here’s a guide to the reviews and interviews on Handful of Earth, organized from oldest to newest by date of publication.
This is a review of Michael Lind’s 2020 book, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite. I still believe that this book is the best analysis of the political and sociological forces behind the Trump movement and related populist politics in the United States. I discuss Lind’s history of neoliberalism and the labor movement, the idea of “hubs” and “heartlands” and “somewheres” and “anywheres,” contemporary political realignments, and the pivotal concept of the professional-managerial class.
I hosted this video-recorded interview with
conducted by members of the Penn Anti-Coercion Coalition, a group of University of Pennsylvania community members opposed to covid vaccine mandates. We discuss the mandates on American college and university campuses, the policy failures of the pandemic response, and the breakdown of trust in the public health establishment.
I review and reflect on the Minds Festival of Ideas, which I attended in New York City in the summer of 2022. I discuss a heated exchange between
and Steven Bonnell (aka “Destiny”) on the war in Ukraine, a conversation on race between Cornel West and , and the role of alternative media platforms like Minds in the struggle for free speech in America.
This post discusses and links to a long-form piece at the MIT science magazine, Undark, for which I was interviewed on the topic of campus covid vaccine mandates. While clearly constrained by its publication in a mainstream outlet, the article seeks to explain the debate surrounding the mandates on American college and university campuses. I am quoted at length in the article, which also links to my work on Handful of Earth.
I appear on this episode of the What’s Left? podcast to discuss the topic of science and truth. I am joined by my colleague, George Borg, as well as two What’s Left podcast hosts, Andrew Libson and Kenny Zepeda. In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss our personal trajectories in relationship to the problem of science and truth, the position of experts and the role of expertise, the function of science under capitalism, among many other topics.
This is one of the longer pieces published on Handful of Earth to date. In it, I review
’s 2020 book, What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley. I compare and contrast recent right- and left-wing critiques of technology and evaluate several of Daub’s arguments. I conclude with reflections on the question of why we should criticize Big Tech in the first place.
This interview with James Murray and the late Noel Ignatiev explores class and race in America. We discuss James and Noel’s personal backgrounds, the significance of the Civil War and Reconstruction in United States history, the politics of antifa, and the concept of “whiteness.” Noel passed away in 2019, the year after I completed this interview, so it serves as one of the final documents of his views toward the end of his life.
This discussion on the What’s Left podcast takes my 2022 essay, “The Left’s Problem with Technology,” as a starting point to explore leftist affinities with technology. We discuss the Luddite movement, Marxism’s relationship to technology, the distinction between tools and machines, and the relationship between collective struggle and individual liberty, among other topics.
I hope you find this guide to reviews and interviews on Handful of Earth useful, and I look forward to sharing more work with you in the coming year.
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