Radical Minds

ON NOVEMBER 3, 2012, Spencer A. Leonard interviewed 2012 Green Party candidate Jill Stein. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview. Spencer A. Leonard: You have written that, “It is time for the Left to be realistic about how it is going to build the power we need to make the changes we want.”1 In what ways has the Left been unrealistic in the past? How is your candidacy intended to break with that, in howsoever modest a way? [Read More]

LAST MAY, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a conversation on the campus of the University of Chicago between Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and Cornel West, a veteran member of the Democratic Socialists of America, the co-author of The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto (2012), and Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. Edward Remus circled back to that conversation in a July 3, 2012 interview with Carl Dix on the radio show Radical Minds on WHPK (88. [Read More]

Radical Minds interviews Cary Nelson, Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), on his recent book, No University is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom (2010). Aired on March 27, 2012 on the Radical Minds radio show.

Audio Recording

_LAST SUMMER, SPENCER A. LEONARD interviewed Kevin Anderson, author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism (1995) and Marx at the Margins (2010). The interview was broadcast on August 2, 2011 on the radio show * Radical Minds* on WHPK – FM Chicago. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation._ Spencer A. Leonard: Broadly describe your aims and ambitions in writing Marx at the Margins. Kevin Anderson: One aim was that, in the past couple of decades - Really the past three decades since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, there have been a number of critiques of Marx that centered on charges of Eurocentrism, ethnocentricsm, and so forth. [Read More]

On February 28, 2012, the radio program Radical Minds on WHPK-FM Chicago broadcast an interview with Mary Gabriel, the author of Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011). The interview was conducted by Spencer A. Leonard of the Platypus Affiliated Society.

Audio Recording

Transcript in Platypus Review #47

_LAST SUMMER, SPENCER A. LEONARD interviewed Clyde Young, a veteran member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. The interview was broadcast on June 31, 2011 on the radio show Radical Minds on WHPK – FM Chicago. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. A shorter version of this interview ran in the broadsheet edition of Platypus Review issue 43._ Spencer A. Leonard: Everyone hears a lot about the 1960s, the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. [Read More]

LAST FALL, EDITOR SPENCER A. LEONARD interviewed Michael Dawson, Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. The interview, which centered around a discussion of Manning Marable’s new biography of Malcolm X, was broadcast on September 30, 2011 on the radio show Radical Minds on WHPK – FM Chicago. What follows is a revised and edited transcript of the interview. SL: Like many others in recent months, you have contributed to the controversy raging around Manning Marable’s book Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. [Read More]

On Thursday March 11, 2010, Platypus Review Editor-in-Chief Spencer A. Leonard interviewed the prominent 1960s radical and last National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Mark Rudd, to discuss his recently published political memoir, Underground. In April, Leonard’s interview with Rudd, prepared in conjunction with Atiya Khan, was broadcast in two parts on “Radical Minds” on WHPK-FM 88.5 Chicago.

Audio Recording

Part One

Part Two

Transcript in Platypus Review #24

ON THURSDAY NOVEMBER 19, 2009, Platypus Review Editor-in-Chief Spencer A. Leonard discussed with author George Scialabba a new volume of essays entitled What are Intellectuals Good For? (Boston: Pressed Wafer Press, 2009). Their discussion was conducted live on “Radical Minds,” a radio show Leonard conducts weekly with co-host Greg Gabrellas on WHPK 88.5 FM in Chicago. Leonard and Scialabba’s discussion focused chiefly on a single theme of the book, the connections and disconnects between the intellectuals of the anti-Stalinist Old Left forged in America in the 1930s and the New Left that emerged decades later in the early 1960s. [Read More]