Wonderbread vs artisanal bread. It may seem like a simple choice between variants of the same thing, but for many the two are a universe apart -- one representing industrial production and American hubris; the other a wholesomeness that bespeaks a different way of being in the world. Food scholar Aaron Bobrow-Strain has written a social history of white bread. He discusses the unexpected consequences of trying to change the world with food. (Encore presentation.)

We are now in an era of global finance capitalism, says Richard Peet. But what does this mean? What's the relationship between finance capitalism and neoliberalism? Does finance capital exploit differently than industrial capital? And what are finance capitalism's main features and contradictions? Richard Peet explains how we got to this point; he also describes the perils of the current political-economic moment.

While it may appear an inevitability, how did capitalism come to take hold in the US? Was slave production in the American South actually capitalist or something else? What was the nature of the Civil War and the emergence of sharecropping in the conflict's wake? Marxist sociologist Charles Post weighs in on these questions, which have been hotly debated for many years on the left, with significant consequences for how we see capitalism's permanence and the nature of racial oppression today.

Sex, censorship, paranoia and persecution, aestheticism as a movement and practice, and the first stirrings of what might be called the modern gay identity: the story of Oscar Wilde has it all. Nicholas Frankel discusses the Irish writer's expansive ideas, formidable impact, and dramatic downfall.

Homelessness may seem a fact of life in a highly unequal society. But there's much more to it than that. Radical scholars Christina Heatherton and Jordan T. Camp argue that homelessness is fundamentally tied to an intensely racialized form of political control and economic restructuring of our society over the past 40 years, unleashed partially in response to the black freedom struggle and urban rebellions of the 1960s. They discuss why places like Los Angeles' Skid Row have become a laboratory for policies that ultimately will be applied to our society at large.

What does private eye V.I. Warshawski have to do with the Patriot Act? Crime fiction writer Sara Paretsky, creator of the acclaimed Chicago detective, speaks out about feminism, literature, and dissent in the post-9/11 era. She also discusses her own origins and trajectory. (Encore presentation.)