We all know that Obama is shifting the focus of US military intervention from Iraq to Afghanistan. What we don't all know is the history of Afghanistan and its tribes and its experiences in relation to empires like the British and the Russian. Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould speak primarily about Afghan history pre-1960.

It's a grand thought experiment rooted in one man's passion for the environment. In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman asks, What would happen if humans suddenly disappeared? Which human creations would last, and which would not? And would nature ever fully recover?

Union membership has been falling for decades, yet trade unions still give workers significant power on the job. And there are great hopes that the decline in union density may be reversed, with some pinning their hopes on the Employee Free Choice Act. Michael Yates discusses organized labor, EFCA, radicalism and working class identity.

A forerunner of radical politics a century later, Edward Carpenter advocated women's and homosexual liberation, prison reform, free love, health food, recycling, and Eastern mysticism. Sheila Rowbotham talks about the life, times and legacy of the 19th-century gay socialist writer. (Encore presentation.)

Book sales are plummeting, book stores are closing, layoffs are rampant in the publishing industry, and funding for the arts is drying up, while print, radio and television are taking a beating. Publishing veteran Colin Robinson speaks about the collapse of the book trade, both left and mainstream, and the prospects for the dissemination of radical ideas.

According to Diane Fujino, the Black liberation movement of the 1960s played a key role in radicalizing many Asian Americans, including Yuri Kochiyama, who found a mentor in Malcolm X, and Richard Aoki, a prominent early member of the Black Panthers. Novelist Nina Revoyr takes another angle on the Japanese experience in the US; The Age of Dreaming is about a Japanese silent film star in Hollywood. (Encore presentation.)