The late Christopher Hitchens was a prodigiously gifted writer and polemicist. He was also an enormously provocative and controversial one. In 2007, KPFA organized a debate between journalist Chris Hedges and Hitchens on the subject of religion, to a rapt and overflowing audience, which ultimately inspired Hedges to write his book I Don't Believe in Atheists.

Many leftists may believe that reactionary thought is a contradiction in terms -- that there is no intellectual complexity, substance, or allure to conservative ideas. But that, political scientist Corey Robin argues, is wrong. He discusses the motivations and power of reactionary thought, as well as how conservatives have been avid students of left movements. And he considers the future of the right following the upsurge of Occupy Wall Street.

Two decades into the internet revolution, what's the state of a medium that was supposed to create new, perhaps utopian, relationships between people around the world? Why is it not dominated by collaborative, non-profit efforts like Wikipedia?  Media critic Robert McChesney describes how capitalist interests have managed to enclose the non-commercial promise of the internet -- and argues that it doesn't have to be so. He also considers the state of online journalism.

Last Friday, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed into law a bill that strips the state's public workers of most of their collective bargaining rights, following almost a month of mass demonstrations. Where did the protests come from and who sustained them--the national leadership of unions or rank and file members? Labor journalist Steve Early discusses organizing in a time of austerity. And he considers the trajectory of a generation of Sixties activists into the leadership of unions that have gone to war with each other over the last several years.

They were socialists, free love advocates, birth control campaigners, and trade unionists. Feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham describes the women who transformed gender relations in the US and the UK at the turn of the last century, prefiguring in many ways the New Left, and embodying an optimism about social change that is sorely lacking today. (Encore presentation.)

The term "community" is everywhere. It is used by those in power -- witness the "business community" -- and those with no power. But what does it actually mean? Should people on the left continue to claim it? Or is it too flawed a concept, with real political dangers attached? Anthropologist Gerald Creed talks about the history of "the community", the explosion of the term since the early 1990s, and why it is so ubiquitous.