Fear dominates our society. Fear of crime, fear of the poor, fear of foreign terrorists, to which we might add fear of our government and fear of our bosses. For some liberal thinkers, fear serves a purpose. It's supposed to pull us all together so we can find some kind of social solidarity in an atomized, alienated world. Corey Robin discusses the problems with that notion and talks about the places where fear truly lurks in our society. (Encore presentation.)

Scientists are some of the most outspoken critics of global warming, with an overwhelming majority of scientists seeing human activity -- such as the burning of coal -- as the main cause of climate change. Yet there are other areas where science is divided. One is over the degree to which our genes determine our lot in life. Radical scientist Steven Rose about the perils of the "new genetics." And Ted Nace reflects on a remarkable grassroots campaign in 2007 to keep coal plants from being built in the United States.

Farmers' markets appear to embody many of the qualities of the much touted green economy -- environmentally sustainable, local, and wholesome. Yet as a solution, according to sociologist Alison Hope Alkon, they tend to reinforce, not undermine, racial and class inequality. Alkon explores the limitations of farmers' markets and the market-driven green economy, by contrasting a farmers' market in affluent and white North Berkeley with a now-closed market in poor and predominantly African American West Oakland. 

In the mid-20th century, the US government and private companies joined together to develop medical applications from the byproducts of the nuclear industry. Ellen Leopold talks about the rise of radiotherapy, experiments on unwitting patients in US hospitals, and the pioneering lawsuit of a Kansas housewife called Irma Natanson, as well as the legacy of the Cold War on cancer detection and treatment today.

What might finance capitalism have to do with poetry?  And how might resistance to the former come from the latter? Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Italian political philosopher, writer, and media theorist, discusses money, precarious labor in an age of information and heightened alienation, and why a mantra might be a powerful weapon. He also talks about the autonomist movement in Italy in the 1970s and his involvement in the iconoclastic pirate radio station based in Bologna, Radio Alice.

It's only been a decade and a half since the height of the AIDS epidemic. Yet there's profound amnesia about what happened during those years, in which hundreds of thousands of people died in this country, ignored by a government that only helped those with the disease after being forced through direct action. Writer Sarah Schulman argues that AIDS paved the way for massive gentrification in cities like New York and San Francisco. She describes the erasure of a liberatory queer culture and its replacement with a conservative one.