Latest Content for Old Mole Variety Hour

Portland is embarking on a great experiment, a pretty radical change in the how the city council and mayor operate, thanks to the Charter Commission and a 58% approval from the voters. But will it work to democratize city governance and can city elites be defeated in their ... Read more

Larry Bowlden reviews Pomegranate, by Helen Elaine Lee, a rich book on so many levels. Written though the eyes of Ranita Atwater, a woman just released from four years of imprisonment for opioid possession, the book leaps forward to her assiduous efforts to regain parental ... Read more

Desiree Hellegers revisits an earlier segment on the life and 2021 death from Covid of Palesa Mofokeng, adopted daughter of playwright, actor, and Portland street photographer Kendall. Given the choice of a life of relative privilege in the U.S., and serving as an LPN and a... Read more

  Patricia Kullberg hosts this episode of the Old Mole, which includes the following segments: Covid, Polio, and Medical Populism: Norm Diamond speaks with Patricia Kullberg about the ambiguous role of so-called medical populism as it has played out during the Covid epide... Read more

Norm Diamond speaks with Patricia Kullberg about the ambiguous role of so-called medical populism as it has played out during the Covid epidemic and earlier during the mid-twentieth century polio epidemic in this country. Medical populism often rises up out of legitimate gr... Read more

Patricia Kullberg as our Well-Read Red, reads excerpts from an article by epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina, who finds that Covid-19 disinformation is coordinated, effective, lucrative, and cost lives. The article was originally published on a Substack Newsletter called Your ... Read more

On June 29th, the Court delivered on the long standing goal of rightwing politicians to overturn affirmative action. In deciding against Harvard College and the University of North Carolina, the Court ruled that race could no longer be an explicit factor in college and univ... Read more

Right-wing demagogues in the mold of Donald Trump or the Ku Klux Klan gain traction when there are underlying economic insecurities and cultural resentments they can exploit. That’s true today and it has been true before in the state of Oregon, as historian Jeffrey LaLande ... Read more

In part two of her interview with Mexican journalist Jose Luis Granados Ceja, Luisa Martinez continues to explore the distorted coverage of that country in US media. She and Jose Luis talk about how life in Mexico is changing and the current government’s efforts in that tra... Read more

Michael Lebowitz who died recently, was a scholar who made significant contributions to Marxist theory, and an activist who lived his beliefs, notably in programs he created in VZ and policies he encouraged there. He had the ear of Hugo Chavez, president of VZ, who cited Mi... Read more