Latest Content for Old Mole Variety Hour

Over time it’s become clear some in the Black community have done much better than others, and some, probably most, have experienced decline in their life opportunities and standards of living. In the Mole’s ongoing analysis of racial politics in the US, Bill Resnick interv... Read more

  Patricia Kullberg hosts this episode of the Old Mole, which includes the following segments: Zero Fare: While other cities, like Kansas City and Olympia, have abolished fares on public transport, TriMet is poised to approve a substantial fare hike in the Portland metro ... Read more

Walter Mosley is much more than a successful mystery writer. He will be remembered by most  readers as the creator of the Easy Rawlins mysteries, but in Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, he shows that he is an astute social critic. His lead character, Socrates Fortlow, ... Read more

  Patricia Kullberg hosts this episode of the Old Mole, which includes the following segments: Border Patrol: Nearly every year since the 1990s the U.S. Congress has increased the appropriation for the Border Patrol and the whole apparatus of border protection. Yet every ... Read more

Nearly every year since the 1990s the U.S. Congress has increased the appropriation for the Border Patrol and the whole apparatus of border protection. Yet every year increasing numbers, mostly from the Americas but also from all over, gain entrance by evading the enforcers... Read more

Movie Moles Jan Haaken and Denise Morris talk about the film Tár, a 2022 psychological drama directed by Todd Field and starring Cate Blanchet. The film charts the downfall of fictional composer and conductor Lydia Tár.  Jan and Denise take up the mixed reviews and reaction... Read more

Book Mole Frann Michel reviews The Corner That Held Them, published in 1948, the sixth novel by British queer communist musicologist and writer Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978). Set mostly in a 14th-century Benedictine convent between the Black Death of 1349 and the Peasa... Read more

Bill Resnick talks to Malik Miah who made a living as an aviation mechanic and spent most of his life fighting racism in the unions. He has written several books and hundreds of magazine pieces. Bill and Malik discuss Critical Race Theory – what it is, the complex ways raci... Read more

On a day celebrating Martin Luther King, writer and photographer Matt Witt reviews a memoir by another African American from Georgia who also had a day named after him. The memoir is called Chasing Me to My Grave by Winfred Rembert. Growing up in rural Georgia, Rembert near... Read more

How does a brief period 150 years ago become a flashpoint in our modern culture wars? It does if the same issues of racial equity, working-class organization and democratic control persist. And if activist groups like Black Lives Matter effectively raise them yet again. In ... Read more