This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with author Ben Apatoff, whose writing has appeared in Alternative Press , Loudwire , Ultimate Classic Rock , Metal Injection , MetalSucks , Daily News , The Deli , Electric Literature , Beyond Race , Outburn and MLB.com. He is the author of Metallica: The $24.95 Book (2021). His latest book — the 33 ⅓ dedicated to Bodycount’s Bodycount — is the focus of this episode. Drawn from years of research and dozens of new interviews, ...
Oct 17, 2023•35 min
This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast presents an interview with musician Louis Michot , best known as the fiddle player and lead-singer for the Grammy-award winning Lost Bayou Ramblers. Rêve du Troubadour , the first solo album from Louis Michot and the focus of this episode, is set for release on September 22, 2023. Special guests on these recordings include Nigerian Tuareg guitar wizard Bombino and critically acclaimed singer / cellist Leyla McCalla, among others. Although known as ...
Sep 21, 2023•46 min
This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with journalist, author, and conspiracy theory expert Mike Rothschild. Mike has written two previous books, including The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything . He has been interviewed by CNN , MSNBC , NPR , the BBC , the Washington Post , and the New York Times, among many other outlets, to discuss conspiracy theories and has testified to Congress on the threat of election d...
Sep 12, 2023•28 min
This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast presents an interview with musician Mike Baggetta, one third of the experimental rock/punk band Main Steam Stop Valve ( mssv ). mssv recently released their second studio album, Human Reaction , a captivating collection of songs that is the focus of this episode. The band, composed of guitarist Mike Baggetta, Stephen Hodges on drums, and Mike Watt on bass, creates music that is an unimagined hybrid of a punk power-trio and a dreamy experimental roc...
Sep 05, 2023•26 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with author and political organizer Doug Greco. Greco has organized for over 15 years in Austin and San Antonio with the Industrial Areas Foundation , the nation’s largest and longest-standing network of faith and community-based organizations. Before that, he served as Director of Programs with Equality California, the nation’s largest statewide LGBTQ organization. His book, To Find a Killer: The Homophobic Murders of Norma an...
Aug 22, 2023•33 min
This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, author, and artist Michael Gira. Gira is the founder of the band Swans, in which he sings and plays guitar. He is also the founder of Young God Records and previously fronted Angels of Light. The focus of this episode is on Swans latest release, a terrific album entitled The Beggar . Michael Gira founded the groundbreaking NYC band Swans in 1982. Initially notorious for their rele...
Aug 11, 2023•41 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with director Simon Lereng Wilmont. Simon’s first feature documentary film, The Distant Barking of Dogs (2017), premiered at IDFA and was awarded Best First Appearance. It has since gone on to win 35+ awards worldwide. His latest documentary, A House Made of Splinters , the focus of this episode, made its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Best Director prize in the World-Cinema Documentary compe...
Jul 20, 2023•31 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with director Sean Claffey who has more than 25 years in the film industry spanning feature films, industry documentaries, and commercials. His latest film, Americonned , is a documentary about income inequality in the U.S. and the tragic destabilizing effects it has on Americans. Radical inequality has led to radicalization at every level of society, and this powerful documentary depicts what happens when America hits its tipp...
Jun 21, 2023•31 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with Ukrainian-born artist, songwriter, and frontman of International punk band Gogol Bordello, Eugene Hütz. Hütz is a rare musical force, raucously illuminating stages alongside System of a Down, Rancid, and Dropkick Murphys, dueting with Regina Spektor, and cutting albums with Rick Rubin & Steve Albini. A lifelong lover of the punk scene growing up in Ukraine, Hütz found himself where he felt he belonged, in New York’s Lo...
Jun 14, 2023•49 min
This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast presents an interview with the senior director of the NYC Health + Hospitals Arts in Medicine program, Larissa Trinder. Larissa is one of the talented people behind the project that inspired the new book Healing Walls: New York City Health + Hospitals Community Mural Project (2019 - 2021) which commemorates a brilliant and benevolent three-year Community Mural Project that persists as a flagship of the NYC Health + Hospitals Arts in Medicine Progra...
Jun 06, 2023•32 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with musician trumpeter, slide trumpeter, arranger/composer and bandleader from New York City, Steven Bernstein. Steven is best known for his work in The Lounge Lizards, Sexmob, Spanish Fly, and the Millennial Territory Orchestra. He has released four albums under his own name on John Zorn's Tzadik Records and he has performed with jazz giants including Roswell Rudd, Sam Rivers, Don Byron, and Medeski, Martin & Wood, as wel...
May 09, 2023•36 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with Los Angeles-based writer Will Hagle. Will is a co-host of the Connecting The Classics podcast and a great deal of his work can be found on the webzine Passion of The Weiss . He is also the author of the excellent 33 ⅓ book dedicated to MF DOOM and Madlib’s album Madvillainy . The book — which is the focus of this episode — celebrates Madvillainy as a representation of two genius musical minds melding to form one revered su...
Apr 24, 2023•51 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast features an interview with Joanna Schwartz, a professor of law at UCLA, where she teaches civil procedure and courses on police accountability and public interest lawyering. Her writing, commentary, and research about police misconduct, qualified immunity, indemnification, and local government budgeting have been featured in The New York Times , The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal , Forbes, Christian Science Monitor, ABC News, NBC News, CBS...
Apr 13, 2023•37 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast features an interview with Deborah Rowan Wright, an independent researcher, ocean advocate, and marine-policy researcher who writes about marine conservation. She has worked with the UK NGOs Whale & Dolphin Conservation, Friends of the Earth, and Marinet. Her work on marine renewable energy, ocean governance reform, and public-trust law has been published by the International Whaling Commission and the Ecologist , among others. In 2010, her poli...
Mar 29, 2023•31 min
This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast presents an interview with prolific percussionist, vibraphonist, bandleader, and vocalist Mike Dillon. How many artists have been praised as a “punk rock provocateur,” “jazz vibraphone visionary,” and “percussion virtuoso”? There’s only one: Mike Dillon. Whether through his affiliation with artists like Les Claypool of Primus, Rickie Lee Jones, Dean Ween Group, and Ani Difranco, and collaborations such as Nolatet, Garage a Trois, The Dead Kenny G's...
Mar 07, 2023•33 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast features an interview with Director Connor Martin and Executive Producer Tony Kriz, part of the team behind the eye-opening new documentary Sentenced . Each year millions of kids are sentenced to a future they don’t deserve because of their inability to read, and Sentenced shines a bright light on this devastating problem. The motivation behind the film is simple — over 43 million Americans can't read well enough to get a job and support a family. T...
Mar 01, 2023•45 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with Sequoia Maner, Assistant Professor of English at Spelman College. She is author of the poetry collection Little Girl Blue (2021) and co-editor of the book Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (2020). Her poem “upon reading the autopsy of Sandra Bland” was a finalist for the 2017 Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize. Her essays, poems, and reviews can be found in venues such as Meridians , Obsidian , The Langston Hug...
Feb 23, 2023•52 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast features an interview with Louis L. Reed who organized a national grassroots network of reform activists after serving fourteen years in federal prison, and Brandon Kramer, a Washington, DC-based filmmaker and co-founder of Meridian Hill Pictures . Brandon directed City of Trees . and the Webby Award-winning independent documentary series The Messy Truth . Brandon won Best Director at the 2016 Chesapeake Film Festival and Indie Capital Awards, recei...
Feb 16, 2023•37 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast features an interview with prolific author and renowned scientist and thinker Howard Bloom, who was also a music publicist in the 1970s and 1980s for performers such as Prince, Billy Joel, Michael Jackson, Bob Marley, and Styx (to name a just few). He has published a book on Islam, The Muhammad Code, an autobiography, How I Accidentally Started The Sixties — which is the focus of this episode — and three books on human evolution and group behavior: ...
Feb 14, 2023•1 hr 17 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast features an interview with William J. Carl (PhD), a Greek scholar, screenwriter and playwright, former professor, seminary president, and pastor, who has spoken at Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Cornell, Boston University, Carnegie Mellon, as well as many other schools in the U.S., and internationally. He is the author of eight nonfiction books and one novel entitled Assassin's Manuscript — the focus of this episode. He also lectures on the Brain at ...
Feb 02, 2023•48 min
his episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast features an interview with Catherine K. Ettman, the chief of staff and director of strategic initiatives at the Boston University School of Public Health. Catherine is the co-editor of Urban Health (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Migration and Health (University of Chicago Press, 2022) — the book that is the focus of this episode. Her important work explores the social and economic factors that shape population mental health. International migran...
Jan 18, 2023•29 min
This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast presents an interview with novelist David Goodwillie about his book Kings County . Goodwillie is also the author of the novel American Subversive , a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and the memoir Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time . Goodwillie has written for the New York Times , New York Magazine , Newsweek , and Popular Science , among other publications. He has also been drafted to play professional baseball, worked as a private inves...
Dec 14, 2022•46 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with Dr. Paul Smith, who serves as the secretary-general of Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI). BGCI leads the Global Tree Assessment and recently published the “ State of the World’s Trees Report ” showing that one-third of the world’s tree species are threatened with extinction. Prior to joining BGCI, Paul was the head of the Millennium Seed Bank of the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew. He is editor of The Book of See...
Dec 01, 2022•31 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast finds our host, Michael Shields, in conversation with Dr. Lynda Ulrich, founder of the Goodness Exchange , a website whose aim is to prove that the world is still a beautiful place, full of wonderment, discovery, and compassion. Dr. Ulrich is the author of the book Happiness is an Option : Thriving (Instead of Surviving) In the Era of the Internet, and is also the host of the Conspiracy of Goodness podcast. The Conspiracy of Goodness Podcast is desi...
Nov 23, 2022•53 min
In this episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast, host Michael Shields interviews music critic and journalist Steven Hyden, the author of This Isn’t Happening , Twilight of the Gods , Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me , and (with Steve Gorman) Hard to Handle . His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine , Washington Post , Billboard , Pitchfork , Rolling Stone , Grantland , The A.V. Club , Slate , and Salon. He is currently the cultural critic at UPROXX . Hyden’s latest book, Long Ro...
Nov 15, 2022•46 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with the author of Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles , Alex Har vey. Alex Harvey is a producer and director of programs including Panorama and The Late Show for the BBC. His films include The Lives of Animals and Enter the Jungle . Based in Los Angeles, he regularly writes on literature, film, and music for the London Review of Books and Los Angeles Review of Books. His book, Song Noir, examines the formative f...
Nov 04, 2022•55 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with Tara Watson, professor of economics at Williams College and a co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources , the leading academic journal in labor economics, as well as Kalee Thompson, a journalist and senior editor at Wirecutter and the author of Deadliest Sea: The Untold Story Behind the Greatest Rescue in Coast Guard History . Watson and Thompson are co-authors of The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age...
Oct 07, 2022•27 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with the author of Harvard’s Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science (The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations) , Patrick L. Schmidt . In Harvard’s Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science , Schmidt tells the little-known story of how some of the most renowned social scientists of the twentieth century struggled to elevate their emerging disciplines of cultural anthropology, sociology, and social and clinical psychology. Scor...
Sep 29, 2022•49 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with musician Chris Forsyth. It isn't hyperbole to describe Chris as one of rock’s most gifted improvisers. Chris got his start in Brooklyn's experimental circles in the early 2000s and promptly grew into a masterful technical player. As the bandleader of Chris Forsyth & the Solar Motel Band, he composed mostly instrumental pieces that channeled both the psychedelic jamming of the Grateful Dead and the precision of art-punk...
Sep 14, 2022•38 min
This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with Woodstock, New York via North Carolina singer-songwriter Kenny Roby. Roby is the former lead singer of 6 String Drag, which he formed with bassist Rob Keller in the early 1990s, a band which quickly became one of the more notable bands of the Americana movement. The band's style ranged from old style country with a hint of soul and gospel to rock. While 6 String Drag broke up in the late 1990s, Roby continues to make recor...
Sep 09, 2022•54 min
