This episode of the dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com and by University of California press.

One title that you might like is American Profit, The Life and Work of Carrie McWilliams by Peter Richardson, with a forward by Mike Davis.

Historian Kevin Starr described Carrie McWilliams as the finest non-fiction writer on California ever and the

state's most astute political observer. But as Peter Richardson argues, McWilliams was also one of the nation's most versatile and productive public intellectuals of his time.

Richardson's absorbing and elegant biography traces McWilliams' extraordinary life and career.

Drawing from a wide range of sources, it explores his childhood on a Colorado cattle ranch,

his early literary journalism in Los Angeles,

his remarkable legal and political activism,

his stint in state government,

the explosion of first-rate books between 1939 and 1950, and his editorial leadership at the Nation magazine.

Along the way it also documents McWilliams' influence on a wide range of key figures including Cesar Chavez, Hunter S. Thompson,

Mike Davis, screenwriter Robert Town, playwright Louise Valdez and historian

Patricia Limerick.

American Prophet, the life and work of Carrie McWilliams,

by Peter Richardson, with a foreword by Mike Davis,

out now from University of California Press.

Welcome to the Dig, a podcast from Jacobin magazine. My name is Daniel Denver and

I'm temporarily broadcasting from Santiago de Chile. At New York magazine Eric Levitz has turned the hot take genre into something a lot more interesting,

providing the sort of consistently thoughtful and deeply contextualized analysis that is often quite hard to find on mainstream

news sites.

And good news, he's my guest today.

And we'll be talking about the increasingly impossible to reconcile imminent

...