This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with Alec Karakatsanis. Alec is the Founder and Executive Director of Civil Rights Corps and as one of the country’s leading experts in constitutional civil rights he has pioneered cases to challenge the size, power, profit, and everyday brutality of the punishment bureaucracy across the United States. He has also worked with directly impacted communities across the U.S. to design innovative new legal, advocacy, and narrative strategies for challenging widespread illegal and harmful practices of prosecutors, police, probation officers, judges, and private companies who work with them to profit from the punishment bureaucracy. His recently-released book, Copoganda, is the focus of this episode. In this groundbreaking expose that is Copoganda, essential for understanding the rising authoritarian mindset, readers are introduced to the concept of “Copaganda.” Alec defines Copaganda as a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors, and news media that stokes fear of police-recorded crime and distorts society’s responses to it. Every day, mass media manipulates our perception of what keeps us safe and contributes to a culture fearful of poor people, strangers, immigrants, unhoused people, and people of color. The result is more and more authoritarian state repression, more inequality, and huge profits for the massive public and private punishment bureaucracy. Copaganda documents how modern news coverage fuels insecurity against these groups and shifts our focus away from the policies that would help us improve people’s lives — things like affordable housing, adequate healthcare, early childhood education, and climate-friendly city planning. These false narratives in turn fuel surveillance, punishment, inequality, injustice, and mass incarceration.

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This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with Mark Lo. Mark has worked on films and TV across many genres for over twenty years, first as a music agent and supervisor, collaborating with composers and artists to bring music to films, and then as an Executive Music Producer. As an Executive Music Producer, he worked on films including Todd Hayne’s Carol (Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara), Paul Haggis’s Third Person (Liam Neeson, Mila Kunis, and James Franco), and The Railway Man (Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman and Stellan Skarsgard), amongst others. Mark set up the production company Asylum Giant as a creative hub to develop and produce a slate of Film and TV projects, tell stories that celebrate our humanity and create projects that deepen our relationship with the non-human world. He recently produced and directed the feature music documentary Count Me In — the focus of this episode. Count Me In takes viewers behind the kit with some of the world’s most iconic drummers, featuring insightful interviews and narration from Taylor Hawkins, Stewart Copeland, Chad Smith, Emily Dolan Davies, Roger Taylor, Nick Mason, Cindy Blackman Santana, and more. In their own words, they share the passion that took them from banging on pots and pans as kids to performing on some of the world’s biggest stages. Along the way, these legendary drummers discuss the dedication that fuels their craft and pay tribute to the musical icons who influenced and inspired them, including Ringo Starr, Charlie Watts, Keith Moon, John Bonham, Ginger Baker and others.

Count Me In is available on streaming services everywhere including Apple TV, Amazon, and Fandango at Home.

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This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with Mattea Kramer, a writer who comprehensively explores weighty ideas about drugs, power and powerlessness, and the voice in your head. She's been published in The Guardian, The Nation, Mother Jones, Guernica, and The Washington Post, and she has appeared on MSNBC and on radio stations across the country. Her first novel, The Untended — the focus of this episode — will be published in May 2025. In The Untended, Casch Abbey is a waitress, single mom, and recreational boxer who falls in love twice: first with a veteran who secretly grows pot on a rich man’s land in Vermont’s Green Mountains, and then with a painkiller that eases her long-buried pain. After her foot is crushed under the wheel of a station wagon, Casch loses her waitressing gig and goes broke — and the meds for her foot are her only source of relief. But when the drug is recalled due to outcries of widespread addiction, Casch’s dependence imperils her already tenuous life, as cravings lead her into her small town’s simmering netherworld. Intimate and exhilarating, The Untended will upend your every assumption about who is a hero and who is worthy of love. In this episode host Michael Shields and Mattea Kramer explore the consequential themes present throughout The Unintended having to do with addiction, corporate greed, PTSD, generational trauma, and so much more.

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