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Start Making Sense: The GOP’s Gun Problem

On this week’s podcast, Laila Lalami on ISIS and American Muslims, Joan Walsh on our distorted gun politics, and Amy Wilentz and Tom Lutz on Chernobyl.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

December 10, 2015

Laila Lalami on ISIS and American Muslims, Joan Walsh on our distorted gun politics, and Amy Wilentz and Tom Lutz on Chernobyl.

On this week’s podcast, Laila Lalami talks about what ISIS wants from American Muslims; Joan Walsh explains the real reason we don’t have gun control; and we remember Chernobyl—Amy Wilentz and Tom Lutz talk about writer Svetlana Alexievich, the new winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Start Making Sense is hosted by Jon Wiener and co-produced by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Laila Lalami says ISIS wants to eliminate what they call “the grey zone” between their Caliphate and “the Crusaders,” even though that’s where most of the world’s Muslims live.

Also: Joan Walsh talks about the real reason we don’t have gun control: far-right fantasies about Obama coming to take your guns.

And we remember Chernobyl, thanks to the greatest writer about that disaster, Svetlana Alexievich—she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature this week. Amy Wilentz and Tom Lutz comment.

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Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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