An American Prestige bonus interview.
Vice President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance stand with Col. Susan Meyers, commander of the US military’s Pituffik Space Base, as they tour the base on March 28, 2025, in Pituffik, Greenland. (Jim Watson / Pool / Getty Images)
Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
Danny and Derek speak with historian Gretchen Heefner about how the US military (unsuccessfully) set out to conquer extreme environments and what those efforts reveal about empire, climate, and power. They discuss the US Army training for a desert war that turned out to be mud, the Pentagon’s disastrous attempts to master Greenland’s ice, early blueprints for building on the moon, efforts to gather “environmental intelligence” across the globe, and other failed endeavors showing the limits of American military power.
Read Gretchen’s book Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How U.S. Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments now!
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Danny and Derek speak with historian Gretchen Heefner about how the US military (unsuccessfully) set out to conquer extreme environments and what those efforts reveal about empire, climate, and power. They discuss the US Army training for a desert war that turned out to be fought in mud, the Pentagon’s disastrous attempts to master Greenland’s ice, early blueprints for building on the moon, efforts to gather “environmental intelligence” across the globe, and other failed endeavors showing the limits of American military power.
Read Gretchen’s book Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How U.S. Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments now!
Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: thenation.com/subscribe.
Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
Danny and Derek speak with artist and writer Molly Crabapple about her book on the history of the Jewish Labor Bund, Here Where We Live Is Our Country. They discuss Molly's personal connection to the story, the Pale of Settlement and Jewish emancipation, the founding of the Bund in 1897, the Bund's armed self-defense against pogroms, its fraught relationship with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the Bund's rivalry with Zionism, the flourishing of Bundist culture in interwar Poland, and the lessons of the Bund’s story for the Jewish left today.
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Daniel BessnerTwitterDaniel Bessner is a historian of US foreign relations and is the author of, among other books, Imperialist Realism.
Derek DavisonDerek Davison is a writer and analyst specializing in international affairs and US foreign policy. He is the publisher of the Foreign Exchanges newsletter, cohost of the American Prestige podcast, and former editor of LobeLog.