For our last podcast of 2021, we want to remember two people who died in the past year, and listen again to our interviews with them. Rennie Davis was probably the New Left’s most talented organizer, best known for the trial of the Chicago 7. He died on February 2 at his home outside Boulder, Colo. He was 80. We spoke at an event for The Nation magazine in October, 2020.

Also: Joan Didion died December 23—she was 87. She wrote personal essays about California in the 196s and ’70s, collected in books like Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album, and then about politics and history, especially her reports in Salvador and Miami. We spoke in October 2003, at KPFK in Los Angeles, when her book about her family’s California, Where I Was From had just been published.

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