Human beings are suspended in webs-of-significance—we make sense and we make meaning—and culture is nothing more nor less than the webs. Those webs-of-significance are alive, forever trembling and vibrating, evolving and regenerating, changing and developing as messages and stories and ways-of-being vibrate across the surface. So culture can never stand still, never sit static or inert; rather it is always on the move, in the mix, and on the make—dynamic and churning and charging forward. The joy of the churn, and the burden of resistance, re-imagination, and reconstruction lives within the counter-culture. We’re joined by Alex Zamalin in a wide-ranging conversation about culture, counter-culture, and the quest for revolutionary freedom.

In America is in the Heart, Carlos Bulosan describes his good fortune at landing a job in a library where he could be close to books: “I was beginning to understand what was going on around me, and the darkness that had covered my present life was lifting.” Ursula Le Guin writes of a library’s sacredness: “its accessibility, its publicness.” She calls the public library a public trust, and continues: “A great library is freedom,.” We’re honored to be joined in conversation with Emily Drabinski, past president of the American Library Association, and a brilliant and intrepid defender of the public square.

Comix is a distinct art form—sequential art—that expresses ideas with multiple images, most often combined with text. It's a hybrid (think co-mix) and, importantly, it’s a medium not a genre—don’t confuse the two in the presence of a comix creator or you might get your head bit off (for a real-life dramatization, see the opening of To Teach: the journey in comics). Comics aren’t just for kids anymore, and the medium has been creatively deployed to communicate non-comedic content—see Maus or Persepolis or Fun Home. They’ve taken over the world in this golden comix age, and you can find them everywhere—classrooms, special sections in bookstores and libraries, and, yes, still hidden in that secret drawer in the closet—and still the medium retains a sense of its insurgent origins. The word “comix” (or “comics”) is a “non-count noun” like “politics” or “economics” referring to the medium itself. We’re joined by two old friends in conversation about comix and the world—Eve Ewing, poet, playwright, scholar, teacher, author of the Ironheart series for Marvel comics, and the first Black female author of the Black Panther series; and Ryan Alexander-Tanner (www.ohyesverynice.com), illustrator/comics artist and educator, co-author of To Teach: the journey in comics, and author and artist of Muhammad Ali: The Greatest Comics Biography of All Time Volume One: Cassius Clay.