Billions of people all over the world use apps and websites. We have an unprecedented amount of information at our fingertips but it’s also allowed detailed dossiers to be collected on all of us. While most of the collected data is used for advertising there’s also the possibility of data being used for law enforcement and economic discrimination. In this episode of the Progressive Page Turner I talk to Tom Kemp, author of Containing Big Tech about who’s collecting our data, what they’re doing with it and how you can prevent surveillance.

Social Media has become a battleground for psychological warfare. In this episode I talk with Annalee Newitz about how propaganda worked in the past and how both domestic and foreign agents are targeting voters in the US.

In his book Psychedelics and the Coming Singularity David Jay Brown interviews people who look at the world in some very non-traditional ways. I talked to him about how we experience the world and why psychedelics like DMT might be the door to a new understanding of our minds and consciousness.

Robert Jensen is an emeritus professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. he taught graduate and undergraduate courses in media law, ethics, and politics. His latest book, It’s Debatable, defines his political and ethical positions and how he arrived at them.

Rebecca Renner's book Gator Country takes readers into an undercover operation in the Florida Everglades. Alligator hides worth millions of dollars are harvested every year. Most of them come from alligator farms but alligators don't breed in captivity so eggs must taken from wild nests. Conservation efforts have brought alligators back from the brink of extinction but enforcing rules and regulations with people who face down angry alligator mamas has hazards of its own.

Do children need to be protected from their parent’s on-line activity? That’s the question at the heart of Erin Qiuinn-Kong’s debut novel Hate Follow. The story is fiction but the issues about child privacy and modern parenting are very real.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist who is not ready to give up on the future. Her book What if we got it right? Visions for the Future is filled with conversations, poetry and essays about the kind of world we could create. A world where we can all flourish.

Justin Nobel has spent seven years investigating the way the oil and gas industry deals with the enormous amount of waste products it produces. All of it is toxic but some of it is also radioactive. Lax regulation and legal loopholes expose workers and people living near the wells to levels of radiation far in excess of legal limits. Waste from the fracking process is dumped into watershed where it will become more radioactive over time as elements like radium and radon decay into daughter elements. His book is Petroleum 238.