Latest Content for Old Mole Variety Hour

  Clean & Safe: A Dirty and Dangerous Contract for Portland: Every year, Downtown Clean & Safe receives over $5 million to provide “enhanced services” to 213 blocks of Portland’s Central City. Yet below the surface of this seemingly benign contract lie threats to public tr... Read more

  Jon Nelson hosts this episode of the Old Mole, which includes the following segments: The Legal Case for Genocide: In December 2023, residents of Gaza and two nongovernmental human rights organizations filed a lawsuit in a federal court in California arguing that the US... Read more

  Why do we hear so much about the supposed failures of recent progressive reforms in Portland?  Why does there seem to be so much panic about downtown?  Local organizer and activist Hyung Nam explains how Trump-era tax breaks have further incentivized the wealthiest devel... Read more

  Silhouette of Godzilla looming over silhouette of Broadway bridge against a rainbow background. Image by Mark Nerys. Used with permission. Norm Diamond hosts this episode of the Old Mole, which includes the following segments: Zionism Was Not the Only Alternative! There... Read more

There is a rich history of filmmaking in the Middle East, including a growing number of women filmmakers.  Jan Haaken talks with Professor Yasmeen Hanoosh about the course Hanoosh is teaching this term at Portland State University titled “War and Coloniality in Arab Cinema.... Read more

There was another prominent movement among oppressed Jews in the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe: The Bund. Sharon Rudahl is the author of a new graphic history of The Bund. Norm Diamond talks with her about that working class socialist organization, its commitment to the... Read more

Book Mole Larry Bowlden reviews James McBride’s 2023 novel,The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, which, he argues, deserves all the wonderful press it has gotten. The love and cooperation between poor Jews and Blacks in a small town in Pennsylvania is the backbone of story, a... Read more

    On January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court released its Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, now overturned by the 2022 Dobbs decision.  This episode of the Old Mole looks at the history of abortion access in Portland and at the broader context of reproductive j... Read more

  During the century that preceded Roe v Wade in 1973, abortion was illegal in Oregon. Even so, women consistently sought and obtained abortions, including from licensed physicians. But whether the practice was officially tolerated or suppressed fluctuated significantly ov... Read more

  A few months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a challenge to a federal law designed to keep indigenous children from being taken from their families and put up for adoption outside of their tribes. Oregon writer and photographer Matt Witt tells us about a riveting TV se... Read more