PODCAST · society
Brutal South
by Paul Bowers
On struggles, schooling, and raw concrete in the dirty dirty south. A companion podcast to the Brutal South newsletter. brutalsouth.substack.com
Episodes
-
Wikifest 2026: Haldeman's Weirdest Day So Far
Discursive, self-indulgent, and inconsiderate of the audience’s time or interests, it’s everyone’s favorite Brutal South tradition: The exchange of rare and unusual Wikipedia articles with my pal the sportswriter Michael Baumann. Find him on Fangraphs where he writes about baseball, on Medium...
-
Wikifest 2022: Trashcan Contra
Every December, my friend the sportswriter Michael Baumann joins me for a festive exchange of Wikipedia articles we gathered through the year. We’ve been exchanging them informally for well over a decade now, but in recent years we decided to make a podcast out of it. Mike covers baseball for...
-
Episode 31: Appalachian black metal
My guest is Aaron Carey of the West Virginia black metal band Nechochwen. Aaron is a true Appalachian hesher who's also trained as a classical guitarist, and he's been using his musical project to retell and reinterpret indigenous history in his part of the world. He learned growing up that he…
more -
30: Nehemiah Action (w/ Charleston Area Justice Ministry)
My guests today are Amber Campbell-Moore and Dr. Matt Cressler with the Charleston Area Justice Ministry, a good, radically inclusive organization working for social and economic justice in Charleston, S.C., and the greater Charleston area. As we speak today, the ministry is gearing up for its...
-
Possum Island, the audiobook
I have a new piece of short fiction out today in the Charleston City Paper Lit Issue. It’s called “Possum Island,” and you can read it online or pick up a paper if you’re in the area. I thought it would be fun to make an audio version, so that’s what I did. Enjoy! If you’re looking for more stuff...
-
29: The Lord God Bird is dead (w/ Matt Drury)
We're gathered here today to speak of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a tremendous beautiful bird that is gone forever ... or so some people think. Hey. Welcome to Episode 29 of the Brutal South Podcast. The ivory-billed woodpecker has been on my mind again since late September when the U.S. Fish…
more -
28: Long knives and haunted plantations (w/ Michael Smallwood)
My guest on the pod is Michael Smallwood (@mikeluvsgushers), an actor, director, podcaster, and screenwriter from Charleston. He recently appeared in the biggest movie role of his career as the character Marcus in Halloween Kills, the latest installment of the Michael Myers saga. If you've seen…
more -
27: "Critical race theory" (w/ Davíd G. Martínez & AJ Davis)
Welcome back to the Brutal South podcast, Episode 27. I guess this was inevitable: We're going to talk about critical race theory, both as an actual framework for understanding the world and as a mostly unrelated buzzword that conservatives have been screeching about nonstop since this summer.…
more -
Episode 26: Executing grace (w/ Shane Claiborne)
My guest is Shane Claiborne, a Christian activist fighting against war, gun violence, and the death penalty. I got to meet him recently at a death penalty abolitionists' meeting in Columbia, S.C., and he graciously set aside a little time to talk about the struggle to end state-enforced killing…
more -
25: Black swamp metal (w/ Eddie Newman)
Quick note in case you missed it: I’m trying to decide on a T-shirt design for Brutal South, and my friend CJ Bones came up with three metal-inspired logos to choose from. Click here to check them out and let me know which one you like the best. *** Brood X is upon us. I'm talking about a brood…
more -
24: Okra soup (w/ Amethyst Ganaway)
My guest is Amethyst Ganaway, a chef and writer from North Charleston, South Carolina. Amethyst has been working in the restaurant industry for about 12 years, and during the past year she got deep into researching the history of food from our part of the country. She has published a few great...
-
23: Ghost in the machine (w/ Gardnsound)
My guest is Gardnsound, an Atlanta-based electronic music composer who is also one of my oldest and truest friends. I know him as Gardner. As long as I’ve known him, he has been a restless experimenter, from his classical training on the bass to his hard-partying dubstep phase to that time he…
more -
22: Dress your baby in a union onesie (w/ The State News Guild)
My guests are Bristow Marchant (@BristowatHome) and David Travis Bland (@dtravisbland), reporters at The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C. They and their colleagues went public with the formation of The State News Guild this week, seeking voluntary union recognition from management. On this…
more -
21: Y’all are welcome (w/ Jim Conrad)
My guest is Pastor Jim Conrad of Towne View Baptist Church in Kennesaw, Georgia. His church was, until recently, one of the only Southern Baptist churches that openly accepted and affirmed lesbian, gay, and transgender people. His church has been in the news since February because the Southern...
-
20: Something out of nothing (w/ Shovels & Rope)
My guests on today’s podcast are Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent of the band Shovels & Rope. Most of the songs featured in this episode are from their latest album, Busted Jukebox Vol. 3, which you can buy at your local record store or download on Bandcamp. I was thinking back to 2012, when I...
-
Episode 19: They can linger in our memory like ghosts
My podcast guest is Chuck Johnson, a musician who composes meditative songs on the pedal steel guitar. Chuck grew up in North Carolina, where he heard pedal steel in the context of country music. After building a career playing fingerpicked acoustic guitar in the style of Elizabeth Cotten and…
more -
Episode 18: Raw concrete (feat. Kate Wagner)
My guest is Kate Wagner (@mcmansionhell), architecture critic at The New Republic and proprietor of the McMansion Hell blog. Like me, Kate grew up in the South, and like me, she is a defender of brutalist architecture. Unlike me, Kate really knows what she's talking about. Brutalism is a style…
more -
Episode 17: A free college manifesto
Halfway through John Warner’s new book about higher education, it dawned on me that I was reading a manifesto. The book is called Sustainable. Resilient. Free. The Future of Public Higher Education (2020, Belt Publishing). It’s a sweeping diagnosis of what ails higher education in the United...
-
Episode 16: This bear kills fascists
Michael Baumann (@MichaelBaumann), staff writer for The Ringer, joins me for the second annual Wikipedia Holiday Special. Mike and I met at the University of South Carolina, and one of the ways we’ve stayed in touch since graduating is by sending each other articles we find on Wikipedia. You…
more -
Episode 15: Cowboy like me
I convened this emergency podcast shortly after the release of Taylor Swift’s evermore, the out-of-nowhere follow-up to folklore. Joining me on the panel are my colleagues Michael Majchrowicz (@mjmajchrowicz) and Ari Pérez-Mejía. Subjects of interest for this episode include Myspace, parasocial...
-
Charity, the audiobook (Part 1)
I’m publishing a new piece of fiction today. The title is “Charity,” and I’m releasing it in three parts. You can read Part 1 via the Wednesday morning newsletter edition, or listen to the audio version here. Part 2, Part 3, and the full audio edition are available to paying subscribers only....
-
Episode 14: Making it through December
My guest is the Rev. Dr. Jeremy Rutledge, the minister at Circular Congregational Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Jeremy and I have crossed paths several times over the years. He’s involved with social justice work in Charleston, we have a lot of friends in common, and I’m pretty sure I...
-
Episode 13: Landlord problems
My guest is Marvin Pendarvis, my state House representative here in South Carolina. He's about my age, one of a handful of millennials in the legislature, and he's been one of the loudest voices in the state capital on the issues of housing insecurity and evictions. I wanted to have him on the…
more -
Episode 12: Blast beats for the working class (preview)
This one’s a subscriber-only episode. Paying subscribers to the Brutal South newsletter get today’s full episode and access to all of the archives at brutalsouth.substack.com/archive. It’s $5 a month. Think about it. My guest is Ian Nix, lead vocalist and songwriter for the South Carolina metal...
-
Episode 11: Singing sparrows, snapping shrimp
I wrote in the newsletter a few weeks ago about this thing I saw with my kids when we were camping in the South Carolina Upstate. It was long and yellow and it moved like a slug, but it was shaped like a snake and it had a flattened sort of hammer head. It was horrifying. When we got home I wrote...
-
Episode 10: Power to the nurses
My guest on this podcast episode is Kelley Tyler, a trauma nurse working in Asheville, North Carolina. On Sept. 17, Kelley and her fellow nurses at Mission Hospital won a tremendous victory for organized labor when they voted in a landslide to be represented by a union. It was the largest union...
-
Episode 9: Good news for people who love local news
Today on the podcast I've got two guests, Lucas Smolcic Larson and Stephen Fastenau. They're both reporters at the Beaufort Gazette and Hilton Head Island Packet, two newspapers in the South Carolina Lowcountry that share a newsroom. Just last week more than 80% of the reporters, photographers…
more -
Episode 8: Lord Mammon
He’s a frumpy old fart wearing too much bronzer, scowling into the middle distance. He sports a gold lamé robe and wears a gold crown with an ass’s ears. Someone told him this outfit would make him look handsome, or happy, or dignified, but it only took him one glimpse in the mirror to realize…
more -
Episode 7: Listen to the teachers
It’s been almost 5 months since my daughters went to preschool, and they’ve started getting nostalgic. One of them told me today about a time when a kid hit her with a bike on the playground. I had never heard that before. They’ve both started vividly describing the flavors of popsicles they used...
-
Episode 6: Ain't no laws
My guest this week is Dave Infante, a reporter in Charleston, South Carolina, who recently wrote a piece for Mel Magazine about the curious intersection of White Claw drinking culture and the right-wing militant boogaloo movement. If that sounds bewildering and niche, then strap in. You might…
more -
Episode 5: White picket geofence
Welcome to Episode 5 of the Brutal South Podcast. My guest this week is Dr. James N. Gilmore, assistant professor of media and technology studies at Clemson University. I met Jimmy at the University of South Carolina in the freshman Honors College dorm, which was an old building full of lovable...
-
Episode 4: The patina of politeness
This week’s podcast episode is a very Charleston episode. Sorry, not sorry. While the police killing of George Floyd has set off protests and uprisings across the globe, we are seeing activism take root differently in different communities. In Charleston, South Carolina, it’s dredging up some...
-
Episode 3: You might be a racist
For the third episode of the Brutal South Podcast, my guest is the man behind the popular Twitter account @YesYoureRacist. Twitter, for the uninitiated, is an open-air insane asylum where celebrities, world leaders, and everyday people log on to air their grievances. Logan Smith is a political...
-
Episode 2: Psychedelic empathy
One bright morning in May 1953, Aldous Huxley dissolved four-tenths of a gram of mescaline in a glass of water, drank it, and waited to see what happened. It wasn’t idle curiosity that drove the author of Brave New World to try the psychedelic alkaloid of the peyote cactus. Late in life, he had...
-
Episode 1: How to buy books during a pandemic
I’m broadly skeptical about consumer activism. The first time I set foot in a Whole Foods, I saw a laminated sign beside the coffee grinder indicating that the machine might have been contaminated by non-organic coffee and that eco-conscious consumers might want to grind their beans at home. My...
We're indexing this podcast's transcripts for the first time — this can take a minute or two. We'll show results as soon as they're ready.
No matches for "" in this podcast's transcripts.
TOPICS IN THIS SHOW
Loading reviews...
Loading similar podcasts...
Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Brutal South have?
Brutal South currently has 35 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Brutal South about?
On struggles, schooling, and raw concrete in the dirty dirty south. A companion podcast to the Brutal South newsletter. brutalsouth.substack.com
How often does Brutal South release new episodes?
Brutal South has 35 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Brutal South?
You can listen to Brutal South on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Brutal South?
Brutal South is created and hosted by Paul Bowers.
URL copied to clipboard!