PODCAST · science
On the Commons Podcast
by Antonia Malchik
A newsletter about ownership, property, and what we lose in the privatization of the commons. antonia.substack.com
Episodes
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Fighting traffic
In 1922, the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the U.S., dedicated a memorial to the 286 children killed in car crashes the previous year. More than 5,000 people attended the ceremony, which was inspired by a previous Safety Week in Baltimore, Maryland, and New York City’s Safety Week…
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Poverty isn’t invisible
Where did August go? Into wildfire smoke and the heat of exhausted ecosystems. “What do you notice?” “A lot of grief. And there’s something like . . . an internal flinch. Not a physical flinch, almost a psychological one.” The clinician raised his eyebrows and wrote something down but said…
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A price above rubies
I have a story to share with you. It’s a strange turn of phrase, “I have a story.” Or maybe not strange. In cultures all over the world—and once, I imagine, in every culture—stories are sacred. Some you may only tell in certain seasons, others only to people allowed to receive them. “Have a…
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Private property: bedrock . . . or shale?
I recently came across a news story about the community of Lake Tahoe, California—a place known as a ski resort, as my town in Montana is also known but, also like my town, a place where thousands of people live full-time. People who keep the community running, whose taxes and labor pay for the...
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Trespass against
All wild waters have a different flavor. The North Fork of the Flathead River, the river near the off-grid cabin I stay at most often, is wide, and fast enough I wouldn’t risk trying to swim across it. Its headwaters are in Canada, and it has so far been saved from toxic selenium levels by an...
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When the world shut down
Somewhere between 112,000 and 121,000 years ago, a person walked along the muddy residue of a lake that today is so long gone it might be found only in myth. And maybe not even there—the oldest known story of humankind reaches back only 100,000 years. Whoever walked those shores, whoever it was…
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Bound for hell
My father recently sent me a photo from outside the apartment he and my stepmother share in Moscow. It’s a tiny one-room flat that once belonged to my stepmother’s grandmother, Anastasia Tsvetaeva. Anastasia’s sister, Marina Tsvetaeva, is still one of the most beloved poets in Russia; it was…
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Healing Long Covid
If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons! Some places to roam: * How, and and why, does anyone own the earth? * The limitations of meditation and lure of silence. * Walkability when a problem is systemic, or: you can’t solve for traffic. ✔️ Join over 7,000 On the Commons readers. Upgrade…
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How bad does it have to get
Following is a revised essay originally published in 2021. People leave home for all kinds of reasons. This essay is not a judgment; the relevance of this question— “What would it take for a person to leave?”—never fails to fascinate and sadden me. Friends sometimes ask me how long I’ll stick it...
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Everlasting mythologies: Anglo-Saxon identity
The following is a revised version of an essay originally published in January 2022. Many years ago, late into Barack Obama’s presidential administration, maybe in 2015 or even early 2016, I had a long messaging conversation with an acquaintance about some of the right-wing movements and talking...
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On greed: how much is enough?
If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons! Some places to roam: * How, and and why, does anyone own the earth? * The limitations of meditation and lure of silence. * Walkability when a problem is systemic, or: you can’t solve for traffic. ✔️ Join over 7,000 On the Commons readers. Upgrade…
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Hope is the heartwood
If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons! Here, we explore questions as varied as: * The disastrous and ongoing legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery, the epitome of ownership’s claim “I took it; now it’s mine” in the form of “I saw it; now it’s mine.” * Is it possible to consume without...
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Oligarchy: the power of wealth
If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons! Here, we explore questions as varied as: * The disastrous and ongoing legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery. * Is it possible to consume without exploitation? * What Is Wrong With Russia? ✔️ Join over 7,000 On the Commons readers. Upgrade here. Watch...
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Repair
To new subscribers—welcome to On the Commons! To those of you who’ve been around a while, welcome back! Today’s post comes to you amidst birdsong. I recently wrote an essay for Psyche/Aeon’s “one thing that changed me” series that’s probably the most personal thing I’ve ever published. If you…
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Art harder
If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons. Here, we explore questions as varied as: * The disastrous and ongoing legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery. * Is it possible to consume without exploitation? * What Is Wrong With Russia? ✔️ Join a community of 6,900+ On the Commons readers. Upgrade...
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Border control
If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons! Here, we explore questions as varied as: Why are three little-known 15th-century papal bulls still being weaponized against Indigenous sovereignty today? How is the right to forage for food related to the Magna Carta, freedom, and public lands? Or…
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Wealth knows best
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There were wolves in the woods
Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe
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History is won
Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe
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The time that is given to us
Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe
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Trespassing, or air that feels like home
An audio version of the essay "Trespassing" published in the anthology Elementals, from the Center for Humans & Nature, read by the author Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe
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Writing is a commons of ideas
I finished my master’s degree in creative writing a couple of decades ago, when I was in my late twenties. With a few exceptions it was an off-putting experience: the program felt designed to promote competitive jealousy and a slash-and-burn attitude toward others’ work. I’m not sure why I stuck...
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A culture of domination
In the third book of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, there’s a scene that has stuck with me as a good lesson for many times and circumstances, but especially those that require adaptability when facing great change. In the book, Eustace, a self-entitled and...
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You can't solve for traffic
Several people have sent me notices of the Wall Street Journal Facebook investigation regarding harmful content, harm to teens from Instagram, and many other issues. (I’m not putting in a link because it’s paywalled, but here is a summary from the Los Angeles Times.) In return, I recommend an...
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Buying America
My younger sister and I made a deal once a long time ago—I was maybe 13 or 14 or 15; over 30 years ago anyway—just before or after we’d moved to a new town. I think it was one of our very brief stints in California, or after we’d returned from the Soviet Union. The deal was: we wouldn’t talk to...
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People / on the prairie
A couple weekends ago my family went to a cabin at American Prairie Reserve. APR is a private initiative that started as a World Wildlife Fund partnership in the early 2000s with the aim of purchasing private land in eastern Montana, land that would eventually link federal wildlife refuges and...
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How much space does your self need?
I can’t remember before seeing such a quantity of Very Large Trucks (and also Jeeps) as I’ve seen over the past month in my area. They are . . . Very Large. I know this is a recent design change to make trucks look more intimidating, and I’ve been a bit angry, I guess, at seeing such large…
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When being alive becomes a crime
“No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.” —Spinoza The light recently has been remarkable. Sometimes we get days like that, often during or between bouts of rain. Clouds rumple in a mix of gray-blue, sunlight glancing off odd angles, and the deep pine green sets off…
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Only the lonely
A little over a year ago, early in our state’s lockdown, I watched one of my children crumble into a million pieces. They’d held up okay until then. We’d done a lot of family walks, and my kids were still enjoying the novelty of the puppy we’d adopted shortly before Covid became more than a…
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Sneering at extremism
Shortly after the January 2021 attempted coup in Washington, D.C., Leah Sottile, a long-time reporter on anti-government extremism and host of the Bundyville podcast about the Bundy family, the 2016 takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, and related stories, published a newsletter on what she...
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Silence: on (not) meditating
Years ago I shared an apartment with a guy who used to take a month-long vow of silence whenever the mood struck him. He was the night cleaner at the coffee shop where I worked and played and sang in a band. The apartment was absolutely frigid—my room was a kind of closed-in former second-story…
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Homestead acts
Wurtz Cabin, U.S. Forest Service —- The prevailing themes of my childhood were: having a father from the Soviet Union, and being descended from Montana pioneers who’d homesteaded land that my grandfather’s cousin still ranched until his death a few years ago (his son now runs it). Being proud of...
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Walking belongs to all of us
Every now and then I come across a comment about my book that mentions its glaring lack of Henry David Thoreau. Is it the lack that glares, I wonder, or Thoreau himself? Is there a Thoreau-shaped hole in the universe somewhere glaring at me? It does actually include Thoreau—exactly once because I...
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Consumption without exploitation
“I don’t trust that there is some unilateral, final way to plant our feet in the earth without displacing something. It means that we should be humble.” —poet and clinical psychologist Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé Commodity and consumption. Use. Life. Death. Exploitation. There is nothing about being alive...
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Today will never happen again
One of the very last posts I saw before deleting my Instagram account in 2020 was this photo from fellow Montana writer Eric Heidle (whose work I discovered when we both had pieces in the anthology A Million Acres: Montana Writers Reflect on Land and Open Space, benefiting 50 years and a million...
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Story needs no platform
I left Facebook in 2017 and Twitter in 2018, for many reasons but most because I don’t like who I am on social media, the person I become when I engage too much: snarky, judgmental, every now and then downright mean. I left Instagram in 2020 because I was tired of pretending to create a false...
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Walking requires the Commons
When someone asked a few years ago what my next big project would be and I talked about the commons, private property, and ownership, they asked me why I would go write about something so completely unrelated when my whole thing, for many years now, has been walking. This question has come up…
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The War for Reason
A long time ago I registered a domain name called War on Reason. This was during the early-2000s George W. Bush years, when Congress passed the Patriot Act so quickly they seemed to intentionally be thumbing their noses at the U.S. Constitution, and our president and his administration mired the...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does On the Commons Podcast have?
On the Commons Podcast currently has 38 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is On the Commons Podcast about?
A newsletter about ownership, property, and what we lose in the privatization of the commons. antonia.substack.com
How often does On the Commons Podcast release new episodes?
On the Commons Podcast has 38 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to On the Commons Podcast?
You can listen to On the Commons Podcast 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 On the Commons Podcast?
On the Commons Podcast is created and hosted by Antonia Malchik.
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