What do gingers, vampires, Zach Bryan, and John Locke have in common? Honestly, more than we expected. This week, a “Free Palestine” shirt and the old revolutionary phrase “Appeal to Heaven” lead us into a conversation about free speech, religious tradition, political power, and whether our moral imaginations can actually change the world. Because maybe the world that feels fixed around us isn’t nearly as fixed as we think, even if the connection between redheads and vampires remains an open question.

Avenue M is produced by Bespoken Live with music by Zach Swelber, who plays in Circle It and Mosant.

What can a bidet teach us about power? Apparently, quite a lot. We start with “Muslim showers” and somehow end up asking what it means to have enough confidence in who you are to claim a place at the table and enough generosity to make room for everyone else. Along the way, we wrestle with coercion, accommodation, assimilation, and whether the most meaningful kind of power isn’t power over other people at all, but the power to create the conditions for more of us to belong and contribute.

Avenue M is produced by Bespoken Live with music by Zach Swelber, who plays in Circle It and Mosant.

There was a time when we could believe in Ferris Bueller. Skip school. Steal a Ferrari. Take over a parade. Trust that the future was basically ours. Twenty-five years after 9/11, we’re asking what happened to that sense of possibility, and how much of our lives are now lived inside stories written for us by politics, technology, fear, and algorithms. The question at the foundation of this episode is deceptively simple: Who gets to decide what our lives are for?

Things referenced in this episode:

• “The World of Security” by Ben Rhodes
• “Always Forget About 9/11” by Robert Wright
• Haroon's Episode on Oh God Now What with Nyla Boodoo
• Plain English with Derek Thompson, “What’s the Point of College?”

Avenue M is produced by Bespoken Live with music by Zach Swelber, who plays in Circle It and Mosant.