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Best of 2022: Elie Mystal on the Constitution, plus Kelly Lytle Hernández on “Bad Mexicans”

For the last episode of 2022, we feature some of our favorite book segments.

Jon Wiener and Start Making Sense

December 29, 2022

Nadine Seiler attends a rally for voting rights in front of the Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C., on December 7, 2022 .(Drew Angerer / Getty)

For our end-of year show, we are featuring a couple of our favorite book segments from 2022. First, a Black guy’s guide to the Constitution: Elie Mystal explains why “our constitution is not good.” He’s The Nation’s justice correspondent and author of Allow Me to Retort.

Also: “Bad Mexicans”—that’s what the revolutionaries of 1910 were called as they fought on both sides of the US-Mexico border against the robber barons and their political allies. UCLA historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez tells that story and talks about her book on race, empire, and revolution in the borderlands.

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Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


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