Overview

Beneath the Surface with Suzi Weissman has been on KPFK since 1994, bringing listeners into conversation with the ideas and struggles shaping our world. Each week, Suzi talks with leading thinkers and activists about politics, economics, labor, and social movements — always digging deeper than the headlines.

Suzi Weissman began broadcasting on KPFK in 1981 with Portraits of the USSR and Read All About It. After the Soviet collapse, she created The New World Disorder (1993–1995). Since 1994 she has hosted Beneath the Surface, with early archives preserved at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

Topics on the program range from the breakup of the USSR and shifting politics in Eastern Europe, to global financial crises and their aftermath, labor struggles and working-class politics, the history of socialism and experiments in social change, and mass uprisings from the Arab Spring and Occupy to Syriza, Podemos, and the rise of right-wing populism.

Host & Team

Suzi Weissman

Host and creator of Beneath the Surface, Suzi is a journalist, scholar, and award-winning broadcaster. She edits Against the Current and Critique, and is the author of Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope. Her interviews bring clarity and urgency to global political debates.

Robert Brenner

Executive Producer. Director of UCLA’s Center for Social Theory and Comparative History and a leading historian of political economy. His books include The Boom and the Bubble, Merchants and Revolution, and The Economics of Global Turbulence. He also co-edited Rebel Rank and File and helps shape the program’s big-picture analysis.

Alan Minsky

Producer of Beneath the Surface and Executive Director of Progressive Democrats of America (PDA). Former Program Director at KPFK, he produced The Ralph Nader Radio Hour and the Nation Magazine podcast Start Making Sense. He is also a co-founder of the Los Angeles Independent Media Center.

Recent Episodes

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