Marguerite Casey Foundation and Seattle Arts and Lectures are proud to present an MCF Book Club event in honor of the book Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart. Moderated by MCF’s president and CEO Dr. Carmen Rojas, the virtual premiere of this event features author Astra Taylor, along with Sarah Leonard, editor in chief of Lux magazine, and Maximillian Alvarez, editor in chief of the Real News Network.
This event is part of our MCF Book Club: Reading for a Liberated Future series. The MCF Book Club shares the ideas of leaders who encourage us to imagine how we can radically transform our democracy, economy, and society.
In this urgent cultural diagnosis, author and activist Astra Taylor exposes how seemingly disparate crises—rising inequality and declining mental health, the ecological emergency, and the threat of authoritarianism—originate from a social order built on insecurity. From home ownership and education to the wellness industry and policing, many of the institutions and systems that promise to make us more secure actually undermine us.
Mixing social critique, memoir, history, political analysis, and philosophy, this genre-bending book rethinks both insecurity and security from the ground up. By facing our existential insecurity and embracing our vulnerability, Taylor argues, we can begin to develop more caring, inclusive, and sustainable forms of security to help us better weather the challenges ahead. The Age of Insecurity will transform how you understand yourself and society—while illuminating a path toward meaningful change.
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Dr. Carmen Rojas is the president and CEO of Marguerite Casey Foundation. Under her leadership, the foundation launched the prestigious Freedom Scholar award, committed to ensuring that a majority of MCF’s endowment is overseen by diverse managers, and since starting in 2020 granted more than $165M in funding to dozens of organizations doing the hard work of shifting power to those people who have long been excluded from having it. Prior to MCF, Dr. Rojas was the cofounder and CEO of the Workers Lab, an innovation lab that partners with workers to develop new ideas that help them succeed and flourish.
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Astra Taylor is a Canadian American documentary filmmaker, writer, and organizer. She is the director of numerous documentaries and the author of The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, Democracy May Not Exist but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, and the American Book Award winner The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, among other works. Her latest book is Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, cowritten with Leah Hunt-Hendrix. She was the 2023 CBC Massey Lecturer and cofounded the Debt Collective, a union of debtors.
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Sarah Leonard is editor in chief of Lux magazine. She is a contributing editor to Dissent and the Nation. Previously, she was executive editor of the Appeal and an editor of New Inquiry. She has coedited two books: Occupy! An OWS-Inspired Gazette (Verso, 2011), with literary magazine n+1, and The Future We Want: Radical Solutions for the New Century (Metropolitan, 2016). Her writing about feminism, work, and technology has been widely published in the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Republic, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.
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Maximillian Alvarez is the editor in chief of the Real News Network in Baltimore and the host of Working People, "a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today." Prior to that, he was an associate editor at the Chronicle Review. He is the author of The Work of Living, a collection of interviews with US workers recorded during Year One of COVID-19. His writing has been featured in outlets like the Nation, Boston Review, the Baffler, In These Times, Current Affairs, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. As an analyst and commentator, he has appeared on programs like PBS NewsHour, Breaking Points, Democracy Now!, the New Republic, NPR’s 1A, the Hill’s Rising, and more.
