I’m Raj Patel. I’m a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and I’ve spent twenty-five years working with social movements around the world - from shack dwellers in South Africa to landless workers in Brazil to agroecology networks in India - trying to understand how people organize for change when everything seems to be falling apart at once.

I write about food, power, climate, and change. My books include Stuffed and Starved, The Value of Nothing, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (with Jason W. Moore) and Inflamed (with Rupa Marya). My next is coming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in January 2027.

This Substack is where I think out loud. Some of what you’ll find here connects to the book - the politics of attention, the economics of ultra-processed food, the movements building alternatives. Some of it doesn’t - feminist mathematics, trip-hop, Tourette’s syndrome - whatever I can’t stop thinking about. I also make documentary films, most recently The Ants & The Grasshopper, which aired on PBS.

I send a post once a week or so. Everything is free. If you want to know more, my website is rajpatel.org.