A Map of Future Ruins: A Podcast with Lauren Markham

Join us for an illuminating conversation about borders, belonging, myths, and oracles. She warns, “What we have created is a ruinous map for a ruinous future.”

By Todd Miller

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March 22, 2024

I was so happy to get a chance to talk with writer, author, and journalist Lauren Markham about her insightful and page-turning new book A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging. In this conversation we take a journey through the layers of this book starting with a deadly 2020 fire at the Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesbos in Greece, we talk about borders and bordering throughout the world, maps, getting lost (both psychically and physically, as Lauren puts it), mythology and confronting myths, the layers of history both personal and global, journalism, and, sweetly, how oracles can be medicine. As Lauren told me in the interview, “What we have created is a ruinous map for a ruinous future.” Please read A Map of Future Ruins, you won’t regret it.

Graffiti near the Moria refugee camp. Photo by Lauren Markham.

Lauren Markham has also written the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life. Her writing and journalism can be found in many places including The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New York Times Magazine.

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Author

Todd Miller is Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of The Border Chronicle. He is the author of four books that examine border militarization and its externalization, surveillance technology and industry, climate change, and the search for alternatives. His books include Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders (City Lights, 2021) Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World (Verso, 2019), Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (City Lights, 2017), and Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security (City Lights, 2014).

Todd’s forthcoming book is a deep examination of water as a border issue in an age of climate-induced heat waves and drought. It will be published by Seven Stories Press in 2027.

Besides The Border Chronicle, articles by Todd have appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Guernica, TomDispatch, and Al Jazeera English, among other places. He has also authored and co-authored reports on border surveillance, the border industrial complex, and climate change for the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute, where he is a fellow.

Todd’s book Storming the Wall received the Izzy Award in 2018 for “path-breaking and in-depth reporting.” He also received first place in “Community immigration reporting” by the Arizona Press Club in 2013. Todd has a bachelor’s degree in Latin American Studies and Journalism from Prescott College, where he is also an adjunct professor.

In his spare time, Todd likes to travel, read, philosophize, and hang out with his two kids—whether it be going to a dance recital or being a basketball coach.