MF GALAXY

Actor William B. Davis is best known as Cigarette Smoking Man, AKA Cancer Man , from the 1990s hit science fiction television series The X-Files . By know all you X-Files -ophiles know that the Chris Carter -produced show will be returning to television in 2016 as a six-episode miniseries shot in Vancouver, and will feature stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as Fox Mulder and Dana Scully . And returning with them will be the sinister Cigarette Smoking Man, whom the readers of TV Guide voted Television’s Favourite Villain. Davis, the Canadian screen legend, is also an acting teacher who founded his own acting school where he taught stars such as Lucy Lawless . Davis is the author of a memoir called Where There’s Smoke... Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man . In this episode’s conversation you’ll hear Davis talk about the craft of acting and his odyssey to enrich his own artistry, including the time when his fellow student Donald Sutherland was, in Davis’s words,...

Buk Arop, president of the Edmonton-based South Sudan Development Foundation , says that Emmanuel Jal , the award-winning South Sudanese hip hop artist, activist, and actor, is stoking the South Sudanese Civil War . To hear my interview with Jal, download episode 021. Like Jal, Arop is a so-called “lost boy” --a person who lost his childhood to the Sudanese Civil War. Born in 1981, Arop entered the Pinyudo Refugee Camp in Ethiopia where the Sudan People’s Liberation Army conscripted him as a child soldier. When the Ethiopian regime fell in 1991, ten year old Arop and all the other refugees were forced to leave on foot. He arrived in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp in 1992, where he stayed until the year 2000. Then, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees nearly sent him to Norway, but at the last moment switched his destination to Canada, where Arop earned a BA in International Development Studies and an MA in Cultural Studies. Today Arop speaks five languages and works w...

Award-winning hip hop artist, activist, author, and former lost boy Jal Jok, better known as Emmanuel Jal , was born around 1980 into a destiny of pain. When he was seven years old, Sudanese soldiers killed his mother—the first of many of his family to die at government hands. After his father joined the Sudan People’s Liberation Army or SPLA , Jal sought refuge in Ethiopia along with thousands of other children, and ended up enslaved by the SPLA as a child soldier—the so-called “lost boys.” SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iTUNES SUPPORT MF GALAXY ON PATREON LISTEN TO DOWNLOAD FOR FREE, RIGHT-CLICK AND SELECT "SAVE AS" Jal eventually escaped to the town of Waat where he met a British aid worker named Emma McCune who was married to SPLA commander, and future South Sudanese vice president Riek Machar . After adopting Jal, McCune took him to Kenya for education, but she herself died in a vehicle accident only months later, and he soon found himself living in the slums...

Last episode was part one of NOW READ THIS! , in which ten awesome people awesomely awesomed up their awesome reading recommendations. Why? Because a whole bunch of angries didn’t like the Bradford Reading Challenge. What’s the Bradford Reading Challenge, you ask? Simple! Author, tech-reviewer, and fandom activist K. Tempest Bradford suggested in an xoJane.com opinion piece that readers should discover the world of writers who never get confused for Mitt Romney, Stephen Harper, or Patton Oswalt. This episode, instead of ten boffo-socko book baptisers, let’s level up to SIXTEEN SCINTILLATING BOOK SPEAKERS. That’s right! We’ll hear from: Directors Ernest Dickerson, Seith Mann, and Reginald Hudlin Alternative Radio founder and interviewer David Barsamian South Sudanese community activist Buk Arop Sociologist and author Algernon Austin Columnist, author, and activist Bill Fletcher Hip hop artist and activist Young Mav Actors Isaiah Washington, Jamie Hector, Robert Wisdom , and...