The first episode of Primer, a new series from Jacobin Radio, hosted by Alex Press and produced by Sarah Hurd, just launched.

You can find Primer on Spotify or iTunes, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts.

Primer is your entry point for understanding Amazon, the company that is reshaping, mediating, and controlling our lives and the planet. In each episode of the new Jacobin podcast, staff writer Alex Press will cover a key element of the Amazon empire. Early editions will focus on Amazon’s working conditions; its finances, its operations in places like New York City, or Southern California, or Italy; and on its founder, Jeff Bezos.

Amazon touches everything: there are its retail operations, Amazon Web Services, Alexa, Ring, Kindle, Whole Foods, Rekognition, the possible MGM acquisition, to name just a few. Primer will trace these operations. We’ll cover the working conditions of the company’s warehouse workers, delivery drivers, pilots, software engineers, and Mechanical Turkers.  We’ll look at the enormous impact Amazon has on the environment, the company’s collaboration with police departments, and its revolving door with the US government. We’ll even figure out what’s going on with Bezos’s extraterrestrial interests, and whether we can get him to go to outer space and stay there.

Start listening to Primer today. On our introductory episode, we’re joined by Dania Rajendra, director of Athena, and Alessandro Delfanti, who has a forthcoming book on Amazon warehouse work. They try to answer a pressing question: what exactly is Amazon?