On ‘Stars and Stars With Isa,’ an Astrologer Asks Artists Cosmic Questions

Isa Nakazawa has a gift for making guests feel seen when they sit down for an astrological reading on her podcast, Stars and Stars With Isa. In a wide-ranging 2024 conversation that covered mutual aid, Desi futurism and channeling ancestors for guidance, R&B singer Raveena told Nakazawa, “You know what this show feels like? It feels like a spiritual Nardwuar.”

Like Nardwuar, the music journalist known for shocking artists with his hyper-specific insights, Nakazawa carefully studies her guests’ birth charts and creative output to ask uncanny, poignant questions. Her vulnerable conversations zoom out from the interview subjects’ inner emotional landscape to their life’s purpose and contributions to broader culture and social movements.

This week, Stars and Stars With Isa is back for a second season on all podcast platforms and YouTube through Futuro Studios, the production company founded by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa. The debut episode features author, trans activist and TIME woman of the year Raquel Willis, and forthcoming guests include rapper and activist Vic Mensa and New York Times Magazine journalist J Wortham.

“I intentionally book people who are both very vulnerable and are open and have been cracked open by these direct experiences, whether it’s falling in love, whether it’s loss — grief is a huge throughline in my show,” Nakazawa says. “But they’re also going to keep it real about the struggles that they’ve been through and how those experiences are racialized and classed.”

The daughter of an Uruguayan immigrant mother and Japanese American father, Nakazawa grew up in Boston and New York before relocating to the Bay Area almost two decades ago. She immersed herself in San Francisco and Oakland’s artist-activist scenes, first as a mentor at the youth development and poetry nonprofit Youth Speaks.

Early on, when she discovered the work of Afrofuturists like Sun Ra, and the writings of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, Nakazawa became inspired by Black American artists’ use of imagination to transcend the limitations society placed on them. She sees a similar power in astrology to help people see beyond their struggles.

“Thank goodness astrology is here to say, ‘No matter what you are, you in this state today are connected to the cosmos,’” she says. “And I hope that that would make someone say, ‘Wow, maybe I should consider that I’m inherently worthy and that I’m more than anyone could ever say.’”

Nakazawa believes one’s astrological chart is a roadmap, not a destiny. Rather than fixating on planetary placements that might pose challenges to one’s love or professional life, she embraces them as sources of resilience and even humor.

“It’s been really amazing to connect with people I admire and could easily project they have it easy,” she says of her guests. “And we end up going there and having a lot of conversations that are pretty real about our love lives not being linear, about the ways in which direct lived experience has made us uniquely positioned to talk about these things publicly.”

More than a lens for understanding personal struggles, Stars and Stars With Isa makes a convincing case that astrology can also prompt us to grapple with global questions. In this age of rising authoritarianism and war, Nakazawa says that even though astrology isn’t frontline work, it can still play an important role in leading us towards a better world. Much like art, astrology can feed the soul of activism, injecting movements with hope and possibility.

“We need to create seductive, sustainable, compelling, adaptive, spacious social movements that are political and spiritual,” she says.

“Astrology is the space of meaning making,” she adds. “And it’s also the space where we have to tap our imagination, which is very hard because our imaginations have been colonized. So that’s where you confront that.”

New episodes of ‘Stars and Stars With Isa’ come out every Tuesday.