Episodes
Monday Jan 25, 2021
Monday Jan 25, 2021
Tuesday Jan 19, 2021
The Hispanic Republican Vote
Tuesday Jan 19, 2021
Tuesday Jan 19, 2021
Friday Jan 08, 2021
It's Time For America to Create a New Origin Story
Friday Jan 08, 2021
Friday Jan 08, 2021
Wednesday Dec 30, 2020
Understanding Goodfellas and the Trump Henchman
Wednesday Dec 30, 2020
Wednesday Dec 30, 2020
immediately to mind. The reality truly reflects the sometimes magisterial and always violent family saga of the large organized crime family
But what about for the foot soldiers that have been corrupted by Trump? Those who have taken on his imprimatur to lie, steal and cheat. To understand them, we need to go back 30 years and look at Nicholas Pileggi's Wise guys, later to become the movie Goodfellas.
The movie was iconic and perhaps we could have learned form from it. Glenn Kenny digs keep into the movie, and those lessons in his book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas.
Saturday Dec 26, 2020
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
Saturday Dec 26, 2020
Saturday Dec 26, 2020
The Black lives matter movement, profound and successful as it is at this moment, is simply part of the arc of history trying to bend toward justice.
It’s impossible to understand that without understanding the work and the ideas of so many who have shaped the movement. And Malcolm X stands amidst the pantheon of those
Over the years many have tried to understand Malcolm X and his politics, his philosophy, his evolution and his influence on the civil rights movement. Certainly his speeches and autobiography are part of that cannon. But to fully understand the man, we need Les Paynes biography The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
Thirty years in the writing, Les Payne died in 2018 and the book was completed by his daughter Tamara Payne who was also it’s co-author and his principal researcher.
It is the winner of this year's National Book Award for Non-Fiction.
Wednesday Dec 16, 2020
Broke is the definition of every aspect of American medicine today
Wednesday Dec 16, 2020
Wednesday Dec 16, 2020
It’s a system that is broken, and that increasingly places barriers to entry for those without knowledge of the system or the poor without the financial resources to access it.
But what about the doctors that work in such a system. How does it impact them, many of whom wanted to practice medicine not social work. Dr. Michael Stein looks a this in Broke: Patients Talk about Money with Their Doctor.
Tuesday Dec 08, 2020
The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
Tuesday Dec 08, 2020
Tuesday Dec 08, 2020
Most people, even charismatic founders of companies can understand the difference. It's like what used to be said of political campaigns, that candidates campaigned in poetry and governed in prose. Sometimes though when the myth takes over the reality, trouble is not far behind.
Rarely has the foundational myth and a company's operations become as interconnected as they were with Adam Neumann and WeWork.
That’s the story that Reeves Wiedeman tackles in Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
Tuesday Dec 01, 2020
The Saudi Enigma - How Will Biden Deal With It?
Tuesday Dec 01, 2020
Tuesday Dec 01, 2020
Its effort today to modernize both its culture and its economy, the US’s own confidence about oil independence and other dramatic geopolitical shifts have caused us to reassess the Saudi role in the world. At the same time, the murder of Jamal Kashogi and other human rights abuses have not helped. In short, Saudi Arabia still remains a great enigma. Trying to help us understand it is as a new administration must face another new policy is Saudi expert David Rundell, the author of Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads.
My conversation with David Rundell:
Monday Nov 23, 2020
Monday Nov 23, 2020
The past four years, really right up to this moment, have been a test for the American republic. Over and over we’ve heard it asked, “can our institutions hold, are the ideas and documents of the framers adequate for the modern age.”
At the same time, we’ve heard over and over again since Nov. 8, 2016, how did we get here? What has driven us to such political and social division, to our appetite for authoritarianism, the disregard for norms, the rural-urban and the educational divide?
What ties all of these questions together is the idea that when faced with a complex sometimes unsolvable problem, it’s best to go back to foundational principles.
To deconstruct the enterprise and strip it to its original foundation to see how all of the problems have been layered on and how we might find meaning and/or solutions.
This is essentially what Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and another Tom Ricks does in his new work First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country
My conversation with Tom Ricks:
Monday Nov 16, 2020
A Dolly Parton Moment
Monday Nov 16, 2020
Monday Nov 16, 2020
Monday Nov 09, 2020
The Collapse of America's Founding Mythology
Monday Nov 09, 2020
Monday Nov 09, 2020
From the ideas of manifest destiny to John Winthrop's shining city on the hill, from freedom and equality to American exceptionalism, these stories are not only foundational for Americans, but they run in the American bloodstream.
So what happens when it’s discovered that the myth and reality don’t match up? That the emperor has no clothes.
Ultimately, the myth is exposed, the wheels come off, the anger spreads, first internally and then outside and the enterprise usually collapses or morphs.
Arguably that’s what we’ve been living through today. The exposure and crumbling of the American myth. It explains the populist anger that brought Trump to power, as well as the anger on the other side that has fueled Black Lives Matter. When the myth is stripped bare, the company or the nation must be reinvested or die.
These ideas are at the heart of Jared Yates Sexton’s book American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People.
Sunday Nov 01, 2020
Biden..We Hardly Knew Ye
Sunday Nov 01, 2020
Sunday Nov 01, 2020
Compare this to Ike, or Reagan, George HW Bush, or Lyndon Johnson all who arrived, for better or worse as fully formed political and human beings.
In this year’s election, policy aside, Joe Biden comes to us having lived a very long public life during which time he has grown into the person and politician he is today. Arguable, as a man who would become the nation’s oldest president it is fair to say that he is not still becoming.
While our presidential candidates seldom lack for position papers and policies, it’s who they are that ultimately determines if they have what it takes. Our vote for president is essentially a gut check vote about the man and the moment.
And sometimes, not always, but when we are lucky, the man and moment match up.
This is the question much of the nation is asking and answering about Joe Biden. After almost 50 years in the arena, it should be easy to answer. But amid all the clamoring, it takes work like the new book by National Book Award winner Evan Osnos to pull it all together in Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now.
Thursday Oct 29, 2020
Up Close and Personal with Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
Thursday Oct 29, 2020
Thursday Oct 29, 2020
The United States Senate was once considered the world’s greatest deliberative body. As we witnessed in the first presidential debate, it’s entirely possible that honest debate in America is actually dead. And why should we assume that the US Senate is any different?
But rather than coming to mourn what once was, perhaps by summoning up the history of some of those senators who once infused the body with all that made it and the country great, we can almost by sheer force of will create an environment that might let it bloom once again. After all, isn’t that why we study history, why we visit monuments and capitals and museums. So that we might take with us, in some primal and visceral way, the inspiration of the best that came before and integrate it into doing good today?
In part, this is what US Senator Sherrod Brown, does in his new book, Desk 88.
My WhoWhatWhy conversation with Sen. Sherrod Brown
Tuesday Oct 27, 2020
Is Socialism Coming To America?
Tuesday Oct 27, 2020
Tuesday Oct 27, 2020
AOC, is a one-term congresswoman with no previous political experience and yet her Democratic Socialist views have gotten attention on a national scale.
Particularly among young people, there is a growing dissatisfaction with the state of capitalism and free markets today. Even the likes of billionaires such as Chase’s Jamie Diamon and Salesforce’s Mark Benioff have talked about the need for a new more inclusive capitalism.
While this is essentially about the economy, it’s also about shifts in the social, cultural, and political landscape. The coronavirus has laid bare many of the lurking flaws in our system and the politics of the moment magnify everything.
Is this a tectonic shift in the politics of America or a temporary blip in an otherwise centrist nation?
John B. Judis breaks this down in his new work The Socialist Awakening: What's Different Now About the Left.
Friday Oct 23, 2020
Are We So Divided that Secession Is The Only Answer?
Friday Oct 23, 2020
Friday Oct 23, 2020
Over the past 40 years all that changed. Technology and the proverbial long tail atomized us into our individuals interests. The explosion of thousands of sources of news, entertainment and information satisfied us, satiated us really, but took away our common bonds.
The result is where we are today. On the verge of session. Divided as never before in an environment so fragile and truly the house divided will not stand.
David French has been thinking and writing and living this experience. He brings it forward in Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.
Wednesday Oct 14, 2020
Jimmy Carter: A Good and Decent Presidency
Wednesday Oct 14, 2020
Wednesday Oct 14, 2020
It’s hard to say if the problems that Carter faced, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, inflation, unemployment, and the Iranian hostage crisis, might have happened to any President of that period. But history tells us they were the crisis he was dealt. And the nature of them brought out some of Carter's worst, not his best qualities.
It really is a job that’s about the nexus between crisis and character. Sometimes they line up and sometimes they don't. For Carter, it was often out of sync. Jonathan Alter tell the whole story in His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.
Monday Oct 12, 2020
Is White Collar Corruption the New Normal?
Monday Oct 12, 2020
Monday Oct 12, 2020
While anger is still palpable in many places over those executives not not charged as for their role in the 2008/2009 financial meltdown, many smaller but similar white collar crimes have been committed with no oversight, no punishment and not even any more anger.
Has high end while collar crime simply become an acceptable cost of doing business? Has it become the collateral damage of capitalism that we are willing to accept? This is where Jennifer Taub takes us in Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime.
My conversation with Jennifer Taub:
Monday Oct 05, 2020
The Reverend Michael B. Curry: Advice for Times Like This Week/Month/Year
Monday Oct 05, 2020
Monday Oct 05, 2020
Tuesday Sep 29, 2020
Should Donald Trump Make Us Rethink the Reagan Legacy For the Worse?
Tuesday Sep 29, 2020
Tuesday Sep 29, 2020
Wednesday Sep 23, 2020
Science and Politics are Now Linked
Wednesday Sep 23, 2020
Wednesday Sep 23, 2020
Tuesday Sep 15, 2020
The Curse of the US/Britain Special Relationship
Tuesday Sep 15, 2020
Tuesday Sep 15, 2020
Back on the 4th of July I saw a hat that said, "Make America Great Britain Again." A good laugh, even more so when superimposed on the current relationship between the two countries.
Certainly there is that much vaunted “special relationship''. Not just between the countries, in an abstract geopolitical way, but between leaders that have been shaping and reacting to the world at similar times and in similar ways for the past seventy-five years.
While Great Britain may have lost its empire, its connection to the US in contemporary times, has kept it relevant and dynamic. But after seventy-five years is that relationship due for a refresh? If so, perhaps it will require a degree of honesty about the relationship that has been heretofore lacking on both sides.
Ian Buruma looks at the contemporary history of that relationship in The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, from Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit.
My conversation with Ian Buruma:
Monday Sep 14, 2020
A Conversation with Brian Stelter
Monday Sep 14, 2020
Monday Sep 14, 2020
CNN's chief media correspondent Brian Stelter takes a deep look at Fox News, its power, and its stars in his new book Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth.
My conversation with Brian Stelter.
Tuesday Sep 08, 2020
A Spouse Also Runs: A Conversation with Chasten Buttigieg
Tuesday Sep 08, 2020
Tuesday Sep 08, 2020
As the late Richard Ben Cramer so brilliantly detailed in his seminal book “What it Takes.” running for president, as a serious candidate, is one of the hardest, most grueling and challenging things one can do. Cramer wrote about the 1988 campaign, before the internet, before 24/7 news and yet he said even then that politics had become a kind of a public utility, with hot-and cold-running politics any time of the day or night.
Today in our hyper politicized non stop news environment it’s even worse.
Now imagine breaking barriers and taboos along the way, as Pete Buttigieg did as the first LGBTQ candidate.
Just as challenging, again as Cramer wrote about, is being the spouse of the candidate. For Chasten Buttigieg, a 31 year old gay man with not political experience, he had only his own personal experience and history from which to draw upon.
He shares that journey in his new memoir I Have Something to Tell You: A Memoir.
My conversation with Chasten Buttigieg:
Tuesday Sep 01, 2020
Remember When Diplomacy and the Arts Once Mattered?
Tuesday Sep 01, 2020
Tuesday Sep 01, 2020
Imagine a time when diplomacy mattered. When the arts mattered. And when they could actually work together to project America at its best. Oh how we might long for the days of the Cold War.
Clausewitz said that diplomacy was simply war by other means. During the Cold War, that diplomacy took many forms. From Richard Nixon showing Khrushchev around an American Kitchen, to Ping Pong diplomacy with the Chinese
A little known form of diplomacy was the role that the arts played in the Cold War. Uniquely in the realm of dance in the hands of one of its great practitioners, and leaders, Martha Graham. Although Graham claimed she was not political, her company and her work were a real part of America’s Cold War propaganda apparatus.
Victoria Phillips tells the story in Martha Graham's Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy
My conversation with Victoria Phillips:
Thursday Aug 27, 2020
McCarthy to Cohn to Trump: A conversation with Larry Tye
Thursday Aug 27, 2020
Thursday Aug 27, 2020
Most of you know or have lived in cities with long streets or boulevards and you know that some of the same stores repeat themselves over and over again. Starbucks, CVS, etc. The neighborhoods change, but some of the retail landmarks remain the same.
In a way, history is like that. It goes on and on. And while the neighborhoods often change, there are things along the way that repeat themselves over and over again. In American history, one of them is certainly racism and discrimination, but also our ongoing flirtation with authoritarianism. Our fascination with bullies, the appeal of strength that sometimes proves to be more than just meanness.... it’s really evil.
Whether it was Father Coughlin on radio, Joe Pyne on television, Huey Long in politics, or in the contemporary era, Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump.
The added reality is that each episode pushes the envelope of what’s acceptable. The predicate for new norms is laid out and the next would-be talk show host or political demagogue has to go further.
Perhaps no one pushed the envelope further than Joe McCarthy. So much so that the idea of McCarthyism became baked into our lexicon. Needless to say, now in the midst of one of those flirtations, it seems the perfect time to go back and look at Joe McCarthy with journalist and author Larry Tye, whose new book is Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy.
My conversation with Larry Tye:
Tuesday Aug 25, 2020
Gail Sheehy: In Memoriam
Tuesday Aug 25, 2020
Tuesday Aug 25, 2020
I guess it’s just that we are all getting older, but these In Memoriam programs are coming much too frequently lately…...Over the years I had the opportunity to do five interviews with Gail Sheehy. Beginning in May of 1998 we talked about everything from Men's Passages, to older women, Hillary Clinton, and the changes in middle America. Our last conversation was in the fall of 2014 upon the publication of her memoir Daring: My Passages: A Memoir.
My conversation with Gail Sheehy from October of 2014:
Sunday Aug 23, 2020
Only The Best People: Why The Best and The Brightest Sometimes Aren't
Sunday Aug 23, 2020
Sunday Aug 23, 2020
Donald Trump came to power on a wave of distrust. Americans had lost faith in government, it’s institutions, and the ability of their government to be honest with them.
It’s a through-line that begins perhaps with the assassination of John Kennedy, runs through the endless lies Americans endured about the Vietnam war, and continues through to the Iraq war; the lies about weapons of mass destruction.
And while Americans often want simple answers, the reality of policy, particularly foreign policy is far more nuanced and complex.
I have said over and over again of late, that I wish I could get into the time machine to read, 50 years from now, what historians will say about this period we are living through.
So it’s equally important that now, almost 20 years after 9/11 and 17 years after the start of the Iraq war that we can look with some perspective at the distrust that got us where we are today.
Again, the reality is nuanced, complicated and shaped by the foibles of human beings. Robert Draper tells that story in his new book To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq
My conversation with Robert Draper:
Monday Aug 17, 2020
Why Are Millennials Feeling Left Behind?
Monday Aug 17, 2020
Monday Aug 17, 2020
Every generation faces the challenges thrust upon it by the generation that came before. Today the millennials face the challenge of how they pick up the baton and carry it forward Their contribution, their imprimatur is still being written. Will, it simply be too scold those that came before, or as we see millennials doing in silicon valley redefining the very nature of society.
This is what Jill Filipovic bring to the fore in OK Boomer, Let's Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.
My conversation with Jill Filipovic:
Wednesday Aug 12, 2020
Nixon and The Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution
Wednesday Aug 12, 2020
Wednesday Aug 12, 2020
Over the 200 plus year history of political parties in the US, something our founders advised against, the same parties have, at different times, stood for different sets of ideas. The Federalists, the Whigs, the national Republican Party, the Democrats and others all have been made up of different coalitions at different times
We all know for example that Lincoln and his Republicans were once the anti-slavery party. Oh how that’s changed.
The modern Democratic party really emerged with the New Deal coalition beginning with FDR in 1933. It was an amalgam that was considered the core of American liberalism. It was anchored in ethno-religious constituencies (Catholics, Jews, African Americans,) white Southerners, well-organized labor unions, urban machines, progressive intellectuals, and populist farm groups.
However, like all previous party coalitions, it would begin to splinter. Elements of the once liberal base of the new deal coalition would become part of the Republican party of Nixon and Reagan and Trump.
The story of how this happened is really the story of our modern politics that begins in 1970 and it’s the story that David Paul Kuhn tells in The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution.
My conversation with David Paul Kuhn:
Saturday Aug 08, 2020
Pete Hamill in His Own Words...and Voice
Saturday Aug 08, 2020
Saturday Aug 08, 2020
I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with and interviewing Pete Hamill six times since 1997. There was no subject that he could not hold forth on. Our discussions involved subjects ranging from immigration to tabloids, the lexicon of news to urban America, and even Frank Sinatra.
This podcast includes some lengthy excerpts from three of those conversations. First, in a conversation from June 2011, we talked about tabloids, the state of news today, and the way in which tabloids stitched communities together.
Our next conversation is great fun as Hamill talks about his book Why Sinatra Matters. Hamill argued that it’s not possible to understand the country without fully understanding the music and personality of Sinatra. He explains how he transformed the image of Italians and was the first example of American pop culture transported to the world. It was also a powerful way to learn more about both Prohibition and the Depression.
Last but not least, is my first conversation with Hamill from May 1997, just after the publication of his book Snow in August. It’s a look at immigration, the misguided power of television, and the story of a boy growing up in New York in the late 1940s. Because of the age of this conversation, the audiotape had not held up as well as I might have hoped, and I ask that you bear with a little 23-year decay of audio quality. However, I think it’s worth it.
Enjoy this reminiscence of the life and words of Pete Hamill.
Wednesday Aug 05, 2020
Marilyn
Wednesday Aug 05, 2020
Wednesday Aug 05, 2020
58 years ago today, the world awoke to the death of Marilyn Monroe. At her death, she was already one of the most well known Americans of the twentieth century. In death she would become even more famous, steeped in mythology and contradiction, she would become a symbol of her times. The lens of her own dysfunction gave her a unique ken on post-war American. Today, looking at her life gives each of us a unique perspective on how far we’ve traveled in those 58 years.
This is the story that Charles Casillo tells in Marilyn Monroe: The Private Life of a Public Icon
My conversation with Charles Casillo:
Tuesday Aug 04, 2020
Why Are White Evangelicals Primed For Trump’s Fear-Mongering?
Tuesday Aug 04, 2020
Tuesday Aug 04, 2020
Why do self-described evangelicals overwhelmingly support an irreligious commander-in-chief? Why do megachurches demand to stay open in a pandemic, and why is the pro-life act of wearing a mask seen as antithetical to masculinity?
In this WhoWhatWhy podcast I talk with Calvin University scholar Kristin Du Mez, who sheds light on how white evangelicals gave America Donald Trump (81 percent voted for him in 2016).
Du Mez, the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, argues that it is not the intellectual forebearers of Christianity who mobilize the faith today, but muscular, mythical artificial heroes like Mel Gibson or John Wayne, idealized cowboys or soldiers. The toughness and swagger they embody conjures up a nostalgia for a simpler time, a nation unencumbered by activism for racial equality, women’s rights, and same-sex marriage.
An in-depth look at why evangelicals are Trump’s most unwavering supporters, and their plans for making Christianity great again.
My conversation with Kristin Du Mez:
Thursday Jul 30, 2020
Can Local Journalism Rewire Democracy?
Thursday Jul 30, 2020
Thursday Jul 30, 2020
For journalism, it may be the best of times and the worst of times. The national media seems more vibrant than ever. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, as well as the cable news networks are thriving For these outlets the transition to digital was painful, but somewhat successful.
For local news, the story of what happing in your neighborhood, your school board, your city council, is a very different story. Thousands of local newspapers and local radio stations have shut down. The economics of the enterprise has proven to be unsustainable, and even large regional papers in places like L.A., Chicago, and Miami, have proven to be problematic at best and striped by hedge funds at worst.
All of this begs the question of whether our political, cultural, and social divide stems from the top, as is assumed, or whether the hollowing out of the news in our communities, something that should be bringing us together, is at the heart of what’s wrong.
It was the great NY Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia who said that there is no Republican or Democratic way to clean the streets. His comments remind us that locally, there is only the common community interest. Take that away and what’s left is all the bad stuff.
This is with Washington Post media columnist and former NY Times public editor Margaret Sullivan examines in her new book Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy
My conversation with Margaret Sullivan:
Sunday Jul 26, 2020
Do We Have The Strength and Wisdom to BEGIN AGAIN?
Sunday Jul 26, 2020
Sunday Jul 26, 2020
It’s rare that the laws of physics and our ideas of race and politics find common ground.Newton’s third law of motion says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The American story of the struggle for racial equality seems to be subject to that law.
As the Founding gave way to the Civil War, and reconstruction to Jim Crow and segregation, and the civil rights struggle of the ’60s gave way to law and order and Richard Nixon, the election of our first black president would give us Donald Trump and where we are today.
One wonders what it is, particularly around the subject of race and the desire to establish a truly multiracial democracy that drives these contradictory reactions.
Equally, what toll does this whipsawing back and forth take on our democratic experiment, it’s people and those left behind when the moral weather changes. It’s no wonder we are anxious, angry, and exhausted
That just the surface of Professor Eddie Glaude’s new book Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
My conversation with Eddie Glaude Jr.
Friday Jul 24, 2020
The High Cost of Free Speech
Friday Jul 24, 2020
Friday Jul 24, 2020
We seem to be facing a time when the speech police are everywhere, a time when even the majority of progressive people simply seem to be losing faith in the value of free speech, all the while seeming to want to narrow the words that we can use.
“Don’t you see,” George Orwell wrote in 1984, “the whole of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end,” he says, “We shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.” Just what does free speech mean? Is it under threat today from the left and/or the right? Why is it also about safety and why are our colleges and universities front and center in this debate?
To talk about this I am joined by one of the intellectual guiding lights of the discussion of free speech, Professor Stanley Fish.
My conversation with Professor Stanley Fish:
Monday Jul 20, 2020
Christopher Dickey: A Remembrance
Monday Jul 20, 2020
Monday Jul 20, 2020
Christopher Dickey reported from war zones and published many books, including a powerful memoir about growing up with his father, the poet, and author James Dickey.
I had the opportunity to speak with Dickey several times over the years, usually about geopolitical hotspots around the world. Places where his unique reporting skills enabled him to see not only the politics but the cultural heart of what he was reporting on. His reports and books were more than just words and analyses.
However, our most memorable conversation and one I share here was about his memoir Summer of Deliverance. Memoirs, have over recent years, become a genre onto themselves. What Dickey uniquely does is to turn the tables and actually report on himself.
My conversation from September of 1998 with Christopher Dickey.
Wednesday Jul 15, 2020
The Unexpected Role of Feminism in Mass Incarceration
Wednesday Jul 15, 2020
Wednesday Jul 15, 2020
We regularly go through paroxysms of demanding law and order. It's a form of political rhetoric that while it has roots all the way back in the 16th century, is with us once again today.
In our contemporary history we watched Nixon in 1968, New York in the 70s and then were was 1994. A time when the law and order obsession seemed to reach some kind of peak
Rudy Giuliani had become Mayor of New York, the Simpson case shined an arc-light on domestic violence, California passed “three strikes,” and Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act.
It was a kind of perfect storm of both enforcing law, protecting women, and injecting steroids into the business of mass incarceration.
How this ultimately worked out for women, and the broad impact of these efforts on the criminal justice system is a subject that University of Colorado law professor Aya Gruber tackles in her new book The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women's Liberation in Mass Incarceration.
My conversation with Aya Gruber:
Saturday Jul 11, 2020
Without Newt there is no Trump: How we Got Here.
Saturday Jul 11, 2020
Saturday Jul 11, 2020
Donald Trump’s presidency was not an immaculate conception. Rather, the result of 30 years of increased hyper-partisanship, the reshaping of the Republican party, the rise of Rush Limbaugh and talk radio, Robert Ailes and Fox Television, and Newt Gingrich. They all contributed to the pugilistic style of American politics. But perhaps Gingrich did the most damage.
It’s arguable that if Gingrich hadn’t come along, others would have picked up the mantle of this style that lead us directly to where we are today. But Gingrich was uniquely suited to the moment.Julian Zelizer tries to answer in his new book Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party
Understanding him, maybe a big part of that question that gets asked every day, amidst death, unemployment, and anger, how did we get there. That’s what historian and professor
My conversation with Julian Zelizer:
Friday Jul 10, 2020
Is It 1968 All Over Again?
Friday Jul 10, 2020
Friday Jul 10, 2020
Then, as now, there was pent-up frustration, which boiled over, particularly in many poor black neighborhoods setting off riots that rampaged out of control. At the time, many Americans blamed the riots on what they saw as misplaced black rage and often vague outside agitators.
But in March 1968, the Kerner Commission Report turned those assumptions on their head. It declared that white racism, not black anger, was at the root of American turmoil. It talked about bad policing practices, a flawed justice system, unscrupulous consumer credit practices, poor or inadequate housing, high unemployment, voter suppression and other culturally embedded forms of racial discrimination that all combined to ignite the fuse on the streets of African American neighborhoods.
“White society,” the presidentially-appointed panel reported, “is deeply implicated in the creation of the ghetto.” “The nation,” the Kerner Commission warned, “was so divided that the United States was poised to fracture into two radically unequal societies, one black and one white.”
Today, there is only one living member of that commission, and he also happens to be the oldest living current or former United States senator. He was once a candidate for president to the United States. He served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He served for two terms as a senator from Oklahoma. He is Senator Fred Harris.
My WhoWhatWhy conversation with Senator Fred Harris:
Tuesday Jun 30, 2020
The Microbiome is Revolutionizing Medicine and Yes, Probiotics Matter
Tuesday Jun 30, 2020
Tuesday Jun 30, 2020
Beyond the virus we fear most, we are also surrounded by bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites. But wait, no need to reach for the Purell every time. In fact, these things represent what is called our microbiome. It accounts for as much as 90% of our cells, and its positive impact on our health is immeasurable.
However, as a result of antibiotics, the food we eat, urbanization and other wonders of modern world, we have done things in the name of “do no harm,” which just might be making us sicker.
Today, it’s as if this long-suffering field of research has suddenly been rediscovered. Back in 2016, when we had a White House that still believed in science, the office of science and technology announced a One Hundred and Twenty-One million dollar initiative for research into the microbiome.
Professor Rodney Dietert, has been doing this research and talking about this for a long time. He details it in The Human Superorganism: How The Microbiome is Revolutionizing The Pursuit of a Healthy Life.
My Conversation with Rodney Dietert: