A Public Affair Archives - KGNU Community Radio: Recent Episodes

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The June edition of Kitchen Table Talk opened with the lilting violin of chef Aaron Lande. He joined hosts John Lehndorff (of Radio Nibbles) and chef Dan Asher (of River & Woods) as well as virtuoso farmer Mark DeRespinis of Esoterra Culinary Garden. They talked about “The Bear,” cooking with fresh vegetables, the connection between music and cooking, and the power of no-till agriculture.

You can read John’s Nibbles column in the Boulder Weekly at:

boulderweekly.com/cuisine/forage-boulder-county-dos-donts/

You can watch a podcast about John’s career in food and food journalism at:

escoffier.edu/podcast/92-john-lehndorff-palates-and-prose/

Listen: play_arrow*Kitchen_table_talk_06_06_2024Greta Kerkhoff The post Early summer sounds, tastes and cooking tips appeared first on KGNU Community Radio.

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On today’s A Public Affair, a panel with local Boulder journalists. Featuring KGNU’s Alexis Kenyon, KGNU’s Jackie Sedley, Boulder Weekly’s Shay Castle, and The Daily Camera’s Mitchell Byars. The first half was spent discussing topics like objectivity, the community media landscape in Boulder, funding, and how to keep readers and listeners engaged in an ever-changing world.

• play_arrowThe falsehood of objective reporting, and other insight from local journalistsJackie Sedley The post The falsehood of objective reporting, and other insight from local journalists appeared first on KGNU Community Radio.

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This is Episode 4 of Jackie Sedley’s limited series, Nourished. Sedley has spent weeks discussing the wild world of eating disorders, exposing and unpacking the biases we hold against food and bodies. A couple weeks ago, they asked John if he had any perspective, personally or professionally, on eating disorders. He looked straight them my eyes and said, “Nobody’s really ever asked me that before.” And so, Sedley and Lehndorff sat down in a studio at KGNU last week and he answered some tough questions.

Listen:

• play_arrowUntitledJackie Sedley

You know his voice, you’ve probably taken on some of his restaurant recommendations and cooking tips – I’m talking about the one and only John Lehndorff. John has lived in Boulder for decades now, and has become a resident food critic and expert not just for KGNU but for many local publications, including Boulder Weekly. He has a segment on the Morning Magazine – Radio Nibbles – that airs every Thursday. He also has a show once a month on Thursdays called Kitchen Table Talk. John’s commentary on all things food and drink is characterized by humor and wit.

But, food is complicated. Relationships with food are complicated. The way we view our bodies based on the food we eat is complicated. And, even renowned experts like Lehndorff are not immune to the good, bad, and ugly of it all.

Lehndorff grew up in Massachusetts in the 1950s. His mother held a post-Depression-era mentality around food: “Let’s feed everybody.” There was always good food around his house, but paired with contradictory diet talk. Diet pamphlets advertising ways to slim down your waist and cut calories existed in abundance around the home. From a young age, Lehndorff’s weight was a considerable part of his identity.

John Lehndorff as “a slightly pained youngster,” in his words. Taken in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Photo Courtesy of John Lehndorff.“Doctors and everybody else blamed kids who were overweight or they blamed their parents. So, I grew up and my nickname until I got bigger and stronger than everybody else was ‘Fatso.’ And, um, that pissed me off and depressed me. And at one point when I was in high school, I rebelled against the whole thing. And I started referring to myself as ‘Fitchburg Fats’ and wrote [for my high school newspaper] about essentially large people liberation, saying, ‘Well, the hell with you!'” explained Lehndorff. “But I, I, I wasn’t really…that, that wasn’t necessarily true.

This perception of self, largely influenced by others’ perceptions of him, led Lehndorff to develop disordered eating patterns and body dysmorphia.

“Recently…I found some photos of myself as a boy, as a tween, as a teen, and older, and I was not fat. But inside my head I was, and remain,… I’ll look in the mirror now even, and I’ll go, ‘Well, you’re not so fat,'” Lehndorff said. “And that went on to impact relationships. It especially impacted my ability, willingness, understanding around dating, uh, because of how I felt I was perceived and feelings of unattractiveness and stuff.”

Lehndorff started engaging in yo-yo dieting, also known as weight cycling. This type of dieting creates an illusion of “success” when it comes to weight loss, but the loss is not possible to sustain.

“I didn’t think women would be attracted to me because I was overweight or whatever I was,. And…we could spend an hour talking about the diverse and varied diets and diet approaches and the drugs and things that I utilized over the years to go, ‘Alright, I’m finally going to get, I’m going to get skinny and get rid of this thing and then I can live my life as a, as a thin, attractive, successful guy.’ But of course, inside, I was still a fat boy…When I wasn’t happy with my romantic life at all, and I was the features editor at The Camera, I went on a public diet, and I was brutally honest about how I looked. I talked what I weighed, and I chronicled my progress. I formed a club for other people who were struggling with weight, and people joined, people lost weight, I lost weight, we finished the series, and uh, over time I gained it all back.”

A diet pamphlet John Lehndorff inherited from his parents.Lehndorff has found people to be extraordinarily judgmental over the years, in his own words. He’s very aware of his tendency to cover up self-insecurity with humor, but that mechanism can only do so much to shield from judgment.

“I can see people looking at me. And adults are prone to say, “God, John, you’re looking good.” But every once in a while I’ll be walking down the street or I’ll be at the store or something, and there’s a four or five-year-old kid, and they look at me and they go, ‘Mommy, why is that man so fat?'”

Lehndorff eventually moved to Boulder, which he says is one of the “most thin, skinny-focused, fitness-obsessed” places on the planet. There, he started to get more involved with the food scene. He started hosting a segment on KGNU’s airwaves about food, and writing a column for the Boulder Weekly, among other projects.

“I didn’t want to really be a reporter. I wanted people to notice me. You know? So at the same time that I had these body problems, I said, ‘Here, look at me, look at me, read me, love me.'”

He developed a following in the community, continuing to gain admiration for the personal touches in his column.

“I meet people all the time who have really appreciated what I did and loved what I wrote about. in part, especially around family. Because I’ve written extensively about family. My family and their relationship to food. And, you know, when my son was growing up, I wrote about him and food because I believe…other than sex, food is the central act of community in our world. And it’s something that’s sorely missing. You know, if we’re looking at solutions to some of this food disorder, eating together, turning off devices, actually paying attention to people, listening to them over the table, is, is absolutely vital. Also, I think it’s the way that you turn children into human beings.”

Eating disorder recovery is often compared to addiction, as both can be characterized by a need for control and a hyperfixation/overreliance on unhealthy and unsustainable behaviors. However, unlike with drug or alcohol dependence, those with eating disorders have to interact with their trigger – food – every day.

“You have to make your peace…It’s this constant dance with this thing you, you love and hate. So, you know, and every time I open the refrigerator, I have to refocus. I have to think about, “Well, what did you eat today, John? Did you actually get any activity in?” And then I go out to eat, because I write about it. So, I, I’m, I’m the first to admit I have a, I have a complicated situation.”

Lehndorff says this “dance” is particularly complicated because he knows “too much” about food.

“Some people, they really don’t know their bodies, and they really don’t know food or nutrition. And I, I, I do know it, so I, I have to make – right now, I’m making a very conscious, choice to eat right, and to not eat too much or too late, and I have to cut certain things out of my diet in order to lose weight. And now I’m driven by the fact that I have, well, I had back surgery a year ago. I have foot problems, knee problem. I’m trying to get healthy…Will it last? Boy, I don’t know.”

Health is an extremely complicated word. Enshrouded in diet culture, it’s hard to acknowledge and believe that health looks different on everybody. In addition to fad diets, people have misused drugs to try and lose weight. The latest example of this is the misuse of Ozempic – a drug created to treat diabetes.

“Having used various things over the years, including amphetamines, to fight appetite, to lose weight, I don’t think it’s going to work unless you continue to shoot yourself in the stomach once a week for the rest of your life, because as soon as you stop, your body is going to go back to its comfortable place. So…I still think you…you still have to do all the all the recovery work and make peace with the parts of your life that make things harder.”

Lehndorff says there’s a pattern in food culture of granting “permission” to eat to thinner people, while judging those in bigger bodies for making the same food choices.

“When you are a large person and you’re eating and really enjoying yourself, I think that there’s still a high level of judgment. Whether it’s in restaurants or in other situations. I think it’s ingrained in people. So, you know, in larger scope of things, it would be nice if we could have a societal shift that changes this attitude. But at a certain point in your life, and I don’t know what age it is that you come to this, but you go, “This is who I am. These are the things I’m going to have to struggle with.” And it’s so hardwired in, that it’s not going away. It’s going to be part of who you are. And you, you, you have to make some kind of peace with it so you can be happy and have dinner with friends.”

Historically, cisgendered men have been left out of eating disorder recovery spaces. But, needless to say, that by no means men are any less affected.

“Whatever it is I say to myself, how I treat myself internally, is so much worse, so much more brutally critical than anything that anyone ever actually says. Part of the problem is your projection…Men are idiots. Thick-headed, strong-willed, testosterone-driven idiots. You know, “I’m gonna do it by myself and I don’t want to, you know, seem weak.” So it’s not easy…Boulder is full of people who would be obese if they weren’t obsessive runners or triathletes or whatever. And those people are, you know, beating themselves into oblivion, trying to fend off that part of themselves. So it’s like all these 70-year-olds getting knee replacements and hip replacements and back replacements in my case.”

For all of the bad and ugly that comes out in our relationships with food, there is also so much good. For as much trouble as it’s caused him, food is essential to fulfillment for Lehndorff.

“As difficult a job as it was, that’s why I enjoyed being a dining critic, because every time I went out to eat, I would collect a group of friends or family or other people who would come with me. And in the end, it’s, it’s about the getting together…It’s a wonderful lubricant. It’s also a way to find out about people. I mean, sometimes, I ask people, ‘What’s the first thing you remember loving that you put in your mouth? You know, other than mom.’ ‘What’s the first thing you remember cooking or tasting?’ In those moments, you see people become children, especially when I talk to them about pie, you know.”

Children are the best examples of what it means to be an intuitive eater, and Lehndorff agrees. He saw it firsthand while raising his son Hans, who is now 30 years old.

“The first time we let him have peanut butter, it was, it was an extraordinary, it was explosive, it was blissful. You could see it in his face. You wish you, uh, have that ecstatic experience.”

Lehndorff says the key to healing your relationship with food is to find connection through it. Elevate your experience by eating with community.

At the end of our conversation, I asked Lehndorff how it felt to know his relationship with food would be elevated on KGNU’s airwaves.

“Well, I’ve always been interested and people with disordered eating are always horrified, terribly afraid and yet strangely attracted to what people think. So I’m looking forward to to hearing how [listeners] are dealing with it in their own lives.”

Lehndorff’s anxiety didn’t stop him from letting me air the episode. He joined me in the studio at the end of our conversation, to take listener calls. You can hear that, as well as our entire conversation, above.

John Lehndorff’s birthday at Farow restaurant in 2023. Photo Courtesy of John Lehndorff.Resources:

Project HEAL

Eating Disorder Hotlines

National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD)

Families Empowered and Supporting Treatment of Eating Disorders

UC San Diego Eating Disorders Center for Treatment and Research

There are many types of eating disorders. The most commonly diagnosed are:

• Anorexia nervosa
• Binge-eating disorder
• Bulimia nervosa
• Orthorexia
• Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID)

I gave the timeline of my own eating disorder recovery in episode 1 of this series. You can listen to that here.

Transcript:Jackie Sedley: This is A Public Affair.

You know his voice. You’ve probably taken on some of his restaurant recommendations and cooking tips. I’m talking about the one and only John Lehndorff. John has lived in Boulder for decades now and has become a resident food critic and expert, not just for KGNU, but for many local publications, including Boulder Weekly.

He has a segment on the Morning Magazine, Radio Nibbles, that airs every Thursday. He also hosts a show once a month on Thursdays called Kitchen Table Talk. John’s commentary on all things food and drink is characterized by humor and wit.

But, food is complicated. Relationships with food are complicated. The way we view our bodies based on the food we eat is complicated.

I’m Jackie Sedley, and this is Episode 4 of my limited series, Nourished. I’ve spent weeks discussing the wild world of eating disorders on the airwaves, exposing and unpacking the biases we hold against food and bodies. A couple weeks ago, I asked John if he had any perspective, personally or professionally, on eating disorders.

He looked straight in my eyes and said, “Nobody’s really ever asked me that before.”

And so we sat down in a studio at KGNU last week and he let me ask those hard questions. You’ll hear our 40-minute or so conversation right now. After that ends, John will join me in the studio and we’ll have about 15 minutes or so to take listener calls related to what you’ve heard about your favorite local food fanatic. Stay tuned and be ready with those calls afterward.

Jackie Sedley: John, we have so much to dive into. As someone who is been featured on our airwaves for decades talking about food, the joy around food, the joy around dining, the good, bad, and ugly of the industry, the quality of the food that we eat, and all of these concepts around it. But something that I think our listeners haven’t really heard from you a lot is your journey and relationship with food. And so I, I really wanted to invite you into this, this series, my series, Nourished, to talk about that. I think that listeners have the potential to be very, very enlightened from hearing from someone that is in that world. So I already very much just want to thank you for your vulnerability and willingness to chat with me about something that you don’t necessarily always get into on radio.

John Lehndorff: Yes, I’m feeling quite vulnerable at the moment, but that’s kind of how I’ve felt all my life.

Sedley: Yeah. You said, “Vulnerable all your life.” Let’s start from the beginning. What kind of upbringing did you have with food in your in your home? What was the relationship that was around food from a young age?

Lehndorff: So I was born in 1954, Massachusetts. So my parents were from a very different generation. My mother was Sicilian-American. Um, she came out of a Depression-era philosophy of, “Let’s-let’s feed everybody.” And so we ate. And there was always, you know, a lot of good food around the house. At the same time, my parents were in a constant struggle with their own weight. Or at least their, their perception of it. My father was a doctor, but he also had, uh, arthritis in both hips. And so, he was constantly dealing with, uh, pain of that, and trying to lighten the load, and at that point, essentially, doctors and everybody else blamed kids who were overweight or they blamed their parents. So, I mean, I, I grew up and my nickname until I got bigger and stronger than everybody else was “Fatso.” And, um, that, you know, pissed me off and depressed me. And at one point when I was in high school, I, I, I rebelled against the whole thing. And I started referring to myself as “Fitchburg Fats” and wrote about essentially large people liberation, saying, “Well, the hell with you!” You know, but I, I, I wasn’t really, that, that wasn’t necessarily true.

Sedley: Where did you write about that for? Was that for a campus publication?

Lehndorff: That was for my high school newspaper.

Sedley: And was that, was that anonymous?

Lehndorff: No, it was not. Okay. Because I also wanted to write for publication and, you know, I liked the, the notoriety and the, that, so I, I was willing and I, I’ve always been willing to kind of expose myself that way.

Sedley: How was it received by your peers?

Lehndorff: Well, you know, they knew I was fat. The interesting thing, though, is recently I was going through a big you know, people used to actually have printed out photos and so I have a bin of them that I inherited that I’ve been scanning and stuff, but I found some photos of myself as a boy, as a tween, as a teen, and older, and I was not fat. But inside my head I was, and remain, you know … I’ll look in the mirror now even, and I’ll go, “Well, you’re not so fat.” You know, I mean, they talk about “fat eye syndrome,” that you’re looking through disordered eyes, in essence, you know.

Sedley: Body dysmorphia large term for that.

Lehndorff: Yeah, yeah, I’m the classic example of that. And that went on to impact relationships. It especially impacted my ability, willingness, understanding around dating, uh, because of how I felt I was perceived and feelings of unattractiveness and stuff, so.

Sedley: Right, right. So, say a bit more if you’re comfortable about how it impacted relationships, especially, I’m assuming you’re still kind of referring to high school, college, still growing up?

Lehndorff: Well, and even, even beyond … Well, I didn’t think women would be attracted to me because I was overweight or whatever I was, you know, and I, um, we could spend an hour talking about the diverse and varied diets and diet approaches and the drugs and things that I utilized over the years to go, “Alright, I’m finally going to get, I’m going to get skinny and get rid of this thing and then I can live my life as a, as a thin, attractive, successful guy.”

But of course, inside, I was still a fat boy.

Sedley: So, it sounds like you participated in some yo-yo dieting, kind of the back and forth. Can you speak a little bit on that?

Lehndorff: Oh yeah, I would lose, you know, especially, you know, like for special occasions or going back to school or, I don’t know, weddings or whatever, I would, uh, “pull it together” and lose 20, 30, 50 pounds at times, you know. But, eventually, I didn’t feel it anymore, or I got depressed, and I would eat, and comfort myself with food, which of course is, you know, a wonderful thing about food and drink. But I can tell, you know, when I’m, when I’m using food as a, as a drug, you know, usually involves ice cream, you know, or, you know, rich creamy things.

Sedley: How can you, how can you tell what is your-What, what is the difference? How does it feel or what are you thinking when you’re reaching toward food for connection and fulfillment versus for a drug, as you called it, or, or numbing?

Lehndorff: Well, I guess when I’m reaching for it as a comfort, as something to soothe me, usually it’s because my mood has sunk. And I’m like, you know, “I just want some macaroni and cheese. I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna have a salad.” And, you know … I think about food all day long. I write for five or six different publications and do this radio show. So I’m constantly looking at food and going, “Oh, look at that, look at that.” You know, some people at various points have said, “Perhaps you should not focus your life on food.” But that’s what I do, you know.

Sedley: When they say that, what are they alluding to?

Lehndorff: That perhaps if I didn’t write about food, talk about food, think about food, that perhaps I would, uh, uh, focus my life in other ways, you know? Or, or something, that it would take my mind out of that world. At various points I’ve done other things, but, uh, you know, you take you with you, uh, wherever you go.

And, back to the yo-yo dieting thing, some listeners may, may remember this, but sometime in the early 1990s, when I wasn’t happy with my, my romantic life at all, and I was the features editor at The Camera, I went on a public diet, and I was brutally honest about how I looked. I talked what I weighed, and I chronicled my progress. I formed a club for other people who were struggling with weight, and people joined, people lost weight, I lost weight, we finished the series, and uh, over time I gained it all back.

Sedley: I, I want to go back to that comment you made about people kind of voicing what they think about the career path that you chose. Do you feel like those comments are, are from people that are understanding of your complicated relationship with food? Or are they comments that are more, more judgmental?

Lehndorff: Well, I think they’re trying to be helpful.

Sedley: Okay.

Lehndorff: In general, over the years, I have found people to be extraordinarily judgmental. I’ve had to develop what they call the nice guy syndrome, fat guy syndrome. It perhaps is part of why I use humor. Because I can see people looking at me. And adults are prone to say, “God, John, you’re looking good.”

But every once in a while I’ll be walking down the street or I’ll be at the store or something, and there’s a four or five-year-old kid, and they look at me and they go, “Mommy, why is that man so fat?”

And, uh, I could, you know, reel off a snappy comeback or something, but it goes back to that feeling of, I don’t know what it is, targeting, or… What the kid said, may or may not be true, but it also says something about the way that parents are teaching their kids or training their kids.

Sedley: Right, and it says a lot about the value we still put on fitness. That has been a constant, you said, through your generation, through my generation, it, the, the way in which we’ve, internalized these messages time and time and time again, it, it really feels so daunting and overwhelming.

Lehndorff: Especially here.

Sedley: Yeah.

Lehndorff: I grew up in Massachusetts. I was surrounded by large people. I could have moved to Minnesota. I could have moved to, uh, you know, Wisconsin or someplace where the culture was accepting of large people. And also, you know, there are a lot of large men who don’t give a crap, you know, who happily, they live their life. But I didn’t. I moved to Boulder. which is about the most thin, skinny-focused, fitness-obsessed place on the earth. You know, I mean, that’s, I don’t, I don’t know why I, I, you know, there’s other reasons to live here. Like KGNU. But yeah.

Sedley: So, so let’s start in then on your, your career in Boulder, or if it started before within the world of food, how did that, how did that start?

Lehndorff: Well, I mean, obviously I was obsessed with food. I worked for some caterers in high school and college, and then I, I got out because I, I needed work. I got to Boulder, and, uh, I worked at a whole bunch of different restaurants that don’t exist anymore. I did catering, I taught cooking classes, I did a lot of, you know, food-related things. At the same time that I was writing for various publications in Boulder.

Sedley: You said that you were already thinking about food. Do you feel like the hyperfixation on food and body came before you started working in food? And if so, do you think that it led you to work in food in a, in a way?

Lehndorff: Oh, I don’t think you could.

Sedley: Yeah.

Lehndorff: I mean, they’re intimately connected. I don’t think, because at the same time that I was thinking about this and dealing with this, I was, I was becoming a, a writer and basically my, My thing with writing all, all along was that, I mean, and the writers I admired were, were personal. They used the word I.” I didn’t want to really be a reporter. I, I wanted people to notice my, me. You know? So at the same time that I had these body problems, I, I said, here, look at me, look at me, read me, love me. So it, you know, they kind of, they, they kind of went together.

Sedley: Say more about that, that idea of, of kind of putting yourself at the forefront of this work around food. It sounds like almost as a way to gain acceptance.

Lehndorff: Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I, and I, I want it to be, and I’m, you know, as a result of all of this, because of my writing and public activity and KGNU and everything. I live in a community and I meet people all the time who have really appreciated what I did and loved what I wrote about. In part, especially around family. Because I’ve written extensively about family. My family and their relationship to food. And, you know, when my son was growing up, he, you know, I wrote about him and food because I, I believe it is the central, you know, other than sex, food is the central act of, of community in our world. And it’s, it’s something that’s sorely missing. You know, if we’re looking at solutions to some of this food disorder, eating together, turning off devices, actually paying attention to people, listening to them over the table, is, is absolutely vital.

Also, I think it’s the way that you turn children into human beings. Because I’ve noticed it in families that, that don’t eat together and kids don’t learn how to be at a table and be like that. Um, you know, they, they, they struggle. There’s a lot of disassociation amongst kids now, you know, where they don’t want to publicly engage and, you know, I think some of that goes back to families not eating together.

Sedley: So it kind of sounds like this career in food has had mixed effects on your relationship with food and body.

Lehndorff: Oh yeah. I mean, on the one hand, I am me. I’m like the old guy of food and food journalism in Colorado. You know, all the other people send people to me to talk about the history of it, but on the other hand, it’s obviously had a negative impact on my psyche and, you know, even at the age of 70, I haven’t given up on finding a relationship or, or that, but I’m still, you know, afflicted.

Sedley: Finding a relationship with food?

Lehndorff: No.

Sedley: Oh, in general.

Lehndorff: With a partner, yeah.

Sedley: Right, because it does sound like that has been kind of a theme almost is the way you view yourself and the way that you’re able to interact with the world, including people and food and body does impact your interpersonal relationships. They’re directly connected.

Lehndorff: Well, sure. Sure. And I think that people, besides looking at your. at your body when they’re appraising you, they’re also looking at the person, hopefully, standing next to you, or the lack thereof. And, you know, so I think we judge people in part by whether or not they’re in a real relationship or, I don’t know, so I’m not expecting to resolve this actually, but I’m still working.

Sedley: Yeah. I think that is such a point that comes up in a lot of conversations I have with people that have complicated relationships with food and body is, it really, really can take such a toll on your involvement with the exterior world because you’re very, very focused on how people perceive you, how you perceive yourself. Depending on your relationship with food, it can be so obsessive. It’s all you think about. If you’re malnourishing your body or if you’re overeating, it, it takes tolls on your organ systems, needless to say. I’m curious, the identity tied with being a food writer and a food connoisseur of sorts, do you think that if you didn’t take that route in your career, – and this might be hard to answer – you would be more or less focused on your relationship with food and body?

Lehndorff: I think it’s certainly a possibility.

Sedley: And there is something really unique about eating disorders, disordered eating patterns, in the sense that a lot of people try to compare eating disorder recovery to addiction recovery, right? And in some ways they are very, very similar.

Lehndorff: Yeah, I think they come from a similar psychological basis.

Sedley: They do, they do, sure, but a key difference is that a lot of recovery spaces point out is that with something like drugs or alcohol, you are working to keep it out of your life. With food, you have to eat every single day.

Lehndorff: You have to make your peace. Right. One way or another, because, well, as you know, in your own experience, if you don’t eat, equally horrible things happen. So it’s this constant dance with this thing you, you love and hate. So, you know, and every time I open the refrigerator, I have to refocus. I have to think about, “Well, what did you eat today, John? Did you actually get any activity in?” And then I go out to eat, because I write about it. So, I, I’m, I’m the first to admit I have a, I have a complicated situation.

Sedley: So where are you at with that dance right now, with food and, and the ability to, to enjoy, hear what your body is asking for, and respect that, versus the dialogue in your head?

Lehndorff: Well, it’s complicated.

Sedley: Of course.

Lehndorff: Because I know too much about food. My problem, some people are, you know, they really don’t know their bodies, and they really don’t know food, or nutrition, and I, I, I do know it, so I, I have to make, right now, I’m, I’m making a very conscious, conscious choice to eat right, and to not eat too much, and, or too late, and I have to cut certain things out of my diet in order to lose weight. And now I’m driven by the fact that I have, well, I had back surgery a year ago. I have foot problems. I, you know, a knee problem. I’m trying to get healthy. So I, no, I haven’t come to, I mean, I, will it last? Boy, I don’t know.

Sedley: The word health is always such a, a fascinating word to me that I could do a whole different series on.

Lehndorff: Health food.

Sedley: Health food, and when you say health for yourself, that is entirely different than health for me, right? When you say “eating right,” quote unquote, that word means something completely different for you than it does for me. And I think, I feel like that is something that that society gets really, really, really messed up by, right? The, the, the differences in, in what constitutes health. And there’s this phrase in a lot of recovery spaces, health at every size. And essentially what that implies is everybody is a different size. Everybody’s built different. The meaning of health to you, is between you and, and doctors that understand you and everybody else can F off and do what they got to do.

Lehndorff: And the other thing I, I wanted to mention is just, you know, there’s this tremendous buzz right now about the, this new class of weight loss drugs that actually were discovered for fighting diabetes, which is a whole thing. another issue. But, you know, having used various things over the years, including amphetamines, to fight appetite, to lose weight, I don’t think it’s going to work because unless you continue to shoot yourself in the stomach once a week for the rest of your life, because as soon as you stop, your body is going to go back to its comfortable place. So … I still think you … you still have to do all the all the recovery work and make peace with the parts of your life that make things harder.

Sedley: So working in food spaces I’m curious what is the dialogue like around permission to eat food for what I mean by that is in a lot of spaces at least with my generation I see that people who are naturally predisposed to thinness are given a lot more permission to sit on the curb and eat a slice of pizza at 2 a.m., whereas if you’re in a bigger body, people will judge that or, or attach connotations of, of, I don’t know, laziness or, or the list of negative words goes on. How does that show up in, in dining spaces that you’ve seen? Is there still a large emphasis on permission to eat for people that are naturally thin?

Lehndorff: I don’t think people notice them. But when you are a large person and you’re eating and really enjoying yourself, I think that there’s still a high level of judgment, you know? Yeah. Whether it’s in restaurants or in other situations. I think it’s ingrained in people. So, you know, in larger scope of things, it would be nice if we could have a societal shift that changes this attitude. But at a certain point in your life, and I don’t know what age it is that you come to this, but you go, “This is who I am. These are the things I’m going to have to struggle with.” And it’s so hardwired in, that it’s not going away. It’s going to be part of who you are. And you, you, you have to make some kind of peace with it so you can be happy and have dinner with friends.

Sedley: This is a continuing, a lifelong dance, as you put it. Was there a point at which you reached a mental state of saying, “I am someone that has the body that I have, I have put it through all of these trials of trying to lose weight.”

Lehndorff: Yeah.

Sedley: “It falls where it falls, and even if other people have opinions about that, that is who I am.” Is that something that you are able to, to, to believe and trust in yourself at this point?

Lehndorff: Yeah, I think also, um, I’m not sure it’s necessarily true with other eating disorders, but whatever it is I say to myself, how I treat myself internally, is so much worse, so much more brutally critical than anything that anyone ever actually says. Part of the problem is your projection. You look at people and you go, “They must be thinking that I am either emaciated or obese” or whatever, whatever it is. And it’s this, this loop that that goes on, and I’m sure, you know, part of therapy probably is trying to break that feedback loop that makes you assume that people are, are, are judging you.

Sedley: Did you ever seek outside help, like therapy or, or, or dieticians, nutritionists?

Lehndorff: At various times, sure. Yeah.

Sedley: What, what brought you to seek that support? And was there support for you? Because I know that men in particular, there aren’t a lot of spaces to have these kinds of more vulnerable conversations.

Lehndorff: Well, it’s a double thing. One is that women are much more likely to be willing to seek and accept guidance. Men are idiots. Thick-headed, strong-willed, testosterone-driven idiots. You know, “I’m gonna do it by myself and I don’t want to, you know, seem weak.” So it’s not easy. And I’m sure up until recently there probably were a lot fewer resources available to help men with various levels of eating disorders. I mean, Boulder is full of people who would be obese if they weren’t obsessive runners or triathletes or whatever. And those people are, you know, beating themselves into oblivion, trying to fend off that part of themselves. So it’s like all these 70-year-olds getting knee replacements and hip replacements and back replacements in my case.

Sedley: If you’re just joining us now, you’re tuned into A Public Affair. This is Episode 4 of my limited series, Nourished, featuring a conversation with the one and only KGNU food expert, John Lehndorff. Usually John shares the airwaves to talk about joy around food. This time we’re discussing his complicated relationship with food and body. He’s also in the studio with me right now. So we’re going to continue the rest of that conversation, the next 10 minutes or so. And then we will be open to taking your calls, comments, questions between myself and John based on what you’re hearing right now, we’ll get to the second half of that conversation. And this is KGNU FM 88. 5 Boulder, KGNU 1390 Denver.

Jackie Sedley: So let’s talk about the positive aspects of food. The parts of food that have made your life feel so positive and, and fulfilling. I know from my experience that a lot of people in treatment spaces, their goal is to have a body that can sustain itself and to go through the world nourishing their body enough that they can live to see another day. I am someone who believes and needs full recovery to be an option. I want to have the Anthony Bourdain journalistic foreign correspondency adventures of my dreams and, and break bread with people all across the world and eat whatever they serve me that they made in their remote village and in the middle of wherever they reside.

John Lehndorff: That’s the joy.

Sedley: Right.

Lehndorff: I mean, that’s why I, you know, as difficult a job as it was, that’s why I enjoyed being a dining critic, because every time I went out to eat, I would collect a group of friends or family or other people who would come with me. And in the end, it’s, it’s about the getting together, but it’s a wonderful, uh, lubricant. It’s also a way to find out about people. I mean, sometimes, uh, I ask people, “What’s the first thing you remember loving that you put in your mouth? You know, other than mom.” “What’s the first thing you remember cooking or tasting?” In those moments, you see people become children, especially when I talk to them about pie, you know.

Sedley: I love your saying that when you ask people about the things they’ve tasted early in life, it brings them back to being children because when you do watch a child eat, right? When I watch my nephews eat, it is the most intuitive experience that you want to just cherish and hold on to.

Lehndorff: Yeah. That’s one of the things I loved about raising my sons. He’s now 30-years-old, great cook, great palate, and people still mention this column, but the first time we let him have peanut butter, it was, it was an extraordinary, it was explosive, it was blissful. You could see it in his face. You wish you, uh, have that ecstatic experience. Occasionally I, I, part of what I tell people to do to break their food ritual is to something completely new. That’s part of how I remain friendly. So I, I seek out these experiences and I share them with people and it makes me really happy when I do that.

Sedley: I want to ask you my favorite question to ask people that I’ve never asked anyone in a journalistic setting, but I would love to hear your answer. There’s a bit of scenario setting here, so bear with me. Um, hypothetical scenario I created years ago. Unfortunately, in this future that I’m describing to you, the death penalty has not been abolished and it is your time. You have accepted it. It’s a crime you didn’t commit.

I have a couple of parameters for you. So, you get an appetizer, a main course, a dessert, and two beverages. The beverages could be a whole bottle of whiskey in one hand, and a, a sweet iced tea in the other. It could be whatever you want. No water. Water is, water is taken care of. Don’t worry about that. You have to tell me when you drink. You don’t have to worry about being too uncomfortably full. It’s about enjoyment of the meal, and the meal doesn’t have to make sense either. So, your appetizer and your entrée don’t have to go together. For you, they might. For And there’s a bit of magic involved, thanks to these imaginary taxpayer dollars in this fake scenario, so they can revive someone who has passed away to make your favorite stew from then, and that person will do it willingly. There’s no begrudgingness to it. You could get the best sushi chef in the world. You could get a restaurant that closed to make you food. And if this actually happens, I’ll ask you the question again. So don’t feel too glued to your answer. But what are the first things that maybe come to mind?

Lehndorff: Well, the bringing people back to life thing, you know, I mean, on the one hand, it would be mom serving me goulash or egg croquettes or any of the dishes that she liked to make because whatever my issues are, you know, with body dysmorphia and stuff, those were very happy times. So that’s one way of looking at it. I’ve thought about this before and I’ve read about other people’s last meal ideas. You know, appetizer-wise, it’s hard for me to separate it out from my, my problem. I mean, obviously, it should be something fried. Incredible fondness for fried clams growing up in New England. It’s tartar sauce. We called it then tada, tada sauce. Um, so, that, that, that’s certainly one possibility.

Sedley: From anywhere in particular?

Lehndorff: You know, context is everything. Ideally, you know, for that particular course, I would be standing in the sand outside a clam shack on the coast of New Hampshire at Hampton Beach eating a clam roll.

Sedley: Salty, salty air.

Lehndorff: Right.

Sedley: The ambiance of it all.

Lehndorff: As good a job as main shack and other places, it’s not the same. It’s like eating green chili and Massachusetts. So that’s a huge favorite. Um, maybe it’s the heritage, but I, my tendency would be to go with an Italian entrée, whether it was cannelloni or stuffed shells or something that involves tomato sauce and cheese. Cream is good too.

Sedley: And anywhere in particular or no?

Lehndorff: You mean in terms of like a restaurant?

Sedley: Like where it’s from, who’s making it?

Lehndorff: Well, somebody else. I’m really tired of my own cooking. Boy, you know, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve eaten meals cooked by some of the, some of the best chefs in the world, advantages from Thomas Keller and Paul Proudhon, but I have extremely fond memories of a restaurant in Boulder where I, I started to finally understand Italian cuisine. It’s called Laudisio, and it wasn’t Italian-American. It wasn’t spaghetti and meatballs. It was risotto and polenta and carefully prepared meats. That was a revelation. I loved the food and I also loved the way that they approached it. So, so that might be, uh, that might be a possibility.

Sedley: Delicious.

Lehndorff: For dessert, it’s a hard one. I mean the obvious answer would be pie, preferably wild blueberry.

Sedley: Mmmmm.

Lehndorff: You know, near the top, top of my list.

Sedley: Vanilla ice cream?

Lehndorff: Yeah. Or real whipped cream.

Sedley: Mmm.

Lehndorff: Again, it’s probably uh, there’s a lot of other sweets that I’m more than capable of appreciating from macarons to macaroons, but I think that would probably be it. Uh, drinking-wise? A very smooth old Scotch that’s been, I like the ones that are aged sherry in port barrels and around. So delicious. That would certainly be one beverage. And other than that, it would be something refreshing and bubbly.

Sedley: Delicious. It’s a phenomenal answer. And it’s so, I love this question because for one, it’s, it’s always fascinating to me to see if people bring up nostalgia or a meal that was really, really good or how, how much they think about the question and also the way that people light up, the way their eyes light up, the way that their body language usually relaxes or tenses depending on their relationship with food. And it really just always brings me back to the fact that it is so central to our lives. And so if it’s going to be central, regardless of our connotation, the most idealist world would be for everyone to have it central in a positive way, not just a neutral way or a negative way.

Lehndorff: Exactly. Yeah. And I do think, from my experience, that it’s not something that you can solve by yourself. You can’t think it through and, and, and truly solve it. You need other people, whether it’s family, found family, friends, community. The solution isn’t to not eat in front of people, which is a common disorder, but to go ahead and find ways to elevate eating with people. with those connections, with those kind of heart moments where you feel that you’re united with people.

Sedley: Alright, John anything else that we didn’t touch on that you think we should?

Lehndorff: Well, I’ve always been interested and people with disordered eating are always horrified, terribly afraid and yet strangely attracted to what people think. So I’m I’m looking forward to to hearing what listeners, how they’re dealing with it in their own lives.

Sedley: How does it feel to be speaking this into the airwaves of KGNU? It feels okay.

Lehndorff: You know, it’s a little anxious, but I, you know, I hope it helps.

Sedley: Thank you so much, John. I appreciate you.

Lehndorff: Thanks, Jackie.

Jackie Sedley: That was me, Jackie Sedley, speaking with John Lehndorff, resident food critic and expert here at KGNU and in Boulder in general. We spoke last week.

We had that conversation last week, but now this morning, John is in the studio with me. Good morning once again, John.

John Lehndorff: Good morning, Jackie.

Sedley: So at the end of that conversation, I asked you how you were feeling about this going on-air. Do you want to, do you want to say a bit? I know we have a caller on the line already, but do you want to start off by saying a little bit about how you’re feeling now that it has aired?

Lehndorff: Um, anxious I, I think is a, is a safe thing. Mm-Hmm. But, uh, curious about, uh, how, how it’ll, you know, impact people. Yeah. Um, I’ve been, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I talked to you, so.

Sedley: Of course. Well, you never reached out and told me not to air it, so that’s, uh, you know, a good sign in the direction of feeling good.

Lehndorff: Oh yeah. No, I didn’t, I didn’t consider that once I decided that it was okay to talk.

Sedley: Yeah. Yeah. Well, we already have a caller on the line. We have John for John. So let’s bring him onto the board. Good morning, John. You are on-air.

John (caller #1): Hi. Thanks for both of you for doing this. Um, I just wanted to, uh, have a question, but I also wanted to say, I appreciate John for his work, but also, you know, as his, with his insights with gardening, cooking at home and restaurant navigation and reviews, right? So he brings quite a depth to that, but as a, uh, someone who knows that kind of gamut from home cooking to fine dining, I, I just, uh, was wondering how he negotiates, like, eating out from a health perspective versus, like, what you can cook at home. How do you, do you cook same stuff, or do you have a, when you go home, when you got your go to, what, what are you doing there to, um, or is it possible to have that healthy diet when you go out?

Lehndorff: Uh, it’s, uh, hi John, thanks for calling. Uh, it’s, uh, it’s complicated these days. Um, when I do go out, um, it’s, it’s never out of my mind. Uh, it’s like, uh, You know, two sides of a brain. You know, one side of me is saying You know, don’t order the pasta and cheese, and the other side is saying, Uh, but I should, I should eat that and write about it and talk about it and that would be interesting for people. Which, of course, is a rationalization. At home, I, uh, You know, sometimes I, I, I, I eliminate whole food groups from my, uh, from my house. Uh, there’s, you know, certain, uh, trigger things that, uh, foods I love that I, if it’s available, I’ll eat that first instead of good stuff, whatever, you know, and it’s not like I don’t know what, what I should eat, you know.

John (caller #1): Do you, do you do the pasta and cheese at home, or would you just save that for when you’re, uh, you know, out on Pearl Street?

Lehndorff: Well, it depends on, uh, my mood. Um, and, uh, since mostly I’m cooking for myself, you know, uh, it’s just, you know, when I, when I end up making macaroni and cheese at home or something like that, I’m aware that I’m, uh, lapsing into, uh, using, uh, food as comfort, not viewing it strictly as nutrition. Uh, so it’s, uh, it’s always a struggle.

John (caller #1): Okay. All right. Well, Well, that’s interesting.

Sedley: Thank you so much for calling, John. Appreciate it.

John (caller #1): Thanks. I appreciate it. Bye.

Sedley: If you have questions or comments for John – that’s John Lehndorff, not caller John, you can call 303-442-4242, or email dj@kgnu.org if you don’t want to call in. Once again, 303-442-4242. I think that that call was interesting. The, the context of asking John about, um, you know, do you get the pasta when you go out and what does that mean for you? Just because, as a lot of our conversation alluded to, pasta and cheese means something different for everybody, right? If, if I go out and order pasta with cheese, that would be celebrated based on my history that I’ve talked about on the airwaves of having restrictive patterns and how, for me, that would be a sign of health and nourishment to my body. And so it’s, it’s always so interesting because our perspectives on pasta with cheese are going to be just as different as anybody else here asking.

Lehndorff: The other important thing, I think, too, is that, um, I’ve ended up, um, having a, a dysfunctional relationship with the concept of hunger.

Sedley: Mmm.

Lehndorff: Um, you know, some people, they, they ignore food until they get hungry. And then they, you know, they do something about it and then, uh, forget about it. And, um, you know, it’s, uh, very hard for me to get to the point where I’m actually, I, I mean, again, my perception is probably wrong, but where I feel like I am hungry.

Sedley: Right, right. We have a couple other callers coming through. I will bring the first caller on. Once I bring you on, please say your name. All right, first caller on the air. What is your name?

Alec (caller #2): My name is Alec. A-L-E-C. Alright, Alec. Please welcome. You’re on the air. Thank you. Hi, Alec.

Lehndorff: Hello.

Alec (caller #2): Yes, thank you. Um, uh, uh, John, uh, this was just extraordinary. Yes, can you hear me?

Lehndorff: Yes. Yes, we can. Make sure you turn off your radio.

Alec (caller #2): Yeah, that’s, that’s the thing. A bit of an echo there, no worries. Yeah, okay, sorry. So, very, very moving, and, uh, I listened to KGNU from early morning, and, uh, I’ve listened to you over the years, and, uh, now I live in Denver, but I, uh, lived in Boulder for 36 years. So, I thank you for your courage, your sensitivity. and Joe Huber. Uh, it’s really very, uh, very nourishing, speaking of food. Thank you. I, I, I, I, I appreciate that a lot.

Lehndorff: Thank you, Alec.

Alec (caller #2): Yeah, and I’m not a person that is obese. I’m probably, I’m 82 now and about 20 pounds overweight. But, uh, that’s in the last 20 years, so I didn’t have to struggle. This way, as, uh, as you have. And, one more thing, and I know that I have detected one, uh, I think, major prejudice in me about, uh, uh, obese people. I, I recognize it in myself.

Lehndorff: That’s a, that’s a, that’s a first step right there. I, I, I hope part of what happens is that, you know, people grow up with these prejudices. I have them. You know? And so, but, so you, you may not get rid of it, but you can be aware that you have this, this thing.

Alec (caller #2): Oh, yes … Yeah. It’s like seeing it, uh, as if I split myself in two and I can see it on an objective, uh, basis. Oh, “There’s Alec being, being prejudiced.” Mm. So, so it helps you know, that distancing rather than just being that way. So, we thank you both, my wife, both, and I, uh, very much. Thank you so much for this morning.

Lehndorff: Thank you.

Sedley: We appreciate you. Thank you. I think, I think that, that prejudice that Alec was speaking about, John, I think a lot about the comment you made in our conversation, being at a grocery store or out, and a child saying, “Mommy, why is that, why is that man so fat?” And I, I think so much about how, again, from that conversation, and I could talk about this forever, but children have all of this joy, and all of this more objectivity about the world, and this excitement, and when those kind of comments and thoughts come in, come out of their mouths, you recognize that that’s society talking. That’s their parents or the TV or the media they consume because we are not inherently people that would look at somebody and think that. That wouldn’t be a value statement, naturally.

Lehndorff: No, no, it’s environmental and educational.

Sedley: Right.

Lehndorff: And, um, you know, it’s natural for children to absorb their parents prejudices. They are inculcated with that, that attitude from a very, uh, early age, especially if, say, the parents, uh, had, uh, issues with weight in one way or another, and then that, you know, it’s the, it’s the weight of generation after generation being burdened with the, uh, same, the same, uh, prejudice.

Sedley: Right, right. And also the relationship between hunger and children. I think about how my, my sister, I have two wonderful nephews and my sister is very cognizant of these things. And so instead of saying, “Okay, Asher,” to my nephew, “you have to sit at the table and finish your plate or you, you have to, you have to finish X amount or anything like that.”‘ She’ll just say, “Okay, are you, are you full to the top? Are you full to the top of your head? Are you full to the middle? Are you full to the bottom?” And he’ll really check in with his brain, and body, and his cues.

Lehndorff: That is, that is so great.

Sedley: It’s great. And then if he says, “No, I’m full and I wanna go play,” she’ll say, “Okay, you can be full. Just sit at the table for a few minutes, see if it comes back.” And then if he gets hungry again, he will take a couple more bites. “But she is so good at saying, good job listening to your body, Ash!”

Lehndorff: Impressive.

Sedley: And I think that it’s so easy to get numbed out to the tones of your body.

Lehndorff: Mmhmm.

Sedley: And it’s very difficult to reconnect with that if that has been lost over time.

Lehndorff: So one, uh, one more little, uh, memory, um, and this is, uh, you know, adds a further, further level of complication, but I, uh, grew up as a Roman Catholic and was, uh, burdened with that particular religion’s, uh, beliefs. Uh, Catholic school, you know, uh, growing up, uh, school lunch. And, um, there was this very tall domineering, uh, nun dressed in black standing next to the, uh, where you took your tray. And, you know, she was, she, she would send kids back to, “You need to eat all of that because there’s children starving in China.” And I, you know, being smart, I went, “Well, how’s this, this food isn’t going to get to China and feed anybody?” That, that wasn’t what she wanted to hear, of course, but, you know, cause it was waste.

Sedley: Right, that commentary. We also have one more caller, John, to take us to the end of this episode. Hello, you are on the air. What is your name?

Theo (caller #3): Hello, this is Theo. Hello, Theo.

Sedley: You’re on the air with me and John.

Theo (caller #3): Hello, um, I, I have an odd problem. Um, I have no appetite. Um, unless I’m at a restaurant where somebody has made very fancy food, but the things I make for myself I often put, fill the bowl or the glass to, you know, full and I eat like one quarter of it before I’m done.

Lehndorff: Were you, did you like food when you were growing up? Were you hungry?

Theo (caller #3): Um, um, you know, I, there’s, there’s parts of my life when I, like, when I lived in Vermont, I can’t even remember what I ate or how I had the money to eat it. Um, um, I just, um, I have, I have trouble keeping the weight I need, um, because I’m never feeling like I’m, getting to food.

Lehndorff: Do you think it’s, it’s because, uh, you’re, you’re not able to kind of read what your body needs, food-wise, or, or it’s just indifference to food in general?

Theo (caller #3): Um, no, I mean, I’ll, I’ll, uh, any pudding or yogurt, anything that slides easily down, but if I have to, like, chew it and work on it, I also have a problem that I have no saliva. Sometimes I’ll chew on something and until I wash it down, it doesn’t move.

Lehndorff: And, uh, I, I, I don’t think that’s a, uh, a part of the universe of, uh, eating disorders or that, that, that people appreciate.

Sedley: Right. There is a large, there is a large, large part of relationships with food that are very, very, I think, hard for us to unpack on our own and fully understand where it’s all coming from and what part of it is psychological and what part of it is is physical. So I, I really, I really appreciate your call and I hope that we can continue to have more conversations about the different ways that we interact with food in the world and the way different varied relationships and perspectives that we have on it.

So John Lehndorff, that does bring us to the end of our show. Thank you so much for your vulnerability. I am so excited to have another call and show with you about this topic so that we can continue to take listener calls. I know there were many that we didn’t get to.

Lehndorff: Um, I would love to do that. And, um, I just want to say, uh, thank you to you, uh, for asking the question and making me think about it.

Sedley: What’s a good journalist if they can’t make you think about the hard stuff?

Lehndorff: That’s what I do to people all the time.

Sedley: And do you wanna share your email, John, in case people have questions that you weren’t able to answer this morning?

Lehndorff: Yeah, you can send questions, comments, anything to nibbles@boulderweekly.com.

Sedley: All right, and you can also email jackie@kgnu.org with any thoughts you have about further Nourished episodes you would like.

The post “Mommy, why is that man so fat?”: Nourished, Episode 4 feat. John Lehndorff appeared first on KGNU Community Radio.

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On this month’s Black Talk, Michele Simpson talks with Maebel Gebremedhin.

Gebremedhin is a co-founder and the president of the Tigray Action Committee and United Women of the Horn. Her recent New York Times Opinion piece, “Looking away from an epidemic of rape” explores the pervasiveness and intense normalization of sexual violence in Ethiopia, especially in regions like Tigray that are warped by other kinds of violence.

Tigray, a regional state in northern Ethiopia, underwent a devastating civil war between Eritrea and the Ethiopian Government from November 2020 to November 2022. The war, that many call a genocide, left close to two million people displaced and more than a half million dead. In this war, combatants used sexual violence to terrorize and destabilize communities, breaking down Tigray’s social fabric.

In this May segment of Black Talk, we hear about Gebremedin’s trip back to Tigray, meeting her family, and the crisis the people in Tigray are continuing to face due to food insecurity, drought, and ongoing violence against Black women and girls.

• play_arrowBlack Talk: Conversation w/ Maebel Gebremedhin 05/09/2024Alexis Kenyon The post “They no longer saw use for her, so they just dragged her out and threw her into the wilderness to die”: an epidemic of sexual violence in Tigray appeared first on KGNU Community Radio.

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On this morning’s A Public Affair, we hear from Scott Dickers, the founder of the Onion. He spoke at CU Boulder’s Conference of World Affairs last month. Dickers shares the story of creating the Onion back in college with his friends, what they learned in the first few year,s and then lines between fact in fiction became more difficult to understand.

If you listened to the first half of this speech this morning on KGNU’s APA and want to hear the second half, start the video at around 40 minutes.

The post Scott Dickers, founder of the Onion, talks about blurring the lines between jokes and journalism at CU Boulder appeared first on KGNU Community Radio.

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Ginger Perry, a longtime KGNU DJ and contributor, speaks with Nona Gandelman. Gandelman, who started out as a booking agent, has worked as one of Boulder’s most legendary music concert promoters. Eventually forming Maven Productions, Gandelman brought acts like B.B. King, Phish, Buddy Guy, Joan Baez, Roseanne Barr, and Ani DiFranco to stages in Boulder.

Gandelman also served as Vice President of Communications and Marketing at the Jane Goodall Institute. Gandelman often traveled with Dr. Jane Goodall, including a trip to Africa, where Goodall shot her first film with Animal Planet: Return to Gombe. Gandelman is now Dr. Goodall’s book agent. play_arrowNona Gandelman worked with creatives like B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Phish, Ani DiFranco and Jane Goodall to put Boulder’s art scene on the mapAlexis Kenyon Interview Transcript:Ginger Perry:* Good morning. This is Ginger Perry here with Nona Gandelman of Maven Productions. She’s been in the music business since the 70s, starting out as a local booking agent and moving on to national and international groups. She has done more than we can imagine. She’ll tell you about a number of her shows and her unusual shows.

She was also the general manager of the Boulder Theater in 1990 and 1991. She’s gone on to do some really interesting things. And she’s here in the studio with me now. Nona Gandelman’s company is Maven Productions. Good morning, Maven! Good morning, Maven Productions! (Laughter)

Nona Gandelman: That’s Right! I’m the Maven, all right. I’m the music Maven. Good morning, Ginger. It’s great to be here.

Ginger Perry: Good morning. We’re going to have a really good time.

Nona Gandelman: Yeah.

Ginger Perry: Now you started out, you talk about a change in career. You started out as a tennis person.

Nona Gandelman: Yes. Well, I’ve had many careers, but right at the beginning, when I first came to Colorado, I was coming off of being a full-time tennis pro in Connecticut. I came here and was offered the pro-ship at the Flatirons Country Club, which put in one or two courts. Now it’s a full-time golf club.

So I think I was there two summers, two seasons. And then my life changed.

But I actually had planned to be a teacher. I have a master’s in education, but as you know, my life took some twists and turns and led me in a different direction.

Ginger Perry: Yeah, I was just talking with my book club last night about what, how you changed your life story along the way, and you certainly did. Bam! So tell us how you went from tennis to music production.

Nona Gandelman: I had some friends here, and one of my really dear friends, surprisingly, told me she was going to be part of a rock and roll band, an all-female rock and roll band, which was unique in those days.

Ginger Perry: Raw honey, right?

Nona Gandelman: Raw honey. And the way we came up with the name, by the way, we were all sitting around at lunch and ‘What are we going to call the band? What are we going to call it? ‘

And we all looked down at this honey bottle, and it said, ‘raw honey,’ and it was like, that’s it. Perfect.

And so I was just friends with them. And then they got a gig at one of the hotels here in Boulder for terrible money. And I said to them, ‘Jeez, you guys should be making more money. You want me to talk to them?’

I didn’t know what I was doing. I went in. I talked to the guy, and I don’t know, I got twice the amount of money. And before I knew it, two months later, I was their manager. I mean, you know, they were desperate, and I didn’t mind switching gears and you know, the entertainment thing was very seductive.

Ginger Perry: And you created a whole job of becoming a booking agent, right?

Nona Gandelman: After that, there’s another whole story. That happened. Yeah.

After, I don’t know, some time traveling with them and getting convincing booking agents to book them, I found myself going down to this agency in Denver, which was the biggest one down there. And Alan, who was the owner of it, there were two other agents, Kathy and Kent. And I would go down there because I’m pitching my group, Raw Honey. And I would be sitting in the hallway eavesdropping on how they were selling the artists. So I was hearing them work as booking agents.

Ginger Perry: Talk about self-taught!

Nona Gandelman: Yeah, no, I totally was. Everything I’ve done has been sort of streetwise.

Yeah. And I listened, you know, this goes on for long periods of time. I go down there a lot. And then the next thing I know, Kent comes to me and says, you know, I’ve got some money, let’s start our own booking agency.

Ginger Perry: And then he dropped out, right?

Nona Gandelman: Yeah, so we started out, like, house on fire booking. We had a little office, I think. And, within months he tells me he’s going to drop out, and now I owe him the money that he used to start the agency. I had no choice if I wanted to keep doing it. So I came up with the money and became my own booking agent, and it was sink or swim.

Ginger Perry: And then you started to learn about venues and even create venues, right? Tell us all about that.

Nona Gandelman: After some time, I think I called myself Peak Productions. Very original name. And I was the only booking agent in Boulder.

So, a lot of the local bands were coming, and I was booking everybody from, you know, the Mother Folkers to Dusty Drapes, you name it.

All the locals to Rob from Rob’s Music had a band. I booked him a lot. Hot Rize. But later on I booked Hot Rize at another level, a national level. But at any rate, then this guy comes along, once again, these guys changed my life.
Hot Rize

Ginger Perry: These people just drop in your lap!

Nona Gandelman: I know! he comes along. He says, ‘You know, I’ve got all this money. I’m gonna start this big company at the Market Center in Denver, a brand new building. ‘I’d like to have a management company and a booking agency. How would you like to run the booking agency?’

I said, ‘Okay.’ And so became Panther Presentations and Leonine Productions.

Ginger Perry: Get the animals in there.

Nona Gandelman: Yeah. We were both Leos. So, and you know, as Leos, we wanted to tout our Leoism. And our company was hot. And it happened right at the beginning of the urban cowboy fad, which was huge. All the clubs in Colorado wanted country.

Yeah. We were both Leos. So, and you know, as Leos we wanted to tout our Leoism. And our company was hot. And it happened right at the beginning of the urban cowboy fad, which was huge. All the clubs in Colorado wanted country.

Ginger Perry: When was that about? Do you remember?

Nona Gandelman: Gosh. Early 80s? Whenever the movie came out. Yeah. Right. I have to look it up. 70s maybe.

Ginger Perry: Yeah.

Nona Gandelman: And we captured all these country groups coming in and out of town, you know, cover bands, not necessarily recording artists. And I was booking, at one point, I think, eight or nine clubs a week.

Ginger Perry: Oh my gosh.

Nona Gandelman: No, yeah, in Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins, and all over Colorado. I was at the Hotel Colorado in Glenwood. I booked things up in Aspen. I booked things in Denver.

You name a club, I would go out and find them and they would work with me. And at one point we were so strong we were written up in Pollstar.

You name a club, I would go out and find them and they would work with me. And at one point we were so strong we were written up in Pollstar.

Ginger Perry: Wow.

Nona Gandelman: And I think, I don’t know. Immediately, somebody came and offered to buy our company, but we didn’t sell it.

Ginger Perry: And then you went into national acts from there.

Nona Gandelman: Well, that was by accident. That was…

Ginger Perry: Everything seems by accident!

Nona Gandelman: Okay, yeah! Here I am, I’m going to be a teacher. So far, I’m miles away from teaching, which was my love. Now my partner, Peter, comes to me and says, ‘Nona, I have a friend from high school. She’s a folk singer. She’s coming to Colorado. I guess she’s good. She’s recorded. And can you get a gig for her?’

So I go, I figure, okay. I find out her name. And I said, ‘That name’s very familiar,’ and I realized who she was, and I’ll spring that on you in a minute.

But I went to Tulagi’s, and I said to them, ‘You know, here’s this great singer-songwriter. You ought to book her.’

And they said, ‘We don’t know who she is. We’re not interested.’

So I said, ‘Would you give me a Monday night and let me do a show?’ And you charge me rent if you want?’

And they said ‘Yes.’

Well, the artist was Cris Williamson.

Ginger Perry: Oh.

Nona Gandelman: She was the co-founder of Olivia Records and had a huge career. Still does.

Ginger Perry: Women’s music.

Nona Gandelman: ‘Women’s music,’ they called it. She came to town, and we put the show on sale. We had a line from Tulagi’s door all the way up College Street and around the block. And I think we added a show. I think we added a late show.

Ginger Perry: You had no idea how popular she was.

Nona Gandelman: I knew she would do well, but not that well.

And the owners, they couldn’t believe it. They said, ‘Who is she? Who is she?’

I said, ‘Well, I, you know, well, if I explained it to you, I still don’t know if you’d understand who she is, but…”And, of course, she went on to sell lots of tickets all over the country, including here.

Ginger Perry: And did you continue to produce her?

Nona Gandelman: Oh, yeah, for years. Oh, yeah, years and years. 20,25 years. It started me on a course of doing all of the “women’s music” quote-unquote performers, and I used to be able to do shows with them at Macky.

I mean, it was a huge cultural event for women who were hungry to hear their music.

Ginger Perry: Really creating a community.

Nona Gandelman: Right. Gay or straight, it didn’t matter; they would come. It was oriented towards women, and many talents were popping up. Comedians like Kate Clinton and Marga Gomez, Lucie Blue Tremblay. I mean, I did everything, Holly Near.

Ginger Perry: all of it, Teresa Trull,

Nona Gandelman: Barbara Higbie, and Barb, of course, is Windham Hill. It was huge for years and years.

Ginger Perry: You created a niche.

Nona Gandelman: That’s right.

Ginger Perry: And tell us about how you got in a little trouble and the boycott happened.

Nona Gandelman: Oh, the boycott.

Ginger Perry: The boycott.

Nona Gandelman: The boycott. That was a dark moment.

I got a call from Redwood Records, Holly Near’s label, Jo-Lynne Worley, and Joni Shoemaker. They called me and said, ‘Nona, we’re getting reports that people are unhappy with you.’

And I said, ‘Well, why? The shows are doing great.’

Well, it was because some women felt that the shows should be restricted, which would mean women only. And that really put me through something. I had to think about that really long and hard because I understood the thinking and the desire to have a safe space, quote-unquote, or a space where everybody could be themselves and be very comfortable.

But as a promoter, I also felt my job was to develop the artists, and the music was certainly good enough and wonderful enough to appeal to everybody.

And so I wouldn’t; I said I wasn’t going to do that. I didn’t think a lot of men would want to be there with 2, 000 women anyway, hogging the men’s room and the women’s room.

Ginger Perry: How many would be there?

Nona Gandelman: Well, we would get some, you know, maybe if there were 2,000, there might be 20 guys. It increased as time went on. The audience was very mixed.

It was like with Ani DiFranco; used to be all women, and now it’s just everybody. Everybody’s coming. And so I was boycotted. A lot of people wouldn’t come to my shows for a while, and they even picketed, I think, outside the shows.

Ginger Perry: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well.

Nona Gandelman: But it really developed into major concert work and huge audiences. And I have to say thanks to a lot of the media people, the local media people, and I’ve gotta, I always give them a shout out because honestly, without their support, I don’t know if my. My little company, which now is, you know, Maven Productions, would have advanced so quickly, you know, Gil Asakawa, Leland Rucker, David Kirby, Justin Middleton, G. Brown.

You know, when I had more rock shows, they all were so supportive, you know.

Ginger Perry: That was print media.

Nona Gandelman: Print media, and they would, like, I would get a Friday mag, I would get a Westward cover, not a cover, but I would get a big article. They were just incredibly helpful to me. And, of course, KGNU was the bedrock of my promotions team, and KBCO, yeah, KUNM, KUNC.

Ginger Perry: Yeah, well, you were offering them something too, so it’s kind of a two-way street.

But yeah, you really are great for when you’re in the business and those people help you out. You can’t do it without that.

Nona Gandelman: And that’s how these artists developed. And that was my goal. That’s what I wanted for them.

Ginger Perry: Yeah. I wanted to back up and talk about venues. You told me that you create, you sort of created The Olympic.

Nona Gandelman: Oh yeah, I don’t, yeah. We’re going way back now to when Boulder was a very rich music environment.

We had The Blue Note. We had Freddi and Henchi’s venue. We had the Walrus. I mean, I don’t even remember some of the names, but there was so much live music. Boulders Coast opened on Baseline, I believe.

And there was a bowling alley in Boulder. It was called the Olympic Bowling Alley. And my partner then, from Denver, Peter and I, went up there. They had a little lounge.

Ginger Perry: Where was it?

Nona Gandelman: It was where Best Buy is now on 30th Street.

Oh. Best Buy is where the Olympic was.

Ginger Perry: Okay.

Nona Gandelman: And also the Hi-Lo, right, of course. Hi-Lo. Let’s not forget that. And I spoke to Mick, who was the owner of the Olympic. And to make a long story short, over time we convinced him to expand the lounge to 400 seats and make it a music venue, and that actually launched, my career as a promoter, a producer of events, rather than, you know, a booking agent.

And I started to book national acts in there.

Ginger Perry: And you started with Blues?

Nona Gandelman: No, I did everything. Everything. And also the Hi-Lo came to me, and he wanted me to book his club, so I had two Boulder venues I was booking all the time. It was really fun.

Ginger Perry: Amazing. So, then, but you did start doing the blues at one point? You even did like blues festivals and.

Nona Gandelman: Well, blues was very popular then.

It was really, and it was mainly the black blues artists, some of whom have gone. But I did everyone from Etta Jka

Etta James to B.B. King to Albert Collins to Buddy Guy to… I’m gonna throw in a couple of white blues artists, Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks.

Robert Cray, who’s gonna be at Chautauqua. They just announced it. I think I did his first show here in Boulder at the Olympic.

Ginger Perry: You’ve got a couple of funny stories you tell me. Tell us about, was it the Buddy Guy one?

Nona Gandelman: Oh, and Mose Allison, who kept calling me and asking me out long after the… I was totally mystified by that. I have absolutely no idea, but he really persisted to ask me out months after I did a show with him.

And Albert too, Albert.

Ginger Perry: Come on, baby. Come on, baby. Hey, baby.

Nona Gandelman: ‘Hey, baby. I’m going to be a little late,”

I’m going, ‘Albert! The show started 30 minutes ago. Where are you?’

‘Oh, baby. I’m on my way. Don’t worry. I’m coming. I won’t let you down. I won’t let you down, Nona. I won’t.’

Ginger Perry: I’m sure you had some unusual situations.

Nona Gandelman: Buddy Guy was really the one that really. I’ve done many shows with him, but the one at Boulder’s Coast was the one when Buddy was completely drunk, stoned, whatever, could hardly move, could hardly talk. And the show was going to start. He was going to go on stage, you know, any minute. And, of course, it was packed.

So I just said, ‘Buddy, we’ll do it the hard way. Stand up.,’ and he stood up, and I put his arm around me. I was taller than by two inches.

So, I just sort of dragged him up on stage. The guitar was in the stand, And I stood him next to the mic. I said, ‘Hold on to this,’ and he’s holding on to the mic stand and I got his guitar and just put it on him.

I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Buddy Guy!’ And I guess the screaming and the clapping, he just sort of came to life and started playing. I don’t know how he did it.

I’ve done many shows with him, but the one at the Boulder’s Coast when Buddy was completely drunk, stoned, whatever, could hardly move. Could hardly talk. And the show was gonna start. He was gonna go on stage, you know, any minute. And, of course, it was packed.

So I just said, ‘Buddy, we’re going to do it the hard way. Stand up.’ and he stood up, and I put his arm around me. I was taller than by two inches.

So, I just sort of dragged him up on stage. The guitar was in the stand, you know, And I stood him next to the mic. I said, ‘Hold on to this,’ and he’s holding on to the mic stand and I got his guitar and just put it on him.

I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Buddy Guy!’ And I guess the screaming and the clapping, he just sort of came to life and started playing. I don’t know how he did it.

Ginger Perry: Well, you know, those performers. And then you had a cute one about B.B. King.

Nona Gandelman: Oh gosh. Yeah, I felt really grateful to get that show at the Boulder Theater.

Yeah, and because B.B. King didn’t do small venues, I think he had the date and such a beautiful venue. It still is an incredible venue.

And, so, of course, he’s elite. He’s an elite performer. One of the tops in the blues world. And he does his show packed to the gills. And it was very high security.

So, actually, at the time, I was managing the Boulder Theater.

I was just sort of patrolling around the stage area after the show, a little before all the people left. And some little boy, about 10, came up to me. And he said, ‘Please, can I see BB? Please, can I see BB?’ And he had, you know, a little paper, and he had a record or something he wanted autographed.

And I said, ‘Well, he really doesn’t want to see anyone. He’s really tired,’ and the little boy was so sad, and he was so excited.

So, I went down to the dressing room, and B.B. was just sitting there with Lucille, playing the guitar and resting. And I said, ‘There’s a little boy out here. I know you don’t want to see anyone, but would you let him in? Just this little one.’

And he said, ‘Okay.’

And you should have seen the look on the boy’s face when he walked into the dressing room. It was so precious. Oh, and BB was very sweet with him and gave him an autograph.

Ginger Perry: Humanizing him. Well, you also did a lot of international shows. You took a lot of chances. I mean your whole career, and you presented some people that nobody had heard of. Some were great successes, and I’m sure some were flops. But do you mind telling me about the Throat Singers? What was that?

Nona Gandelman: Oh, well, yes, I think what happened is after a while, after I tried Rock and roll and metal and things that I really couldn’t relate to personally.

Ginger Perry: Phish.

Nona Gandelman: Well, no Phish was really good. That was a little different story, but it did turn out that, I did bring, I was, I think, the first promoter to bring Phish into the market thanks to Don Strasberg, who was at CU at the time. He was a student.

And I don’t remember. Oh, he called me and he started talking, “You should do this. You should do that.” and I had the wisdom to listen to the young at that point. And I just, I researched it and I took a chance.

And, of course, Phish, Widespread Panic, and Blues Traveler. You know, Don’s an excellent producer and promoter, of course, but he was just a student. But I listened to him and I had great success with these.

I decided I really wanted to bring artists who were meaningful to me and who I thought would expand the community and enrich it culturally.

There were several groups that nobody had ever heard of. One of them was the Throat Singers of Tuva. I don’t remember where I saw the name, but I must have seen them coming in on tour because they’re Mongolian cowboys.

And they actually are Mongolian cowboys. They ride horses on the range in Mongolia. And they hear the sounds of nature, from water, to birds, to the horses, to other animals, to the wind.

And they learned how to sing in what they call double voice which is very hard to do and actually I think it dates back to way back to Days of Jesus, I think people were singing in double voice.

But at any rate, I decided I wanted to bring them to Boulder. So I did and nobody knew who they were, but the promotion was so extraordinary.

Ginger Perry: Again, the media helping you.

Nona Gandelman: Yeah, the media. All those people we mentioned got on board. It was so fascinating.

Ginger Perry: Where’d you bring them?

Nona Gandelman: To the Boulder Theater.

Ginger Perry: And how’d they do?

Nona Gandelman: They sold out.

Ginger Perry: Oh my gosh.

Nona Gandelman: And when they came out dressed in their garb, you know, people were just sort of, you know, and they said something, and then they started to sing. It was total silence in the theater and the look on people’s faces. It’s so extraordinary to hear it.

Ginger Perry: Yeah, that’s amazing. You said there were a couple of times when the Boulder Theater felt like church to you.

Nona Gandelman: This was one of those times. when it was so still. And people realized they were hearing something, you know, sacred. And actually, it is. It goes back to days of, you know, sacred practices.

Ginger Perry: And Joan Baez, one time, she even told you that it was like being in church.

Nona Gandelman: Yeah, of course. I had the good fortune of producing events with people I grew up with and loved. Joan was one of them, and Etta James was another.

And, you know, I was thrilled when I got my first show with Joan. I did many shows with her, but she only wanted to play the Paramount Theater, Macky, or 2000- and up-sized seat venues.

But I got to be, you know, developed a good relationship with her manager, who trusted me, and I finally convinced him to do one show at the Boulder Theater.

Ginger Perry: Oh, wow. And what’s the seating at the Boulder Theater?

Nona Gandelman: It was 840. Small for her.

Well, she came in either before or after an election. And this is, of course, Baez, and she’s, you know, who she is, and political.

Needless to say, it sold out in about a minute.

And she did the show, and throughout the whole show, I was so struck. Honest to God, it felt like, a church. The audience was, there was such reverence, attention, and presence during her show that when I went downstairs, I had already done a show with her at the Paramount, so it was not like my first show.

But I went downstairs to see how she was doing, and she said, ‘Nona, come in here.’ She said, ‘I haven’t felt that in, I don’t know how long.’

That was really special.

Ginger Perry: Oh, that’s so great.

Nona Gandelman: And I said, I told the manager, bolder audiences are fabulous.

Ginger Perry: Yeah. So, how many concerts and people do you think you did over all these years? Like decades, five, how many decades?

Nona Gandelman: Well, I started in the 70s and sort of started winding down around 2010ish.

I’ve done about 250 individual events, but many of those I’ve done many times. So I’ve done a lot of shows and events.

Ginger Perry: And now you’ve diversified. You also did comedy. Also, you did women’s self-help authors and all kinds of different things.

Nona Gandelman: Well, I started to diversify, especially when I was booking the Olympic all the time. I wanted to do some special things and I created a comedy night in Boulder, which Boulder didn’t have, I don’t think, up to that point. And that’s when I met Roseanne Barr.

We did many Monday night comedy nights with her. She also did a headline for a women’s festival I produced for the Hilton Harvest House on a Friday. What was it called? A FAC? Yeah, FAC. And I brought in Judy Tenuta, Sarah Bernhardt, Emo Phillips, and Louis Johnson.

So, I did a lot of comedy and started working with best-selling authors. At first, my colleague Jo-Lynne Worley asked me if I would do something for her, and she wrote a best-selling book, “The Dance of Anger.” So I brought her in. She was very successful, and then I just kept doing that.

Ginger Perry: Yeah, so then it actually led you to work with Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who you still represent.

Nona Gandelman: Well, that came from Tammy Simon, at Sounds True, and my friend Andrea Davis, a singer-songwriter in Boulder.
She was working at Sounds True and she said, ‘You know, there’s a cassette that Tammy has recorded that’s huge. You ought to check out this woman in Denver. Her name is Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes.’

Tammy introduced me, and I persisted for months and months. Finally, Dr. Estes gave me a chance to do a couple of events for her, one in Birmingham, Alabama, and one in Boston. The rest is history. She’s been my client for 30 years.

Ginger Perry: Wow. And you’ve still produced her?

Nona Gandelman: Well, now I produce training for her in Loveland at Sunrise Ranch. But I did go on the road with her. We were in Canada, all over the United States, early on in the 90s when “Women Who Run With the Wolves” came out and was a huge success. Se had absolutely no help. Luckily for me, the timing was perfect, and with my broad skill set, I was able to step in and really help her out.

Ginger Perry: And somebody else you kind of created was Ani DeFranco, who, of course, is huge and now is on Broadway in Hadestown.

Nona Gandelman: Yeah, that’s a great story. I’ll tell it really quickly. As you can tell, I have a million stories. I know we could be here forever, but we have limited time. But it is sort of a funny story.

When I finally got a chance to produce Ani, the first show I did with her was at September School in the Art Building. There, she stood in front of about a hundred people, all seated on the floor at her feet.

She did two sets of music, and from there, she stuck with me all these years. She was, what, 19 or 20 years old? It’s very unusual for a successful performer to stick with a small independent promoter.

Ginger Perry: And then she sold out Red Rocks?

Nona Gandelman: I’ve done two shows with her at Red Rocks, all over New Mexico and Colorado, and two with Meow Wolf.

I mean, you name a venue, and she is still occasionally calling me to do something for her, and she’s what, 52, with two kids?

Ginger Perry: That’s great.

Nona Gandelman: And she’s on Broadway in Hadestown, and I’m gonna see that in May.

Ginger Perry: Oh, so terrific. Well, we’re kinda winding up, I wanted you to talk about your, recent work with the incredible Jane Goodall. You worked with her for 10 years, you were still working with her, you just celebrated her 90th birthday with 11 other people and had lunch with her alone, and obviously, you’re best of friends. Tell us a little bit about

Nona Gandelman: Oh, I don’t know the best of friends! I’m one of her one thousand best!

Ginger Perry: Yeah, right?

Nona Gandelman: But yeah, there are a lot of stories about that, and honestly, I know we don’t have time.

But I was lucky enough to produce a tour for her and co-produce it in, I guess, about 1997 or 8. And went on to get a job at the institute in the DC area and worked very closely with Jane for many years. I would like to be on the road with her and have many experiences traveling with her and getting to know her. When I left the institute, she enlisted me to continue working with her as her literary agent.

So that’s my job for her now. Thank goodness I’m still connected. And yes, I just saw her for one of her many celebrations of her 90th birthday. It’s still going on. I just heard Clint Eastwood showed up at one of her birthday celebrations.

And I did have lunch with her, and I could look at her face and remember… She asked me, ‘How long has it been?’ and I said, ‘I’ve been working with you for over 20 years.’

Ginger Perry: Well, you’ve had a long, illustrious career and contributed a lot to this area’s culture and beyond that. And so what now? I mean, you’re winding down your music business. You still have these other interests. What do you see ahead of you? A little retirement?

Nona Gandelman: Yeah. Well, I feel semi-retired, Ginger, because I only work, you know, 5 days a week, not 24/ 7, which I did for years and years.

I feel a lot of freedom, and I love that I still work with Dr. Clarissa Pincola Estes Reyes, Jane Goodall, and Ani when she needs me. Occasionally, I do other projects. So, you know, I feel very blessed and love the Boulder community. It was joyful and thrilling work, and I’m happy I had an opportunity to dedicate part of my life to that.

Ginger Perry: Yeah. We’re thankful,, too. This is Nona Gandelman. She had a company called Maven Productions for a long time and branched out into a lot of different areas, and what a life. I mean, the people she’s met, the stories she could tell—we could go on and on. And this is Ginger Perry. Thank you for listening, and thank you to Nona for being here with me today.

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Approaching its 50th Anniversary, Metro Caring Denver continues to work closely with local surrounding communities to meet people’s immediate needs for nutritious, culturally relevant food while building a movement to end hunger at its root.

Metro Caring Denver hosts innovative programming in healthy food access, nutrition education, cooking classes, ID procurement, urban gardening and agriculture, community wealth building, and community organizing.

Photo Credit: Metro Caring DenverTash Mitchell, Director of Programs and Impact for Metro Caring Denver sits down with Tish Beauford on “A Public Affair” to discuss the organization’s philosophy, vision and their nearly 50 years of community presence and impact in the Denver Metro Area.

For more information please click: Metro Caring Denver

• play_arrowA 50-Year-Old Nonprofit Continues To Fight Food Insecurity In The Denver CommunityTish Beauford The post A 50-Year-Old Nonprofit Continues To Fight Food Insecurity In The Denver Community appeared first on KGNU Community Radio.

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People hear the term “end-of-life choices” but don’t know what it means to move from serious illness to death – whether it’s a quick unexpected trip or a long complicated journey. Most of us will have more complex deaths and more resources than we can imagine.

For this edition of Kim Mooney’s quarterly programming on death and dying, Mooney sits down with Dr. Anne Giesen, who has enjoyed the challenges and rewards of practicing geriatric medicine and end-of-life medicine for over 20 years, to discuss end-of-life choices. They talk about how powerful information can be in end-of-life situations, options at each stage, and why each medical option and quality-of-life choice have to go hand in hand.

• play_arrowAPublicAffair_2024-04-03Jackie Sedley The post Navigating murky territory between sickness and death appeared first on KGNU Community Radio.

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Denver residents have rallied to support a growing population of new immigrants, providing shelter, clothing, and hope to those seeking a new start.

On this edition of A Public Affair, KGNU’s Alexis Kenyon spoke with Cindy Miller, a Broomfield resident and mother who has been hosting groups of new immigrants at her home for more than a year; Heidi Henkel, a Broomfield City Council person and executive director of the Broomfield Resettlement Task Force; Tracy Di Lorenzo, an advocate for the migrant newcomer and traditionally unhoused communities; and Amy Beck, a member of Together Denver, working with the new immigrant population and encampments. The group discussed their experiences and efforts in supporting the influx of new immigrants in the Denver metro area, grassroots mobilization efforts, and the need for broader support from surrounding communities and the federal government. Listen: play_arrow*APublicAffair_2024-03-27Alexis Kenyon From left: Coraline, Cindy Miller, Amy Beck, Tracy Di Lorenzo. Photo by Alexis Kenyon/KGNUIf you are interested in getting involved, email Amy Beck at amy@togetherdenver.org.If you have work or household goods to donate for migrant newcomers who have recently found housing, email tracy@houseofglowdenver.com You can also email Cindy Miller at denvercindy@gmail.com.The city of Denver offers resources and support for new immigrants. Visit their website for more information. We have also compiled a list of resources for new immigrants at the bottom of this page.If you have a resource we should add to this page or a story you want us to cover relating new immigrants in Colorado, please email alexis@kgnu.org.The post Hundreds of women across the Front Range are working to support new immigrants appeared first on KGNU Community Radio.

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Listen: play_arrow*Myths and facts about plastic recyclingRingo Joon Myths and Facts about Plastic RecyclingThis week on How on Earth Beth speaks with Mattie Matsch, deputy director of Boulder’s Eco-Cycle. We spoke about the challenges of recycling plastics. As consumers, it’s vital to be aware of these challenges and the limitations they impose on the types of plastic we can toss in the barrel for pickup.

Executive Producer: Joel Parker
Show Producer: Beth Bennett
Engineer: Sam Fuqua

The post Myths and facts about plastic recycling appeared first on KGNU Community Radio.

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This month of February, Storytellers of Color KGNU’s Rossana Longo Better interviews local lawyer and author Cesar Cuactemoc Garcia Hernandez, who has appeared in the New York Times, NPR, The Guardian, and many others, to talk about his recent book Welcome the Wretched his recent book which is well-timed for a year when our national immigration policies will be debated in the upcoming presidential election and beyond.

• play_arrow2-12-24STC_no intromp3Rossana Longo-Better (download)

To García Hernández, the solution is clear: allow migrants to cross the border, decouple and defang the immigration and criminal legal systems, and let America live up to its promise as a safe and welcoming haven for all, not only for some.The book reveals how Silicon Valley today makes millions of dollars by harvesting and selling data that helps movement agencies find migrants who may have committed even. the most negligible crimes: Humanizes reams of research data to show that fear of criminal aliens is overblown in the US – where most immigrant communities are more peaceful and crime-free than non-immigrant communities and are driven by racism and bias.

The post Storyteller Shares Thoughts On Dehumanizing Immigration Practices appeared first on KGNU Community Radio.

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The Boulder County NAACP will host its annual Freedom Fund event on Sunday, Feb. 18. The lineup includes Danielle Ponder, a former public defender turned globe-touring singer-songwriter whose newest release, Some of Us Are Brave has been featured on Jimmy Kimmel’s Tonight Show and Late Night with Seth Meyers. Late Night with Seth Meyers.

On this month’s Black Talk, host Michele Simpson talks with Ponder about her career as a public defender and her decision to share what many call an unforgettable voice with the world. Ponder’s music embraces themes of self-love, authenticity, resistance, and justice.

Also on Sunday’s ticket, the Freedom Fund presents Anthony Ray Hinton, who served on death row for 30 years for a crime he was found to have not committed. Michele Simpson discusses Hinton’s memoir and its impact on the students who read it in Simpson’s undergraduate courses.

The Freedom Fund began, nationally, in 1953 as a ten-year program to intensify efforts to complete the job of Black emancipation. Last year’s Freedom Fund event, Boulder’s NAACP presented the Nashville African American Wind Symphony

For more information about Sunday’s event, visit NAACP Boulder County’s website here.

Image via Danielle Ponder play_arrow*03_08_BLACKTALKAlexis Kenyon The post Danielle Ponder will be playing for free at CU’s Macky Auditorium next Sunday appeared first on KGNU Community Radio.

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In December 2022, Matt Burgess was casually chatting with Chris Barnard at CU Boulder’s UN Human Rights Climate Summit when a lightbulb went off in his head.

“He said something to me like, ‘You know, in our internal polling, what we keep seeing is that climate change and abortion are the two issues that the GOP is the weakest on, especially with young voters, but I haven’t seen anybody try to quantify rigorously what the effect of that is on election outcomes. Do you know of that?”‘ Barnard asked Burgess.

Burgess wasn’t aware of that, but found it interesting; interesting enough to conduct an entire research project.

“And so I remember saying to him something like, ‘you know, you might not like what I find. I might find that there isn’t much of an effect and you know, I’m a scientist. I’m going to publish what I find, whether you like it or not.’ But it, it turns out that he was right and I was wrong. Uh, and, and so, you know, we did, we did find an effect.”

To hear more about that effect, KGNU’s Jackie Sedley sat down with Burgess for the latest segment of A Public Affair.

Listen here:

• play_arrowMatthew_BurgessJackie Sedley Matt Burgess is an assistant professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, as well as the Director of the Center for Social and Environmental Futures at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences also at CU Boulder.

Transcript:

Jackie Sedley:  Your latest research that we’re talking about today focuses on estimating the effects of climate change opinion on US presidential elections. So let’s start with the study itself. What piqued your interest in finding correlations between climate change and voting behavior? And how did you go about even studying this, using layperson’s terms to describe the study dimensions, if possible.

Matt Burgess: Sure. So the origins of this study are actually really interesting.

So my research group has been interested for several years now in where’s the common ground on climate change. And related to that, I got to be on the steering committee of CU Boulder’s UN Human Rights Climate Summit that we hosted in December 2022, and I helped them organize two panels on bipartisanship around climate.

And one of the panelists on one of the panels was somebody named Chris Barnard, who’s now the president of the American Conservation Coalition, which is a group of young Republican climate activists. He then I think was their VP external. And at one of the receptions of the UN Summit on the sidelines, he said something to me like, ‘You know, in our internal polling, what we keep seeing is that climate change and abortion are the two issues that the GOP is the weakest on, especially with young voters, but I haven’t seen anybody try to quantify rigorously what the effect of that is on election outcomes. Do you know of that?’ And I was like, no, that’s pretty interesting. And so I said to him, you know, I, I think, I think I might try to do this. Now, I was also aware at the time of polls that we mentioned in our report that suggests that although most Americans think climate change is an important issue, most Democrats even don’t think it’s the most important issue.

And so I remember saying to him something like, you know, you might not like what I find. I might find that there isn’t much of an effect and you know, I’m a scientist. I’m going to publish what I find, whether you like it or not. But it, it turns out that he was right and I was wrong. Uh, and, and so, you know, we did, we did find an effect.

So our report basically does three things. So the first is we review a whole bunch of different polling data from different sources to look at what is climate opinion and different ways to slice it, right? How many fraction of voters say it’s important? What fraction of voters say it’s the most important?

Where is there common ground on specific policies? So we do that. And then we have data from this group called the voter study group that has about four and a half thousand voters in 2020 presidential election and about seven and a half thousand in 2016. We have data on 22 issue opinions and then demographics and who you voted for, for all those voters.

And so we, and when I say we, we attain the data from them. The Voter Studies Group is a non-partisan group that I’m not a part of that just makes their data available. And so when I saw that, I, you know, I thought, well, hmm, we could, we could estimate the effect, right? Or we could try to, right? We could try to tease out, because we have all this information for individual voters, we could tease out, how does climate change compare to other things as a predictor of who you vote for?

And is it possible to separate it out? So without going into the gory details, we ran a couple of different types of statistical models. One that’s more traditional statistics, and one that’s machine learning based, to try to estimate what the effect of climate change is. And then we asked, what would happen to the popular vote if we turn the effect of climate change off?

And then we made a model that simulates the electoral college probabilistically and to try to estimate, if there was a particular vote shift in the popular vote in one direction or the other, probabilistically, what would that have done to the outcome? And so, the, the headline of what we found is: across a whole bunch of different polls, including that one, the fraction of voters that are, I would consider climate conscious — so either they’re saying they care about climate change, they think it’s important, or they favor government action on it in general — is roughly two thirds of voters, give or take a bit, depending on the question, but a clear majority and about twice as large as the fraction of voters that doesn’t care and doesn’t want the government to do something about it.

And those voters that care, strongly prefer the Democrats, even if you control for other things about them. And if you put those two facts together, it logically follows that there’s an advantage in elections to the Democrats from the climate change issue, right? Most voters care about the issue and the voters who care about the issue prefer them.

Then we’re trying to quantify how big is that effect? That’s challenging. And again, I won’t go into the gory details, but basically our estimates range from 3%. So if you turn the climate change effect off, the Republicans gained something like a 3 percent shift in the margin. So think about a one and a half percent moving from the Democrats to them, or twice, that about 6 percent, and in between.

And so the effect of climate is, in other words, basically the opposite of that. So if you turn off climate and the Republicans gain three percent, then that means that climate costs them three percent, right? So then when we simulate the electoral college with the climate change effect off, if it’s a 3 percent margin swing, then in our model, Biden goes from winning 85 percent of the time with the status quo to losing 85 percent of the time with this margin shift.

And so that’s where our, our headline that’s been quoted a lot in the media comes from that we think the effect was probably large enough to change the outcome of the 2020 election.

Sedley: So I am very, very curious for you to explain how this might have implications or predictions for the 2024 election. But first, starting with previous presidential elections, how did climate change opinion affect voting behavior in 2016 and 2020? You were just starting to get into that.

Burgess: Yeah. So in terms of affecting the outcome, we only paid attention to 2020 because Donald Trump already won in 2016. And so if you turn off the climate effect, the answer is he wins by more, right?

It’s not as interesting. The degree to which climate change opinion predicts the voting behavior, we found it was pretty strong in both elections, but it was stronger in 2020 than in 2016, and the fraction of voters who said that climate change was important, which is how that survey phrases the question was larger in 2020 than 2016.

So, if you continue that trend, the default expectation would be that the effect of climate change might even be larger in 2024 than what we saw in 2020. It’s also important to note that Donald Trump was the nominee in both of the elections that we looked at, and he may be the nominee again.

So, you know, I don’t have a crystal ball, so I can’t say, I can’t say for sure. I would say all else equal, it would seem likely that that effect will remain and, and maybe even be larger unless either the Republicans nominate somebody else who has a different climate stance, and certainly there’s a contrast between Donald Trump and Nikki Haley on climate change that’s emerged in the last few months.

It’s possible that Donald Trump might change his stance, right? He’s changed his stance on other issues in the past. My impression is he’s more of a populist than he is an ideologue. And, and so, so, so that could happen. And then, of course, we found that climate-conscious voters historically have preferred the Democrats.

That doesn’t mean that everything the Democrats will ever propose on climate will necessarily be popular or that voters will always have that preference. Um, and so it’s certainly possible that the Democrats might propose something, you know, between now and the election that’s unpopular. I don’t think that’s super likely, to be honest, because the policies that, that the Biden administration has passed, polls suggest, are pretty popular.

They have a lot of elements, something that, that I and a former student of mine named Renee Marshall, who’s at UC Santa Barbara now, have written about in the past. She’s a co-author on this report too, by the way. Something that we’ve written about in the past is that the IRA, or the Inflation Reduction Act, even though it was partisan, it was not bipartisan, uh it has elements in it that are similar to elements that bipartisan legislature have passed at the state level. And so if you couple that with the fact that most of the money is going to red districts because that’s where you build renewable energy, for example, I suspect that the policies like the IRA are more likely than not to be electorally and politically durable because there are some. Left wing climate policies that are divisive, but as far as I can tell, that isn’t one of them.

Sedley: So I know that your study wasn’t arguing climate change as the number one concern among voters that was made clear.

Burgess: Uhhuh.

Sedley: So if that’s true, why is it such a strong predictor of voting behavior?

Burgess: That’s a great question. The short answer is the data that we’ve looked at can’t directly tell us the answer. Um, and, and that contrast that you pointed out, again, is the reason why I wasn’t sure we were going to find what we did, and, and, you know, I was, I was wrong when I was talking to, to Chris Barnard. So what are my hypotheses?

I have two basic hypotheses about what could explain this contrast. So one is, there’s probably a lot of voters, and I resonate with this personally a little bit because I’m a Canadian, and in Canada, I sort of am this voter. So, so over the past 10 years, I’ve swung between supporting the Liberal Party, which is Justin Trudeau, and the Conservative Party, which is kind of the center-right Party, and I wouldn’t say climate change is my number, is the number one issue for Canada, although it is an important issue, you know, probably housing affordability is the number one issue in Canada right now. But I would not vote for a climate denier under any circumstance.

Now, why? Because, because if somebody, the evidence for climate change being real is so strong that if somebody’s denying the issue altogether, then I wonder, you know, what science are they reading? And, and, and what are the implications of that for how much I should trust them on other issues? Or maybe they’re not saying what they really believe about climate change.

And what does that say about how much I should trust them on other issues? Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t legitimate disagreements to have about climate policy, right? I don’t necessarily agree with any particular party’s climate policy all the time. But, you know, you want somebody who is scientifically literate, and you want somebody who follows the courage of their convictions, right?

And so maybe there are independent voters in the United States that have the same type of mindset that I have in Canada, that, you know, yeah, climate change maybe isn’t our number one issue, but it’s an issue, it’s an important issue, and if somebody’s not even willing to acknowledge that it’s an issue, even if there’s disagreement about what to do about it, then, then I wonder if there’s a trustworthiness implication.

The second explanation is, you know, what are the issues that people rank higher than climate change? It’s issues like the economy, security, health, crime, immigration. Most, if not all of those issues, are affected by climate change. So climate change certainly affects the economy, it certainly affects health, it certainly affects security, it probably affects immigration, there’s a couple of studies even that suggest it affects crime.

And maybe Americans are becoming more and more aware of those connections, such that even if they’re not saying climate is the number one issue when asking to compare it to the economy, they still understand that if we want to have a strong economy, not only do we want to limit the effects of climate change, we also want to lead the world in the technologies that are going to be the future of the global economy.

Right? We want to be able to be the leaders and export our leadership to the world because that will be great for our businesses. That’ll be great for the general idea of American exceptionalism, which is popular on the right and popular in the middle. So those are kind of the two ideas. And then I guess the third one that’s, that’s not mutually exclusive is just, you know, elections are so close that climate change effect doesn’t have to be that big to be pivotal, right?

One and a half percent moving from the Democrats, the Republicans, or vice versa is not that big. Trump lost Michigan by something like 10, 000 votes in 2020, right? You don’t need that big of an effect to move 10, 000 votes in Michigan, right? From one side to the other.

Sedley: That’s so interesting. I’m curious, when you’re talking about your personal perspective on the way in which climate change may sway your votes or the votes of voters like you – can you get more into the weeds of how climate change opinion varies across regions and demographic groups, different ways that you can potentially, or that you were in your research, predicting how people would vote? Because that’s harder to conceptualize, I feel like.

Sure. So, so there’s lots of different variations demographically, right?

So age is a big one. Younger voters are more concerned about climate change than older voters, especially among Republicans. So among, among Democrats, there’s high concern across the board. Among Republicans, there’s a big age gap, where younger Republicans are much more concerned than older Republicans.

Um, on race. What we saw in the data that we looked at is that white voters are more polarized. So among Republicans, non-white voters are more concerned. Among, you know, liberal Democrats, white voters are more concerned. I think overall, non-white voters are somewhat more concerned, on average.

Those are the two that we looked at specifically regionally. The sample that we looked at isn’t large enough to get really fine-scaled regional analysis, right? We, we, talking about four and a half thousand voters in 2020, right? You’re not going to have a great sample in all 50 states, right?

But if you look at the broader body of evidence and polling on this, certainly places that are very fossil fuel-dependent are, I think, understandably and rightly more concerned about what the implications of the transition are. So, for example, I think the state with the lowest support of any state in, in Yale’s Climate Opinion Map Study for government action on climate change is Wyoming.

That makes a lot of sense if you think about the economy of Wyoming. Now, it’s also worth pointing out that Wyoming is a great place for carbon capture and wind. And, and so there’s, there’s, there’s growing industries in that. So I, I think that’s where you get some of the regional differences. But even regionally, there’s a high level of overall concern that translates to a majority in a lot of places you might not think. So my favorite example of this is in the 2021 Yale Climate Opinion Map they just released the new one last week but in the 2021 one that I’ve looked at before, I think it’s the case that a majority of constituents of both Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene think that Congress should be doing more to address global warming.

So again, if you’re talking about two thirds of the country, give or take, that’s going to be a majority in a lot of places.

Sedley: Okay, so that’s kind of the general regional and demographic look. You’ve already kind of touched on how climate change fits into this broader political polarization of Democrats versus Republicans, the importance in those categories, but can you speak on the degree to which Democrats versus Republicans trust that the person they elect will actually address issues in the way they want to? Is there a trust there?

Burgess: That’s a really great question. So first of all, Democrat and Republican divide somewhat masks a more interesting divide between the hard right and everybody else on a lot of climate questions. So moderate Republicans are, have a high level on average of concern about the issue.

There certainly is also a tribal element to this, right? So, and you see this on both sides. So I have a colleague named Leaf Van Boven who’s the chair of psychology at CU and he had a study from a few years ago that found that the support among Democrats for a carbon tax policy that I think was based on the real one that was proposed on a ballot measure in Washington state went down by about half when you told respondents in the survey that it was the Republicans proposing it.

So people will support the same policy less if they think it’s the other party proposing it. And, and the same thing certainly goes the other way, right? So, uh, you know, I, I want to say a good example of that might be Obamacare. Obamacare is pretty popular now, but there was a time when, you know, if you ask people about, Individual elements of it, like, say, expanding Medicaid, there’d be huge support across the aisle, but then, do you like Obamacare?

No, right? And some of that is the, you know, maybe it’s that some people, they don’t like Obama, right? Or they don’t like the Democrats. So certainly that’s an element that’s been seen in research a lot.

So, did your report seek out to offer any recommendations as to how to reduce political polarization around climate change, or was the intention more to just lay out the data and let it speak for itself?

Our report was very explicit explicitly took the latter position. So we explicitly said in the report something like, we are aware of politicians and advocates having a wide range of angles on this, and we are not going to editorialize about it, and we’re going to let our results speak for ourselves.

My research group, in general, though, is very interested in understanding where the common ground is. And, and I would say we have characterized a lot of different elements of it in our broader body of work, right? So, where’s the common ground on climate change? Broadly speaking, I would say it’s policies that are aligned with economics.

Right? So policies that are going to be too expensive, even in the short term are going to be unpopular, but policies that are economically beneficial. So provide subsidies like the Inflation Reduction Act does. Um, and that are also framed in economic ways, like not, you know, the world’s going to end. And so we need to, you know, raise our gas prices.

That’s not going to be popular, but you know, the world is changing and we have the opportunity as exceptional Americans to be on the front tier of that and and boost our economy and our competitiveness globally. That’s going to be more popular. Related to what I just said, doomism is not popular.

Histrionics is not popular, right? If you say, which I think John Podesta said to the New York Times when the IRA negotiation was happening and it looked like it might not pass through Joe Manchin, he said something like ‘it’s odd that he’s choosing this as his legacy to be the president. One person who single handedly doomed humanity.’

The idea that the IRA is the difference between humanity living or dying is just not, not right. And, and, and, and, and so that’s the kind of, that kind of rhetoric I think hurts parts of the left when they, when they, when they engage in that. Similarly, Most Americans are patriotic, and I have a paper coming out that makes this point soon, that most Americans are patriotic and there’s a negative correlation between being patriotic and caring about climate change.

So probably that’s a big blind spot among climate advocacy, right? If you go around and say, America is this horribly backwards country, we never done anything right. All we do is rapacious racial capitalism But rest of the world, you should follow our lead into the climate sunset. First of all, Americans would be like, wait, why?

And certainly other countries are going to think the same thing, right? If you’re saying that we’re horrible, why should we listen to you about anything? Um, and, and both doomism and anti-Americanism I think are also deflating, right? We, we need to build a lot of things to get climate solutions done and building requires a can-do attitude. Building also requires things like thinking about, you know, we’ve been talking about permitting reform a lot in the news recently, thinking about, you know, how do we make it so it doesn’t take six to eight years to get a federal permit for an interstate power line, right?

If you want to decarbonize the grid by 2035, you might have almost no shovels in the ground, right? And, and that’s an area where there’s a lot of natural territory for Republicans to add value there. Everybody likes American competitiveness, right? The world is moving this way.

We should be the leaders. Everybody likes technology. We want to develop technology. Developing technology helps our economy. Everybody likes clean air and clean water. And, and so emphasizing those benefits of climate solutions is something that resonates with a lot of people. So those are the main ones.

And then, and then in the analysis that we published about a year ago, looking at bipartisan bills at the state level, we found that the three strong correlates of bipartisanship, in state level decarbonization bills, were expanding choice – so carrots as opposed to sticks, instead of banning something, we’re going to give an incentive or something – financial incentives, and then framing elements addressing inequality in terms of class and kitchen table issues, and not in terms of immutable characteristics.

So not in terms of race. And there’s another study by another group that saw a similar thing that if you frame the same policy – they looked at climate and several other domains – if you frame the same policy in terms of race or in terms of kitchen table issues, it’s going to be more popular across the aisle in the second case.

Sedley: Are there any implications that you see your research having or any other points of interest that we didn’t touch on that you feel are important to highlight?

Burgess: I think we’ve touched on the main stuff. I think the obvious implication of this is that voters care about climate change, and both parties have an opportunity to offer voters something to grab onto there. And I think, you know, this doesn’t come directly from the study, but just my personal opinion is that if we really are serious about changing all of society over decades, if that’s what it’s going to take to address this problem, then there’s no other way that’s possible besides doing it together.

And so what I would love to see come out of this study is an intelligent conversation across both parties about what to do.

Sedley: All right, Matthew. Thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate it.

Burgess: Yeah. Thank you very much for having me.

The post Can climate change impact election outcomes? This researcher says yes – in big ways appeared first on KGNU Community Radio.

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The growth in electric vehicle production is fueling demand for the rare metal at the heart of EV batteries: lithium. A new report examines the impact of lithium mining on water in the American West. “Lithium Liabilities” was produced by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University. We spoke with two of the journalists who contributed to the report: Morgan Casey and Joshua Shimkus.

• play_arrowThe Impact of Lithium Mining on Water in the American WestSam Fuqua The post The Impact of Lithium Mining on Water in the American West appeared first on KGNU Community Radio.

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This episode of From The Archives to the Air marks the 95th anniversary of the birth of one of the major figures of the 20th Century, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. King is remembered primarily for his work in advancing the cause of civil rights in America. But in the last years of his life he also condemned American militarism.

The centerpiece of this episode is The Hidden Radical Dimensions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., produced by Pacifica Radio and first broadcast on KGNU in 1990. (We digitized Hidden Radical Dimensions from an old reel-to-reel tape. The tape box had a worn-out label. We think it dates back to 1974, since there is a reference to Dr. King’s 45th birthday.)

The Pacifica program includes extended excerpts from Dr. King’s 1967 sermon at Riverside Church in New York. A transcript of the sermon is online, and the full speech is on YouTube.

Listen: play_arrow01_18_24_ep_12_archives_MLKJohn Kelin CREDITS/NOTES*

From The Archive to the Air features audio drawn from the KGNU Archives. The show is written and produced by John Kelin with the able assistance of Alexis Kenyon, and hosted by Jackie Sedley.

The image of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on this page is Copyright: © 2008-2017 Wes Candela Photography LLC, and licensed from Creative Commons.

From The Archives to the Air opening music: “Circus” by Portron Portron Lopez is licensed under an attribution-noncommercial-share-alike license.

The post Archival audio from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. discussing American Militarism appeared first on KGNU Community Radio.

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All Photos Courtesy of Jackie Sedley. On today’s “A Public Affair,” a conversation with the Partridges, a family irrevocably wronged by the criminal justice system. Please note that the interview you are about to hear contains has mild-to-moderate descriptions of […]

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Our guest this morning is Marcela Lay, a professional dancer who has been teaching various dance styles and helping form a dance community in Colorado. Producer of Havana Nights at the Dairy Center for the Arts and the local “A […]

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This episode of From The Archives to the Air features an interview with Josh Shepperd, the author of Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting. The book traces the emergence of public broadcasting in the United States: […]

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You’ve probably heard awareness campaigns about online scams targeting seniors – but what those aimed at teenagers? As teens and tweens grow up in digital spaces and join social media platforms, scammers are finding a new, younger audience. KGNU’s Emily […]

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Image courtesy of Women’s Wilderness. According to the Outdoor Foundation, women and girls take part in outdoor recreation activities at significantly lower rates than their male counterparts. Time in the outdoors is even scarcer for those experiencing racial, socioeconomic, and […]

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Images courtesy of Hanna Rose Shell and Pau Martin. On this week’s A Public Affair, KGNU and Report for America’s Jackie Sedley dives seam-first into the world of textiles. Sedley is joined in the studio by two textile aficionados: Pau […]

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KGNU intern Kira Zizzo spoke with author James Larue, Executive Director of Garfield County Public Library District, about his new book On Censorship: A Public Librarian Examines Cancel Culture in the US, and how America’s political and demographic changes have altered […]

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Wayne Watts is a dedicated arts and education advocate. He is the co-founder of the Dream Create Inspire Tour, and the Director of Player Engagement for our NBA Champion Denver Nuggets. Wayne is a 13 year Denver transplant. He’s a […]

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Photo by Alexis Kenyon. The joy of fresh ripe local tomatoes, the beauty of local flowers, breakfast burritos and garlic scape pesto were top of mind on the August edition of Kitchen Table Talk on KGNU. Hosts John Lehndorff (Radio […]

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On today’s A Public Affair, News Director Shannon Young takes us to the Sun Valley Neighborhood of Denver, near the intersection of West 8th Street and Federal Boulevard. There she meets with Lucha Martinez de Luna, Director of the Chicano/Chicana/Chicanx […]

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Photo by Jackie Sedley. KGNU’s Climate and Environment Reporter and Report for America’s Jackie Sedley, alongside Sam Fuqua hosted a call-in show to discuss the complicated, turbulent issues surrounding Boulder Municipal Airport. Bri Leighman, a member of the community working […]

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Allen Ginsberg (left) with Peter Orlovsky In 1974, the late Allen Ginsberg co-founded Naropa University’s poetry department. As a tireless promoter of fellow Beat Generation writers, Ginsberg named the school in commemoration of one of his close friends: the Jack […]

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Destination Freedom Black Radio Days broadcasted live from the Boulder studio with their radio play “The Difference.” The show explores racial tensions lurking beneath the workplace and dives into the fear that motivates modern white supremacist ideology. Cast members are […]

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Our Guest this morning is Sam Adams, sportswriter-turned-stand-up comedian, keynote speaker, book author, actor, and master of ceremonies. Sam performed his first standup comedy set in 2000, only a few months after his return from reporting on track and field […]

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Rita Mae Brown (right) seated next to unidentified woman before the Lavender Menace Action, New York Public Library Digital Collections June was Pride Month! This edition of From the Archives to the Air begins with voices from the Denver […]

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Photo courtesy of Carly Silberman from Growing Gardens. Freshly picked strawberries and fava beans were on the menu July 6 for Kitchen Table Talk, KGNU’s monthly one-hour call-in show. Hosts John Lehndorff of Radio Nibbles and chef Dan Asher of […]

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With all the rain and hail coming on the heels of a hard winter, your garden may be having a tough time. We bring in a panel of expert gardeners into the studio to talk about current gardening conditions and […]

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History books often glaze over the period in Europe just after the fall of the Roman Empire and before the rise of the feudal states. The so-called Dark Ages existed in the shadows of their better documented historical book ends. […]

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Photo courtesy of Girl Scouts of Colorado. Laurie McGraw joined us for “A Public Affair.” McGraw hosts the podcast Inspiring Women, hoping to provide other women with the insight and inspiration needed in their careers. On the air, she shared […]

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What do our new state end-of-life options organization, equitable access to choices, abortion, conscientious objection and medical tourism have in common? They are all pieces of the complicated terrain we face nationally as we move into Generation Two of allowing […]

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This morning’s guest is Oriana Ledesma, who identifies as a queer, Filipino, American, veteran, woman, and filmmaker with brown skin whose work brings humanity to people subjected to social marginalization. Ledesma is the associate producer of the upcoming film Conte: […]

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D.H. Peligro, Jello Biafra.RIP IT UP, ISSUE 73, 1 AUGUST 1983, PAGE 16 This fourth and final episode of From The Archives to the Air features two interviews. We hear from Jello Biafra, a native of Boulder (“Born, raised, […]

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Summer is coming, and this should be an exciting time of getting ready for fun road trips. But what if you have an “adventure” of conflict while trying to share the road? How do you prevent those conflicts from happening? […]

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Lisa Armao is a retired Montessori teacher and after a 30-year career teaching, she created a nonprofit called the Early Childhood Service Corps. It’s a program that recruits older adults to work in preschools across Colorado. Since its inception and […]

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Aaron Massey is a dedicated community leader, student and education advocate and is the Senior Director of the Generational Schools Network. As Senior Director his mission has been to continue to elevate the education experience for all students and families, […]

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Image of John Trudell, via John Trudell Archives From the Archives to the Air, Part 3 In this third installment of KGNU’s From The Archives to The Air, we hear from three prominent figures in 20th Century Indigenous Peoples culture: […]

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Image via Briscoe Center for American History, Austin, Texas Weatherby Gallery From KGNU’s Archives to the Air, Part 2 Produced By John Kelin and Alexis Kenyon From KGNU Archival Audio On this second episode of From the Archives to the […]

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One of Boulder’s most iconic architectural landmarks – the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse – celebrates its 25th anniversary this month. The Museum of Boulder has an exhibit up to mark the occasion and the teahouse itself will be organizing some special […]

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This morning’s guest is Tamil Maldonado, chief operating officer and founder of the Raíces Brewing Company, which recently was awarded the Best Brewery “Por y Para La Raza” in Denver by Westword. Maldonado shares her vision to create a cultural […]

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On today’s edition of A Public Affair, host Benita Lee speaks with Dr. Kevin McSweeney, a veterinarian and longtime dairy farmer, who owns and operates Five Freedoms Dairy. After years of working on large dairies, McSweeney dreamed of managing […]

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On this Public Media Giving Day, KGNU News Volunteer John Kelin and News Producer Alexis Kenyon dug into the station’s archives and put together this first of four archive specials. Listen: (Download Audio)

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Ali Duncan is the creator and founder of Urban Sanctuary and is a Colorado Native born and raised in Fort Collins. She is a complete Life Coach, Clairvoyant, Tantrika, Energy Healer, Spiritual Guide and Teacher. Ali for over 16 years […]

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Residents of Boulder County and its mountain districts need to be aware of the area’s fire risks. Property maintenance tips, structure hardening best practices and knowing when and how to evacuate can all involve a learning curve that not everyone […]

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Photo via Kriste People’s Instagram Black folks have always had a special connection to the land and outdoor spaces. However, due to racial terror, economic status, and/or access, many Black people have avoided engaging in outdoor recreational activities. Thoroughly cognizant […]

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Today’s A Public Affair features an hour-long discussion with a panel of Colorado-based reproductive rights experts to examine the two contradictory legal rulings on mifepristone issued on Friday afternoon and how that may shape the future of access to medication […]

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Our guest this morning is Monica King a Somatic Psychotherapist specializing in trauma and resilience from Naropa University. She learned from several indigenous traditions of healing from Mexico to Africa, blending both Western mental health perspectives and ancient healing modalities. […]

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KGNU YA Book Reviewer, Phoebe Donovan spoke with YA author, Anna Rose Johnson, about her book, “A Star That Always Stays.” KGNU Young Adult book reviewer Phoebe Donovan interviews author Anna Rose Johnson about her debut novel The Star That […]

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Image by Alexis Kenyon Via Dall-E On today’s A Public Affair, we gather Boulder’s waste experts and get answers to all your burning trash, recycling, and composting questions. Plus, what you should know about big changes in composting guidelines that […]

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On today’s A Public Affair, Stacie Johnson visits with Jim Tolstrup, Executive Director of the High Plains Environmental Center, located in Loveland’s Centerra development. The work of the High Plains Environmental Center focuses on land restoration, native plants, biodiversity, and […]

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Craft coffee and artisan pies were top of mind (and taste buds) on today’s Supersized Radio Nibbles as part of KGNU’s Spring Membership Drive. John Lehndorff welcomed Rebekah Hoffman of Ozo CCopy to a new draft offee and John Hinman […]

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Image by Alexis Kenyon via DALL•E 2 On this month’s Black Talk, host Michele Simpson speaks with Dr. Jazmyne Peters, an embedded therapist for the University of Colorado, Boulder’s (UCB) College of Arts and Sciences. We will ask her to […]

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The show’s primary goal is to provide a safe space for artists of color through conversations, to elevate their voices, and discuss equity in media. This morning’s guest is Fernanda Nieto, an amazing Argentinian pianist, Director of Education and Community […]

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Nature, nurture, culture, family, life experiences, deaths, spiritual beliefs, collective traumas; every single thing in our lives contributes to how each being perceives, experiences and integrates grief. How can we recognize grief when many of us don’t really understand what […]

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Ian Brennan field-recording in Rwanda with The Good Ones (credit: Marilena Umuhoza Delli) On today’s A Public Affair, we’ll spend the program with special guest Ian Brennan. He’s a Grammy award winning music producer who specializes in live field recordings, […]

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Our Guest is Topaz Hooper, a world traveler, poet, writer, and artist based out of Boulder, Colorado. She has spent the better part of her life writing poetry about world injustice, living in a queer-friendly household, being a person of […]

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Think it’s impossible to live in a 21st century American city without your own car? Think again. On today’s A Public Affair, host Sam Fuqua speaks with local transportation experts working to make mobility accessible to all; from buses to […]

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CU Boulder kicked off Black History Month by opening the Center of African and African American Studies, known as the CAAAS (“the cause”) for short. The event drew a standing room only crowd to its new space in the Macky […]

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KGNU is dedicating Wednesday A Public Affair programming during the month of February looking at various aspects of Black History within the United States. Today News Director Shannon Young spoke with Clarence Lusane, a professor of political science, interim political […]

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On the Feb. 2 Kitchen Table Talk, co-hosts John Lehndorff and Boulder chef Dan Asher (Ask’Kara and River & Woods) welcomed chef Edwin Zoe (Zoe Ma Ma, Dragonfly Noodle) and chef Eric Skokan (Bramble & Hare, Black Cat Farm) to […]

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By now you’ve probably heard about the passage of Proposition 122 in Colorado. Also called the Natural Medicine Health Act, the initiative passed by 53% of the vote last November and decriminalized certain psychedelic plants and fungi. In addition to […]

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We’ll be talking about dogs this morning on A Public Affair and taking your calls. Our guest is Marc Bekoff, author of over 30 books and professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at CU-Boulder. His books include Canine Confidential: […]

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On today’s A Public Affair, News Director Shannon Young speaks with Katherine Corcoran, former Associated Press Mexico bureau chief and author of the recently published book, In The Mouth of the Wolf: a murder, a cover-up and the true cost of […]

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On today’s A Public Affair, KGNU’s Sam Fuqua talks with artist Joel Haertling about his exhibit at Canyon Gallery in the downtown branch of the Boulder Public Library. It’s a testament to Joel‘s passion for collecting and his appreciation for […]

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On today’s show, we talk about the ongoing struggle between Colorado regulatory agencies, the federal government, and Suncor refinery, the state’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases that’s in a mostly Latino residential North Denver community. The Environmental Protection Agency announced […]

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Our Guest this morning is an award-winning playwright, musician, composer, educator, and social activist Thomas J García. Known as the flame keeper of the Chicano – Latino culture in Denver, Garcia is the executive artistic director of Su Teatro Performing […]

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For the January 2023 edition of Kitchen Table Talk, hosts John Lehndorff and Daniel Asher speak with Jodie Pompa and Katie Corr of Slow Food Boulder County. Listen: (Download Audio)

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Art by Alexis Kenyon vis DALL-E Most Americans have felt the costs of inflation in recent years. High gas prices and the cost of food have piled upon skyrocketing housing costs and healthcare bills. While inflation has impacted the entire […]

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In today’s A Public Affair, KGNU Newsroom volunteer and CU Boulder freshman Juanita Hurtado interviews linguistics professor Chase Raymond. Professor Raymond works at the University of Colorado-Boulder and researches what is known as “situations of contact,” moments when divergent languages, […]

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As the end of the year approaches, we take a look back at some of our favorite youth-produced and reported stories. Featuring: Mobile Home Residents Fight Rent Cap Provision by Luis Licon Fairview Senior Shares Thoughts on Registering and Motivating […]

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Bi-weekly updates on what's happening in the world of cannabis with marijuana reporter Leland Rucker.

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On Today’s A Public Affair, KGNU News Director Shannon Young speaks with award-winning author Anand Giridharadas about his new book, The Persuaders; At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy. Giridharadas is on-air political analyst for […]

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On today’s edition of A Public Affair, News Director Shannon Young speaks with Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo. The women are co-hosts of the “Boom! Lawyered” podcast and senior editors at Rewire News Group. The discussion ranges from […]

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Our Guest this morning is Frank Archuleta, community historian, and racial justice activist. Archuleta received the International Human Rights Award in 2021 from Boulder County United Nations Association of America. The Collective Community Arts Center in Lafayette shows an exhibit […]

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The first half of A Public Affair for November 9, 2022 features Longmont-based author Jon Bassoff and Loveland-based musician Wendy Woo. Bassoff recently released his latest book, Beneath Cruel Waters and childhood friend Woo created music inspired by the […]

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In today’s Kitchen Table Talk, Chef Daniel Asher, from River and Woods and guests Marissa Pulaski, with Drylands Agroecology Research, Azuraye Wycoff, with Yellow Barn Farm, and Mark Guttridge, with Ollin Farms talk about local food and the need for […]

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During the October, 31, 2022 edition of A Public Affair this morning, host Rossana Longo Better speaks with Boulder County Commissioner Marta Loachamin and Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Molly Fitzpatrick about the integrity of our elections, our local ballot […]

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On the October 27, 2022 edition of A Public Affair, host Tish Beauford sits down with Monica Martinez, Executive Director of The Fax Partnership. The East Colfax-based nonprofit, also known as “The Fax”, recently purchased two East Colfax motels to […]

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A few years ago, Boulder adopted changes intended to make it easier for citizens to petition questions onto the ballot. That system initially caused some confusion and some challenges. On Today’s A Public Affair, KGNU’s Sam Fuqua talks with Eric […]

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Our guests this morning are poet Norma Johnson and human rights advocate Dr. Renee Fajardo to talk about the long-awaited return of the Corn Mothers 2022: Inspiring Women of the Southwest History Colorado exhibit. The exhibit features artistic photographs and […]

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A panel from the League of Women Voters of Boulder County took calls from KGNU listeners with questions about the 2022 election. Emma Piller (left) is the League’s Voter Service Director, supporting the League ballot issue, candidate forum, voter outreach […]

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On the ballot this election, Boulder voters will be asked to consider moving municipal elections to even years. The measure is known as Ballot Question 2E. KGNU’s Sam Fuqua moderated a panel discussion on the measure. Speaking in favor was […]

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The men and women who have bravely served our country as members of the U.S. Armed Forces account for about nineteen million people which is less than 10% of our country’s population but have fought and provided safety for tens of […]

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Our Guest this morning is Katrina Miller, director of the documentary This Is NOT Who We Are, which explores racial equity and inclusion. Storyteller and visual artist who creates films and video content to come to terms with issues of […]

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On today’s A Public Affair, News Director Shannon Young speaks with author Cornelia Maude Spelman. Her latest book is called Missing. It’s a memoir steeped in 20th century family history. Spelman is also the author of the How I […]

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Jean Dubofsky is a local trailblazer; one of the first female graduates of Harvard Law School, she went on to become the first woman – and the youngest person – appointed to the Colorado Supreme Court. From there she took up […]

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Today’s edition examines changes in college admission requirements, available funding mechanisms and strategic support for students eligible for financial aid. Since the pandemic made it difficult for students to attend college classes in person and get the complete experience, it […]

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Today we will take a tour of Jack’s Solar Garden and learn more about how community solar can increase access to clean energy technologies. Byron Kominek is the owner of Jack’s Solar Garden. He describes the layout of the farm […]

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Our Guest on this week’s Trends Podcast is neo-expressionist, abstract artist and painter, Lio Bravo Bumbankini. Bumbankini is a Congolese-American visual artist from Denver. He is currently in residence at Eldorado Springs Art Center and shares his story of growing […]

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At the beginning of the pandemic, a report commissioned by Colorado Creative Industries found that between April and July 2020, Colorado’s music industry alone lost over 8 thousand jobs and nearly $350 million dollars in sales revenue. As pandemic restrictions […]

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(Herb Carnegie Pictures and Biography Credit: Bernice Carnegie, www.bernicecarnegie.com) On today’s A Public Affair, host Tish Beauford shares an interview on the life and legacy of the late Canadian hockey legend Herb Carnegie, featuring interviews with his close relatives; the son, […]

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On today’s A Public Affair, News Director Shannon Young interviews David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé; authors of What Your Food Ate; How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health. David is a geologist and Anne is a […]

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News Director Shannon Young interviews author, scholar and award-winner Bill McKibben about his latest book, The Flag, The Cross and the Station Wagon; A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened. McKibben is […]

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KGNU’s Shannon Young talked with two experts about media literacy and the nebulous social media landscape. Our guests include Claire Woodcock, a regular contributor to Vice’s Motherboard, and Dr. Ellis Jones, a sociologist, and author of “A Better World Shopping […]

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On today’s A Public Affair, teen journalist Lily Nobel interviews health journalist Lisa L. Lewis about her new book, The Sleep-Deprived Teen, which centers on teen sleep and the argument for later school start times. Listen: (Download Audio)

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Our Guest this morning is Kali Fajardo-Anstine, an American novelist and short-story writer from Denver. 2020 winner of the American Book Award for her collection of stories: Sabrina & Corina. Kali has recently published her first novel, Woman of Light, […]

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KGNU’s Young Adult book reviewer Phoebe Donovan interviews Crystal Maldonado, author of No Filter and Other Lies. Phoebe Donovan. Maldonado’s debut novel, Fat Chance, Charlie Vega, was a Cosmopolitan Best New Book and a POPSUGAR Best New YA Novel. Listen: […]

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People across the country are still digesting the ruling handed down by a Supreme Court majority that effectively overruled a pillar of reproductive rights that had been in place for 50 years. While it wasn’t necessarily a surprise, it still […]

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Severe weather effects like drought, heat waves, unseasonal fires, and high wind make climate change hard to ignore across the Front Range. To talk about what actions Boulder County is taking to prepare for changing climate change and protect the […]

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On today’s edition of A Public Affair, we will broadcast an online candidate forum that was held for the primary candidates running for Boulder County Sheriff. The candidates are Boulder County Sheriff Division Chief Curtis Johnson and Louisville Police Chief […]

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Every year the Boulder Council For International Visitors, a nonprofit leadership organization, hosts emerging leaders from around the globe to foster what they call “a network of mutual understanding and respect.” This year, a group is hosting citizen diplomats from […]

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Our guest this morning is Adriana Paola Palacios Luna; mother of three, communicator, sociologist and volunteer community connector. She’s passionate about art, science and culture for social justice. Adriana is the Founder of Luna Cultura, which recently celebrated its anniversary […]

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Thousands will stand up against gun violence this weekend in Denver’s March For Our Lives rally. Students have organized rallies in Denver, Longmont and Colorado Springs. During our A Public Affairs Rossana Longo-Better Spoke with two 17-year-old Denver-based student organizers. […]

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To reflect on the 10th anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals known DACA, created in 2012 to provide two-year deferred deportation, a work permit, and increased opportunity for higher education for children brought without documentation. Rossana Longo-Better spoke […]

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Gather around the KGNU kitchen table with Radio Nibbles host John Lehndorff and chef Daniel Asher of Boulder’s AshKara and River & Woods. Their guests this week are chef Paolo Neville at 95A Bistro in Lafayette and cacao expert Michael […]

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We know the Maasai people for their distinct culture. They live in Tanzania, a world-renowned place for its wildlife that draws lots of travelers. Maasai women, wrap themselves in their brightly-colored shúkas. Angel Mollel is one of them: a Maasai. […]

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On today’s A Public Affair, News Director Shannon Young speaks with prolific children’s literature author, Tui T. Sutherland. Her latest book is The Flames of Hope, her 15th installment in the bestselling series, Wings of Fire. Listen: (Download Audio)

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On today’s edition of A Public Affair, guest host Michele Simpson speaks with award-winning children’s book illustrator and author Brian Pinkney. Mr. Pinkney will be presenting his work this Saturday, June 4th at the Boulder Public Library at 11am. More […]

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The Making of Chicanas: Nurtures & Warriors is a documentary about Denver women with Mexican and Indigenous roots who have dedicated themselves to social justice. KGNU’s Rossana Longo-Better spoke with Rowena Alegria, Chief Storyteller of the City of Denver, […]

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St. Vrain Valley School District Parents and Students are organizing a peaceful protest ahead of this afternoon’s school board meeting. They’re calling to request fresh and healthy food in school lunches for students who are in reduce of free lunches […]

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Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about your household trash and what do to with it. What gets tossed and what can be recycled? News Director Shannon Young hosts a call-in show with recycling expert, Rosie Briggs, EcoCycle’s Community Education […]

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On today’s A Public Affair, News Director Shannon Young speaks with Vince Waldron, co-author of Be My Baby; a memoir by the late Rock n’ Roll icon, Ronnie Spector. The singer originally published her memoir in 1990, but updated it […]

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Youth radio host Phoebe Donovan makes her debut by interviewing author Sayantani DasGupta about her latest book, Debating Darcy; a modern retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Dr. DasGupta is a pediatrician by training and a Columbia University writing professor […]

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On the Wednesday, May 11, 2022 edition of A Public Affair, News Director Shannon Young spent the half hour with Justine Cowan, Atlanta-based environmental attorney and author of the book, The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames. (Download Audio)

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The Boulder-Nablus Sister City Project and Colorado Palestinian Club are presenting Palestinian Cultural Day this coming Saturday, May 14th at the Museum of Boulder. Nablus, Palestine is a Sister City of Boulder that fosters relationships through cultural education, and inspiring […]

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Frasier Meadows, an active retirement community in Boulder, opened a new exhibit yesterday. “Celebrando Nuestra Cultura” aims to bring awareness on the history of latinos living in the state, by featuring the stories of professionals, civil servants and entrepreneurs in […]

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John Lehndorff of Radio Nibbles and chef Dan Asher welcomed Justin Buo of Mycocosm and tempeh maker Griffin Giordano to talk about fungi in its various tasty, useful forms… plus listener call-in questions. (Download Audio)

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Our guest this morning is José Gustavo Melara, local poet and Spanish language professor at Front Range Community College. Melara is originally from El Salvador and his poems have been published in several literary magazines in Mexico and other countries. […]

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Where do we put our bodies after we die? For some people it’s of utmost importance; for others a body is but a shell they are leaving behind. These days, our options, our planning, and our attitudes are more open […]

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Zander Oklar and Chris Sanchez are a queer couple. They have been together for three years and are both outspoken advocates for the human equity and equal rights of the LGBTQA+ community. Zander has lived in Colorado for the last […]

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On today’s edition of A Public Affair, KGNU News Director Shannon Young spends the half hour with Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett. They discuss a range of local issues, including housing policy, minimum wage, and transportation design. Listen: (Download Audio)