Story in the Public Square: Recent Episodes
Story in the Public Square
“Story in the Public Square” is a year-round initiative to study and celebrate public storytelling. It features an annual conference, lectures, awards and student contests, as well as original scholarship about public storytelling and how those stories can affect the public debate.
Story in the Public Square is a partnership between the Pell Center and The Providence Journal, and is directed by visiting fellow G. Wayne Miller with Pell Center executive director Jim Ludes.
The data says that more than half of the country’s population is made up of women. But women’s healthcare has grown increasingly politicized. Dr. Mary Fariba Afsari is on the front lines of care, offering healthcare from a mobile clinic that meets patients where they are.
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The United States and Israel began bombing Iran in February 2026. In the months that followed, we have seen spasms of violence and claims of diplomatic progress. New York Times reporter Farnaz Fassihi covers the conflict, its impact on the Iranian people, and the diplomatic efforts to end it.
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Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton stand astride the core debates in American history from neutrality to civil rights and beyond. New York Times bestselling author and constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen traces that history, the rise and falls of each man’s reputation, and the enduring questions they asked about power, the citizen, and the American state.
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Scholars of religion and philosophy, and even some spiritual leaders, have long identified key similarities in the world’s different moral codes. Author and futurist Jamie Metzl asks whether artificial intelligence can distill a compelling moral code that synthesizes the greatest thinking from across humanity.
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To Americans, it’s soccer. To most of the rest of the world, it’s football. Author and journalist Nick Greene traces the evolution of the game played with our feet from a 19th century British past-time to today’s glittering World Cup.
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Two-hundred and fifty years ago, patriots gathered in Philadelphia declared America’s independence from England. Former U.S. ambassador David McKean and historian M. Todd Bennett explore the celebrations that have followed every 50 years since, revealing the enduring challenges and promise of the American republic.
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The prognosticators of doom for traditional newspapers are everywhere and it’s hard to argue with them. But for more than a decade, Matthew Watkins has been part of a new model of non-profit journalism at The Texas Tribune as editor in chief.
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For all the pages and documents in libraries and archives around the world, there are some stories that remain veiled in mystery. Through her historical fiction, award-winning author Dolen Perkins-Valdez helps us understand events and people largely lost to the passage of time.
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The history of American-Iranian relations is complex, sometimes contradictory, and repeatedly violent. Author Scott Anderson explains that history with a special focus on the Islamic revolution in Iran, the fracture that followed, and its continued relevance today.
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American audiences know the history of slavery in the United States—from 1619 to the emancipation proclamation. Historian Carrie Gibson reminds us that slavery in the Western hemisphere predates the British colonies of North America, lasted decades after the end of the American Civil War, and was punctuated by perpetual resistance, especially from enslaved persons themselves.
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The human mind has difficulty comprehending just how much money one billion dollars actually is. The New York Times’ Steven Rich is part of a reporting team that has unpacked the power of billionaires in American communities and American politics—where their influence is substantial.
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Journalist Stuart Jeffries explores the concept of stupidity from the ideas of ancient philosophers to today’s age of AI, examining how it has been defined throughout history and how it is monetized and exploited in contemporary culture.
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After the Cold War, some hoped that the end of superpower competition would usher in a world of lasting peace and cooperation. Former CIA operations officer Sean M. Wiswesser saw where that hope faded only to be replaced by a new era of espionage and covert affairs.
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There is a curious debate about the health of American elections. Some allege they are sick. Others say they are thriving. Fair-elections advocate Rebekah Caruthers peels away competing claims to help us understand the real challenges to American voting rights today.
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It’s easy, in this 250th Anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, to find things that divide Americans. But best-selling author Colin Woodard says we’re still bound together as a people by the ideals of our founding.
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Writing and creative expression are a frequent topic on this show, but scholar Naomi S. Baron challenges all of us to consider the joy, the practice, and even the challenge of reading, especially in a world where artificial intelligence can do the reading for us.
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Senator Wendell Ford of Kentucky once said, “we can disagree without being disagreeable.” Harvard Kennedy School professor and author Julia Minson has made a career out of how to disagree better—and she has the science to back her claims.
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Journalists play a vital role in the health of a free society. But The New York Times’ David E. McCraw isn’t a journalist, he’s a lawyer, reporting from the frontlines of the battle for freedom of the press.
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This year’s Academy Awards nominations have almost everything: fast cars, conspiracies, classic tales, monsters, intrigue, and nature. It’s a remarkable collection of films and pre-eminent film critic and awards columnist Pete Hammond has reviewed them all.
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Go to the movies or visit the bookstore and you’ll see that war stories are everywhere—whether the protagonists are gods, super-heroes, or human beings. But author and West Point professor Elizabeth D. Samet warns that the appeal of the good war story obscures the complexity of conflict and shapes the way we view current international tensions.
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The war in Vietnam was the first war in U.S. history fought by a fully-integrated military. But award-winning author and journalist Wil Haygood says that the challenge beyond the battlefield was that American society was not as fully integrated as the fighting force that served it—and that difference had impacts in Vietnam and at home
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Democratic societies can choose to either let the arts remain the domain of elite society—or a shared expression of community accessible to all. Pam Breaux and Todd Trebour are champions of the arts, on a mission to make them accessible to the largest number of Americans.
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Literature’s power comes from its ability to see not just from the eyes of the hero, but the villain, too. Author Megha Majumdar brings us into that literary world with a tale of scarcity and desperation set in the not-too-distant future of her native Kolkata, India.
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Anyone who pays even passing attention to world news has heard the term “sanctions” every time a foreign crisis threatens a larger conflict. But few understand the power of these weapons to wage economic warfare with devastating effect. Global energy policy researcher Edward Fishman explains that power with skill and insight.
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From World War II through the Cold War, and into this century, the Voice of America and its journalists demonstrated the strength and power of a free society and the weakness of America’s enemies. Now, Patsy Widakuswara—a seasoned veteran of VOA—finds herself at the heart of a legal battle over the future existence of the Voice of America.
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Some are concerned that the advantages autocracies like Russia and China have over democracies like the United States are insurmountable. But Ambassador Michael McFaul argues that it’s just the opposite—that it’s the very messiness of American democracy that is the source of our greatest strength.
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As a candidate in 2016 and 2024, Donald Trump promised to crack down on undocumented immigrants—and after one year in office, the president has moved fast. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Caitlin Dickerson says that the policies and their implementation come with a very high price—for the immigrants and even for U.S. officials.
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It’s easy to be skeptical of idealistic notions of American power, the indispensable nation that some have talked about, when the history of the last 25 years is of misguided conflicts in the Middle East and a democratic backsliding at home. But through it all, Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid takes readers through a compelling case for American power.
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Nearly one in four doctors in the U.S. is foreign-born—many from South Asia—and they often serve in rural and underserved urban communities where American physicians are scarce. Harvard medical historian Eram Alam describes the public health challenges posed when immigrants are frequently met with suspicion in the communities they serve.
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As 2025 draws to a close, we look back on the major stories that shaped public life in the last year with Evelyn Farkas of the McCain Institute at Arizona State University.
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During the Renaissance, ruling families like the Medicis funded the creation of great works of art that dazzle us to this day. In the modern era, the ability of democracies to fund the arts is often contentious and even controversial. Arts advocate Erin Harkey discusses the value of art in public life.
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An alarming number of Americans are receptive to the lure of conspiracy thinking. Pollster Stephen Clermont unpacks the most popular conspiracy theories and what they tell us about current American politics.
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As the contours of public debate coarsen, it's easy to brand political rivals with epithets from the worst chapters in history. Tom Nichols, a writer for The Atlantic, warns about doing just that.
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In the aftermath of George Floyd's murder, a long, simmering effort to rename U.S. military installations previously named for Confederate officers gained momentum. Historian and retired Army Brigadier General Ty Seidule recounts the effort to rid the military of old names, as well as the actions by the Trump administration to resuscitate old ghosts.
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On October 19, 1979, a massive tropical cyclone struck Japan and the Marines stationed at Camp Fuji. Retired Marine and journalist Chas Henry recounts the ensuing firestorm that swept the island, killing 13 Marines and wounding more than 70 others.
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Brown University public policy, political science and urban studies professor Marion Orr takes a fresh look at the life and legacy of Congressman Charles C. Diggs Jr., one of the most consequential Black federal legislators in American history.
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The challenges facing American healthcare are substantial, but Dr. Troy Brennan, who teaches at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says they all stem from long-simmering issues in primary care.
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One of America's storied military leaders General Stanley McChrystal offers insights on the power of character and integrity in leaders—whether in the military or civilian life.
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Researcher at the Council on Criminal Justice Ernesto Lopez looks at the story being told about crime in American cities doesn't match the data.
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Beginning in the late 19th century, a Canadian network of residential schools for indigenous children became sites for rampant child abuse. Documentary filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat recounts the horrors that took place in those schools.
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Private equity firms wield enormous control over the American economy, public utilities, and even the health of local newspapers. Author Megan Greenwell explores the extent of their unchecked power and the ways in which these firms—and their private owners—are reshaping America.
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In recent years, commentators and gadflies have looked at American presidents and, based on age and, sometimes, politics, called for the invocation of the 25th amendment to remove the president from office. Constitutional scholar John Feerick helped write the 25th amendment and shines a light on its provisions and the intentions of its framers.
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In the summer of 2020, the country was racked by disease, violence, and social disruption as generations of racial injustice seemed to fall in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Thomas Chatterton Williams warns, however, that extreme views on the left—ascendent in that summer heat—are just as dangerous to western liberalism as extreme views on the right.
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Artificial Intelligence is changing all of our lives and the biggest changes are yet to come. Yet despite the revolution on our doorstep, few have looked carefully at the impact of AI on children. Dr. Mhairi Aitken has done just that and has evidence-based advice for policy makers and developers.
Aitken is a Senior Ethics Fellow in the Public Policy Programme at The Alan Turing Institute, where she focusses on social and ethical dimensions of digital innovation. Aitken leads research on AI and children’s rights there, in addition to a data justice, ethics of Generative AI and emerging AI policy and regulation topics. She is particularly interested in the role of public engagement in informing ethical data practices and is a frequent contributor to media discussions on AI and data. She is a visiting senior lecturer at the Digital Environment Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London and an Honorary Senior Fellow at the Australian Centre for Health Engagement, Evidence and Values at the University of Wollongong, Australia.
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For more than a decade, now, the world has been experiencing a process of “democratic backsliding,” while alternatives to governing by popular consent have gained popularity—even in the West. James Fishkin offers a path to improving not just the health of democracy, but the effectiveness of liberal democratic governments.
Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he is Professor of Communication, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab. He is best known for developing Deliberative Polling®, a practice of public consultation that employs random samples of the citizenry to explore how opinions would change if they were more informed. His work on deliberative democracy has stimulated more than 100 Deliberative Polls in 28 countries around the world. It has been used to help governments and policy makers make important decisions in Texas, China, Mongolia, Japan, Macau, South Korea, Bulgaria, Brazil, Uganda and other countries around the world. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge.
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Scholars, journalists and even some politicians often warn about the lack of critical thinking in contemporary public and private life. Alex Edmans picks up that alarm and warns that we’re regularly exploited by those who would use our own sloppy thinking and unconscious biases to mislead us.
Edmans is a professor of finance at London Business School. His research interests are in corporate finance, responsible business and behavioral finance. He serves in leadership roles for the American Finance Association, Western Finance Association, Financial Management Association, British Academy and the Academy of the Social Sciences. He has spoken at economic forums, testified in the United Kingdom Parliament and been interviewed by many major news networks. He has won 28 teaching awards, was featured in “Thinkers50 Radar” and was named professor of the year by Poets & Quants in 2021. His latest book, “May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit our Biases- And What We Can Do About It,” was published in 2024.
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It’s comforting to think about American political institutions as “transparent” and open to scrutiny. However, this week on “Story in the Public Square,” Anna Massoglia describes a campaign finance system built, increasingly, on so-called “dark money.”
Massoglia is a political influence expert and investigative journalist with more than a decade of experience exposing the hidden forces of money, power and politics. As the founder and author of “Influence Brief,” Massoglia helps readers to navigate the complex financial systems and influence networks shaping politics and public policy in the United States and across the globe. She also works as an independent consultant and advisor for various organizations, offering expertise in research, strategy and public policy. She is a director of investigations at the Sunlight Reseach Center, a nonpartisan journalism support organization that equips newsrooms to provide their communities fact-based, transparent investigative journalism holding power to account.
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Eighty years ago, World War II ended in the Pacific with the first, and thus far, only use of nuclear weapons in warfare. The widely popular decision to use the bomb at the time has become fodder for historians to debate in subsequent decades. Fred Borch helps us view the decision to drop the bomb from the perspective of American leaders in that summer of 1945.
Fred L. Borch is a historian, lawyer and soldier by profession. He has three history degrees, three law degrees and an M.A. in national security strategy from the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He served on active duty as an Army lawyer from 1980 to 2005 in a variety of roles, at one point having chief responsibility for overall prosecution efforts against alleged terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After retiring as a colonel, Fred returned to the Army for a civilian position as the professor of legal history and leadership at The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School in Charlottesville, Virginia. He has authored 10 books and more than 200 articles on legal and non-legal topics.
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The history of humanity is the history of individuals making decisions, sometimes collectively, and sometimes individually. New artificial intelligence, AI, brings a new player into the mix: machines capable of making decisions alongside or instead of their human counterparts. Sean O’Callaghan and Paul Hoffman grapple with the theological implications of this new technology.
Sean O'Callaghan is an associate professor of religious and theological studies at Salve Regina University, where he also serves as a coordinator of the AI Initiative. He previously served as director of the Ph..D.. program in humanities and technology and is currently a faculty member in that program. He received his Ph.D. in systematic theology from the University of Liverpool in 2008.
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Where five years ago, we were in the thick of the pandemic, with the bulk of the sickness and dying still to come, now, the U.S. federal government is poised to slash spending on public health, as well as basic research in science, healthcare and more. Dr. Ashish Jha helps us sort through competing claims and make sense of it all.
An accomplished and practicing physician, Jha is a trusted expert on major issues impacting public health, and a catalyst for new thinking and approaches. A long-time leader on pandemic preparedness and response, from directing groundbreaking research on Ebola to serving on the frontlines of the COVID-19 response, he has analyzed key issues and advised local and federal policy makers around the world. In March 2022, he was appointed by President Biden as White House COVID-19 response coordinator and led the work that increased the development of and access to treatments and newly formulated vaccines. He has served as a professor of medicine and is currently the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
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What if a secret gathering of luminaries concluded in the 1960s that the consequences of “peace” would be worse than continued war? Phil Tinline explains that in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, just such a story emerged, and its consequences reverberate to this day.
Phil Tinline is a freelance writer and documentarian. He is the author of the 2002 book “The Death of Consensus,” which was chosen as The Times (London)’s Politics Book of the Year. Over the course of twenty years working for the BBC, he has made and presented many acclaimed documentaries about how political history shapes our lives. He has also written for The Times (London), The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph (London), The New Statesman (UK), BBC History Magazine, and Prospect. He is a graduate of Oxford University where he obtained a degree in English language and literature, and he currently lives in London.
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For nearly 250 years, Americans have marked the fourth of July as the birthday of the nation, and in July of 2026, we’ll celebrate 250 years. Colin Woodard argues that the Declaration of Independence is as relevant and vital as ever, and that its promise is essential to preserving the republic today.
Colin Woodard is a New York Times-bestselling historian and Polk Award-winning journalist. He is one of the most respected authorities on North American regionalism, the sociology of United States nationhood and how our colonial past shapes and explains the present. He has authored six books including the award-winning Wall Street Journal bestseller “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.” Woodard is director of Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, an initiative studying where America has come from, how we ended up as we are and how we might shape our future.
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What if a secret gathering of luminaries concluded in the 1960s that the consequences of “peace” would be worse than continued war? Phil Tinline explains that in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, just such a story emerged, and its consequences reverberate to this day.
Phil Tinline is a freelance writer and documentarian. He is the author of the 2002 book “The Death of Consensus,” which was chosen as The Times (London)’s Politics Book of the Year. Over the course of twenty years working for the BBC, he has made and presented many acclaimed documentaries about how political history shapes our lives. He has also written for The Times (London), The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph (London), The New Statesman (UK), BBC History Magazine, and Prospect. He is a graduate of Oxford University where he obtained a degree in English language and literature, and he currently lives in London.
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Journalists chronicle the world in the so-called “first draft” of history. Michael Corkery is helping lead one of America’s great newspapers as it tells the story of President Trump’s second administration with a particular focus on its impact on the world of business and finance.
Corkery is the finance editor at The New York Times, where he oversees a team of reporters writing on banks, private equity, corporate law firms and the stock market. Their coverage focuses on big news events and how Wall Street influences government and society. Prior to becoming an editor, he spent over 25 years as a reporter telling the stories of people from a range of political viewpoints, geographies and life experiences. Before he started at The Times in 2014, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, the Providence Journal and The Burlington (Vermont) Free Press.
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It’s not unusual for friends, family members, and even good bosses to tell us, “practice some self-care.” But Nicole Karlis says that there are physical and emotional benefits to practicing care for others, too.
Karlis is an award-winning journalist and author covering health and science. Currently, she’s a regular contributor at Salon where she’s covered women’s health, science and wellness culture since 2017. Before writing for Salon, she was a contributing editor at The Bold Italic, a culture magazine based in the California-Bay Area. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times. She is the author of the book “Your Brain of Altruism: The Power of Connection and Community During Times of Crisis.”
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It’s been said that the great challenge of diplomacy is to do and say the nastiest things in the nicest ways. Frank Lowenstein uses his experienced eye to consider if this challenge rings true for the United States under the second Trump administration.
Lowenstein is an international policy expert with a concentration in policy development, strategic communication and legal practice. He has served as a special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for the U.S. department of state and worked as a senior foreign policy advisor to Secretary of State John Kerry. He also directed the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near East and South and Central Asian Affairs, a position which allowed him to travel extensively throughout the Middle East. Prior to this role, he was the director of national security policy for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign and practiced law in Boston, Massachusetts.
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It’s probably cliché to say that sport imitates life, but Hanif Abdurraqib traces the intimate details of basketball legends and faded school-yard stars in an unforgettable book about sport, life, and the places we call home.
Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and author of the new book, "There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension,” is the selection for this year's Reading Across Rhode Island Statewide Read, sponsored by the Rhode Island Center for the Book. His first full length poetry collection, “The Crown Ain't Worth Much,” was released in June 2016 and named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, “They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us,” was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. His book, “Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest” became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His 2021 book, “A Little Devil In America,” was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize.
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Humanity is capable of great dualities. Elizabeth MeLampy explores that in the way we both venerate animals, even while we exploit them.
MeLampy is an attorney with experience in animal law and environmental law. She worked on issues related to farmed animals, wild animals, and captive animals with Harvard’s Animal Law & Policy Clinic while she was in law school. She served in the inaugural cohort of Emerging Scholar Fellows with the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law and Policy, where I worked on animal law scholarship. After two clerkships with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and the Federal District Court in Arizona, MeLampy litigated with one of the top environmental nonprofits in the country.
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The saying goes that mothers and motherhood are the same all the world-over. Abigail Leonard puts that folk-wisdom to the test in a new book chronicling the first year of motherhood for four women from four different countries.
Leonard is an award-winning international reporter and news producer, previously based in Tokyo, where she was a frequent contributor to NPR, Time Magazine, and New York Times video. Her stories have also appeared in The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Vox. Before moving to Japan, she wrote and produced long-form news documentaries as a staff producer for PBS, ABC and Al Jazeera America. Stories she reported have earned a National Headliner Award, an Award for Excellence in Health Care Journalism Award, an Overseas Press Club Award and a James Beard Foundation Media Award Nomination. She was a 2011 East-West Center Japan Fellow and 2010 UN Foundation Journalism Fellow. She served as First Vice President of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, a 2,000-member national press organization, and chaired its scholarship program.
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Throughout the campaign of 2024, President Donald Trump promised to use tariffs to reset America’s global trade relationships, revitalize American manufacturing, and increase government revenues—and in the first months of his second administration, the president has used tariffs and the threat of tariffs to drive concessions even while raising antagonism and roiling markets. Kimberly Clausing helps us distinguish between the rhetoric and the reality of these tariffs.
Clausing is an expert on the taxation of multinational firms. She served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis in the U.S. Department of the Treasury, serving as the lead economist in the Office of Tax Policy during the Biden administration. She is a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Clausing has worked on economic policy research with the International Monetary Fund, the Hamilton Project, the Brookings Institution, the Tax Policy Center, and the Center for American Progress. She has testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Committee on Finance, the Senate Committee on the Budget, and the Joint Economic Committee. Her research examines how government decisions and corporate behavior interplay in the global economy. She has published numerous articles on the taxation of multinational firms, and she is the author of “Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital.”
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Eighty years ago, mothers with sons and husbands at war in Europe could celebrate the end of the war there, even as they worried about the possibility their loved ones might be heading to the invasion of Japan. Tim Gray has made his life’s work about telling the stories of those heroes, their sacrifices, and their legacy.
Gray is a documentary filmmaker and founder and president of The World War II Foundation. He has won 5 Regional Emmy Awards in the documentary film writing and outstanding documentary film categories. He has also received four Indie Film Fest Awards in that international competition and two Impact Doc Awards. Gray has completed 38 documentaries to date. Tim Gray Media films consistently rank nationally in the top 5 of most requested programs by PBS and Public Television affiliates. Gray also hosts the “From the Front to the Films” podcast, which features well-known actors, authors, filmmakers, veterans, and others connected to World War II. He has also been a frequent guest on FOX News’ national program, “The Story with Martha MacCallum,” where he contributes to the network’s coverage of WWII events, issues, and stories. Gray sits on the Advisory Board of Patriots’ Hall of Dripping Springs, a foundation established by Emmy Award-winning actor Kyle Chandler and his wife Kathryn. Patriots’ Hall is a permanent retreat and resource base for veterans of all ages and military branches to connect and find support.
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Most of us can probably point to examples of people who suffered from racism, or who overcame racism. But Keon West reminds us all that “the plural of anecdote is not data” and that science actually has a lot to say about the reality of racism today—if we take the time to consider it and really understand.
West is a social psychologist and an Associate Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has also worked at the University of Leeds and the University of Roehampton, both in the U.K. His research interests include stigma, bias and perceptions of people from other groups. Much of his prior research specifically investigated the contact hypothesis and its derivatives. Recently, however, his recent research has developed a stronger focus on gender identity, perceptions of sexuality and sexual orientation, sexism and anti-LGBT prejudice. As well as publishing a number of scientific papers each year, West has disseminated his findings in the broader media. He has appeared multiple times in various national and international outlets including the Guardian and the BBC. Though he currently lives in London, he grew up in Jamaica and has also lived in the United States and France. He received a B.A. in Psychology from Macalester College, St. Paul, MN, and a doctorate in Experimental Psychology from Oxford University.
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We’re used to thinking of technology as politically neutral—the zeroes and ones of binary code that operate independently of partisanship. But Marietje Schaake says that, increasingly, private technology companies are usurping the function of government and thereby posing a real threat to the health of Western democracies.
Schaake is a non-resident Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and at the Institute for Human-Centered AI. She is a columnist for the Financial Times and serves on a number of not-for-profit Boards as well as the UN's High Level Advisory Body on AI. Between 2009-2019 she served as a Member of the European Parliament where she worked on trade, foreign and tech policy. She is the author of “The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley,” which provides insight into steps government institutions can take to protect their citizens from emerging invasive technology.
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Every year, American popular culture focuses on recognizing the entertainment world’s hits and misses in Awards Season. Daniel D’Addario gives us a well-informed, if fictional, glimpse behind the smiles and glittering ceremonies to understand the personal and professional commitment of actresses at the top of their games.
D’Addario is chief correspondent at “Variety,” writing features, profiles, and columns. He has won awards from the Los Angeles Press Club for profile writing and for political commentary and is among the moderators of Variety’s Actors on Actors video series. His debut novel, “The Talent,” follows five actresses as they navigate the complex world of Hollywood. D’Addario was previously the television critic for “Variety” and for “Time.” A graduate of Columbia University, he lives with his husband and two daughters in Brooklyn.
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From the story of a young sex worker to one about an aging star, another about a transgender drug lord, and another about a troubled immigrant and brilliant architect, this year’s Academy Award nominees for Best Picture tell stories that are both epic and intimate. Pete Hammond walks us through the nominees and what to watch for on Hollywood’s Night of Nights.
Hammond, widely considered to be one of the pre-eminent awards analysts for both film and television, has for the past 14 years been Deadline's Awards Columnist covering the year-round Oscar and Emmy seasons. He is also Deadline's Chief Film Critic, having previously reviewed films for MovieLine, Boxoffice magazine, Backstage, Hollywood.com and Maxim, as well as Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide for which he was a contributing editor. In addition to writing, Hammond is also host of the PBS SoCal Cinema Series and the weekly PBS television series "Must See Movies." He previously held producing positions at "Entertainment Tonight," "Extra," "Access Hollywood," "The Arsenio Hall Show" and "The Martin Short Show." Hammond is only the second journalist to have received the Publicists Guild of America’s Press Award twice, in 1996 and 2013.
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There was a time in American public life when “the news” was a nightly ritual, a 30-minute glimpse into the wider-world, a way to stay informed. But Dr. Alice E. Marwick says that world is long gone, washed away in recent years with failing traditional news outlets and the rise of social media influencers.
Marwick is the director of research at Data & Society. She is a qualitative social scientist who researches the social, political, and cultural implications of popular social media technologies. Her most recent book, “The Private is Political: Networked Privacy on Social Media,” examines how the networked nature of online privacy disproportionately impacts members of marginalized communities. Marwick has several other publications in the realm of communications and mass media. She is currently writing her third book on online radicalization, supported by an Andrew Carnegie fellowship. Marwick was previously associate professor of communication and principal researcher and co-founder of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina. She was also Microsoft visiting professor at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.
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Children’s and young-adult authors often explore the pain and loneliness of growing up. Padma Venkatraman does it in an elegantly told story that also explores immigration, environmental change, and the power of friends to make everything better.
Venkatraman is an award-winning author who was born in Chennai, India. Before becoming a novelist, earned a Ph.D. in oceanography from The College of William and Mary. She conducted postdoctoral research in Environmental Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and later worked in Germany. She also served as head of Inwoods Small School, and taught oceanography and directed diversity efforts at the University of Rhode Island. Venkatraman is the author of five novels including “Climbing the Stairs,” “Island’s End,” “A Time to Dance,” and “The Bridge Home.” She has written several other books, including: “Double Stars: The Story of Caroline Herschel (Profiles in Science),” “Women Mathematicians (Profiles in Mathematics),” and the illustrated “Growing Gold,” “Born Behind Bars” and “Cleverest Thief.” Her latest book is “Safe Harbor,” was published this month.
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The world will mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II later this year. Richard J. Evans helps us understand the murderous leaders of Nazi Germany, and the people at every level of German society who did their bidding.
Evans is an historian of modern Germany and modern Europe and is the preeminent historian of the Third Reich today. He has published over 20 books in the field, including his trilogy on the Third Reich. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Literature and the Learned Society of Wales, and an Honorary Fellow of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, Birkbeck, University of London, and Jesus College Oxford. In 2022, he was made an Honorary Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He has been Vice-Master and Acting Master of Birkbeck, University of London, Chairman of the History Faculty in the University of Cambridge. He currently serves as Provost of Gresham College in London and a visiting Professor of History at Birkbeck University of London.
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So many of us are curious about the stuff of space and time and the forces that bind us all together. Author and physicist Sean Caroll wants to encourage that curiosity, and believes physics can be accessible to everyone.
Carroll is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy, a joint appointment between physics and philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He has focused his research on cosmology, field theory, and gravitation, looking at topics such as dark matter and dark energy, modified gravity, topological defects, extra dimensions, and violations of fundamental symmetries. He has shifted his focus to foundational questions, both in quantum mechanics—origin of probability, emergence of space and time—and statistical mechanics—entropy and the arrow of time, emergence and causation, dynamics of complexity, all while bringing a more philosophical dimension to this work. Carroll is the author of several books, including, “The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion,” “Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime,” and its second volume, “Quanta and Fields: The Biggest Ideas in the Universe.” He hosts the “Mindscape” podcast, featuring conversations with accomplished guests on new ideas in science, philosophy, culture, and the arts. Carroll was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2015.
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Climate change has been part of the public lexicon for decades, now. But what once seemed like some dystopian, distant future is, according to Jeff Goodell, a reality—where higher temperatures are reshaping agriculture, animal migrations, the health of the oceans, and our futures.
Goodell is a bestselling author and has written seven books including “The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World,” which was a New York Times Critics Top Book of 2017. He has covered climate change for more than two decades at Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. As a commentator on climate and energy issues, he has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, ABC, NBC, Fox News and The Oprah Winfrey Show. He has a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA from Columbia University in New York.
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From the joyous streets of Paris and the opening of the Olympic Games to the snap of gunfire at a presidential campaign rally, 2024 has seen its highs and lows. Evelyn Farkas helps us unpack the stories that defined 2024 and name our story of the year.
Farkas is a highly respected expert in American foreign policy and geopolitics, particularly known for her insights into U.S.-Russia relations and now serves as the Executive Director of the Arizona State University’s McCain Institute, based in Washington, D.C. She earned her MA and Ph.D. from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and is fluent in multiple languages. Under President Obama, Farkas served as the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia. She is the author of the book, “Fractured States and US Foreign Policy: Iraq, Ethiopia, and Bosnia in the 1990s.” Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe and on sites including The Daily Beast, Politico, and Foreign Policy. Farkas has had an extensive career in government and has held prominent roles, such as senior advisor for Public-Private Partnerships to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe and the Commander of the U.S. European Command, and executive director of the bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism. She also served as a senior staff member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, overseeing U.S. defense policy and military budgets. Farkas also serves on the boards of several prestigious organizations, including the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Institute Socrates Seminar.
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America’s wars have produced a legion of heroes. But historian Ronald C. White focuses us on the story of Maine’s Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a Civil War lion whose service in war and in peace still resonates today.
White is the author of two New York Times bestselling biographies, “A. Lincoln: A Biography,” and “American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant,” which won the William Henry Seward Award for Excellence in Civil War Biography. His latest book, “On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain,” was published in 2023 and is a USA Today national bestseller. He has also written, “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural,” a New York Times Notable Book, “The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words,” a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and “Lincoln in Private: What His Most Personal Reflections Tell Us About Our Greatest President,” which received of the 2021 Barnondess/Lincoln award. White is a graduate of UCLA and Princeton Theological Seminary and received a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He is a Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum in Washington, D.C. and has taught at UCLA, Whitworth University, Colorado College, and Princeton Theological Seminary. He has lectured at the White House and been featured on the PBS NewsHour. He has spoken on Lincoln in England, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and New Zealand. He lives with his wife Cynthia in Pasadena California.
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Survey after survey shows that local media is the most trusted media in the United States today. Tiziana Dearing transformed a successful career in advocacy, philanthropy, and the academy into the morning voice of news and information in one of America’s great cities.
Dearing is the host of WBUR’s “Morning Edition.” Prior to helping listeners start the morning with news from around the corner and around the world, she hosted “Radio Boston,” WBUR’s daily local magazine, for five years. Prior to journalism, Dearing’s career spanned academia and advocacy work. She taught graduate students at the Boston College School of Social Work and chaired its program in Social Innovation and Leadership. Dearing also ran a start-up foundation focused on breaking generational cycles of poverty in Boston neighborhoods and was the first woman president of Catholic Charities for the Archdiocese of Boston. Additionally, she ran a research center at the Harvard Kennedy School and worked in management consulting. She earned the Pinnacle Award from the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and was named one of Boston Business Journal’s 40 Under 40.
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Survey after survey shows that local media is the most trusted media in the United States today. Tiziana Dearing transformed a successful career in advocacy, philanthropy, and the academy into the morning voice of news and information in one of America’s great cities.
Dearing is the host of WBUR’s “Morning Edition.” Prior to helping listeners start the morning with news from around the corner and around the world, she hosted “Radio Boston,” WBUR’s daily local magazine, for five years. Prior to journalism, Dearing’s career spanned academia and advocacy work. She taught graduate students at the Boston College School of Social Work and chaired its program in Social Innovation and Leadership. Dearing also ran a start-up foundation focused on breaking generational cycles of poverty in Boston neighborhoods and was the first woman president of Catholic Charities for the Archdiocese of Boston. Additionally, she ran a research center at the Harvard Kennedy School and worked in management consulting. She earned the Pinnacle Award from the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and was named one of Boston Business Journal’s 40 Under 40.
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Across human history, we have looked to the heavens and seen things that didn’t make sense. Greg Eghigian chronicles how those human experiences were translated by believers, skeptics, investigators and hoaxers in the aftermath of the Second World War into the UFO phenomenon we still talk about today.
Eghigian is a historian of the human sciences and medicine as well as modern Europe. He earned both his Master’s and Doctorate in Modern European History from the University of Chicago. He is now a professor of History and Bioethics at Penn State University. His past work has focused on how societies use science, technology, and medicine to define and treat people and behaviors deemed to be troubling, bizarre, or outright dangerous. In recent years, the modern history of supernatural and paranormal phenomena has caught Eghigian’s captivation. His 2024 book, “After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon,” depicts the social effects of claimed UFO sightings in the backdrop of the Cold War. He also has two other book projects in the works; a broad overview of the history of madness from the ancient world to the present and a study of the alien abduction phenomenon in the late-20th century.
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When many of us think about animal rescue, we think about abandoned pets looking for a new home. But Carol Mithers chronicles the work of one woman in Los Angeles who challenges us all to understand that animal and human suffering are connected.
Mithers is writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, L.A. Weekly, Smithsonian, O, the Oprah Magazine, Architectural Digest, Ladies’ Home Journal, Glamour, The Nation, Los Angeles, Salon, The Daily Beast and many other outlets. Her Village Voice cover story, “My Life as a Man,” was syndicated internationally and made into an NBC movie of the week. Mithers is also the author of four books including “Mighty Be Our Powers,” written with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Leymah Gbowee. Her fourth book, “Rethinking Rescue: Dog Lady and the Story of America’s Forgotten People and Pets,” tells the story of Lori Weise, known in Los Angeles as the Dog Lady, who’s spent decades caring for people in poverty and the animals that love them.
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Shakespeare called death “the undiscovered country.” Luke Lorentzen documents the work of spiritual guides, also known as hospital chaplains, as they help patients navigate this country and the next.
Lorentzen is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and a lecturer in Stanford University’s Department of Art and Art History. His latest film, “A Still Small Voice,” follows a chaplain during her year-long hospital residency. Exploring perseverance, spirituality, and the human connection, the film received critical acclaim. It won the U.S. Documentary Best Director Award at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and was listed among the New York Times’ top ten films of the year. Lorentzen is also a co-founder of Hedgehog Films, an independent production company. His previous film, “Midnight Family,” was also shortlisted for the best documentary Oscar after winning over 35 awards from film festivals and organizations around the world including a Special Jury Award for Cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival, Best Editing from the International Documentary Association, and the Golden Frog for Best Documentary from Camerimage.
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The most 2024 story would have to involve the Olympics, presidential politics, and Taylor Swift. Joanna Weiss unpacks the recent convergence of those cultural phenomena and what they portend for American politics.
Weiss a Boston-based writer and editor. She is executive director of the AI Literacy Lab at Northeastern University, a project to connect journalists and technologists. Weiss is a former columnist, television critic, and a political reporter at the Boston Globe. She is the founding editor of Experience magazine, published by Northeastern University. She started her career covering Louisiana politics for the Times-Picayune of New Orleans. A contributing writer for Politico Magazine, she has also covered culture and politics for Boston Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, The Economist, and others. Weiss is also contributing to an album-by-album coffee table book about Taylor Swift, coming out in 2025.
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Since 2016, the presence of foreign disinformation in American politics—and especially on our social media platforms—has been well documented. But Darren Linvill says different state-actors—like Russia and China—behave differently online, depending on their goals.
Darren Linvill is a professor of communication whose research explores social media disinformation and its influence on civil discourse (in and out of the classroom). He became a faculty member at Clemson after earning degrees from Wake Forest and Clemson and started studying social media in 2010. After becoming an associate professor in 2017, he delved deeper into the truth or falsity of online messaging and its effects. As a sought-after media expert, he’s contributed to many articles and broadcasts by outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, Inside Higher Ed, The State, CNN, NPR, ABC, NBC, WFAE and others.
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Shakespeare called death “the undiscovered country.” Luke Lorentzen documents the work of spiritual guides, also known as hospital chaplains, as they help patients navigate this country and the next.
Lorentzen is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and a lecturer in Stanford University’s Department of Art and Art History. His latest film, “A Still Small Voice,” follows a chaplain during her year-long hospital residency. Exploring perseverance, spirituality, and the human connection, the film received critical acclaim. It won the U.S. Documentary Best Director Award at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and was listed among the New York Times’ top ten films of the year. Lorentzen is also a co-founder of Hedgehog Films, an independent production company. His previous film, “Midnight Family,” was also shortlisted for the best documentary Oscar after winning over 35 awards from film festivals and organizations around the world including a Special Jury Award for Cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival, Best Editing from the International Documentary Association, and the Golden Frog for Best Documentary from Camerimage.
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The most 2024 story would have to involve the Olympics, presidential politics, and Taylor Swift. Joanna Weiss unpacks the recent convergence of those cultural phenomena and what they portend for American politics.
Weiss a Boston-based writer and editor. She is executive director of the AI Literacy Lab at Northeastern University, a project to connect journalists and technologists. Weiss is a former columnist, television critic, and a political reporter at the Boston Globe. She is the founding editor of Experience magazine, published by Northeastern University. She started her career covering Louisiana politics for the Times-Picayune of New Orleans. A contributing writer for Politico Magazine, she has also covered culture and politics for Boston Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, The Economist, and others. Weiss is also contributing to an album-by-album coffee table book about Taylor Swift, coming out in 2025.
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The data tells us that every minute of every day, 20 people are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States. Ashley Bendiksen has turned her personal experience with domestic abuse into a calling to prevent domestic violence and help victims.
Bendiksen is an author, domestic abuse survivor, speaker, and an award-winning activist. She also graduated from Salve Regina University in 2013 as the valedictorian. She is also a nonprofit founder, co-owner of a life coaching agency for youth, and founder of the Blue Hearts Project. Bendicksen experienced dating violence that began a cycle of abusive relationships and trauma at age 14. She speaks publicly about her struggles with self-worth and unhealthy coping habits that led her to her most damaging relationship where she said, “I became homeless, penniless, and was forced to drop out of college by my abuser. I only finally escaped after I was severely physically attacked.” In the days following her attack, Bendicksen says a moment of clarity helped her take steps to turn her life around. She began telling her story to raise awareness and serving on boards and committees of organizations that supported victims of domestic abuse. She chose domestic violence awareness as her central advocacy focus as Miss New Bedford, MA, and continues to leverage her experiences to serve others work in victim services and the justice system.
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Lies and disinformation are as old as humanity itself. But Steven Brill argues that the witches brew of 30-year-old legislative consequences; mixed with technological innovation; and bad actors threaten the lives of democratic institutions and truth itself.
Brill is an award-winning journalist, author, and the founder of Court TV, The American Lawyer Magazine, American Lawyer Media, Brill’s Content Magazine, Journalism Online and The Yale Journalism Initiative. He is also the co-founder and co-CEO of NewsGuard, a media platform that rates the reliability of news and information websites. His latest book, “The Death of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World – and What We Can Do About it” explores the threat of disinformation on society.
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It may be a scarcity mindset that views plenty as better than a world where nations and people compete over limited, scarce resources. But Francis Gavin explains that even in a world of plenty, there are vexing international challenges for which the United States is not prepared.
Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the inaugural director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS. He was the first Frank Stanton Chair in Nuclear Security Policy Studies at MIT and the Tom Slick Professor of International Affairs and the Director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas. Gavin has had fellowships at Harvard University, the University of Texas, and at the Noble Institute. From 2005 until 2010, he directed The American Assembly’s multiyear, national initiative, The Next Generation Project: U.S. Global Policy and the Future of International Institutions. He currently serves on the CIA Historical Panel and is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Gavin is the Co-Founder, Co-Director and Principal Investigator, with James Steinberg, of the Carnegie International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network (IPSCON), and Founder and Director of the Nuclear Studies Research Initiative (NSRI). He’s also the author of a new Adelphi Paper from the International Institute of Strategic Studies: “The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty: Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era.”
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The shear amount of media generated and consumed in the United States every day is simply staggering. Eric Deggans reminds us that the stories we tell, tell us something about ourselves—whether those stories are about music, or politics, or race.
Deggans is NPR’s first full-time TV critic and media analyst, providing reviews, feature stories, commentary and guest hosting services for the network’s shows such as “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” along with writing for NPR.org and appearing on NPR podcasts such as “Consider This,” “Life Kit,” “Code Switch,” “Pop Culture Happy Hour” and “It’s Been a Minute.” Deggans is also an adjunct instructor at Duke University and Indiana University, a member of the National Advisory Board for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and chair of the Media Monitoring Committee for the National Association of Black Journalists. From 2017 to 2021, he served as a contributor/media analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. In April 2021, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida gave him its Irene Miller Vigilance in Journalism Award.
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The impact of climate change on the world around us is there for everyone to see—from stronger and more frequent storms to the loss of Arctic Sea ice. But Sherri Goodman says the threat isn’t just to crops or the polar bears, but to American national security.
Sherri Goodman, Senior Fellow at the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and Polar Institute, and Secretary General of the International Military Council on Climate & Security, is credited with educating a generation of US military and government officials about the nexus between climate change and national security, using her famous coinage, “threat multiplier,” to fundamentally reshape the national discourse on the topic. Sherri serves as Vice Chair of the Secretary of State’s International Security Advisory Board and on the EXIM Bank’s Council on Climate. A former first Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Environmental Security) and staff member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Goodman has founded, led, or advised nearly a dozen research organizations on environmental and energy matters, national security, and public policy.
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The stories journalists tell can stretch from the personal to the public. Francesca Mari is no different, giving us narratives and an understanding of personal health crises, the challenge of housing, and the kinds of shelter offered by both families and physical structures.
Francesca Mari is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine focused on housing and equity. She is also an assistant professor at Brown University. Her cover stories for The New York Times Magazine explore the pandemic real estate boom, the rise of private equity landlords, and how the U.S. housing market became so dysfunctional and why it didn’t—and doesn’t—have to be this way. In addition, she has written features on homeless house sitters, con men, and other abuses of power for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, The New York Review of Books, The Cut, and others.
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Disinformation has a long history in the United States—often taking the form of storytelling. Best-selling author Annalee Newitz explains how stories have been weaponized—historically and today—and charts a path to a more peaceful future for all Americans.
Newitz writes fiction and nonfiction about the intersection of science, technology and culture. Their first novel, “Autonomous,” won the Lambda Literary Award and was nominated for the Nebula and Locus Awards. Newitz’ book, “Scatter, Adapt, and Remember” was nominated for the LA Times Book Award. They are currently a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. Previously, they were the founding editor of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo and as the tech culture editor at Ars Technica. They have also written for publications including Wired, Popular Science, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and more. Newitz is the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast, “Our Opinions Are Correct. They were the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, worked as a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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We know healthcare means hospitals and stethoscopes, and x-rays, and bloodwork, and prescriptions. But Dr. Dean-David Schillinger says stories are the key to healthcare—both our willingness to tell them; and our caregiver’s ability to listen and understand them.
Schillinger is a primary care physician, scientist, author, and public health advocate. He has served as chief of the UCSF Division of General Internal Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital, and chief of the Diabetes Prevention and Control Program for the California Department of Public Health. He is an internationally recognized expert in health communication and has been widely recognized for his work related to improving the health of marginalized populations. Schillinger is credited with a number of discoveries in primary care and health communication and is considered a pioneer of the field of health literacy. He is the inaugural recipient of the Andrew B. Bindman Professorship in Primary Care and Health Policy at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF).
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It’s easy to think that people and animals are incapable of coexistence. But Ruth Ganesh warns that mindset is dangerous to biodiversity, to the existence of some of planet earth’s most remarkable creatures, and even to humanity.
Ganesh is a creative conservationist and philanthropist with a particular interest in environmental issues. She has spent the last 15 years conceiving and producing large scale public art exhibitions in London, Edinburgh, NYC and Mumbai. Ganesh serves as the co-founder of the CoExistence Collective and principal trustee of Elephant Family, a non-government organization based in the United Kingdom dedicated to protecting Asian elephants from extinction in the wild. The Great Elephant Migration is a global fundraising project of the CoExistence Collective that aims to to amplify indigenous knowledge and promote shared spaces between wildlife and humans. The Migration features one hundred life-size elephant sculptures created a community of 200 indigenous artisans in the Nilgiri Hills of South India. The sculptures are made from lantana camara, an invasive weed that encroaches on wildlife habitat and each one is modeled after a real elephant the artisans live alongside in India. The elephant herd is currently in Newport, Rhode Island and will continue to visit sites across North America, including Miami Beach, Fla., The Blackfeet Nation in Montana, and Los Angeles, Calif. as they raise money and awareness to better protect migratory animals like the elephants.
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Tyranny comes in many forms. But Leah Umansky uses her art—poetry—to remind us that whether the tyrant is personal, societal, or political—resistance is possible.
Leah Umansky is a poet, writer, artist and writing coach. She has been an educator for over 15 years and teaches 8th and 10th grade English at a private school in New York. She is also the author of three collections of poetry: “OF TYRANT,” “The Barbarous Century,” “Domestic Uncertainties,” and two chapbooks, “Straight Away the Emptied World” and the Mad-Men inspired “Don Dreams and I Dream.” She is also the creator of “STAY BRAVE,” a monthly newsletter for women-identifying creatives on bravery in the creative life. Her writing has been widely published in such places as The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, USA Today, POETRY, Guernica and American Poetry Review. She has also been the host and curator of the NYC-based poetry series. “COUPLET,” since 2011 and is a graduate of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College.
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Immigration has long-been a contentious issue in American politics. But legendary journalist Ray Suarez says immigrants keep coming to the United States, overcoming obstacles, working for better opportunities for themselves and their families, and all the while buying into the idea of America that binds us all together.
Suarez is a journalist and author who co-hosts “World Affairs,” produced by the World Affairs Council and distributed to public radio. He also covers Washington for the English-language all-news network Euronews. Since launching Brooklyn Boy Productions in 2019, he has created content for public radio and television, The Washington Post, The Independent London, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Pew Research, Knowable, “America in One Room,” Hispanics in Philanthropy, Slate, The Nation, Hearst TV, AlterNet, CityPaper, The Annie E. Casey Foundation, the American Communities Project, and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, among others. Suarez spent 14 years as a correspondent and anchor at public television’s nightly newscast, The PBS NewsHour, where be became chief national correspondent. During his years at The NewsHour, Suarez covered the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, four presidential elections, reported from the floor of seven party political conventions, moderated two presidential primary candidates’ debates, among hundreds of others.
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The last 25 years have produced plenty of conflict and a seasoned community of journalists who have moved towards the sound of fighting. Sean Carberry documents the personal costs of those reporters, producers, photographers, and videographers who, in documenting the worst of humanity, have paid a price with their physical and emotional health.
Carberry spent years as a journalist reporting from some of the world’s most dangerous and mysterious locations, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. He then worked for the government producing oversight reports on military operations in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. He aims to keep his work non-partisan and non-political as he breaks down complicated foreign policy challenges. He recently reported for National Public Radio where he served as correspondent in Kabul, Afghanistan and currently serves as managing editor at National Defense. Carberry is also the author of a powerful new memoir, “Passport Stamps, Searching the World for a War to Call Home.”
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In 2011, the Food and Drug Administration held a hearing to review a drug previously approved for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer. The hearing was fraught with concerns over the drug’s safety competing with cancer patients who felt they were alive because of the drug. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres was on the panel receiving testimony, and weighing what he heard against the long history of the FDA to make sure drugs are safe AND effective.
Mikkael Sekeres is a professor of medicine and chief of the division of Hematology at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. He earned a master’s and medical degree in clinical epidemiology from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine before completing his postgraduate training at Harvard University. He has served as Director of the Leukemia Program and Vice-chair for Clinical Research at the Cleveland Clinic Cancer Center. Sekeres’ new book, “Drugs and the FDA,” is set in the context of the FDA's 2011 trial for the drug Avastin. There, he examines the ways the FDA became the sole authority on medicine in the United States and the process of approving drugs.
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For thousands of years, a mix of truth, lies, and down-right myths have shaped medicine’s understanding of the female body. While the modern era has seen progress, Dr. Elizabeth Comen tells us those narratives about women and their bodies continue to shape the care provided women today.
Comen is a Medical Oncologist specializing in breast cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and a professor at New York University. She earned her bachelor’s degree in the History of Science from Harvard College and her medical degree from Harvard Medical School. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital and her fellowship in oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Comen’s research has been published in several prestigious scientific journals. She is a tireless advocate for women’s healthcare and has mentored many students throughout their academic and medical careers, helping them to empower their patients with the tools they need to survive and thrive. Her book, “All In Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today,” dives into the inherent gender divide between males and females in the healthcare system.
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As a best-selling author, Sebastian Junger has taken us to sea with an ill-fated fishing boat and, as a documentarian, shown us the reality of war in Afghanistan. But his new book is his most intensely personal, a look at his own health crisis, the near-death experience it triggered, and how it shaped his views on an afterlife.
Sebastian Junger is the #1 New York Times bestselling-author of “The Prefect Storm,” “Fire,” “A Death in Belmont,” “War,” “Tribe,” “Freedom” and his latest work, “In My Time of Dying.” An award-winning journalist, Junger is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a special correspondent at ABC News, he has covered major international news stories around the world and has received both a National Magazine Award and a Peabody Award. Junger is also a documentary filmmaker whose debut film, "Restrepo", a feature-length documentary co-directed with Tim Hetherington, was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.
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Racism is often described as an individual failing, but Dr. Tricia Rose explains that racism is better understood as the result of a system built over generations and even centuries—and perpetuated by the stories we tell about it today.
Rose is the Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies and Associate Dean of the Faculty for Special Initiatives, Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. She studies African American life, culture, and the impact of inequality, in the post-civil rights era. She specializes in the ways contemporary forms of systemic racism are blurred and hidden in our everyday storytelling about racism and the important role African-American expressive culture plays in creating spaces of recognition, resilience, and resistance. She is the author of four books and one edited collection on subjects ranging from her most recent work on systemic racism to her earlier award-winning work on hip hop, black women’s sexuality, and black popular culture. They include, “Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America,” “Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy” and “The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters.” Her latest, published this year, is “Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives―and How We Break Free.”
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At the height of World War II, American military commanders created a unit dedicated to deception to give Allied forces an advantage on the battlefield. The artists, sound technicians, and radio operators of the so-called Ghost Army remained hidden for decades, but filmmaker Rick Beyer made sure their stories were told.
Beyer is a New York Times best-selling author, an award-winning documentary producer, and a long-time history enthusiast. His independent documentary, “The Ghost Army,” premiered on PBS in 2013. It tells the story of an extraordinary WWII unit that used creativity and illusion to fool the Germans. He also co-authored a bestselling book on the unit, and is president of the Ghost Army Legacy Project, a non-profit dedicated to preserving and honoring the legacy of the unit. He spearheaded the lobbying effort that convinced Congress to award the unit a Congressional Gold Medal. Beyer has produced numerous other documentaries and is the author of the popular “Greatest Stories Never Told” series of history books. He has written for Politico, The Hill, the History Channel Magazine, America in WWII and other publications. Beyer also co-hosts the “History Happy Hour” livestream with Chris Anderson, which can be seen live every Sunday at 4:00 p.m. ET on the “History Happy Hour” Facebook and YouTube pages and is now available as a podcast.
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Public education has a long and varied history in the United States. But Laura Pappano says the challenges it faces now from parent-activists and partisan politics is unlike anything America’s schools have seen.
Pappano is an award-winning journalist and author who has written about K–12 and higher education for over 30 years. A former education columnist for the Boston Globe, Pappano has written about education for the New York Times, Hechinger Report, Harvard Education Letter, Washington Post, USA Today and Christian Science Monitor, among other publications. She is the author or co-author of four books, including, “The Connection Gap: Why Americans Feel So Alone,” “Playing with the Boys: Why Separate is Not Equal in Sports,” “Inside School Turnarounds” and her most recent book, “School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics and the Battle for Public Education.” “School Moms” is an investigative study of the far-right’s attack on education and an on-the-ground look at the parent activist battle, on either side of the debate, to control the future of public schools. Combining on-the-ground reporting with research and expert interviews, “School Moms” will take a hard look at where these battles are happening, what is at stake, and why it matters for the future of our schools.
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The novelist has a way of exploring issues—putting flesh on bones—to tell stories about people that can educate, inform, sometimes inspire, and often anger. Vanessa Lillie uses that art form to shine a light on challenges facing native communities and native women, in particular.
Lillie is the author of the 2023 USA Today bestselling suspense novel, “Blood Sisters,” which launches a new series with Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two Spirit at the heart of the stories. “Blood Sisters” was a Target Book Club pick and GMA Book Club Buzz Pick as well as named one of the best mystery novels in 2023 by the Washington Post and Amazon. Her previous bestselling thrillers are “Little Voices” and “For the Best.” She also co-authored the number one bestselling and ITW award-nominated Audible Original, “Young Rich Widows,” and its sequel, “Desperate Deadly Widows." Lillie was also a columnist for the Providence Journal and hosts an Instagram Live show with crime fiction authors. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma living on Narragansett land in Rhode Island.
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The poet’s ability to capture meaning with words has long been one of humanity’s great gifts. Brian Turner has that muse and uses poetry to explore enduring questions of love and loss.
Turner is the author of five collections of poetry “Here, Bullet;” “Phantom Noice;” “The Wild Delight of Wild Things;” “The Dead Peasant’s Handbook” and “The Goodbye World Poem.” He has also authored a memoir, “My Life as a Foreign Country,” and is the editor of “The Kiss” and co-editor of “The Strangest of Theatres” anthologies. Also a musician and songwriter, Turner has written and recorded several albums with The Interplanetary Acoustic Team, including “11 11 (Me Smiling)” and “The Retro Legion's American Undertow.” His poems and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Harper’s, among other fine journals. He was also featured in the documentary film “Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience,” which was nominated for an Academy Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he has received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.
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Thomas Jefferson famously said he’d prefer newspapers without government over government without newspapers. In large parts of the United States today, government exists without independent news sources—undermining accountability and diminishing civic participation. Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy tell us that despite these troubling trends, there’s much to celebrate in the work of community news outlets around the country.
Clegg spent over three decades at The Boston Globe and retired in 2018 after four years of running the opinion pages. In between stints at the Globe, she was deputy director of communications at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She is a member of the steering committee for the Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship at the International Women’s Media Foundation and the co-founder and co-chair of Brookline.News, a nonprofit startup news organization. Kennedy is a Northeastern University professor in the School of Journalism and a nationally known media commentator. He was a panelist on the GBH News television program “Beat the Press” and a weekly columnist for the network. He was also a columnist for The Guardian and produces Media Nation, an online publication that serves as a media watchdog. Kennedy is a recipient of the Yankee Quill Award from the New England Academy of Journalists and the James W. Carey Journalism Award from the Media Ecology Association.
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We take for granted that the “immigrant experience” is part of the American story. But in an epic new history Daniel Schulman tells the story of the Jewish immigrants who built some of America’s biggest financial institutions and transformed America.
A best-selling author, Schulman is known for his first book, “Sons of Wichita,” a biography of the Koch brothers, which was a finalist for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. His second book, “The Money Kings,”was recently released and details several German-Jewish immigrants who influenced the rise of modern finance in the United States, including Goldman Sachs, Kuhn Loeb, Lehman Brothers and J. & W. Seligman & Co. Beyond his books, Schulman is a journalist whose work has appeared in publications including the Boston Globe Magazine, Politico, Vanity Fair, the Washington Post and Mother Jones, where he is the magazine's deputy Washington, D.C. bureau chief.
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Working together across party lines is anathema to much of political Washington, but Margaret Spellings says doing so is the only way to create solutions that last.
A nationally recognized leader in public policy, Spellings serves as President and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center. Previously, Spellings was President and CEO of Texas 2036, president of University of North Carolina System and president of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas after she served as U.S. Secretary of Education. As secretary, she led the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, a bipartisan initiative to provide greater accountability for the education of 50 million U.S. public school students. She also launched the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, a plan to address challenges of access, affordability, quality and accountability in our nation’s colleges and universities. Before serving as secretary, Spellings was a White House domestic policy advisor, overseeing the agenda on education, transportation, health, justice, housing and labor.
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Hollywood’s annual night-of-nights is upon us with the Academy Awards around the corner. Pete Hammond helps us take stock of the film industry and the films singled out for their powerful storytelling this year.
Hammond, widely considered the pre-eminent awards analyst for film and television, is Deadline’s Awards Columnist covering the Oscar and Emmy seasons. He is also Deadline's Chief Film Critic, having previously reviewed films for MovieLine, Boxoffice magazine, Backstage, Hollywood.com and Maxim, as well as Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide where he was a contributing editor. In addition to writing, Hammond also hosts the KCET Cinema Series and the weekly KCET television series "Must See Movies." Previously, he held producing positions at “Entertainment Tonight,” “Extra,” “Access Hollywood,” “The Arsenio Hall Show,” “The Martin Short Show” and AMC Networks. He has received five Emmy nominations for writing and is only the second journalist to have received the Publicists Guild of America’s Press Award twice, in 1996 and 2013.
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It's easy to listen to the news and conclude that we have never been more gripped by the so-called “Culture Wars.” But Kliph Nesteroff argues just the opposite: today’s conflict isn’t a fluke, it’s part of a long history of conflict, controversy and recrimination.
Canadian comic Kliph Nesteroff is, according to the New York Times, the “premier popular historian of comedy.” He has authored two books since starting out as a stand-up comic, including “The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy” and “We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy.” His work has been praised by comedy legends from Gilbert Gottfried to Mel Brooks to Norm Macdonald. His forthcoming third book is titled “Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars.”
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To some, the civil rights era seems like ancient history, but to others, it’s within living memory. Françoise N. Hamlin helps put the history of the era into a broader context about who we are as a people and what it means to be an American.
Hamlin is the Royce Family Associate Professor in history and Africana studies at Brown University. Prior to joining the faculty at Brown, Hamlin was a fellow at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, the Radcliffe Institute, and the Andrew Carnegie Foundation. She also spent several years as an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Hamlin is the author of “Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II,” winner of the 2012 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize and the 2013 Lillian Smith Book Award. She also authored “These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on Citizenship and War” and republished the previously self-published 1975 autobiography of Mississippi civil rights activist, Vera Pigee, “The Struggle of Struggles.” Her co-edited anthology, “From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle,” will be published in spring 2024.
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Free speech is under assault in educational settings, school committees, university boards and political rallies across the United States. Suzanne Nossell warns the danger isn’t just about our access to books and ideas, but to the fundamental human rights and political freedoms we all hold dear.
Nossell currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer of PEN America, the leading human rights and free expression organization, and the author of “Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All.” She is a leading voice on free expression issues globally, having overseen groundbreaking work in Hong Kong, China, Myanmar, Eurasia and the United States. Her prior career spanned government service and leadership roles in the corporate and nonprofit sectors. She served under Presidents Obama and Clinton as well as for Amnesty International USA, Bertelsmann, and the Wall Street Journal. Nossell is also a featured columnist for Foreign Policy magazine and has published op-eds in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, LA Times, and dozens of other outlets, as well as scholarly articles in Foreign Affairs, Dissent, Democracy, and other journals.
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It’s easy to look at American politics, now, and find individuals for whom loyalty to party or an individual leader is the only thing that matters. But Richard Aldous tells us of another time when service to the nation was the highest service in public life.
Aldous is the Eugene Meyer Professor of British history and Culture at Bard College and specializes in twentieth-century history. He earned his Ph.D., from the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow in the Royal Historical Society. He has authored and edited 11 books, including “Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian,” “Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship,” “Macmillan, Eisenhower and the Cold War,” “The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli” and biographies of Malcolm Sargent and Tony Ryan. Aldous also taught for 15 years at University College Dublin, where he was chair of the History Department. He continues to write regularly for publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and The American Interest, where he is a contributing editor.
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Most who write about politics focus on the horse-race of elections or the specifics of policies. But Joanna Weiss says we should view American politics—especially current American politics—through a pop-culture lens.
Weiss is the executive director of the AI Literacy Lab at Northeastern University, a project to connect journalists and technologists. She is a contributing writer at POLITICO Magazine and isa former columnist, television critic, and political reporter at the Boston Globe; and the founding editor of Experience magazine, published by Northeastern University. She started her career covering Louisiana politics for the Times-Picayune of New Orleans. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, The Economist, Pacific Standard, and Boston Magazine, and was anthologized in the book “Nasty Women and Bad Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 Presidential Election.” She has appeared on local, national and international television and radio.
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There was a time in the United States—not that long ago, actually—when local newspapers played an undisputed positive role in holding people in authority to account. Daniel Golden is a journalist practicing his craft in that great tradition.
Golden is a Boston-based senior editor and reporter at ProPublica. He has been instrumental in three Pulitzer Prizes, two as an editor and one as a reporter. He co-edited a ProPublica series on Latin American asylum-seekers caught between the U.S. government and the MS-13 gang, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Before joining ProPublica, he worked as managing editor for education and enterprise at Bloomberg News. There he edited a series about tax inversions—companies moving headquarters overseas to avoid taxes—that earned Bloomberg’s only Pulitzer Prize in 2015. Golden won a Pulitzer as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in 2004 for a series of articles on preferences for children and donors in college admissions. He expanded that series into a critically acclaimed national bestseller, “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.” An updated edition was published in October 2019 with new reporting on the Operation Varsity Blues scandal. He is co-author of “Spy Schools: How The CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America’s Universities,” with Renee Dudley. Golden spent 17 years as a staff reporter at the Boston Globe, including a stint on its Spotlight team, and served as senior editor for investigations at Conde Nast Portfolio. He has won three George Polk awards, three National Headliner awards, the Sigma Delta Chi award, the Gerald Loeb Award, among others.
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Writing and creative expression have long been among the defining characteristics of humanity as a species. But Naomi Baron chronicles the rise of artificial intelligence and its myriad abilities to write, to compose, to create—and what it means for our humanity.
Baron’s research interests include language and technology, reading, first language acquisition, the relationship between speech and writing and the history and structure of English. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Fellow, Fulbright Specialist, and Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, she has published ten books. “Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World” won the English-Speaking Union’s Duke of Edinburgh English Language Book Award for 2008. “Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World” appeared in 2015. “How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio” was published in March 2021. She examines artificial intelligence and writing in her newest book, “Who Wrote This? How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing,” published in 2023. Baron taught at Brown University, Emory University, and Southwestern University and American University. She has appeared extensively in the media, including interviews on “Good Morning America,” ABC News’ “20/20,” CNN, NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show” and “All Things Considered,” the BBC, and has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, among others.
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Persistent Organic Pollutants: you don’t need a Ph.D. in chemistry to recognize realize they are dangerous. But Dr. Rainer Lohmann has been studying POPs for some time and their danger to the environment and human beings.
Lohmann’s research combines marine organic geochemistry and environmental chemistry to study recalcitrant organic compounds, including persistent organic pollutants on the molecular level. He has led Superfund Research Center at the University of Rhode Island since 2018, one among roughly 20 nationwide. The Center is a collaboration with scientists from Harvard University and the Silent Spring Institute. It focuses on the Sources, Transport, Exposure and Effects of PFASs—poly- and perfluorinated alkyl substances. Lohmann has engaged decision-makers by working with scientists from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Environment Canada to advance the use of novel sampling devices to better characterize fluxes of organic pollutants in water and air. Lohmann is currently one of several scientists from around the world coordinating the AQUA-GAPS program, a joint effort with the Czech Republic’s RECETOX initiative at Masaryk University, which conducts research and education around managing the environmental and health risks associated with the chemicals around us. The AQUA-GAPS program promotes the use of passive samplers for legacy and emerging organic contaminants in the waters of the world is now underway.
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The year began with chaos in the U.S. House of Representatives and ended much the same. Along the way, we saw technology demonstrate its potential to reshape human productivity and creativity; we have seen wars and violence; and we have worried aloud about the health of American Democracy. Dr. Evelyn Farkas helps us take stock of all of that and name our 2023 “Story of the Year.”
Farkas is one of the nation’s premier voices on American foreign policy and geopolitics, and one of the nation’s most-trusted experts on U.S.-Russia relations. Some of her former positions include: the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the U.S. Department of Defense’s top Russia expert under President Barack Obama and advisor to three U.S. Secretaries of Defense during her tenure at the Pentagon. She serves as a Senior Fellow, German Marshall Fund of the United States and worked in Congress as well as the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). She was a professor of international relations at the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Marine Corps University and is the author of “Fractured States and US Foreign Policy: Iraq, Ethiopia, and Bosnia in the 1990s.” Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe, and more.
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From the violence in the Middle East to the dysfunction in Congress, the world feels increasingly untethered. Tom Nichols spent his early career analyzing threats to American security and now is unapologetic in his warnings about the threats to American democracy.
Nichols is an author and a staff writer for The Atlantic. His expertise encompasses a broad range of topics, including nuclear weapons, international security, Russia, and the overarching challenges to democracy globally and in the United States. Nichols has a background as a legislative aide in both the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. He taught at the U.S. Naval War College for 25 years and now holds the position of professor emeritus. Among his published works are “The Death of Expertise” and “OurOwn Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy.”
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The elements of a scary story might be exotic, super-natural, or even mundane. Tananarive Due weaves all of those things together in an ethereal world of her creation to explore the violence of the Jim Crow South.
Due is an award-winning author who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at the University of California-Los Angeles. She is an executive producer for the documentary “Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror” and has written for “The Twilight Zone” and “Horror Noire” projects. She is co-writing a Black horror graphic novel, “The Keeper,” alongside her husband, Steven Barnes. Due’s work in the Black speculative fiction genre has won various awards including an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award. Her books include “Ghost Summer: Stories,” “My Soul to Keep,” and “The Good House.” She co-authored “Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir” with her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Due. Her new historical fiction book, “The Reformatory,” is based on the life of her relative, Robert Stephens. Set in Jim Crow Florida, it follows twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr. who is sent to a reformatory, where he must learn how to navigate the harsh reality of the Jim Crow South.
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Globalization is often portrayed as the bogeyman in American politics. Thomas Barnett credits it with making the world better, more peaceful, and even more equitable. In the future, he argues, it will continue to drive even more profound shifts in the way the world operates—with real challenges for American leadership and security.
Barnett is a strategic planner who has worked in United States national security affairs across his entire career. He also operates a consulting practice, Barnett Consulting LLC. A “New York Times" bestselling author and nationally known public speaker who addresses government officials as a forecaster of global conflict and an expert on globalization. Barnett is the author of three bestselling books, including, “America's New Map: Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse,” which was released this year. Barnett was a Senior Strategic Researcher and Professor in the Warfare Analysis & Research Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, U.S. Naval War College, Newport RI. There, he taught and served – in a senior advisory role – military and civilian leaders in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, Central Command, Special Operations Command, and Joint Forces Command. He co-authored the U.S. Navy’s historic white paper “From The Sea;”and pioneering and managing CNAC’s contractual relationship with the U.S. Agency for International Development.
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Everyone faces challenges in life, but when those challenges are born of trauma, the challenge to persevere becomes more daunting. Dr. Jonathan DePierro discusses the science of resilience and how we can all thrive in the wake of adversity.
DePierro is the Associate Director of the Center for Stress, Resilience and Personal Growth which provides comprehensive programming to support the resilience and mental health of Mount Sinai faculty, staff, and trainees. His clinical expertise is in the treatment of trauma-related mental health conditions, and the development and delivery of flexible resilience-building interventions. DePierro also teaches Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. His new book “Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges” includes three experts in trauma and resilience to answer what helps people adapt to life’s most challenging situations.
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The transition from childhood to adulthood ushers in a wide variety of difficult questions like who actually loves us, and why. Nyani Nkrumah explores those coming-of-age themes, as well as issues of race, identity, trauma, and who is responsible for the person we actually are.
Nkrumah was born in Boston and grew up in Ghana, West Africa and later Zimbabwe. Nkrumah holds a doctorate from Cornell University and attributes her love of writing to her mother, a former English and literature teacher who entertained her kids by reciting poetry and Shakespeare soliloquies on the way to school. Her book, “Wade in the Water,” tells the story of an unforgettable summer in 1982 seen largely through the eyes of Ella, an 11-year-old black girl trying to overcome familial abuse.
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For too long, the history we’ve considered “America’s” has really just been the history of European conquest. Ned Blackhawk argues that there is no American history without its first, indigenous inhabitants.
Blackhawk is a Professor of History and American Studies at Yale. He is the author of “Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the early American West,” a study of the American Great Basin that garnered half a dozen professional prizes, including the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians. In addition to serving in professional associations and on the editorial boards of American Quarterly and Ethnohistory, Blackhawk has led the establishment of two fellowships, one for American Indian Students to attend the Western History Association’s annual conference, the other for doctoral students working on American Indian Studies dissertations at Yale named after Henry Roe Cloud.
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All over the world, girls face challenges—and outcomes—far worse than boys—a fact borne out by research on different continents and in different societies. But Dale Bourke says that the challenges facing girls shouldn’t overwhelm us; they should inspire us.
Bourke is an award-winning writer and editor who has served as president of the CIDRZ Foundation and SVP at World Relief, publisher of Religion News Service, and has been a syndicated columnist. She has traveled extensively and written about the issues people across the world face for a variety of national and international publications. Her forthcoming book, “Strong Girls, Strong World” will be released on October 23, 2023.
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One constant human wish is for the longevity of the people we love. Bill Kole explores the coming era of “super-aging,” where more and more of us will live more than a century, with dramatic consequences for retirement, finances, relationships, and even the politics of the next century.
Kole, the author of “The Big 100: The New World of Super- Aging,” recently retired as New England editor for The Associated Press. He is an award-winning former foreign correspondent who’s reported from North America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. A 2022 fellow in aging journalism at Columbia University in New York and at the National Press Foundation in Washington, D.C., Kole has been writing about extreme aging since the 1990s. Among his many awards is one from the Society of American Business Editors & Writers for an investigation into the exploitation of illegal immigrants by the Walmart retail chain.
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The United States is both the richest country on Earth, and yet beset with a crushing poverty that saddles too many Americans. Dr. Matthew Desmond is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and sociologist who says the reality of American poverty is sustained by those who benefit from it.
Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University and joined the Harvard Society of Fellows in 2010. He is the author of four books, including “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, Carnegie Medal, and PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. Desmond leads The Eviction Lab, focusing his research on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. A contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Desmond was listed in 2016 among the Politico 50, as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.”
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In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that love is love is love and marriage equality became recognized in all 50 states. Brad Sears warns, however of legislative efforts across the country to roll back LGBTQ rights.
Sears is the Founding Executive Director and Rand Schrader Distinguished Scholar of Law and Policy at the Williams Institute. He is also the Associate Dean of Public Interest Law at UCLA Law. Sears has published several research studies, primarily on discrimination against LGBT people and people living with HIV. He has taught courses on LGBT and disability law at UCLA, Harvard, and Whittier law schools. He has testified before Congress and state legislatures, authored amicus briefs in key court cases, helped to draft state and federal legislation, and been cited frequently by national media. A graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School and has received the Co-Presidents Award from the LGBT Bar Association of Los Angeles in 2019 and the Earl Warren Outstanding Public Service Award from the American Society of Public Administration in 2018.
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Every generation seems to lament the decline in public virtues, morality, and decency. But Adam Mastroianni argues that those perceptions are generally not rooted in reality.
Mastroianni is an experimental psychologist and author of the science blog, “Experimental History.” He earned his doctorate in psychology from Harvard in 2021, and his work has been covered everywhere from The New York Times to “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” He is originally from Monroeville, Ohio (pop. 1,400). Outside of science, he’s also a stand-up and improv comedian, he has done over 140 escape rooms, and he once came in second on a British reality show about hosting dinner parties.
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Architecture is about the built environment. But Justin Brown helps lead a firm whose mission is to use architecture to help move communities forward, promote social justice and healing, and expand the possibilities of tomorrow for cities and their residents.
Brown is a co-founder and Principal at MASS Design Group focused on expanding architectural work in the U.S. He leads the Hudson Valley Office in Poughkeepsie, NY and is dedicated to the growth of MASS’s Social Justice and Adaptive Re-use portfolios. He was the Project Architect for the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice and founder of the Fringe Cities Design Lab, which researches vulnerable American cities and follows community-engaged design practices to unlock upstream capital to transform liabilities into assets. Brown has led award winning projects at Gensler in Washington D.C., Perez APC in New Orleans, and Toshiko Mori Architect in New York. He has guest lectured in seminars at Harvard Graduate School of Design, MIT School of Architecture and Planning, University of Toronto, and Dartmouth College. He holds a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Arts in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.
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In grade school, we might learn history in class and think of it as a straightforward recitation of facts and dates. Dr. Jade McGlynn however, explains that history’s stakes are high—shaping the collective memories and national narratives that can prepare a nation for great trials and even conflict.
McGlynn is an author and Research Fellow at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Her research focuses on Russia’s war against Ukraine since 2014, propaganda, memory politics, and state-society relations in Russia. Her newest books include, “Russia’s War,” was released in March 2023 and explains why Russians support the war on Ukraine. “Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia,” released in June 2023, discusses how the Kremlin rebuilt a mythical past to justify a militant present. Both books are based on over a decade of research into Russian politics of memory and propaganda, including McGlynn’s doctoral research she completed at the University of Oxford. You can find her journalism and expert commentary on all things Russia in a wide variety of international media outlets, from CNN to The Times. She is a frequent contributor to BBC, Deutsche Welle, The Telegraph and The Spectator. This is in addition to her academic work at King’s College London and her policy work with New Diplomacy Project and CSIS. McGlynn is often engaged as a public speaker and to consult on issues of foreign policy, diplomacy and defense relating to Russia and Ukraine by governments and organizations in the United Kingdom, the U.S., and beyond.
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For longer than anyone can remember, politicians and concerned citizens have asked ‘what kind of world are we leaving our children?’ Elizabeth Rush grappled with that question in a very personal way when she journeyed to Antarctica’s fragile glaciers to chronicle the work of scientists trying to understand the realities of a changing climate.
Rush is the author of “Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and “The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth,” which was released this month. The act of listening is central to Rush’s writing practice, especially to those who live in front-line climate changed communities and the voices long locked out of environmental conversations. Her work explores a couple of fundamental questions, “what does our disassembling world ask of us?” and “how can we continue to live and love while also losing much?” In 2019, Rush joined fifty-seven scientists and crew onboard a research icebreaker for months to visit Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica which is believed to be both rapidly deteriorating and capable of making a catastrophic impact on global sea-level rise this century. In “The Quickening,” Rush documents their voyage, offering the sublime—seeing an iceberg for the first time; the staggering waves of the Drake Passage, the torqued, unfamiliar contours of Thwaites—alongside the workaday moments of this groundbreaking expedition. Along the way, she takes readers on a personal journey around a more intimate question: What does it mean to bring a child into the world at this time of radical change? Rush’s work has appeared in a wide range of publications from the New York Times to Orion and Guernica. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Howard Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Metcalf Institute. She teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University.
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Schools are at the heart of communities across the United States, and teachers are at the heart of each school. Alexandra Robbins shares a year in the life of three teachers, the schools in which they teach, and the children whose lives they shape
Robbins is the author of five New York Times bestselling books, is an investigative reporter and a recipient of the prestigious John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism, given by the Medill School of Journalism. In 2022, she also was honored for “Distinguished Service to Public Education.” She is the author of “The Overachievers,” a New York Times Editors’ Choice and People magazine Critics’ Choice, New York Times bestseller, “The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital,” and “The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth.” Robbins’ latest book, “The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession,” described as “A remarkable piece of storytelling … with extraordinary reporting,” was released in March 2023. Robbins has written for several publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, Forbes and The Atlantic. She has appeared on television, on 60 Minutes, The Today Show, CBS Mornings, Oprah, The View and The Colbert Report and has appeared as an on-air expert on hundreds of other shows on dozens of networks. She won the Best Single Article of the Year award from Media Industry News, an Exceptional Merit in Media Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Donald Robinson Memorial Award for Investigative Journalism; the June Roth Award for Medical Journalism, among others.
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The photographers eye sees things the rest of us might not. Haruka Sakaguchi uses the camera to tell stories about cultural identity and intergenerational trauma.
Sakaguchi is a Japanese documentary photographer based in New York City. She was born in Osaka, Japan and immigrated to the US with her parents when she was three months old. Sakaguchi’s documentary work focuses on cultural identity and intergenerational trauma. Her clients have included The New York Times, National Geographic, Time Magazine, ProPublica, The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, BBC News, Bloomberg Businessweek, NPR, Newsweek and The Washington Post among other publications.
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The myth is that technology is unbiased, but says the truth is more complex and explains how bias and discrimination creep into the algorithms that shape the modern world.
Broussard is a data journalist and an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology, and the author of several books, including “More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech” and “Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World.” Her academic research focuses on artificial intelligence in investigative reporting and ethical AI, withttps://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047654/h a particular interest in using data analysis for social good. She appeared in the 2020 documentary Coded Bias, an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival that was nominated for an Emmy Award and an NAACP Image Award. She is an affiliate faculty member at the Moore Sloan Data Science Environment at the NYU Center for Data Science, a 2019 Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow, and her work has been supported by New America, the Institute of Museum & Library Services, and the Tow Center at Columbia Journalism School. A former features editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, she has also worked as a software developer at AT&T Bell Labs and the MIT Media Lab. Her features and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, and other outlets.
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For all of the excitement and glamour, professional female athletes still lag well behind their male counterparts in terms of how much they earn, the power they wield in their profession, and the respect afforded them. Macaela MacKenzie shows that this phenomenon in sports is no different from the experience of women across American society.
MacKenzie is a journalist who writes about women and power. She covers women’s equality through the lenses of sports, wellness, and the gender gap across industries. She is the author of “MONEY, POWER, RESPECT: How Women in Sports Are Shaping the Future of Feminism. She was a Senior Editor at Glamour where she directed all health and wellness coverage. She’s profiled Billie Jean King, Megan Rapinoe, Simone Biles, Allyson Felix, Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, Maya Moore, Mikaela Shiffrin, and many other ground-breaking women. Prior to her role at Glamour, MacKenzie was a freelance journalist focusing on the intersection of women’s wellness and culture. She has over 2,000 bylines for outlets including Glamour, Elle, SELF, Bustle, Marie Claire, Allure, Women’s Health, and Forbes among other publications.
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Justice is supposed to be blind. But Elie Honig says that individuals blessed with power, fame, and money have advantages in the criminal justice unavailable to most Americans.
Honig is a former New Jersey and federal prosecutor with extensive experience leading and managing criminal trials and appeals. He provides strategic advice to individuals and businesses in government-facing investigations as well as counsel on internal investigations. Honig previously served as Director of the Department of Law and Public Safety at the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice, where he directed major criminal cases against street gangs, drug trafficking organizations, illegal firearms traffickers, corrupt public officials, child predators, and white-collar offenders. Under his leadership, statewide law enforcement introduced new initiatives to address emerging criminal threats, including post-Sandy fraud, cybercrime, human trafficking, and prescription opioid abuse. Before joining the Division of Criminal Justice, Honig worked for eight years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he successfully prosecuted more than 100 members and associates of La Cosa Nostra, including bosses and other high-ranking members of the Gambino and Genovese organized crime families. He has tried 15 cases to jury verdict and has argued over 20 cases in the federal appellate courts and the New Jersey Supreme Court. He currently works with partners in the White-Collar Criminal Defense practice as a key advisor on investigations and trial strategy at Lowenstein Sandler. He is also a CNN Legal Analyst and leverages his prosecutorial and trial experience to offer informed commentary on timely legal and government issues.
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Political polarization is at epidemic levels in the United States—shaping national politics, friendships, and even family dynamics. But Peter T. Coleman says it doesn’t have to be that way—that each of us can adopt simple practices to reduce the polarization in our lives and in our communities.
Dr. Coleman is Professor of Psychology and Education at Columbia University where he holds a joint appointment at Teachers College and The Earth Institute. He directs the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, is founding director of the Institute for Psychological Science and Practice, and is co-executive director of Columbia University’s Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity. Coleman is also a renowned expert on constructive conflict resolution and sustainable peace. His current research focuses on conflict intelligence and systemic wisdom as meta-competencies for navigating conflict constructively at all levels and includes projects on adaptive negotiation and mediation dynamics, cross-cultural adaptivity, optimality dynamics in conflict, justice and polarization, multicultural conflict, intractable conflict, and sustainable peace. His latest book is book on breaking through the intractable polarization plaguing the U.S. and other societies across the globe is “The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization.”
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Poetry comes in many forms. Dr. Joshua Bennett explores the history of “spoken word” and its expansion of the contours of poetry and its ability to capture the urgent, social issues of the day.
Bennett is the author of five award-winning books of poetry, criticism, and narrative nonfiction, including “Spoken Word: A Cultural History,” “The Study of Human Life,” which is currently being adapted for television in collaboration with Warner Brothers Studios, “Owed,” “Being Property Once Myself” and “The Sobbing School.” He has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His writing has been published in The Atlantic, The Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He has recited his original works at the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. He has also performed and taught creative writing workshops at hundreds of middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities across the United States, in the U.K. and in South Africa. Bennett currently teaches literature at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned his Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and a master’s degree in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar.
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Soldiers know what it means to keep the faith—a character trait valued in others given the grim realities of fighting on distant battlefields. Shafo Sahil and Matt Waters know the bond borne of shared battlefield experience and can help us understand what recent Hollywood portrayals got right and what they got wrong.
Shafo Sahil was an interpreter who was assigned to work as a Special Forces interpreter and completed over 100 missions in Afghanistan, including one where he saved for Matt Waters’ team from an IED. Sahil grew up in rural Kabul and was a good student who dreamed of going to college but sought work as an English teacher to help support his family after high school. After the Taliban tried to bomb his school, he decided to work as an interpreter to help defend his country from insurgents. As the U.S. prepared to withdraw from Afghanistan, they laid off interpreters and Sahil went back to work as a teacher. The Taliban started sending him death threats, and he went into hiding when they began searching for him at his home. He applied for a United States special immigration visa but was denied. When the Taliban overran Kabul, Waters and his team helped Sahil, his pregnant wife, and two kids get into Kabul airport and onto a military evacuation flight to the U.S. Sahil, his wife, and three kids now live in New Jersey at Waters’ parents’ home. Sahil now works as an IT Support Technician at Pfizer and is planning to purchase his first home in the United States.
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Anyone who has ever enjoyed watching sports will typically concede that part of the appeal is absolute wonder at the skill, drive, courage, and commitment it takes to perform at the highest levels. Jamie MoCrazy embodied all of those attributes as an extreme skier until a traumatic brain injury ended her competitive career.
MoCrazy is an American freestyle skier and motivational speaker who began winning State Championships on Connecticut in gymnastics and skiing at age nine. She was the first female skier to land a double backflip in a competition at the Winter X Games XVII in Aspen, Colorado. Her professional career ended after a skiing accident in 2015 while she was competing in the World Tour Finals in Whistler where she sustained a traumatic brain injury. Her injury and subsequent recovery has driven her career as a motivational speaker. She also established MoCrazy Strong, Inc., that serves persons who have survived traumatic brain injury and their family caregivers. The organization also works to raise awareness of traumatic brain injuries and for patient recovery efforts. In 2023, MoCrazy co-directed the short documentary, “#MoCrazyStrong,” with Mark Locki, which premiered at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival and won the best biographical documentary short at the Atlanta DocuFest. MoCrazy holds a bachelor’s degree in English Communications from Westminster College in 2019.
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It’s been said that the history of an era is written in the countless acts of individuals, doing their best to live their own lives. Ilyon Woo shares the story of one married couple whose personal journey—literally and figuratively—charts the course of the United States in the dozen years before the American Civil Car.
Woo is the New York Times best-selling author of “Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom” and “The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times.” Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and The New York Times, and she has received support for her research from the Whiting Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Antiquarian Society, among other institutions. She holds a bachelor’s degree in the Humanities from Yale College and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University.
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The pantheon of writers focused on climate change ranges from scientists and scholars to poets lamenting the loss of our environment. Jake Bittle documents the impact of climate on people, including the great migration of Americans caused by changes to the Earth’s environment.
Bittle is an author and climate change specialist for the non-profit magazine Grist. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s and other media outlets. He is also author of the new book, “The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration.”
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So much of our modern life is built upon simplifying the complex. We reduce social interactions to likes and follows on social media and dilute the “news” in our favorite echo chambers. But Azar Nafisi warns that life is not simple, and the complexity found in great literature is ultimately liberating of the mind and essential to the health of our democracy.
Nafisi is a best-selling author and professor. She was a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., from 1997 and 2017. She taught as professor of aesthetics, culture and literature there, as well as acting as Director of The Dialogue Project & Cultural Conversations. She released her nationally best-selling book “Reading Lolita in Tehran” in 2003, which went on the spend over 117 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. The book has been translated in 32 languages and won many awards such as the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Frederic W. Ness Book Award, Non-fiction Book of the Year Award by Booksense, the Latifeh Yarsheter Book Award, an achievement award from the American Immigration Law foundation and the Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle. It has also been a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Memoir. Nafisi won a Persian Golden Lioness Award for literature in 2005, presented by the World Academy of Arts, Literature and Media. The Times named Reading Lolita in Tehran one of the “100 Best Books of the Decade,” in 2009. She has worked with both policy makers and human rights organizations to improve human rights for the women and girls of Iran. She was awarded the Cristóbal Gabarrón Foundation International Thought and Humanities Award in 2011 and was named a Georgetown University/Walsh School of Foreign Service Centennial Fellow in 2018. She has been awarded honorary doctorates from Susquehanna University (2019), Pomona College (2015), Mt. Holyoke College (2012), Seton Hill University (2010), Goucher College (2009), Bard College (2007), Rochester University (2005) and Nazareth College.
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Motherhood is the stuff of childhood play and, often, adult anxieties. Jessica Grose unpacks the realities of motherhood in the United States today, the reasons for those anxieties, and the experience of mothers from various walks of life.
Grose is an established author and opinion writer at the New York Times. She is the founding editor of the email newsletter and website, Lenny. Her coverage of the pandemic earned her the title of a Glamour “Game Changer” in 2020. She has worked as an editor at Jezebel as well as senior editor at Slate. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York, Elle, Cosmopolitan, Businessweek and other notable publications. Grose is the author of two novels, including her latest, “Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood,” which was published in 2022.
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Most of us are used to shopping in stores where one section is devoted to fresh produce, but the rest of the food for sale is either boxed, canned, or shrink-wrapped. Jamila Norman is an urban farmer and food advocate teaching the world about the benefits of growing our own food and eating fresh fruits and vegetables—whether grown on a community farm or in our own backyards.
Norman is an internationally recognized urban farmer and food activist based in Atlanta, Ga. In 2010, she founded her own independent organic urban farm, Patchwork City Farms, which she operates full time. Her farm and work has been featured in publications such as SeedStock.com, Modern Farmer Magazine, The Library of Congress and Southern Foodways Alliance oral history project. She is currently the manager and one of the founding managers of the Southwest Atlanta Growers Cooperative, which is centered around black urban farmers in Atlanta’s booming urban agriculture movement. She served as U.S. delegate to Slow Food’s Terra Madre Salone del Gusto in Turin, Italy in 2014. Norman is also co-founder of EAT MOVE BeWELL, an initiative that is focused on including more fresh and living foods into our diet, promoting movement for health and wellness, and advocates for communities of color. She hosts “Homegrown,” a show on the Magnolia Network, which is currently on its third season, helping families transform their outdoor spaces into backyard farms. Most recently, Norman has joined the board of Georgia Organics, a non-profit organization which bridges together organic food from Georgia farms to Georgia families.
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Three months ago, the GOP took control of the United States House of Representatives. Steve Scully cuts through the headlines and the talking points to help us understand what has changed in Washington since the end of 2022, and what has stayed the same.
Scully has worked as a political editor, host, and senior executive producer of C-SPAN’s programming. In his career, he has interviewed every president since Gerald Ford, and been executive producer on programming such as “Road to the White House” series, the Washington Journal, and the podcast “The Weekly.” Scully has taught at the University of Denver, Pace University, George Mason University and the University of California-DC Program. Scully completed his Terker Fellowship—2019-2021—at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. Scully served on the White House Correspondents’ Association for nine years, serving as president from 2006-2007. He has chaired the Educational Society Global summit in Erie, Pa. for the past 11 years, and was named to the Pennsylvania Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2019.
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In the last two years, from the steps of the U.S. Capitol to the streets of Kiev, the fight for democracy has been joined. Max Boot reviews the struggle and the links between events overseas and the health of American democracy at home.
Named as one of the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict” by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Boot is a historian, best-selling author and foreign-policy analyst. He is a columnist for The Washington Post, as well as the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has worked as an op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal, as well as editor and writer at the Christian Science Monitor. In 2002, he went on to join the Council on Foreign Relations. Boot is the author of four books, winning the 2003 General Wallace M Greene Jr. Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation as the best nonfiction book pertaining to Marine Corps history for “The Savage Wars Of Peace.” His 2018 biography, “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam,” was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in biography, and a New York Times bestseller. He is currently working on a biography on Ronald Reagan for Norton/Liveright.
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Slavery has been called America’s original sin, yet its depiction in American history and schools remains surprisingly controversial. Clint Smith has travelled the country to document the ways in which that story is told, shining a light not just on who we were, but who we are.
Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America,” which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2021. He is also the author of the poetry collection “Counting Descent,” which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. His forthcoming poetry collection, “Above Ground,” which will be published March 28, 2023. Clint has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art For Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His essays, poems, and scholarly writing have been appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, the Harvard Educational Review, and elsewhere. Previously, Clint taught high school English in Prince George’s County, Maryland where he was named the Christine D. Sarbanes Teacher of the Year by the Maryland Humanities Council. He is the host of the YouTube series Crash Course Black American History. Clint received his bachelor’s degree in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University.
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Narcissism is difficult to confront whenever we meet it. It’s even more of a challenge when it overwhelms the dynamics of a family. But Dr. Karyl McBride says there are ways to free ourselves from the harmful effects of narcissism and begin to heal.
McBride is a licensed marriage and family therapist with over forty years of experience in public and private practice, specializing in treatment of trauma. In her career she has worked as a school psychologist, expert witness, a marriage and family counselor and a marriage and family therapist. Her work has been recognized in several publications, including HuffPost and Psychology Today. She is a leading author on books focusing on narcissism such as “Will I Ever Be Good Enough?,” “Will I Ever Be Free of You?” and her latest book, “Will the Drama Ever End?”
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In the midst of a year that saw pandemic disease, social unrest, and bare-knuckled politics, Hollywood churned out a tremendous body of work—even while theaters closed, and films created for the big screen streamed directly to our homes. Pete Hammond says this year’s Academy Awards reflect the issues facing Americans.
Hammond, chief film critic for Deadline Hollywood, is widely considered to be one of the most distinguished awards analysts for both film and television. In addition to being chief film critic at Deadline, he has also been Awards Editor and Columnist for the past eight years. In his past he has reviewed films for MovieLine, Boxoffice magazine, Backstage, Hollywood.com and Maxim, as well as frequently contributing to Variety. Outside of writing, Pete is also in his seventeenth year as host of the year-round KCET Cinema Series in Los Angeles, where he screens a selection of films prior to their theatrical release and interviews filmmakers. He is also host of UCLA extension’s Sneak Preview for the past ten years, and has hosted panels at AFI Fest, the Santa Barbara Film Festival, Palm Springs International Film Festival, Los Angeles Film Festival, Mill Valley Film Festival, CineVegas, San Francisco Film Festival, and Cannes Film Festival. He has interviewed prestigious filmmakers and stars from groups such as SAG, DGA, BAFTA, and WGA. He previously held producing positions at Entertainment Tonight, Extra, Access Hollywood, The Arsenio Hall Show, The Martin Short Show and AMC Network. He is the winner of both the 1996 and 2013 Publicists Guild of America’s Press Award, making him only the second journalist in the 50-year history of the organization to receive the award twice. He served on the Board of Governors for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for six years and is the recipient of five Emmy nominations for writing.
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In the flush of youth, some of us are prone to great bouts of certainty, seriousness, and risk-taking. Others are more cautious. And some just want to have fun—sometimes at all costs. Tara Isabella Burton is an author whose recent novel explores the timelessness of coming-of-age stories with a very modern tale of her own.
Burton’s debut novel “Social Creature,” was named book of the year by The Guardian, New York’s Vulture and The New York Times in 2018. In 2022, she published her second novel with Simon & Schuster, titled “The World Cannot Give.” In 2020, she released her first nonfiction book, “Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World,” which prominent disability rights activist Tim Shriver celebrated as “the most thoughtful analysis of our current spiritual crisis anywhere.”. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, Granta, The Washington Post, and much more. In June 2023 her fourth book, Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians” will be published by Public Affairs.
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In the years after World War One, more than 100,000 Jews were murdered in pogroms across Ukraine. Jeffrey Veidlinger is an acclaimed historian who says this targeted violence sowed the seeds for the Holocaust that would arrive two decades later.
Veidlinger is an award-winning author and Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of several books, including his most recent, “In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust” which was a finalist for both the Lionel Gelber Prize and the National Jewish Book Award, as well as a Kirkus Top Nonfiction Book of 2021 and a Times of London “Book of the Week.” Veidlinger is the former Vice-President of the Association for Jewish Studies, Chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History, a member of both the Executive Committee of the American Academy for Jewish Research and of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as Chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History. Veidlinger was the Director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University from 2009-2013, and Director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies from 2015-2021. His work has been found in Harper’s Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Tablet Magazine, and The Forward. He is currently writing about an early twentieth-century project to redirect Jewish immigration to the American Great Plains, known as the Galveston Movement.
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Authoritarian impulses are rising in the United States and around the world. Gary Hart argues that the very ideals of America’s founding–including a commitment to the will of the people–can redeem American democracy and keep the light of freedom burning for all the world to see.
Hart is a former United States Senator, strategic advisor, teacher, author and lecturer. He is the president of the business advisory group at Hart International, Ltd. Hee serves as chair of both the International Security Advisory Board of the U.S. Department of State and of the Threat Reduction Advisory Council at the Department of Defense. He is also chair of the American Security Project, as well as co-chair of the US-Russia commission. Previously, Hart was co-chair of the U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st-century, performing the most comprehensive review of national security since 1947, predicting terrorist attacks on America, and proposing an overhaul of U.S. national security structures and policies for the age of terrorism and post-Cold War new century. Hart represented Colorado in the U.S. Senate from 1975 to 1987 and was a candidate for his party’s nomination for President in both 1984 and 1988. During his time in the Senate, Hart served on the Senate Environment Committee, the Budget Committee, the Intelligence Oversight Committee, the Armed Services Committee, and was an original founder of the military reform caucus. Hart is also widely recognized as among the first to predict the end of the Cold War. He was a founding member of the Board of Directors on U.S.-Russia Relations, a co-chair of the Council task force which produced the report “America Unprepared—America Still at Risk,”in October of 2002, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was also a member of the National Academy of Science task force on Science and Security. Hart is the author of twenty books, including “The American Republic Can Save American Democracy” which was published in 2022. Hart has been Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, a Chatham Lecturer, and a McCallum Memorial Lecturer at Oxford University, a Regents Lecturer at the University of California, and a Global Fund Lecturer at Yale University.
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The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to free speech. The Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms. Mike McIntire documents what happens when those two rights clash and the chilling effect open-carry laws are having on protest and public assembly across the United States.
McIntire is an investigative reporter, author, and editor. In 2003 he joined the New York Times, serving in the New York City Hall bureau before transferring to the investigations unit in 2007. Before that, he was the investigative editor at The Hartford Courant, where he shared a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting and was a Pulitzer finalist for his investigative reporting on medical malpractice. Covering topics such as presidential campaigns, political corruption, New York City Hall, and international terrorism. McIntire has made a name for himself as a fearless investigative reporter, who reports on important issues which affect the lives of his readers. His book, “Champions Way: Football, Florida and the Lost Soul of College Sports,” was published in 2017, focusing on his investigation of college sports corruption, which earned him the role of finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. He went on to share the Pulitzer Prize in both 2017 for reporting on Russia’s hidden interference with the U.S. presidential election and in 2022 for reporting on disclosed financial incentives with police traffic stops. McIntire also earned George Polk, Daniel Pearl and Scripps-Howard awards for obtaining and publishing Donald Trump’s long-concealed tax returns alongside his team in 2020. Outside of investigative reporting, McIntire has also dedicated his time to teaching journalism as a professor at New York University since 2004 and served as a 2019 Ferris Visiting Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.
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When Pope Pious XII died, the Catholic Church sealed his documents until 2020. David Kertzer was among the first to gain access to those documents when they were unsealed, and his new book reveals what the Pope knew and did while World War II ravaged Europe.
Kertzer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and the Paul Dupee University Professor of Social Science at Brown University. His latest book, “The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler,” was published in June 2022, with Italian, German, Spanish, and Chinese editions also in press. He is an authority on Italian politics, society, and history; political symbolism; and anthropological demography. Kertzer is a past president of both the Social Science History Association and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe and is co-founder and served for many years as co-editor of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. In 2005, Kertzer was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 2006 to 2011, he was the Provost of Brown University. Kertzer’s “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara” was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1997 and has been published in eighteen foreign editions. The book was also adapted into a play by playwright Alfred Uhry was performed at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 2006. In April 2016, Steven Spielberg announced that he would be making a film based on Kertzer’s book, with a screenplay by Tony Kushner.
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Science is under assault—on social media, on our airwaves, and sometimes even around our dinner tables. Holden Thorp discusses the role science can and should play in an era of profound challenges, like climate change, pandemic disease, and profound changes in technology’s relationship with humanity.
Holden Thorp has been the Editor-in-Chief of the “Science” family of journals in 2019. He came to “Science” from Washington University, where he served as provost and continues to serve as the Rita Levi-Montalcini Distinguished University Professor, holding appointments in both chemistry and medicine. A North Carolina native, Thorp earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 1986 and a doctorate in chemistry in 1989 at the California Institute of Technology, working with Harry B. Gray on inorganic photochemistry. He completed postdoctoral work at Yale University with Gary W. Brudvig, working on model compounds and reactions for the manganese cluster in the photosynthetic reaction center. In his research career, Thorp studied electron-transfer reactions of nucleic acids, developed technology for electronic DNA chips, and cofounded Viamet Pharmaceuticals, which developed VIVJOA (oteseconazole), now approved by the FDA and marketed by Mycovia Pharmaceuticals. Thorp is the coauthor, with Buck Goldstein, of two books on higher education: “Engines of Innovation: The Entrepreneurial University in the Twenty-First Century” and “Our Higher Calling: Rebuilding the Partnership Between America and its Colleges and Universities.”
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Since the fall of 2022, the women of Iran have confronted the authority of the Islamic Republic of Iran after one young woman died in the state’s custody. Ali Kadivar views the advocacy of those brave women through the broader struggle for democracy around the world.
Kadivar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and International Studies at Boston College. He also directs the Middle East Popular Politics Lab at Boston College, which focuses on collecting and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data on various instances of contentious mobilization such as revolutions, wars, civil wars, anti-regime protests, and pro-regime mobilization globally, in the Middle East, and particularly in Iran. Kadivar’s work contributes to political and comparative-historical sociology by exploring the interaction between protest movements and democratization and draws on his experience as a participant-observer of the pro-democracy movement in Iran, but his research agenda moves outward from this case to explore these issues on a global scale, using case studies, comparative-historical methods, and statistical analyses. His research has been published in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Comparative Politics, Socius, and Mobilization, and has won awards from the Collective Behavior and Social Movement (CBSM), Comparative Historical Sociology, Global and Transnational Sociology, Sociology of Development, and Peace, War and Social Conflict sections of the American Sociological Association (ASA). His new book is “Popular Politics and the Path to Durable Democracy,” from Princeton University Press.
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In an age of fake news and so called “truthiness,” the world sometimes feels untethered from reality. Today’s guest uses her reporting and storytelling to ground her audience in science, even while her words reconnect us to our shared humanity and our relationship to the natural world. She’s Alanna Mitchell, this week on “Story in the Public Square.”
Mitchell is a Canadian journalist, author and playwright who works at intersection of science, art and society. Her book, “Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis,” was an international best seller that won the U.S.-based Grantham Prize for excellence in environmental journalism in 2010. She turned it into a one-woman play in 2014 and has been performing it internationally since then. The theater adaptation was nominated for a Dora award in Toronto for outstanding Indie play. Mitchell was a playwright-in-residence at The Theatre Centre while she adapted her book, “Malignant Metaphor: Confronting Cancer Myths: A Memoir” into a play. The book also won the $10,000 Lane Anderson Award for best Canadian science book written for adults in 2015. She is also the author of “The Spinning Magnet: The Force that Created the Modern World and Could Destroy It,” about the Earth’s magnetic field. Mitchell’s journalism has appeared in the New York Times’ science section, CBC’s Quirks & Quarks, National Geographic, The Guardian, GQ India, The United Church Observer and Canadian Geographic Magazine. She has also made radio documentaries for CBC and has given talks on climate change, ocean change, cancer, John Franklin’s expedition, evolution, Charles Darwin, neonic pesticides and the earth’s magnetic field.
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The American revolution had many fathers. But Stacy Schiff paints a picture of Samuel Adams—the cash-strapped publisher and political leader from Boston—as, perhaps, the essential founder whose spirit and maneuvering shaped so many of the seminal events of the revolutionary era.
Schiff is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Witches: Salem, 1692,” “Cleopatra: A Life,” which was one of the New York Times’s Top Ten Books of 2010 and won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography and was translated into 30 languages. Schiff is also the author of “Véra” (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; “Saint-Exupéry,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America,” which was the winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d’Amérique. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Among other honors, she was named a 2011 Library Lion by the New York Public Library, a Boston Public Library Literary Light in 2016, and in 2017 received the Lifetime Achievement Award in History and Biography from the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2019. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Los Angeles Times, among many other publications. Her latest book, “The Revolutionary,” was published in 2022.
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History and memory are two different things, one is built on facts and documents and the other is built on tradition, myth and politics. Ty Seidule dissects the history of the American Civil War and the legacy of the myths it spawned about the cause of the war.
Seidule retired from the U.S. Army as a brigadier general after 36 years of service. Seidule was then appointed Vice Chair of the National Commission on Base Renaming by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in 2021. He has served as Professor Emeritus of History at West Point for two decades, is a visiting professor at Hamilton College and a New American fellow. Seidule is passionate about stopping the spread of misinformation about American history, especially the Civil War. His Southern upbringing contributed to his great reverence for Robert E. Lee and a misguided understanding of the Civil War. Through years of reflection and study of history, his opinion on the issue has changed significantly and he now uses his platform to deconstruct the narrative that Lee was a hero and challenges the idea that Confederate soldiers were underdogs fighting for a noble cause. Seidule asserts that the Civil War was unequivocally about the South’s resistance to the abolishment of slavery and ignoring this history continues to cause harm. He has published numerous articles, books and videos on the topic, including his latest book, “Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause,” which was published this year.
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In 2022, the United States dealt with the Omicron surge, saw a major land war in Europe and witnessed a Supreme Court decision that reversed 50 years of precedent. Dr. Evelyn Farkas breaks down these stories and discusses the 2022 Story of the Year.
Over her three-decade career, Farkas has made a name for herself in foreign policy with a specialty in American-Russian relations. Early in her career, she worked as a human rights officer for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and was an election observer in Bosnia and Afghanistan. In 2003 she published her book “Fractured States and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, Ethiopia and Bosnia in the 1990s” detailing her experiences. Following her time abroad, she worked as a professor of international relations at the Marine Corps University. From 2008 to 2009, she served on the bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction as the executive director. Farkas has worked in both Congress and the United States Department of Defense. During the Obama administration, she was the foremost expert on Russia in the Department of Defense. She has appeared as a national security contributor and commentator on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN and more. Her writings have been featured in various publications and websites, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Daily Beast, Politico and Foreign Policy. She serves as a Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and has penned research papers and op-eds featured in most leading publications. Farkas also serves as the executive director of the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University.
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Some mysteries are never solved, but Casey Parks says some, like the one she writes about, can shed light on profound questions of gender and identity and fundamental questions about how we treat each other as human beings.
Parks is a reporter on the social issues team of the Washington Post. Throughout her career as a journalist, she has focused on stories about the LGBTQ+ community and other marginalized groups. In 2015, her story “The Pact” won first place for “Personalities” from Reporting Society of Professional Journalists, second place for Diversity Reporting for the C.B. Blethen Award and was a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. The piece detailed the journey of Kofe and Taumoe’anga, two Polynesian immigrants living in Portland, deciding between playing collegiate football and serving as missionaries for the Mormon church. “About a Boy,” Parks’ three-part series detailing the life of a transgender boy living in Washington state, was awarded third place for Explanatory Reporting in the Best of the West, second place in the National Headliner Awards for a News Series and first place by the Society for Professional Journalists for Comprehensive Coverage in 2018. Parks served as a Spencer Fellow for education reporting at Columbia University. Her pieces on education in the South have appeared in New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine and USA Today, among others. Her book “Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and a Mystery” Parks’ reflection on her life as a gay woman from a Southern family, was published this year.
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Nearly 20 people are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States every 60 seconds, more than ten million people every year. Ruth Glenn bravely shares her story of trauma, survival, and advocacy.
Glenn has dedicated her life to supporting survivors of domestic violence. She is the president and CEO of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), an organization dedicated to holding abusers accountable while protecting survivors and advocates. Before her work with the NCADV began, she worked in the Colorado Department of Human Services for 28 years and served as the director of the Domestic Violence Program in her last nine years there. Glenn is a survivor of domestic violence and has often shared her story to help enlighten others about the prevalence and development of domestic violence. She has advocated for many causes, including reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. The act “creates and supports comprehensive, cost-effective responses to domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking.” Glenn has also advocated for legislation involving firearms and domestic violence. This is clearly an important cause, given the 557 deaths due to gun-related domestic violence that have already occurred this year, according to the NCADV website’s count at the time of writing. Glenn has been a part of several domestic violence programs, provided her expertise on domestic violence survivor issues and testified before the Colorado State Legislature and the United States Congress. In October, she published her memoir “Everything I Never Dreamed: My Life Surviving and Standing Up to Domestic Violence.”
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Throughout American history, leadership has played an important role, and it continues to matter as we grapple with the lingering effect of the pandemic, intractable political disputes, and disputes about the integrity of American elections. Despite all this, David Gergen pins his hope on the public leaders who he believes can lead the country to a brighter future.
Gergen has worked as a political analyst for CNN, chief editor of U.S. News & World Report and a public affairs commentator at MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour. He has also served as a White House advisor, reaching across the political aisle working for Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. He reflected on his experiences there in his 2011 New York Times bestseller, “Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton.” Gergen won two Peabody awards as part of an election coverage team and multiple Emmy Awards for his work on political analysis teams. A graduate of Yale, he has served on the boards of both his alma mater and Duke University, as well as the boards of several non-profits, including Teach for America, The Mission Continues, The Trilateral Commission and the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School. His most recent book is “Hearts Touched with Fire: How Great Leaders are Made.”
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The threats to American democracy seem to grow every day, not from some external threat, but from within: revelations about the January 6 insurrection, gerrymandered Congressional districts and even restrictions on voting rights proposed or in place across the country. Marc Morial helps document those threats to American democracy and offers lessons about how citizens can resist them.
Morial served as mayor of New Orleans from 1994-2002. After leaving office, he became President and CEO of the National Urban League. The League was founded in 1910 to aid Black migrants fleeing from the South to the Northern states. Since then, they have grown to serve 300 communities through their 90 affiliates. Morial says the goal of the League has always been “to bring voice to those who have been locked out and left out.” Over the past 15 years, he has expanded the reach of its services and assisted in creating a framework for policies that will continue to benefit communities of color. Morial earned a bachelor’s degree in Economics and African American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and his Juris Doctorate from Georgetown University. He is a recipient of the Louisiana State Bar Association’s Pro Bono Publico Award for his work with the disadvantaged and impoverished. Additionally, he has been listed as both one of Ebony Magazine’s 100 Most Influential Black Americans and one of the Nonprofit Times’ Top 50 Nonprofit Executives. During the pandemic, Morial played an integral role in bringing attention to the needs of Black Americans and addressing the fracturing of the United States before and after January 6th. In 2020, he published “The Gumbo Coalition,” a book that reflects Morial’s time as a public figure and the lessons he learned throughout.
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Too frequently, the captions flash across the lower third of the television screen: another mass shooting; more innocent lives cut short. The debate in the following days follows a well-worn script of hopeless resignation and incensed outrage. But Mark Follman says there are techniques and methods already in use that successfully prevent mass shootings.
Follman is the national affairs editor of Mother Jones Magazine, a publication that promotes “Smart, Fearless Journalism.” His main journalistic focus since 2012 has been gun violence and mass shootings. He has written several in-depth investigative pieces on child gun deaths, mass shootings and the impact of gun violence on the economy, all of which have received a myriad of awards and acclaim. Follman also created one of the first mass shooting databases on Mother Jones, cataloging mass shootings in the United States from 1982-2022. His work has been featured in The Atlantic, The New York Times and on National Public Radio. In April of this year, Follman published “Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America.” His book chronicles the specialized teams that have been working toward the prevention of Mass shootings in the United States. “Trigger Points” has received rave reviews and gives hope to the despairing reality of mass shootings.
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Nowadays, science is often reduced to facts, data and analysis which can seem impersonal and cold. But science journalist Mark Johnson brings the human capacity for empathy to his reporting. He has become known within the industry as someone who brings great knowledge and great empathy to his scientific coverage.
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The evidence is overwhelming: the impact of COVID-19 on communities of color was out of proportion to the size of those communities in the overall American population. Dr. Yohuru Williams is among a group of scholars whose new book argues the experience with COVID is consistent with other difficult experiences in American history.
Williams is an accomplished writer, Distinguished University Chair, Professor of History and founding Director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas. His published works include “Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights Black Power and Black Panthers in New Haven,” “Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement” and “Teaching beyond the Textbook: Six Investigative Strategies.” Along with his published books, Williams has had scholarly articles printed in the American Bar Association’s “Insights on Law and Society,” “The Black Scholar,” “The Black History Bulletin” and several other journals. Williams has also made television appearances in PBS documentaries like Ken Burns’ “Jackie Robinson” and Stanley Nelson’s “The Black Panthers” and as one of the hosts of “Sound Smart” on the History Channel. He has also served as a general editor on several projects, including “The Color Line Revisited,” “The Souls of Black Folks: Centennial Reflections” and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s 2002 and 2003 Black History Month publications. Williams’ newest project is “After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America,” of which he is a contributor and co-editor.
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Often, politics can feel like a thankless and often futile undertaking. But White House chief speechwriter Cody Keenan tells his readers that occasionally, through long and sustained effort, the world moves.
Keenan began his political career as an intern and legislative aide to senator Edward M. Kennedy. He earned a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he studied speechwriting and delivery. After a speechwriting internship on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign working under White House Director of Speechwriting Jon Favreau, Keenan returned as a full-time staffer on Obama’s presidential campaign. In 2013, Keenan took the lead in writing the State of the Union Address just prior to Favreau’s departure from the White House. He became the White House Director of Speechwriting in March 2013. Among his many notable speeches, Kennan wrote Obama’s speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in 2015. An expert on politics, messaging, and current affairs, he now serves as a partner at leading speechwriting firm Fenway Strategies and teaches political speechwriting at his alma mater Northwestern University.
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For most of the last 20 years, the conversation about American national security has been focused on the threats posed by extremists. With the death of al Qaeda Leader Ayman al Zawahiri, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and rising tensions with China, Javed Ali argues that conversation has swung back to great-power competition.
Ali is an associate professor of practice at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He spent 20 years of working with national security and intelligence issues in Washington, D.C. at the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security before joining the Federal Bureau of Investigation. While at the FBI, he also held senior roles on joint duty assignments at the National Intelligence Council and the National Counterterrorism Center, and the National Security Council under the Trump Administration. Ali holds a JD from the University of Detroit School of Law, and an MA in international relations from American University. He writes and provides commentary across a number of media sites and platforms, including MSNBC, CBS, CNN, ABC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Hill, and Newsweek.
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People come from all over the world to access cutting-edge care in American hospitals. But Linda Villarosa describes a different experience for Black Americans, who she says “live sicker, and die quicker” than their white compatriots.
Villarosa is a journalist, author, editor, novelist and educator. A contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, where she covers race, inequality and health. Her 2018 cover story, “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis,” was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. She has covered the toll Covid-19 has taken on black communities in America and the environmental justice movement in Philadelphia in 2020 and wrote about life expectancy in Chicago in 2021. Villarosa previously edited the health pages for the New York Times, working on health coverage for Science Times and for the newspaper at large. She was also a two-time executive editor of Essence Magazine where she wrote or edited a number of award-winning articles. She is the author or co-author of three books, including “Body & Soul: The Black Women’s Guide to Physical Health and Emotional Well-Being,” her first novel, “Passing for Black,” which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, and “Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation,” which was published in June 2022. Villarosa was a journalism fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and is an associate professor and journalist in residence at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. She also teaches reporting, writing and Black Studies at The City College of New York in Harlem.
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Indigenous artists often straddle a space created by white anthropologists between art and craft. Cannupa Hanska Luger grapples with that dichotomy. Creating art from tradition that, in its time, was purely practical. And seeing his own contemporary activism viewed as art when it was, in fact, protest.
Luger is a multidisciplinary artist and an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold—Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota. Through installations and social collaboration, Luger communicates stories about 21st-century indigeneity with critical cultural analysis and respect for the diverse materials, environments, and communities he engages. He lectures and produces large-scale projects around the globe and his works are in many public collections. Luger is a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, recipient of the 2021 United States Artists Fellowship Award for Craft and was named a Grist 50 Fixer for 2021, a list which includes emerging leaders in climate, sustainability, and equity who are creating change across the nation. He is a 2020 Creative Capital Fellow, a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, the recipient the 2020 A Blade Of Grass Artist Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art and the recipient of the Center For Crafts inaugural Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship for 2020. He is the recipient of a 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grants, a 2019 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Honoree and the recipient of the Museum of Arts and Design’s 2018 inaugural Burke Prize.
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The social determinants of health—how living conditions, family life, poverty, homelessness and other factors affect human health—have emerged as key factors in understanding health outcomes. Dr. Maria Raven shines a critical light on the complexity of cases she sees every day in one major city’s emergency room.
Raven is a practicing emergency medicine physician and health services researcher and is the Chief of Emergency Medicine at UCSF and a Vice Chair in the UCSF Department of Emergency Medicine. She co-directs the Section of Social Emergency Medicine and Health Equity and is on faculty at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. Maria researches and speaks locally and nationally about caring for complex populations, frequent emergency department users, and the link between homelessness and health. She has published and peer-reviewed extensively on these and other topics. A graduate of UC Berkeley and the Oregon Health and Sciences University for her MH/MPH, she completed her residency training and Master’s in Clinical Research at the NYU-Bellevue Hospital Center. She is co-editor of the first Social Emergency Medicine textbook and works on multiple funded initiatives to address social and behavioral needs in emergency departments including emergency department-initiated treatment for alcohol use disorder. Since March 2020, she has also focused on emergency department operations/preparedness in the face of COVID-19, and related research including a CDC/NIOSH-funded study on N95 reuse.
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When Russian forces invaded Ukraine earlier this year, Dr. Michael Fine was outraged—like a lot of Americans. So he traveled to see first-hand the human cost of this war.
Dr. Michael Fine serves as the Chief Health Strategist for the city of Central Falls, R.I. and as a family physician with a practice in Rhode Island. He is the author of several books, including “Health Care Revolt: How to Organize, Build a Health Care System, and Resuscitate Democracy—All at the Same Time,” published in 2018, “Abundance,” a novel about love, war and redemption, based on his experience as a volunteer during the Liberian Civil War, published in 2019, “Rhode Island Stories,” published in 2021, among others. Dr. Fine’s career as both a family physician and manager in the field of healthcare has been devoted to healthcare reform and the care of underserved populations. Before his confirmation as Director of Health, Dr. Fine was the Medical Program Director at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections, with a healthcare unit serving 20,000 people a year and a staff of over 85 physicians, psychiatrists, mental health workers, nurses, and other health professionals. He was a founder and Managing Director of HealthAccessRI, the nation’s first statewide direct primary care organization, which made prepaid primary care available to people without employer-provided health insurance. Dr. Fine founded the Scituate Health Alliance, a community-based, population-focused non-profit organization, which made Scituate the first community in the United States to provide primary medical and dental care to all town residents. He also convened and facilitated the Primary Care Leadership Council, a statewide organization that represented 75 percent of Rhode Island’s primary care physicians and practices.
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Of all the hashtag social movements, #MeToo has proven among the most enduring—for its truth, for the power imbalance it revealed, and because so many women had the courage to speak out. Winnie M Li told her story in her first novel. Now, in her second novel, she tells another about appearance, reality, and the facades that dominate public life, whether in the film industry or at the corner shop.
Li is an author and activist who has worked in the creative industries over three continents. Taiwanese-American and raised in New Jersey, Li studied Folklore and Mythology at Harvard, and later Irish Literature as a George Mitchell Scholar. Since then, she has written for travel guidebooks, produced independent feature films, programmed for film festivals, and developed eco-tourism projects and now writes across a range of media, including fiction, theatre, journalism, and memoir. Her debut novel, “Dark Chapter,” is a fictional retelling of her real-life stranger rape in Belfast, from both victim and perpetrator perspectives. It won The Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize in 2017, was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and shortlisted for The Author’s Club Best First Novel Award. It has been translated into ten languages and Li is currently adapting it for the screen. Her forthcoming second novel, “Complicit,” was sold in a six-figure pre-empt to Orion Fiction, and later, in a heated five-way auction to Emily Bestler at Atria Books for U.S. rights. Li is also Co-Founder of the Clear Lines Festival, the UK’s first-ever festival addressing sexual assault and consent through the arts and discussion. Her ongoing doctoral research at the London School of Economics explores media engagement by rape survivors as a form of activism. She has delivered over 150 public talks and appeared in TEDx London, The Guardian, The Mail on Sunday, The Times, The Independent, The LA Review of Books, The Chicago Tribune, The Irish Times, BBC World News, Sky News, Channel 4, and BBC Woman’s Hour, among other media outlets. She has an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland, in recognition of her writing and activism.
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We grow up being educated on the power of science to explain the physical world. But Dr. Elena Conis offers a more complex view of the role of science in public life—and the stories and understanding it offers all of us as we grapple with everything from pesticides, to vaccines, and climate change.
Conis is a writer and historian of medicine, public health and the environment and an affiliate of Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society and the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Prior to joining the Graduate School of Journalism, she was a professor of history and the Mellon Fellow in Health and Humanities at Emory University. She was also award-winning health columnist for the Los Angeles Times, where she wrote the “Esoterica Medica,” “Nutrition Lab,” and “Supplements” columns. Conis’ current research focuses on scientific controversies, science denial, and the public understanding of science, and has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine, and the Science History Institute. Her first book, “Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization,” received the Arthur J. Viseltear Award from the American Public Health Association and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and a Science Pick of the Week by the journal Nature. Her latest book is “How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall and Toxic Return of DDT.” She holds a Ph.D. in the history of health sciences from UCSF, master’s degrees in journalism and public health from Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree in biology from Columbia University.
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The long arc of history bends towards greater and more complex levels of cooperation. But Jonathan Haidt says that over the last 10 years American society has become ever more fragmented—all thanks to the rise of social media.
Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a social psychologist whose research focuses on morality and its emotional foundations, cultural variations, and developmental course. He began his career studying the negative moral emotions, like disgust, shame, and vengeance, then to the understudied positive moral emotions, such as admiration, awe, and moral elevation. As the co-developer of Moral Foundations Theory, and of the research site “YourMorals.org,” where he uses his research to help people understand and respect the moral motives of people with whom they disagree. At NYU-Stern, he is applying his research on moral psychology to business ethics, asking how companies can structure and run themselves in ways that will be resistant to ethical failures. Haidt was named a “top 100 global thinker” in 2012 by Foreign Policy magazine, and one of the 65 “World Thinkers of 2013” by Prospect magazine. He is the author of “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom,” “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion” and “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” two of which were New York Times best sellers.
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Caring for a sick or aging loved one can be an uncertain journey filled with every emotion—from love and devotion to anger and frustration. Dave Iverson pulls back the curtain on the decade he spent caring for his elderly mother to offer a modern love story with insights and meaning for anyone who is a caregiver or anyone who has ever loved.
Iverson is a writer, documentary film producer, director and retired broadcast journalist. He was 59, he moved in with his 95-year-old mother who could no longer care for herself. His new memoir, “Winter Stars: An Elderly Mother, an Aging Son and Life’s Final Journey,” tells the story of the 10-year caregiving odyssey they shared until her passing at the age of 105. Iverson has produced and reported more than 20 documentary specials for PBS, including the Frontline film, “My Father, My Brother and Me” which explored his family saga with Parkinson’s disease. He has served as a special correspondent to the PBS NewsHour and hosted local PBS and NPR programs for 35 years at Wisconsin Public Broadcasting and at KQED San Francisco. Iverson is also a founding member of The Michael J. Fox Foundation’s Patient Council. He is the recipient of a national Emmy, four regional Emmys and numerous film festival citations.
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Infectious disease has shaped the course of human history—and, as the last couple of years remind us, it continues to do so. Vidya Krishnan puts the focus on more than just the viruses and bacteria that cause illness, she turns our attention to societal factors like race, gender, and class to understand the anti-science rhetoric and politics that shape so much of the modern world and limit the global response to disease.
Vidya Krishnan is a writer and an award-winning journalist who has been reporting on medical science for the last 20 years. Based in Goa, India, she has written for the Atlantic, the LA Times, The Hindu, as their health and science editor, and for the British Medical Journal. Her first book, “Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped our History,” traces the history of tuberculosis, from its origins as a haunting mystery in the slums of 19th-century New York to its modern reemergence that now threatens populations around the world. Krishnan details the folk remedies made way for scientific understanding of tuberculosis and its cure in the West and the disease’s remarkable ability to adapt, aided by authoritarian government, science denialism and medical apartheid. “Phantom Plague” was published in February 2022.
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Food is central to the daily existence of Americans, whether we are growing it, shopping for it, preparing it, or consuming it. Dr. Joseph C. Ewoodzie, Jr. argues that, for many, food intersects with race and class to help form our identity as individuals.
Ewoodzie is an associate professor of sociology and the Vann Professor of Racial Justice at Davidson College. He uses qualitative research to examine how marginalized populations in urban areas make sense of inequalities in their everyday lives and ethnographic methods to investigate how those same populations interpret their social selves and the boundaries that both constrain and enable them. Ewoodzie has used both music and food as a lens to understand the cultural dynamics of African American life in urban settings. His most recent book, “Getting Something to Eat in Jackson: Race, Class, and Food in the American South,” paints a vivid portrait of African American life in the urban south, using food to explore the complex interactions of race and class. His first book, “Break Beats in the Bronx: Revisiting Hip Hop’s Early Years,” combines historical and sociological methods to examine symbolic boundaries and tell the creation story of hip hop. Ewoodzie was awarded the 2021 C. Wright Mills Award for “Getting Something to Eat in Jackson,” a distinction awarded annually by the Society for the Study of Social Problems for the book that “best exemplifies outstanding social science research and a great understanding of the individual and society.”
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In 2021 online video games produced more than $180 billion in revenue for more than 2.8 billion users. Dr. Jessica White warns that hidden in all of that cash and among all of those users are extremists who encourage and often inspire real-world violence.
White is a Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute who works in their Terrorism and Conflict group. Her research expertise encompasses counterterrorism and preventing and countering violent extremism policy and programming. She also focuses on far-right extremism and terrorism, security policy, gender, and terrorism in the media and online. White recently published research on the impact of the pandemic and other global events on extremism, the transferability of counterterrorism frameworks across the threat spectrum, as well on the importance of applying a gender lens to counterterrorism and preventing and countering violent extremism approaches. She is a co-founder of the Extremism and Gaming Research Network and an Associate Fellow at the International Centre for Counterterrorism.
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In 2021 online video games produced more than $180 billion in revenue for more than 2.8 billion users. Dr. Jessica White warns that hidden in all of that cash and among all of those users are extremists who encourage and often inspire real-world violence.
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Noses—and their ability to detect smell—may not be as celebrated in words and songs as our other human senses—but Saskia Wilson-Brown says scents tell stories, too.
Wilson-Brown began her career in music video and production design, going on to serve as festival co-director for Los Angeles’ seminal Silver Lake Film Festival, launching the festival’s visionary media arm, MP4Fest, in 2005. She went on to work as an independent producer and a film distribution strategist, producing events including the Open Video Alliance Filmmaker Summit, several of Lance Weiler’s DIY Days events, and the TEDActive Innovation Lab. Wilson-Brown founded The Institute for Art and Olfaction in 2012. A 501(c)3 non-profit arts organization, the institute is devoted to experimentation and cross-media projects with a focus on scent. In 2013, she created and launched one of the institute’s flagship programs, The Art and Olfaction Awards, an international, blindly judged awards mechanism for independent and artisan perfumers, and experimental practitioners with scent. In 2020, she launched the institute’s online division, allowing it to continue its mission to facilitate access to the tools and information of perfumery, while reaching an even wider audience through online education. In 2019 and 2020, Wilson-Brown was a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art in London, teaching about scent-making as a creative practice in the MA Fashion program. She is currently producing a documentary about ownership and historic reconstruction in the field of perfumery, while pursuing a Ph.D. about the relationship between perfume, access and power. She earned her BA from the University of California, Berkeley and her MFA at Central Saint Martin’s College in London.
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Russia’s war in Ukraine has killed thousands while displacing millions of Ukrainians. For many Western journalists, the war has made it untenable to report from Russia amid a crack-down on independent journalism. Anton Troianovski has seen Russia up close, reporting there first for The Washington Post and, now, as the bureau chief for The New York Times.
Anton Troianovski has lived in Moscow since January 2018 and has traveled to three Russian-controlled disputed territories, from Crimea to the Kuril Islands, delving into the Kremlin’s geopolitical gamesmanship. He previously spent nine years at The Wall Street Journal and was based in Berlin from 2013 to 2017 to cover two German elections, two Olympic Games, the Ukraine crisis, migration and populist politics in Europe. Troianovski began his journalism career as a photographer for the Webster-Kirkwood Times in Missouri. He was born in Moscow and grew up in Heidelberg, Germany, and in St. Louis. He holds a degree in social studies from Harvard University, where he wrote a senior thesis on the Kremlin’s push for influence in cyberspace.
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It’s been said that truth is the first casualty of war. As Russia wages its war in Ukraine, Darren Linvill sounds the alarm that social media, which has long had its own problems with the truth, is again a platform for Russian disinformation.
Linvill is a social media forensics expert and Associate Professor at Clemson University. He investigates data messaging and the impacts of inauthentic behavior on social media networks, exploring the exploitation of trust and social capital in social networks. He also examines misinformation and disinformation in the context of social media forensics and data monitoring. He has collaborated with social media companies and government entities to expose fake accounts and counterfeit messaging. Linvill’s research also examines social media users’ connections with troll farms or robots disguised as other users that disseminate propaganda to promote specific ideas and encourage actions or reactions. Linvill uses the Social Media Listening Center at Clemson University to access data and monitor and analyze a range of topics including the spread of white supremacy to the influence of foreign states on American conversations. In 2020, he and colleague Patrick Warren partnered with the Commission on Presidential Debates to monitor social media conversations around the debates and help safeguard the 2020 election. They have also worked with Twitter and Facebook to suspend hundreds of social media accounts they have attributed to a range of bad actors, including the Russian Internet Research Agency. Linvill has published many articles on misinformation and has been a contributor to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, Inside Higher Ed, The State, CNN, NPR, ABC, NBC, WFAE and others.
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Democratic backsliding isn’t limited to weak governments abroad. Rachel Kleinfeld warns about the dangers facing American democracy, including the growing acceptance of intimidation and even political violence in some communities.
Rachel Kleinfeld is a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she focuses on issues of rule of law, security, and governance in post-conflict countries, fragile states, and states in transition. Her work bridges comparative and U.S. democracies through her service on the National Task Force on Election Crises and as the former CEO of the Truman National Security Project. As the founding CEO of the Truman National Security Project, she spent nearly a decade leading a movement of national security, political, and military leaders working to promote people and policies that strengthen security, stability, rights, and human dignity in America and around the world. In 2011, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton appointed Kleinfeld to the Foreign Affairs Policy Board, which advises the secretary of state quarterly, a role she served through 2014. Kleinfeld has consulted on rule of law reform for the World Bank, the European Union, the OECD, the Open Society Institute, and other institutions, and has briefed multiple government agencies in the United States and abroad. She is the author of “Advancing the Rule of Law Abroad: Next Generation Reform,” which was chosen by Foreign Affairs magazine as one of the best foreign policy books of 2012. She has also co-authored “Let There Be Light: Electrifying the Developing World with Markets and Distributed Generation.”
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Traumatic brain injuries can have lifelong impacts on cognitive and psychological function. Dr. Eve Valera studies these injuries among survivors of domestic violence and says they have serious mental health impacts.
Valera is an associate professor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a research scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital. She has been studying domestic violence for nearly 25 years and is recognized internationally for her work in understanding the effects of traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) sustained from intimate partner violence. Her current work uses a range of methodologies to understand the neural, cognitive, and psychological consequences of such TBIs. She published one of the first studies examining the prevalence TBIs in the context of intimate partner violence and their relationship to cognitive and psychological functioning. Valera has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, Harvard Medical School Center of Excellence in Women’s Health and the Rappaport Research Fellowship in Neurology to support her work. She continues to disseminate her research at through lectures for academics and other justice-involved personnel, at police departments and for front-line staff for intimate partner violence support and shelter, and to women with lived experience.
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Cartoons communicate ideas in ways words cannot. Canadian artist and humorist John Atkinson shares his unique take on the world through his cartoon series, “Wrong Hands” creations.
Born and raised in Ottawa, Canada, John Atkinson has been writing and drawing his cartoon series, “Wrong Hands,” for over ten years. After graduating from the University of Ottawa with a degree in fine arts, Atkinson began his comic series for children. After posting his work for a wider audience, “Wrong Hands,” online, it was quickly embraced by a loyal following worldwide, with nearly eight million fans visiting the site. In addition to being syndicated on Andrews McMeel’s site GoComics, “Wrong Hands” was featured weekly in TIME magazine for over two years. In 2018, his incredibly popular series “abridged classics” was expanded into a book and published by HarperCollins. The book featured dozens of new abridgments and unique illustrations for both domestic and international markets. “Wrong Hands” has regularly appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and textbooks worldwide, while several of his comics have been featured on major online sites including Upworthy, Bored Panda and Literary Hub, and Atkinson has collaborated with Chanel Paris, Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Janis Ian, and the Quevedo Institute of Humour Arts in Madrid, Spain. He is the author of “Abridged Classics: Brief Summaries of Books You Were Supposed to Read but Probably Didn’t.”
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A decade ago, social media could be seen as a well-spring of democratic innovation and potential. Events of the last six years may have changed the public’s perception on that score, but Katie Harbath warns that social media platforms have much more work to do to protect democracy in the United States and around the world.
Harbath is a global leader who works at the intersection of elections, democracy, and tech. Most recently, she was a public policy director at Facebook where she was credited with building out and leading a global team responsible for managing elections over the course of 10 years. She played a significant role in building another team of over 30 people that worked to engage governments and elected officials from around the world at the local, regional, and national levels, in using Facebook and Instagram to connect and engage with constituents. She worked closely with product development teams to deploy civic engagement and election integrity products, including transparency features for political ads, developing and implementing election policies, building teams to support government, political, and advocacy partners, and working with policymakers to shape election regulations online. Harbath was involved in this work in major elections for every country around the globe, including the United States, India, Brazil, United Kingdom, European Union, Canada, Philippines, and Mexico. Before joining Facebook, Harbath held senior strategic digital roles at the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, DCI Group and multiple campaigns. She sits on the boards of the National Conference on Citizenship, Democracy Works and the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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Tyranny comes in many forms, but its central elements of violence, lost glories, and corruption seem to repeat. Ruth Ben-Ghiat warns that autocrats have risen frequently from democracy over the last century by relying on a simple playbook that has proved as durable as it is menacing.
Ben-Ghiat is a historian and commentator on fascism, authoritarian leaders, and propaganda and the threats they present to democracies. She brings historical perspective to her analyses of current events on MSNBC Opinion Columnist and author or editor of six books, with over 100 op-eds and essays in CNN, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post. Her insight into the authoritarian playbook has made her an expert source for television, radio, podcasts, and online events around the globe. She grew up in Pacific Palisades, California, where many intellectuals who fled Nazism resettled, which sparked her interest in the subject. Ben-Ghiat teaches History and Italian Studies at New York University and an Advisor to Protect Democracy and her work has been supported by Fulbright, Guggenheim, and other fellowships. Her books “Fascist Modernities” and “Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema” detail what happens to societies when authoritarian governments take hold and explore the appeal of strongmen to collaborators and followers.
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So much of our modern life is built upon simplifying the complex. We reduce social interactions to likes and follows on social media and dilute the “news” in our favorite echo chambers. But Azar Nafisi warns that life is not simple and the complexity found in great literature is ultimately liberating of the mind and essential to the health of our democracy.
Dr. Azar Nafisi is best known as the author of the national bestseller “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books,” a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran and how it affected one university professor and her students. Born and raised in Iran, she came to the United States to earn her Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma during the 1970s. Afterward, Nafisi returned to Iran and taught English at the University of Tehran. In 1981, she was expelled for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil and did not resume teaching until 1987. She taught at the Free Islamic University and Allameh Tabatabai, and went on to a fellowship at Oxford University, teaching and conducting a series of lectures on culture and the important role of Western literature and culture in Iran after the Revolution in 1979. Nafisi returned to the United States in 1997—earning national respect and international recognition for advocating on behalf of Iran’s intellectuals, youth, and especially young women. Nafisi was a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC, where she taught aesthetics, culture, and literature, and taught courses on the relation between culture and politics. She also served as Director of The Dialogue Project & Cultural Conversations there. She has lectured and written extensively in English and Persian on the political implications of literature and culture, as well as the human rights of the Iranian women and girls and the important role they play in the process of change for pluralism and open society in Iran. She has been consulted on issues related to Iran and human rights both by the policymakers and various human rights organizations across the world.
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America is a study in contrasts: from the pomp and circumstance of a presidential inauguration to the reality of hunger across the land, Maddie McGarvey documents life in the United States as only a photojournalist can.
Maddie McGarvey is a freelance photographer based in Columbus, Ohio. She graduated from Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication in 2012 with a degree in Photojournalism, interned at the San Francisco Chronicle in 2011, and worked as a staff photographer at the Burlington Free Press in Vermont before returning to the Midwest. In 2014 she was named an Emerging Talent for Getty Reportage and in 2015, she was selected as one of Magnum’s 30 Photographers under 30. In 2016, she was chosen as one of TIME magazine's 51 Instagram Photographers to follow in the USA and was recognized by Picture of the Year International for her campaign work. She works for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Time, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, AARP, NPR, ESPN and her work has appeared in Mother Jones Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, and FiveThirtyEight, among others.
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The 2022 Academy Award nominations are out. Pete Hammond says they celebrate a remarkable array of films exploring topics as diverse as toxic masculinity and environmental catastrophe.
Hammond is widely considered to be one of the preeminent awards analysts for both film and television and is the Chief Film Critic for Deadline Hollywood, where he has also been the Awards Columnist, covering the Oscar and Emmy seasons for the past seven years. For the past eight years, he has been Awards Editor and Columnist for Deadline and previously covered a similar column for the Los Angeles Times. He has also served as a frequent contributor to Variety and as a film critic for Boxoffice magazine, Backstage magazine, Maxim magazine and Movieline. He is in his eighteenth year as host of the “KCET Cinema Series” in Los Angeles, and UCLA extension’s “Sneak Preview” for the past eleven years. He also hosts the TV series, “Must See Movies,” which showcases classic films every Friday night and Saturday afternoon on KCET. He is the recipient of five Emmy nominations for his television writing and is the winner of the 1996 Publicists Guild of America’s Press Award. He is the second journalist in the organization’s 50-year history to receive the award twice, winning again in 2013. He also served on the Board of Governors for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences representing writers for six years.
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The line between what is right and what is just isn’t always clear. Laura Coates is a former federal prosecutor who describes how she reconciled ideas of justice, race, the role of law enforcement in our society, and her own role in the U.S. justice system.
Laura Coates is a CNN senior legal analyst, SiriusXM host and author of “Just Pursuit: A Black Prosecutor’s Fight for Fairness.” A former federal prosecutor, Coates served as Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia and a Trial Attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, specializing in the enforcement of voting rights throughout the United States. As a civil rights attorney, she traveled throughout the nation supervising local and national elections and led investigations into allegations of unconstitutional voting practices. In private practice, Coates was an intellectual property litigator with expertise in First Amendment and media law. She is a graduate of Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, and the University of Minnesota Law School.
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It’s one thing to say that politics has always been a tough business, but it’s another to confront the reality that public insults have become more frequent, more intense, and more personal. Ruth Colker explains this is not an accident, but often part of intentional efforts to hijack public issues.
Colker is a leading scholar in the areas of Constitutional Law and Disability Discrimination and currently serves as the Heck Faust Memorial Chair in Constitutional Law at the Moritz College of Law at the Ohio State University. She is an award-winning author of 16 books and has published more than 50 articles in law journals including the “Boston University Law Review,” “Columbia Law Journal,” “Georgetown Law Journal,” “Harvard Law Review,” “Michigan Law Journal,” “University of Pennsylvania Law Review,” “University of Virginia Law Review” and “Yale Law Journal. Her work has been cited by the United States Supreme Court in Tennessee v. Lane, 541 U.S. 509, 527 n.15 (2004), which cited Colker and Milani, “The Post-Garrett World: Insufficient State Protection Against Disability Discrimination,” 53 Ala. L. Rev. 1075 (2002). In 2014, she was appointed as a disability expert to help resolve a consent decree between the United States Department of Justice and the Law School Admissions Council. Her work helped change the way the LSAC determines whether applicants are entitled to testing accommodations on the LSAT. She has also served on the National Board of the ACLU since 2013. Colker is also an innovator in the classroom and has studied the effectiveness of an ungraded formative assessment in first-year classes. Before joining the faculty at Ohio State, Colker taught at Tulane University, the University of Toronto, the University of Pittsburgh, and in the Women’s Studies graduate program at George Washington University. She also spent four years working as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, where she received two awards for outstanding performance.
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For one generation of Americans, civil and sectarian violence in Northern Ireland was brought into our homes through regular reporting on the nightly news. For a younger generation, it was brought home in the powerful lyrics of the band known as U2. Tom Kelly and Kevin Hasson of the Bogside Artists are creating street art and murals that remember that era in Northern Ireland’s history.
Tom Kelly and Kevin Hasson are artists and members of The Bogside Artists, best-known for their outdoor murals called “The People’s Gallery” in the Bogside neighborhood of Derry. Kelly’s brother William, now deceased, was the third member of The Bogside Artists. Kelly is a native of Derry, Northern Ireland. He leads a Celtic Christian community in the heart of the Bogside that provides spiritual support for those affected by the “Troubles.” He views art as a powerful tool to bring Protestants and Catholics together, using it to assuage religious conflict long before the cultural elite of Northern Ireland recognized its cathartic and healing power. Coming from a family talented in visual and musical arts, Kevin Hasson’s art has been influenced by his extensive travels. Apart from his work with the Bogside Artists, he painted many murals across Germany during his twelve-year residency in Frankfurt. Hasson’s boyhood experiences as a member of The International Voluntary Service in Calcutta, India helped him realize the ubiquity of social injustice and its roots.
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It’s not much of an exaggeration to say the internet changed all of us and everything around us. Just look at the way we communicate, earn money, date, entertain, and inform ourselves. Pamela Paul chronicles the things we’ve lost in the process—the charm that comes with some uncertainty and the romance of the time before the internet.
Paul is the editor of The New York Times Book Review and oversees all book coverage at The New York Times, which she joined in 2011 as the children’s books editor. She is also the host of the weekly “Book Review” podcast for The Times. She is the author and editor of “How to Raise a Reader” with coauthor Maria Russo, “My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books,” “Plot Ensues,” “The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony,” “Pornified,” “Parenting, Inc.,” “By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life,” and “Rectangle Time,” her picture book for children. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and Vogue. She is a former contributor to Time and former correspondent for The Economist and has been a columnist for the Styles section of The Times, Worth magazine and The Economist. Her latest book, “100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet,” was published in October 2021.
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Some of the most popular and profitable stories today are based on characters created and developed by authors and artists at Marvel Comics. Douglas Wolk has read all 27,000 issues to unpack the hopes, anxieties, and cultural aspirations in their half-million pages.
Douglas Wolk is a pop culture critic, teacher and writer, and the author of “All of the Marvels,” “Reading Comics” and “33 1/3: Live at the Apollo.” He’s written about comics and music for magazines, newspapers and websites including Time, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Believer, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Slate and Pitchfork. Wolk has been a National Arts Journalism Fellow at Columbia University and a Fellow in the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program. His other projects have included the comic book “Judge Dredd: Mega-City Two” and the record label “Dark Beloved Cloud.” Wolk has lectured and moderated panels at Comic-Con International, the Experience Music Project Pop Conference, the Center for Cartoon Studies, New York Comic-Con, Rose City Comic Con, Emerald City Comic Con, WonderCon, and elsewhere. He has appeared in the documentaries “Marvel’s Behind the Mask,” “Cartoon College,” “Ink: Alter Egos Exposed” and “Jandek on Corwood.” He’s been honored with the Will Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book, the Harvey Award for Best Biographical, Historical or Journalistic Presentation, and the Krill Tro Thargo for Service to Thrill-Power. Currently, he teaches at Portland State University and hosts the podcast “Voice of Latveria.” His latest book, “All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told,” was published in October 2021, receiving critical acclaim.
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The rise of instant updates from today’s online news sources have left many to regard the local newspaper as a thing of the past. But Atr Cullen describes how he and his family have kept Iowa’s Storm Lake Times newspaper alive and prosperous in the digital age.
Cullen is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and editor of The Storm Lake Times, a family-run weekly newspaper in Storm Lake, Iowa. He has made it his life’s work to ask the big questions, speak truth to power, and share the struggles and successes of his community. Part cultural history, part memoir, his book, “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper” explores the themes of family, community, immigration, and the Heartland’s turbulent history and promising progressive future. It is both a story of cultural upheaval and loss and a story of successes and surprising sources of optimism for those who still believe in the promise of America. The small town of Storm Lake is vividly described as a diverse, growing community enhanced by immigration from Mexico, Laos and other countries. It is a story of how immigration revitalizes America culturally and spiritually, and how a small newspaper plays its role in investigating, explaining and sharing the life of the community around it. “Storm Lake” was published in 2018.
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In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw war coming with Hitler’s Germany even as he reconciled the isolationism of American politics with his own internationalist instinct. Ambassador David McKean tells the story of FDR’s personal reliance on his hand-picked ambassadors to Europe in the critical years before America’s entry into World War II.
David McKean served as United States Ambassador to Luxembourg from 2016-2017. He currently serves as a Consensus member at the American Security Project and is a Visiting Distinguished Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Previously, he was the Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State, beginning in February of 2013. There, he also served as a Senior Advisor to Secretary of State Clinton for the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. He is the recipient of the State Department’s Distinguished Honor Award and Superior Honor Award. McKean spent two decades working in the United States Congress: serving as chief of staff to Senator John Kerry from 1999 to 2008 and chief of staff to Representative Joseph P. Kennedy II from 1993 to 1994. He served as staff director for the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2009 to 2010, and minority staff director for the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations from 1998 to 1999. McKean was a key player in laying the groundwork for the Senator Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004 and was a co-chairman of the Senator’s presidential transition team. In 1997 and 1998, he served as the Minority Staff Director for the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. McKean is the author of four books on American political history: “Friends in High Places” with Douglas Frantz, “Tommy the Cork,” “The Great Decision” with Cliff Sloan, and “Watching Darkness Fall: FDR, His Ambassadors, and the Rise of Adolf Hitler,” which was published in 2021.
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Most Americans want to believe that the United States of America as a bastion of liberal democracy. But Michael Paul Williams is a columnist whose work exposes the illiberal elements in American society, including white supremacy, banning books, and vigilantism.
Michael Paul Williams is a native of Richmond and longtime columnist at the Richmond Times Dispatch. Williams joined The Times Dispatch in 1982 and covered local government for a decade before becoming the paper’s first Black columnist a decade later. His columns have never shied away from sensitive public issues, including race. His unflinching truth telling has secured numerous honors; among them a Nieman Fellowship and in 2021, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his series of columns that changed the conversation about race and remembrance in the former capital of the Confederacy following George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Williams was named the 2021 recipient of the Pell Center Prize for Story in the Public Square, which honors storytellers whose work has a meaningful, positive impact on the public dialogue.
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According to the CDC, more than 588,000 Americans have died from opioid overdose since 1999. Danny Strong tells the story of that epidemic in “Dopesick,” a new series on Hulu.
Danny Strong is one of the most prolific TV and big-screen talents today, with more than 75 acting, screenwriting, producing, directing, show running and creating credits, three directing credits, according to IMDB. For writing, directing and producing, he is best known for “Recount,” “Game Change,” Lee Daniels’ “The Butler,” and “Mockingjay,” the two-part Hunger Games finale. He is also known for the 2019 TV series, “Proven Innocent” and the 2017 film, “Rebel in the Rye,” which he directed. Strong is co-creator of the smash hit, “Empire.” His acting career begin in 1994, when he was 20, with a role on “Saved by Bell: The New Class.” His most famous roles since then have been as characters on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Gilmore Girls,” “Mad Men,” “Justified and Billions.” Strong’s “Game Change,” the 2012 HBO production about the 2008 presidential election, won a Golden Globe, a primetime Emmy, a Writers Guild of America Award, and a Producers Guild of America Award. His 2008 HBO film “Recount,” about the 2000 presidential election, won an Emmy. He has won an NAACP Image Award for Empire and been nominated for a Critics Choice Award and a Golden Globe for the show. Strong was the recipient of the 2014 Pell Center Prize for Story in the Public Square. Most recently, he is the creator and an executive producer of “Dopesick,” the Hulu eight-part mini-series, of which he directed an episode.
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The planet is warming. This isn’t conjecture and it isn’t political: it’s the overwhelming conclusion of climate scientists from all over the world. Now, for a long time, the debate has been over whether and how we mitigate the threats posed by climate change. But Alice C. Hill warns that debate needs to be expanded to include a discussion about the things we must do to adapt human existence to a warmer planet.
Hill is the David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. Her work focuses on the risks, consequences, and responses associated with climate change. Hill previously served as special assistant to President Barack Obama and senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff where she led the development of national policy to build resilience to catastrophic risks, including climate change and biological threats. Her coauthored book, “Building a Resilient Tomorrow,” was published in 2019. In 2020, Yale University and the Op-Ed Project awarded her the Public Voices Fellowship on the Climate Crisis. Hill’s new book, “The Fight for Climate After COVID-19,” was published in September 2021. In 2009, Hill served as Senior Counselor to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in which she led the formulation of DHS’s first-ever climate adaptation plan and the development of strategic plans regarding catastrophic biological and chemical threats, including pandemics. While at the Department of Homeland Security, Hill founded and led the internationally recognized anti-human trafficking initiative, the Blue Campaign. Earlier in her career, Hill served as supervising judge on both the superior and municipal courts in Los Angeles and as chief of the white-collar crime prosecution unit in the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney’s office. The Department of Justice awarded her its highest accolade, the John Marshall Award for Outstanding Legal Achievement.
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2021 is the second year of the pandemic, and it began, almost immediately, with a violent insurrection at the United States Capitol. Dr. Evelyn Farkas helps us put the big stories of the last 12 months in context even as we name the top story of 2021.
Dr. Farkas has three decades of experience working on national security and foreign policy in the U.S. executive and legislative branches, the private sector and for international organizations overseas. In 2019-2020, she ran to represent New York’s 17th Congressional District in the House of Representatives. She is currently President of Farkas Global Strategies. She was previously a Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Atlantic Council and a National Security Contributor for NBC/MSNBC. From 2012 to 2015, Farkas served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the Balkans, and the Caucasus and conventional arms control. From 2010 to 2012 she served as Senior Advisor to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe and Special Advisor to the Secretary of Defense for the NATO Summit. Prior to that, she was Executive Director of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism and senior fellow at the American Security Project. From 2001 to 2008, she served as a Professional Staff Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee responsible for the Asia-Pacific region, the Western Hemisphere, Special Operations Command and policy issues including combatting terrorism, and export control. From 1997-2001 Farkas was a professor of international relations at the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College. She served 1996-97 in Bosnia with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). She has published numerous journal articles and opinion pieces, in addition to her book, “Fractured States and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, Ethiopia, and Bosnia in the 1990s.”
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The demands society places on women—the choices they make about their lives, their relationships, and their appearance—can be overwhelming. Lindsay Crouse exposes those expectations to the bright light of day and forces all of us to consider our own roles in them.
Crouse is a film producer and senior editor at The New York Times. A Rhode Island native, she graduated from Harvard University, where she competed in both track and field and cross-country sports events. She helped produce the 2017 documentary 4.1 Miles, which won an award at the 2017 Peabody awards. Crouse first wrote about the female athletes who wanted to become mothers and faced pressure to continue competing and training that would jeopardize their health and pregnancy outcomes in October 2014. In May 2019, she reported on Nike’s lack of maternity support for the female athletes it sponsors. She produced a video interview and wrote an op-ed, about distance runner Mary Cain, entitled “I Was the Fastest Girl in America, Until I Joined Nike,” which was critical of both Nike and its chief coach, Alberto Salazar, for the grueling training methods and negative culture that profoundly affected Cain’s mental and physical health. Following the publication of the article, Salazar was permanently suspended from participating in track and field events by the U.S. Center for SafeSport, a nonprofit that protect athletes from sexual, physical and emotional abuse.
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There are some who argue that the United States of America as a nation, should be defined by its civic identity. A federal Republic that’s found he promised equality under the law and Liberty to all of its people. But there’s a darker side to the American history too, one built on ethnonationalism and white supremacy. Colin Woodard traces the rise and fall, and rise again of these competed ideas, over the long arc of our national history.
Woodard is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and Polk Award-winning journalist. He is a respected authority on North American regionalism, the sociology of United States nationhood, and how our colonial past shapes and explains the present. He is a POLITICO contributing editor and the State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, where he was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. A longtime foreign correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, for which he has reported from more than fifty countries. Author of the award winning “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America,” Woodard has written six books including “The Republic of Pirates,” a New York Times bestselling history of Blackbeard’s pirate gang that was made into a primetime NBC series with John Malkovich and Claire Foye, and “Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood.” His work has appeared in dozens of publications including The Economist, The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Newsweek and Washington Monthly.
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Every president, every public servant in the United States, raises their hand and takes an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Robert Costa says the end of the Trump presidency saw an unprecedented threat to the Constitutional order emanating from the White House itself.
Robert Costa is co-author of the new book, “Peril,” with Bob Woodward. He has been a national political reporter at The Washington Post since 2014 and previously served as moderator and managing editor of “Washington Week” on PBS until 2021. He was a political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC before that. Costa joined Washington Week with nearly a decade of reporting experience that began with coverage of movement politics and Capitol Hill, including the battle over health care policy during the Obama presidency and the 2010 mid-term elections. In 2012, he covered the race for the Republican presidential nomination and published interviews with all the major candidates. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame and a master’s degree from the University of Cambridge.
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Since early 2000, the world has become familiar with the impacts of COVID-19: isolation, mask-wearing, and, for far too many, disease and death. Dr. Shekhar Saxena says there’s another impact we are just beginning to grapple with: the way the pandemic has affected global mental health.
Saxena is Professor of the Practice of Global Mental Health at the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. He served in the World Health Organization (WHO) from 1998 to 2018, and served as the Director of the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse from 2010 to 2018. In 2017, he received the prestigious Leon Eisenberg Award from Harvard Medical School. Saxena is the author of more than 350 academic papers. He served as the editor of the Lancet Series on Global Mental Health 2007 and 2011 and the Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health and Sustainable Development 2018. He advises policymakers on prevention and management of mental, developmental, neurological and substance use disorders and suicide prevention, and is an active contributor to Harvard’s Global Mental Health initiative.
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Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much—and, generally speaking, they don’t agree on health care policy. But Robert Hackey and Todd Olszewski tell us that there is a rich history and potential for actual cooperation on policies intended to keep Americans healthy and the nation strong.
Bob Hackey is a Professor of Health Policy and Management at Providence College and an Affiliate of the Taubman Center for American Politics & Policy at Brown University. He is the author of two university press books on state health care regulation and the rhetoric of health care reform, and co-edited two other volumes on health care reform. Hackey’s research on health care professions, health care in popular culture, state health planning, and the regulation of medical providers has appeared in more than 20 peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of the American Academy of PAs, and the Journal of Popular Culture, among others. In 2018, he served as a guest editor for the Rhode Island Medical Journal‘s special issue on the PA profession. For more than a decade, his research has focused on how Americans talk about health care and health care reform. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from Brown University in 1992.
Todd Olszewski is an associate professor of health policy and management at Providence College, where he also serves as associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence. He was previously a Stetten Fellow in the History of the Biomedical Sciences at the National Institutes of Health. He has published on the history of heart disease and clinical research in Annals of Internal Medicine, the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, and the Rhode Island Medical Journal. Olszewski’s research focuses on how medical research and public health institutions—like the NIH—translate scientific discoveries into clinical practice, technological innovation, and public policy. He earned his Ph.D. in history with a concentration in the history of medicine from Yale University in 2008.
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Forests have long been celebrated in literature as a repository or life and solitude. But Dr. Suzanne Simard says they are also an important repository of wisdom—a wisdom passed from tree to tree as they communicate with one another.
Dr. Simard is a Professor of Forest Ecology in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada. She is particularly known for her work on belowground networks that connect the creatures of the forest, and how these are fundamental to the complex adaptive nature of ecosystems. At UBC, she facilitates a vibrant research program, a teaching program focused on forest ecology and complexity science. A strong contributor to the forestry profession in Canada, her research is motivated by her desire for protecting our fundamental right to a clean and healthy environment. She contributes to this goal by conducting scientific research on the synergies and complexities of our natural world and the development of sustainable land stewardship practices that both conserve and protect the environment. Her research is centered on understanding the vital relationships between plants, microbes, soils, carbon, nutrients and water that underlie the adaptability, resilience and recovery of ecosystems. She works primarily in forests, but also grasslands, wetlands, tundra and alpine ecosystems. She strives to communicate this research so that it is understandable and usable to all people and is dedicated to empowering people with science-based knowledge and tools to manage and heal the land from human impacts including climate change.
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The promise of a liberal arts education has always been the insight offered to us by classic texts about the human experience. Emily Allen-Hornblower and Nafeesah Goldsmith tell us the appeal is not limited just to traditional students in classrooms, but also students learning in environments as challenging as the American judicial system.
Emily Allen-Hornblower is Associate Professor of Classics at Rutgers University. She is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, and received her Ph.D in Classics from Harvard University. She has published articles on archaic and classical Greek literature, Greek and Roman historiography, and the twentieth-century reception of Greek drama. She is the author of “From Agent to Spectator: Witnessing the Aftermath in Ancient Greek Epic and Tragedy.” Her areas of interest include, storytelling, religion and gender, ancient cultural history, ancient Greek and Roman epic, Greek drama, and social justice. Her book and articles center on both ancient and modern conceptions and portrayals of the human condition, suffering, and connection and disconnection between individuals and groups. Allen-Hornblower has taught Classics and world history in medium and maximum security prisons in New Jersey, as part of the Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons (NJ-STEP) program.
Nafeesah Goldsmith is the CEO of RISE, Real Intervention Supports Excellence, a mission-based sustainability initiative that supports initiatives that support at-risk communities and building prison-free futures. When she was 21 years old, she began serving a 15-year prison sentence at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women, where she began her college career through the Clinton College Bound/NJ-STEP program. Goldsmith was released from prison on June 23, 2015, and dedicates her time to speaking on incarceration, reentry, the School to Prison Pipeline, and the effects of incarceration on families and communities. She studied Criminal Justice at Monmouth University after earning a bachelor’s degree in Sociology. She is also an alumna of Rutgers University and is currently pursuing a degree in law.
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On January 6, 2021, a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol seeking to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. While our attention has been consumed with things like the pandemic, vaccines, and America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, Scott MacFarlane reminds us that the investigations into the events of that day—and the prosecutions of those responsible—are just beginning.
MacFarlane is an investigative reporter with the News4 I-Team and joined NBC after almost a decade of work as a Capitol Hill reporter for the Cox Media Group. He began his career as a reporter for CBS TV affiliates in Detroit, Cleveland, Grand Rapids and Syracuse. MacFarlane also once served as a congressional staffer in the U.S. House of Representatives. His work has led to the creation of five state laws, triggered federal prosecutions, and has been referenced in more than a dozen formal congressional hearings and floor speeches. MacFarlane has interviewed U.S. presidents, dozens of U.S. senators, governors and a Supreme Court justice, and he's questioned press secretaries in the White House press briefing room. He is the recipient of several awards for his work on behalf of children’s safety. He won the Anna Quindlen Award for Excellence in Journalism from the Child Welfare League of America in 2018. His series of investigations on public school security has yielded several honors from the Associated Press and a series of Emmy and Edward R. Murrow awards. His reporting on thoroughbred horse racing deaths in West Virginia triggered a series of new safety state regulations for the sport and earned an award from the Humane Society of the U.S. His series of investigations on the U.S. State Department was honored in 2020 by the National Press Club. MacFarlane’s investigations of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs inspired a congressional review by the U.S. House Oversight Committee, which played and cited his news reports in a June 2019 hearing.
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Colleges and universities all over the United States are facing a wave of students suffering from depression and anxiety heightened by the last year and a half of the pandemic. Dr. Jud Brewer says there are things everyone can do to be more mindful, to break bad habits, and to be happier.
Brewer is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and associate professor in Behavioral and Social Sciences at the School of Public Health and Psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University. He is also a research affiliate at MIT. Before that, he held research and teaching positions at Yale University and the University of Massachusetts’ Center for Mindfulness. Brewer is a New York Times best-selling author of “Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind” (March 2021). He is an addiction psychiatrist and an internationally known expert in mindfulness training for treating addictions. Based on the success of these programs in the lab, he co-founded MindSciences, Inc. to create app-based digital therapeutic versions of these programs for a wider audience, working with individuals, corporations, and hospital systems to put effective, evidence-based behavior change guidance in the hands of people struggling with unwanted behaviors and “everyday addictions.”
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There is a contradiction inherent in today’s China. The Chinese Communist Party wields total control over the politics of the land, but the state also celebrates and encourages private wealth. Desmond Shum offers an insider’s account of wealth, power, corruption, and vengeance in today’s China.
Shum was born in Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong and developed the largest air cargo logistics facility in China, the Beijing Airport Cargo Terminal. He also led the development of the Bulgari Hotel in Beijing. Since the early 2000s, Shum was an early pioneer of philanthropy in China, gifting extensively both domestically and internationally. Desmond holds a bachelor’s degree in Finance and Accounting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a graduate of the joint-EMBA program of Northwestern University and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
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The idea of “caste,” or a hereditary structure to society is foreign to many U.S. audiences. But Padma Venkatraman takes young readers into the caste structure of her native India in a soulful exploration of identity and hope.
Venkatraman is an award-winning author who was born in Chennai, India. Before becoming a novelist, she earned a Ph.D. in oceanography from The College of William and Mary. She conducted postdoctoral research in Environmental Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and later worked in Germany. She also served as head of Inwoods Small School, and taught oceanography and directed diversity efforts at the University of Rhode Island. Venkatraman is the author of five novels including “Climbing the Stairs,” “Island’s End,” “A Time to Dance,” and “The Bridge Home.” She has written several other books, including: “Double Stars: The Story of Caroline Herschel (Profiles in Science),” “Women Mathematicians (Profiles in Mathematics),” and the illustrated “Growing Gold” and “Cleverest Thief.” Her latest novel, “Born Behind Bars,” was published this month.
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When schools finished the academic year earlier this summer, they looked forward to the fall with the first cautious optimism anyone had felt in years. But Dr. Ashish Jha has offered level-headed wisdom that the pandemic simply is not over.
Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH, is a physician, health policy researcher, and the Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. Before joining Brown, he was the K.T. Li Professor of Global Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. An internationally respected and consulted pandemic expert, Jha strongly believes that communication with the public is an essential part of public health, and never more important than during a public-health emergency like COVID-19. He appears regularly on national news network shows, is active on social media, and is the authoritative voice on the “COVID: What Comes Next” podcast, available from The Providence Journal and the USA TODAY Network. In addition to his duties at Brown, maintains a clinical practice at the Providence VA Medical Center.
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It’s been 20 years since the attacks of 9/11. Next month, we’ll mark the 20th anniversary of the arrival of American troops in Afghanistan who toppled the Taliban regime and hunted down Osama bin Laden. Now, as American combat troops leave Afghanistan, we sit down with Craig Whitlock who has pieced together the secret history—warts and all—of America’s war in a land long-called “the graveyard of empires.”
Craig Whitlock is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post. He has covered the global war on terrorism for the Post since 2001 as a foreign correspondent, Pentagon reporter, and national security specialist. In 2019, his coverage of the war in Afghanistan won the George Polk Award for Military Reporting, the Scripps Howard Award for Investigative Reporting, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Freedom of Information Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for international reporting. He has reported from more than sixty countries and is a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
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Democracy is under attack—in the former Soviet-dominated lands of Eastern Europe, in Turkey, Brazil, India, and yes, even the United States. Tom Nichols urges us not to just look for leaders to whom we can ascribe blame, but to look at ourselves and discern our own role in the weakening of America’s democratic institutions.
Nichols is a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct at the U.S. Air Force School of Strategic Force Studies and the Harvard Extension School. He is a specialist on international security affairs, including U.S.-Russia relations, nuclear strategy and NATO issues. A nationally known commentator on U.S. politics and national security, he is a columnist for USA Today and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He served as a staff member in the U.S. Senate and has held fellowships at CSIS and the Harvard Kennedy School. He has taught at Dartmouth, La Salle and Georgetown. He is also a five-time undefeated ‘Jeopardy!’ champion.
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Before 1979, the only way to see the proceedings of Congress was to visit the Capitol. Brian Lamb believed the American public had a right to see government working and convinced the cable industry to create C-SPAN, the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network.
After serving in the United States Navy, Lamb worked as a White House staffer and as the Washington bureau chief for Cablevision magazine. Known for his unobtrusive interview style, direct questions, and balanced approach, Lamb has hosted C-SPAN’s “Booknotes” and “Q&A.” His awards include the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Humanities Medal.
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Personal conviction and democratic activism often go hand-in-hand. Mohammed Ali Kadivar is both a scholar of democracy and an advocate whose family has long been vocal proponents of it.
Kadivar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and International Studies and director of the Middle East Popular Politics Lab at Boston College. The Middle East Popular Politics Lab focuses on collecting and analyzing data on various instances of contentious mobilization such as revolutions, wars, civil wars, anti-regime protests, and pro-regime mobilization globally, in the Middle East, and particularly in Iran. His work contributes to political and comparative-historical sociology by exploring the interaction between protest movements and democratization. Kadivar draws from his experience as a participant-observer of the pro-democracy movement in Iran, and his research agenda explores these issues on a global scale, using case studies, comparative-historical methods, and statistical analyses. He earned a doctorate in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a bachelor’s and master’s degree in political science from University of Tehran in Iran. His research has been published in the American Sociological Review, among many other publications. His work has received awards from the Comparative Historical Sociology, Global and Transnational Sociology, Sociology of Development, and Peace, War and Social Conflict sections of the American Sociological Association.
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On more than one occasion, we’ve welcomed guests to this show who engage in “speculative” or “useful” fiction. Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis are the latest, their new book, titled 2034, looks at what a war between the United States and China might look like in the not-so-distant future.
Admiral James Stavridis is a retired four-star U.S. naval officer. He is currently an Operating Executive of The Carlyle Group, a global investment firm and Chair of the Board of Counselors of McLarty Associates, an international consulting firm. Previously he served for five years as the Dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He led the NATO Alliance in global operations from 2009 to 2013 as Supreme Allied Commander with responsibility for Afghanistan, Libya, the Balkans, Syria, counter-piracy, and cybersecurity. He also served as Commander of U.S. Southern Command, with responsibility for all military operations in Latin America from 2006-2009. He earned more than 50 medals, including 28 from foreign nations in his 37-year military career. Admiral Stavridis earned a Ph.D. in international relations and has published nine books and hundreds of articles in leading journals around the world. He is a monthly columnist for TIME Magazine and Chief International Security Analyst for NBC News.
Elliot Ackerman is the author of the novels “2034,” “Red Dress In Black and White,” “Waiting for Eden,” “Dark at the Crossing,” and “Green on Blue,” as well as the memoir “Places and Names: On War, Revolution and Returning.” His books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in both fiction and non-fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize among others. His writing often appears in Esquire, The New Yorker, and The New York Times where he is a contributing opinion writer. Ackerman’s stories have also been included in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Travel Writing. He is both a former White House Fellow and Marine and served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart.
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With the advent of effective vaccines, it feels—we hope not foolishly—like the pandemic may be coming to an end. But Martin Halliwell says the crisis in American public health isn’t limited to one particular disease—it’s a theme that recurs again and again over the last century in these United States.
Halliwell is a specialist in American cultural, intellectual and literary history of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and in the health humanities. He is also a professor of American Studies at the University of Leicester’s Centre for American Studies and the current head of the School of Arts. He is the Co-Lead for Humanities and Social Sciences for the University’s Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund and a member of the Action on Communities on Health and Equality group. Halliwell currently sits on the AHRC’s Science in Culture Advisory Group and is a member of the cross-research council Mental Health Experts Group. He has served as the Co-Chair the Arts and Humanities Alliance since 2016, sitting on the British Academy’s Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Skills Advisory Group and the Strategic Forum for the Humanities. Halliwell’s recently published book, “American Health Crisis,” analyses contemporary public health crises in America through a historical and cultural lens, bringing individual events together to a narrative of calamity that has brought us to our current crisis in health politics. He holds a doctorate in American Studies from the University of Nottingham.
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“The Other Black Girl” is one of the most anticipated and critically acclaimed releases of 2021. Part thriller and part social commentary, the author Zakiya Dalila Harris has been heralded for her “genre-bending evisceration of workplace privilege.”
Zakiya Dalila Harris is based in Brooklyn, New York, and has a passion for writing and talking about Blackness, books, and oldies music. Her debut novel and New York Times bestseller, “The Other Black Girl,” was published in 2021 and was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by TIME, The Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Entertainment Weekly, Fortune, and the BBC. Its television adaptation is currently in development with Tara Duncan, Temple Hill Entertainment, and Hulu. Harris earned her MFA in nonfiction creative writing from the New School and her bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was born and raised in Connecticut.
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The faithful among us often learn to pray as children. We ask for things. We might even, sometimes, say thank you. Father James Martin asks what it would mean to pray like adults—and offers insights about faith in public life and the challenges to democracy.
Rev. James Martin, SJ, is a Jesuit priest, editor at large of America magazine and consultor to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication. He is the author of numerous books, including New York Times bestsellers “Jesus: A Pilgrimage, The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything” and “My Life with the Saints,” which Publishers Weekly named one of the best books of 2006. His latest book, “Learning to Pray, a Guide for Everyone,” was published in 2021. Martin is a frequent commentator in the national and international media and has appeared on all the major networks and outlets including the Colbert Report, NPR’s Fresh Air, the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Before becoming a Jesuit priest in 1988 he graduated from the Wharton School of Business.
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Documentary filmmakers take us into the lives of their subjects in a way that the written word can’t capture. We see what they see. We get a sense of the physical space they occupy with our own eyes. We hear their voices. Elaine McMillion Sheldon weaves these elements together in powerful films that explore everything from love to addiction.
McMillion Sheldon is an Academy Award-nominated, and Emmy and Peabody-winning documentary filmmaker based in Appalachia. She has been commissioned by Netflix, Frontline PBS, The Center for Investigative Reporting, The Oxford American, The New York Times Op-Docs, TEDWomen, Field of Vision, and The Bitter Southerner. Sheldon is the director of two Netflix Original Documentaries, “Heroin(e)” and “Recovery Boys” that explore America’s opioid crisis. “Heroin(e)” was nominated for a 2018 Academy Award and won the 2018 Emmy Award for Outstanding Short Documentary. The short film premiered at the 2017 Telluride Film Festival and went on to screen hundreds of times across America as part of a community-driven impact campaign. Sheldon has appeared on “The Daily Show” with Trevor Noah, Anthony Bourdain’s CNN show, “Parts Unknown” and “Meet The Press” with Chuck Todd. She’s a founding member of the All Y’all Southern Documentary Collective. She is a recipient of the 2020 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Film and 2021 Creative Capital Awardee. In 2016 she received a highly-competitive national “Breakthrough Award” and fellowship from Chicken and Egg Pictures. She was also named a 2018 USA Fellow by United States Artists, one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker magazine, one of 50 People Changing The South by Southern Living magazine, and grants from Sundance, Tribeca, Catapult, Chicago Media Project, and Field of Vision.
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The Human Rights Campaign estimates that there are 2 million transgender people living in the United States, today. Yet Kylar Broadus says the fight for human rights is not yet won as long as transgender Americans lack equal rights under the law.
Kylar Broadus is a Black trans man that has been a pioneer in the movement as an attorney, long-time activist, public speaker, author and professor. Broadus is known worldwide for his avant-garde work in the LGBT and Trans movements. He was just awarded the Trans Trailblazer Award by the LGBT Bar Association of Los Angeles and issue a Proclamation by the City Attorney’s Office of Los Angeles on March 28, 2019. In 2018, he was awarded the 2018 Gentleman of Excellence Award by the Gentlemen’s Foundation of Atlanta. Mastercard featured Broadus for Pride Month that same year, and he was recognized by the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office of King’s County in Brooklyn, New York in 2018 for his contributions to the legal field. Liberty Mutual honored him at the GLAAD Awards for his 30 years contribution to the movement and he was awarded a Certificate of Legal Excellence by the City of New York District Attorney’s Office. The Advocate recognized Broadus as one of “25 Legal Advocates Fighting for Trans Rights.” He was honored to stand with President Obama while signing the Executive Order adding protections for millions of workers in 2014. He is the first out transgender American to testify before the United States Senate in favor of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act in 2012. Broadus was given the Pioneer Award at the Trans faith of Color Conference by the Freedom Center of Social Justice. He is founder and director of the Trans People of Color Coalition the only national organization dedication to the civil rights of transgender people of color and is on the board of the National Black Justice Coalition. He currently serves on the Freedom For All Americans board of directors.
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In 2009, an acclaimed historian of the Holocaust was shown a picture of one family’s execution by Ukrainian allies of the Nazis some 70 years earlier. In the years that followed, Dr. Wendy Lower’s research gave names to the victims and the killers and lays bare the horror of the Holocaust on an intimate, personal level.
Dr. Lower is an acclaimed historian and widely published author on the Holocaust and World War II. She is the John K. Roth professor of history at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. She was also named the director of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont in 2014. Lower chairs the Academic Committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and directed the Visiting Scholars Program at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies from 2000 to 2004. Her research and teaching focus on the history of Germany and Ukraine in World War II, the Holocaust, women’s history, the history of human rights, and the history of genocide. Lower’s 2013 book, “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields,” was translated into 21 languages and was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award in the nonfiction category and for the National Jewish Book Award. Her latest book, “The Ravine: A Family, A Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed,” was published in 2021.
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Everyone of us knows heartache—the sweet melancholy of a love that just doesn’t work. Multi-talented Dessa traces much of her musical inspiration to that pain, and commissioned a team of neuroscientists to help her fall out of love.
Dessa is a singer, rapper and writer whose musical resume includes performances at Lollapalooza and Glastonbury, co-compositions for 100-voice choir, performances with the Minnesota Orchestra, and top-200 entries on the Billboard charts. She contributed to the number one album The Hamilton Mixtape: her track, “Congratulations,” has notched over 16 million streams. Her writing has been published by The New York Times and National Geographic Traveler and broadcast by Minnesota Public Radio and published as a memoir-in-essays, entitled “My Own Devices” in addition to two literary collections. Dessa has delivered keynote speeches and presentations on art, science, and entrepreneurship, guest lectures at universities and colleges across the United States and a TED Talk about her science experiment on how to fall out of love. She hosts the “Deeply Human” podcast, created by the BBC and American Public Media.
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Love is the stuff of poetry, and heartache, and hope, and songs. Valarie Kaur says love can be revolutionary and is needed as a public ethic to confront hate, and nationalism, and the violence born from ignorance.
Valarie Kaur is a renowned civil rights leader, lawyer, best-selling author, award-winning filmmaker, educator, innovator, and celebrated prophetic voice. She leads the Revolutionary Love Project with a mission to reclaim love as a force for justice. In the wake of the 2016 election, Kaur’s “Watch Night Service” address went viral with 40 million views worldwide. Her question, “is this the darkness of the tomb or the darkness of the womb?” reframed the political moment and became a mantra for people fighting for change. Her debut book, “See No Stranger: A Memoir & Manifesto of Revolutionary Love,” was released in 2020 and expands on her popular TED Talk. In the last twenty years, Kaur has won policy change on multiple fronts–hate crimes, racial profiling, immigration detention, solitary confinement, internet freedom, and more. She founded Groundswell Movement, Faithful Internet, and the Yale Visual Law Project to inspire and equip advocates at the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and justice. Kaur is a regular commentator on MSNBC and contributor to CNN, NPR, PBS, the Hill, Huffington Post, and the Washington Post. A daughter of Sikh farmers in California’s heartland, she earned degrees at Stanford University, Harvard Divinity School, and Yale Law School.
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The prognosticators of doom would have you believe that humanity is cursed to a future without work as Artificial Intelligence replaces people in the workforce. But Jamie Merisotis says we’ll still be working—doing the kinds of things only human beings can do.
Jamie Merisotis is a globally recognized leader in philanthropy, education, and public policy and the author of “Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines.” Since 2008, he has served as president and CEO of Lumina Foundation, an independent, private foundation that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. He previously served as co-founder and president of the nonpartisan, Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Higher Education Policy and as executive director of a bipartisan national commission on college affordability appointed by the U.S. President and Congressional leaders. His work includes extensive global experience as an advisor and consultant in southern Africa, the former Soviet Union, Europe and other parts of the world. A respected analyst and innovator, Merisotis is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Merisotis is the author of the widely-acclaimed book, “America Needs Talent,” named a “Top 10 Business book of 2016” by Booklist. A frequent media commentator and contributor, his writing has appeared in The Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Journal, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Washington Monthly, Politico, Roll Call and other publications. Merisotis serves as chair of the Council on Foundations in Washington, D.C. and was a past chair of The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, the world’s largest museum for children. He also serves on the boards of the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership and the UK-based European Access Network.
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Hate crimes are nothing new to members of the Asian American community. Dr. Janelle Wong helps us put them in historical context—from the Asian Exclusion Acts to the rise in violence targeting Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wong is a professor of American Studies and a core faculty member in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland. From 2001-2012, Wong was a member of the Departments of Political Science and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. in 2001 from the Department of Political Science at Yale University. Wong is the author of “Immigrants, Evangelicals and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change” (2018), “Democracy’s Promise: Immigrants and American Civic Institutions” (2006), and co-author of two books on Asian American politics, including “Asian American Political Participation: Emerging Constituents and their Political Identities” (2011), which is based on the first national, multilingual, multiethnic survey of Asian Americans. Wong was a Co-Principal Investigator on the 2016 National Asian American Survey, a nationwide survey of Asian American political and social attitudes and served on the national board of the Association for Asian American Studies from 2014 to 2017.
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Folk music has a long and rich tradition in the United States, telling stories by capturing life in lyric and melody. Singer-songwriter Mariee Sioux uses those tools to tell stories that reflect her indigenous heritage.
Mariee Sioux was raised in a small gold mining town in Northern California and is of Indigenous and Polish Hungarian ancestry. She was exposed to melody, harmony, and the way music brought community together since childhood, going to Bluegrass festivals, and her father in a bluegrass band. In connection with her native roots, Sioux values the medicinal qualities of music and believes gathering to share her songs is ultimately for healing purposes. An abstract storyteller, she serves as a voice for the natural world and trials of humanity through song. Sioux’s finger-picking guitar has been compared to the greats of Nick Drake and Bert Jansch. She has extensively toured Europe and the United States, opening for acclaimed artists like Mazzy Star, Buffy St. Marie, Frank Black, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, and Joanna Newsom. She has produced seven records, including “Gift for the End” and “Grief in Exile.”
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Books have always seemed like self-contained worlds to me. Pick up a book, and you can transport yourself to any time in history—or the future. Delve into the mystical or the romantic. Books help us to open our minds and our hearts, and over the last 30 years, Jonathan Karp has put more of those books into the hands of readers than just about anyone else.
Jonathan Karp has been president and CEO of Simon & Schuster since May 2020. He joined Simon & Schuster in June 2010 as publisher of their flagship imprint and was promoted to president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing in 2018. Karp worked briefly as a reporter for The Providence Journal and then The Miami Herald before being hired in 1989 by Random House. He worked there for 16 years, rising to editor-in-chief of the Random House division. He moved to Hachette Book Group in 2005, where he founded the Twelve imprint. There, Karp published the acclaimed bestselling works, “True Compass” by Edward M. Kennedy, “God Is Not Great” by Christopher Hitchens, and “War” by Sebastian Junger. Since joining Simon & Schuster, Karp has overseen the publication of “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson, “What Happened” by Hillary Clinton, “Fear” by Bob Woodward, “Frederick Douglass” by David Blight, the winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in History, “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen, “In One Person” by John Irving, and “The Library Book” by Susan Orlean.
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The analytical mind can explain the world around us, but the creative mind can help create our future. Dr. Julian Chambliss explores the power of Afrofuturism in comic books, the expression of creativity in the midst of the pandemic, and the way we think about and process history as a society.
Chambliss explores the real and imagined city. From planning and community development to comic books and popular culture, his research, teaching, and writing explore how perceptions shape policy and action creating our collective urban experience. Chambliss studied urban history at the University of Florida and focused his attention on policy formation, culture, regionalism, and civic infrastructure issues. His research evolved to focus on urban development and culture in U.S. cities. Chambliss served as Professor of History in the Department of History at Rollins College from 2004 to 2018. He joined the Department of English at Michigan State University in 2018 with a joint appointment in the Department of History and as core faculty in Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research. There, he teaches courses exploring critical making, or the process of creative synthesis that animates his class projects, comics and culture in the United States. In 2019, Chambliss joined the Michigan State University Museum as the Val Berryman Curator of History, where he designs generative digital projects that use the classroom as a platform for students to act as co-researchers to trace community development, document diverse experience and explore culture. Chambliss is one of the producers of “Every Tongue Got To Confess,” a podcast exploring the experiences and stories of communities of color.
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The pandemic has had a profound effect on the entertainment industry, disrupting live performances and posing challenges for production in both film and television. Ida Darvish and Josh Gad are two of the bright lights of Hollywood and they tell us that the creative process continues.
Ida Darvish is a producer and actor who has played multiple characters in the “Assassin’s Creed” video game franchise, a common house proprietor on “The Mandalorian,” and Marta Alvarez in Tom Hank’s “Inferno.” She and her husband have both appeared in “She Wants Me,” “The Lost Nomads: Get Lost!,” and “Big Guy.” Together, they run a production company called “Angry Child,” which has produced a number of shows, notably “Central Park” and “1600 Penn.”
Josh Gad is an actor and singer and is known for voicing Olaf in the “Frozen” franchise, playing LeFou in the live-action adaptation of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” and Elder Arnold Cunningham in the Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon,” for which he received a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Musical. Gad played Skip Gilchrist in the political sitcom “1600 Penn” on NBC, and a fictionalized version of himself on FX’s The Comedians, alongside “Billy Crystal.” Several of his other film roles include “The Rocker,” “The Internship,” “Love & Other Drugs,” “The Wedding Ringer,” “The Angry Birds Movie,” “A Dog’s Purpose,” “Marshall,” and Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express.” He has also appeared in “ER,” “The Daily Show,” “Modern Family,” “New Girl,” “Bored to Death,” and “Numb3rs.” In 2020, he began starring in the HBO comedy series “Avenue 5.” His continuing pandemic series, “Reunited Apart,” has been very popular and it raises money for many charitable causes.
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In the midst of a year that saw pandemic disease, social unrest, and bare-knuckled politics, Hollywood churned out a tremendous body of work—even while theaters closed and films created for the big screen streamed directly to our homes. Pete Hammond says this year’s Academy Awards reflect the issues facing Americans.
Hammond is currently Chief Film Critic for Deadline Hollywood, where he has been the Awards Columnist, covering the seemingly year-round Oscar and Emmy seasons, for the past seven years. For the past eight years, he has been Awards Editor and Columnist for Deadline and previously covered a similar column for the Los Angeles Times. He has also served as a frequent contributor to Variety and as a film critic for Boxoffice magazine, Backstage magazine, Maxim magazine and Movieline. He is in his seventeenth year as host of the “KCET Cinema Series” in Los Angeles, and UCLA extension’s “Sneak Preview” for the past ten years. He also hosts the TV series, “Must See Movies,” which showcases classic films every Friday night and Saturday afternoon on KCET. He is the recipient of five Emmy nominations for his television writing and is the winner of the 1996 Publicists Guild of America’s Press Award. He is the second journalist in the organization’s 50-year history to receive the award twice, winning again in 2013. He also served on the Board of Governors for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences representing writers for six years.
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Stories from the Second World War continue to educate, fascinate, and even entertain audiences around the world. Tim Gray tells those stories to educate a new generation about the horrors of war and the heroism of the generation that saved the free world.
Gray is a national award-winning documentary film director, producer and writer who has produced and directed 17 documentary films on the personal stories of the World War II generation. His latest film is “Surrender on the USS Missouri,” which focuses on the individuals who served on the ship and witnessed the Japanese surrender on September 2, 1945, which ended World War II. All of Gray’s films air nationally on American Public Television and globally in China, Australia, France and England. In 2012, his World War II Foundation dedicated the Richard D. Winters Leadership Monument in Normandy, France, honoring American leadership on D-Day and approved by the late Major Richard D. Winters of WWII’s Band of Brothers. The foundation oversaw all the fundraising for the thirteen-foot statue and organized the dedication event in France, attended by the commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division and former Secretary of Homeland Security, Gov. Tom Ridge. Prior to documentary film making, Gray worked as a television sports and news anchor and reporter for over fifteen years in U.S. markets including Michigan, Washington State, Florida, New York and Rhode Island.
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Some call it climate change, others call it a crisis, and still others call it a hoax. Dr. Michael Oppenheimer tells us to take seriously the impact climate change will have in all of our lives.
Oppenheimer is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), the Department of Geosciences, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. He is the Director of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment (C-PREE) at SPIA and Faculty Associate of the Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences Program and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Oppenheimer joined the Princeton faculty after more than two decades with The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a non-governmental, environmental organization, where he served as chief scientist and manager of the Climate and Air Program. He continues to serve as a science advisor to EDF. He has authored over 200 articles published in professional journals and is co-author, with Robert H. Boyle, of a 1990 book, Dead Heat: The Race Against The Greenhouse Effect. He is co-author of the book Discerning Experts: The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy, published in 2020 by the University of Chicago Press. Oppenheimer is a long-time participant in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, most recently serving as a Coordinating Lead Author on IPCC’s Special Report on Oceans and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate in 2019 and as a Review Editor on the upcoming Sixth Assessment Report.
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Anybody on social media has seen it: dueling posts, arguing over a hot political issue. The protagonists in these online debates are generally sincere in their convictions, but Vanessa Otero says that too many of us remain unaware of the media biases that shape our understanding of the world.
Otero is the creator of the Media Bias Chart®, the viral image that rates news organizations on their reliability and degree of political bias in their work and maps them accordingly. The chart prompted lively discussions about where people get their news when it was published. She is the CEO of Ad Fontes Media, the company she founded in 2018 to fulfill the need revealed by the popularity of the Chart—the need for an easy-to-understand, reliable news rating system. Otero seeks to impact the way consumers, educators, and organizations deal with today’s complex media landscape through her work at Ad Fontes Media. She is a practicing patent attorney and earned her J.D. from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.
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The intersection of America’s criminal justice system and mental health is long and, often, misunderstood. Christine Montross tells us that America’s largest mental health institution isn’t a psychiatric hospital, it’s Cook County Jail in Chicago, Illinois.
Dr. Christine Montross is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction and Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She is also a practicing inpatient psychiatrist and performs forensic psychiatric examinations. She completed medical school and residency training at Brown University, where she received the Isaac Ray Award in Psychiatry and the Martin B. Keller Outstanding Brown Psychiatry Resident Award. She received her undergraduate degrees and a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from the University of Michigan. Montross’s first book, “Body of Work,” was named an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times and one of The Washington Post’s best nonfiction books of 2007. Her second book, “Falling Into the Fire,” was named a New Yorker “Book to Watch Out For.” Her latest book, “Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration,” was named a New York Times Book to Watch For, a Time Magazine Book to Read in July and an Amazon.com Best Book of the Month. She has also written for many national publications including The New York Times, The New England Journal of Medicine, Time Magazine, The Washington Post Book World, Good Housekeeping and O, The Oprah Magazine.
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In the first months of the Biden administration, we’ve seen an intentional effort by the new president to return the country’s politics to some sense of “normal.” S.E. Cupp is a conservative voice who yearns for a return to substance in American politics.
Cupp is a CNN political commentator and practical conservative who brings her distinct outlook to CNN programming and special political coverage. She most recently hosted CNN’s “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered,” a weekly program covering the intersection of politics and media. She previously led a panel-driven show on HLN that debated contemporary issues impacting American public life. She joined CNN as a contributor in 2013 and HLN as a host in 2017. Cupp also hosted “S.E. Cupp’s Outside With Insiders,” a digital series on CNN.com where she took political insiders to the great outdoors. Guests on the show included Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) and Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC) among others. From 2013 to 2014, Cupp co-hosted “Crossfire” on CNN, the relaunched political debate program with panelists Newt Gingrich, Stephanie Cutter and Van Jones. Before joining CNN as a host and political commentator, Cupp co-hosted MSNBC’s roundtable show, “The Cycle.”
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It’s been one year since the coronavirus pandemic upended life across the globe. Dan Barry reminds us that behind the headlines and the previously unimaginable counts of cases and deaths, there are stories of individual lives interrupted and, all too often, cut short by the pandemic.
Barry is a longtime reporter and columnist for The New York Times, having written both the “This Land” and “About New York” columns. The author of several books, he writes on myriad topics, including sports, culture, New York City, and the nation. Since joining The Times in September 1995, Barry has covered many major events, including the World Trade Center disaster, the destructive wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., following the police shooting death of a young black man. His many honors include the 2003 American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for deadline reporting, for his coverage of the first anniversary of Sept. 11; the 2005 Mike Berger Award, from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism; and the 2015 Best American Newspaper Narrative Award. He has also been nominated as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice: once in 2006 for his slice-of-life reports from hurricane-battered New Orleans and from New York, and again in 2010 for his coverage of the Great Recession and its effects on the lives and relationships of America. His most recent honor is the sixth-annual Pell Center Prize for Story in the Public Square, conferred in April 2018.
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This episode was made possible with the gracious collaboration of Newport Film and the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities’ “Culture is Key” Project.
In the 1960s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation spied on civil rights leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sam Pollard and Benjamin Hedin tell that story in a powerful documentary that shines a light on race, power, and the politics of personal destruction.
Sam Pollard’s career as a feature film and television video editor and documentary producer and director spans almost thirty years. He recently served as Executive Producer on the documentary “Brother Outsider,” the Official Selection for the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. His first assignment as a documentary producer came in 1989 for Henry Hampton’s Blackside production “Eyes On The Prize II: America at the Racial Crosswords.” One of his episodes in this series received an Emmy. He returned to Blackside as Co-Executive Producer/Producer of Hampton’s last documentary series, “I’ll Make Me A World: Stories of African-American Artists and Community.”
Benjamin Hedin has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The Nation, The Oxford American, The Chicago Tribune, Poets and Writers, Salmagundi, The Georgia Review, and other publications. He is the editor of “Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader” and author of the nonfiction chronicle, “In Search of the Movement: The Struggle for Civil Rights Then and Now.” Triquarterly Books will publish his first novel, “Under the Spell” in the spring of 2021. He also produced and wrote of the Grammy-nominated documentary “Two Trains Runnin’.”
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Everyone has a ghost story—a personal family experience, something that happened to a friend, an uncle, or even ourselves. Amy Bruni tells us that sometimes these stories are comforting and sometimes they are not, but there is a lot we can learn from them.
Bruni is a paranormal investigator and co-star of the Travel Channel’s hit show, “Kindred Spirits,” and previously appeared on “Ghost Hunters.” She is the author of “Life with the Afterlife: 13 Truths I learned about Ghosts,” which has received critical acclaim, including from The New York Times. In her book, Bruni shares insights from her years of experience with the spirits of the dead, those who encounter them, and the thirteen truths that guide her approach to the supernatural. From both her experiences with those who are haunted, and the spirits not yet departed, Bruni emphasizes connects us as people, in life and beyond. She is also the founder of Strange Escapes, a paranormal excursion company that guides guests around some of America’s most notoriously haunted destinations.
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Political divisions are as old as the republic, itself. But Tom Ricks says that if we’re serious about preserving the union, there is much we can learn from the founders study of the ancient republics in Rome and Greece.
Ricks is an adviser on national security at the New America Foundation, where he participates in its “Future of War” project. He was previously a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and is a contributing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, for which he writes the prizewinning blog The Best Defense. Ricks covered the US military for The Washington Post from 2000 through 2008. Until the end of 1999 he had the same beat at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for seventeen years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize–winning teams, he covered US military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of several books, including, “The Generals,” “The Gamble” and the number-one New York Times bestseller “Fiasco,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
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We live in an age increasingly defined by the intrusion of technology in our lives. Kashmir Hill is a technology journalist whose work explores the looming tech-dystopia—and how we can avoid it.
Kashmir Hill is a New York-based technology reporter who writes about the unexpected and sometimes ominous ways technology is changing our lives, particularly when it comes to our privacy. She joined The New York Times in 2019 after working as an investigative reporter at Gizmodo Media Group and as a writer and editor at Fusion, Forbes Magazine, and Above the Law. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The Washington Post. In 2018, she gave the TED talk, “What your smart devices know—and share—about you,” in which she described what happened when she transformed her apartment into a smart home and monitored the data being sent out of it. She hold degrees from Duke University and New York University, where she studied journalism.
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The music scene in the 1970s and 1980s is now the stuff of legend—from disco to the rise of hip hop, punk, and new wave, innovation and artistry dominated pop music. Chris Frantz was in the middle of it all as a founding member of Talking Heads.
Frantz is one of the Talking Heads band’s founding members. As the drummer, he provided the backbeat for all of the group’s recordings and performances. Frantz formed the Talking Heads with David Byrne, Tina Weymouth and Jerry Harrison in New York City and built a sizeable following, signing a deal with Sire Records. The group issued early new wave classics including, “Talking Heads: 77,” “More Songs About Buildings and Food,” “Fear of Music,” “Remain in Light.” The Talking Heads also produced hit albums, “Speaking in Tongues,” “Stop Making Sense,” “Little Creatures,” and “True Stories,” among others. Frantz also launched a side project, the Tom Tom Club with Weymouth. The duo issued a major hit with the track “Genius of Love” off their self-titled 1981 debut album. Frantz and Weymouth have co-produced with other artists, including Ziggy Marley, los Fabulosos Cadillacs, Happy Mondays, and Angelfish. Frantz’ drumming can also be heard on releases by Byrne, Brian Eno, and Robert Palmer. The Talking Heads were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. Frantz is the author of the recently published, “Remain in Love: Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina.”
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A lot of people believe our politics are broken. Dr. Norman Ornstein says the fault lies squarely with one political party—and will likely shape the course of the Biden administration.
Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies politics, elections, and the U.S. Congress. He is a cohost of AEI’s “Election Watch” series, a contributing editor and columnist for National Journal and The Atlantic, a BBC News election analyst, and the chairman of the Campaign Legal Center. He previously served as codirector of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project and senior counselor to the Continuity of Government Commission. A longtime observer and analyst of American politics and the U.S. Congress, he has been involved in political reform for decades, particularly campaign finance reform and the reform of Senate committees. He has also played a part in creating the Congressional Office of Compliance and the House Office of Congressional Ethics. Ornstein was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. He is the author of “One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported,” with E. J. Dionne and Thomas E. Mann, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism;” “The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track,” with Thomas E. Mann and “The Permanent Campaign and Its Future.”
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The end of the 19th Century in America, is often associated with the rise of profound social movements like the temperance movement; the women’s suffrage movement, and—more darkly—even the eugenics movement. Ernest Freeberg tells the story of the birth of the animal rights movement.
Freeberg is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Tennessee and is the award-winning author of “A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement,” which examines ASPCA founder Henry Bergh’s campaign to grant rights to animals in industrial America. He is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, has served on the editorial board of the “History of Education Quarterly,” and has produced several public radio documentaries. His research has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Huntington Library, the Winterthur Museum, Newberry Library, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Spencer Foundation, Emory University’s Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and others. Freeberg has served as Chief Reader and test development committee member for the College Board’s Advanced Placement U.S. History exam. He is the author of “The Education of Laura Bridgman,” which won the Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association, “Democracy’s Prisoner,” a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist in biography, and winner of both the David Langum Award for Legal History and the Eli Oboler Award from the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Roundtable, and “Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America,” was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2014 by the American Library Association.
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Every family has its secrets. Robert Kolker tells the story of an all-American family in the middle of the 20th century forced to grapple with that era’s stigma and tragic consequences of serious mental illness.
Kolker is the New York Times bestselling author of “Lost Girls,” named one of the New York Times' 100 Notable Books and one of Publisher's Weekly's Top Ten Books of 2013. His most-recent book, “Hidden Valley Road,” a number-one New York Times bestseller and Oprah's Book Club selection, was published in 2020. His 2006 investigation into sexual abuse in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community helped bring an abuser to justice and was nominated for a National Magazine Award. His exploration of an eighteen-year murder-exoneration case and the police tactics that can lead to false confessions received the Harry Frank Guggenheim 2011 Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting Award from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Other articles of note include the police shooting of Sean Bell, a close look at New York’s homelessness epidemic, and New York’s cover stories on airport safety and security, and Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger’s Miracle on the Hudson. Kolker’s journalism has appeared in New York magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and The Marshall Project.
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Our nationality has long been a part of how we identify ourselves. But Alexis Wichowski surveys the rise of “net states,” big tech companies that are, increasingly, taking on roles traditionally played by nation-states.
Wichowski is a public servant, teacher, and writer. She serves as Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Innovation and Acting Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Broadband for the City of New York. She also serves as an adjunct associate professor in Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, teaching in the Technology, Media, and Communications specialization. She previously served New York City as an Associate Commissioner at the newly established Department of Veterans’ Services and a Disaster Relief Field Responder before and during 9/11. She has also served as Program Officer for the U.S. Department of State’s Office of eDiplomacy and Diplomatic Innovation Division and as Director of Media Analysis & Strategy at the Permanent Mission of the United States to the United Nations during the Obama administration. She regularly conducts research and writes about the impact of media, technology and government. Several of her recent publications include. “Net States Rule the World,” in WIRED, “What Government Can and Should Learn from Hacker Culture,” in The Atlantic and “The U.S. can’t regulate Big Tech companies when they act like nations,” in The Washington Post, among others. Her book, “The Information Trade: How Big Tech Conquers Countries, Challenges Our Rights, and Transforms Our World,” was published in 2020. Wichowski holds a PhD in Information Science from the University at Albany’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a BA in Chinese from Connecticut College.
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Change may be an essential part of human existence, but Jen Schwartz explores the dislocations in human society caused by the speed with which the world is changing around us.
Schwartz is a senior features editor at Scientific American who produces stories on the intersection of technology and the human condition. She specializes in writing about how society is adapting—or not—to a rapidly changing world, with a focus on climate change and digital disinformation. During the coronavirus pandemic she has written about the anguish of uncertainty, from the trauma of healthcare workers to the legacy of scientific racism to the chaos of media manipulation. She co-led the magazine’s 2019 special issue, “Truth, Lies & Uncertainty,” about making sense of reality in unreal times, and contributed an essay about how everyone is an agent in the new information warfare. Her feature, “Underwater,” about a New Jersey community that is radically adapting to sea-level rise, won the 2019 National Association of Science Writers “Science and Society” award. Schwartz previously worked as an editor or reporter at Popular Science, GQ, New York, Outside, Self, and The Boston Globe. She is a veteran researcher skilled in fact-checking and investigative reporting and holds a degree in journalism with a minor in environmental science from Boston University.
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2020 is a year we won’t forget any time soon—though many of us might want to. From the impeachment trial of the president, through the pandemic, and the 2020 election, this year has seen more than it’s fair share of important narratives. Dr. Evelyn Farkas helps us make sense of them all and name our 2020 Story of the Year.
Farkas is one of the nation’s premier voices on American foreign policy and geopolitics, and one of the nation’s most-trusted experts on U.S.-Russia relations. As Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, she was the U.S. Department of Defense’s top Russia expert under President Barack Obama. Farkas advised three U.S. Secretaries of Defense during her tenure at the Pentagon and was responsible for policy toward Russia and the surrounding region. She is an outspoken voice on how America should respond to adversaries and manage aggressors, ranging from Russia to North Korea to Iran. Expertly positioned to discuss the at times tenuous intersection of foreign objectives and domestic priorities, Farkas appears regularly as an NBC/MSNBC national security contributor to discuss hot-button geopolitical issues. She serves as Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and has penned research papers and op-eds featured in most leading publications. She discusses how America’s position abroad is shifting under the Trump administration, the global gamut of U.S. foreign and defense policy, and current national security challenges including Russia’s role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
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The uncertainty of a creative career—waiting for acceptance and dealing with rejection—can be an isolating experience. Gayle Kabaker turned artistic resilience into advice for coping through the pandemic.
Kabaker is a graduate of the Academy of Art in San Francisco and has illustrated for various markets worldwide for over 35 years. She illustrated her first New Yorker magazine cover, “June Brides,” in 2012, which celebrated gay marriage, and has subsequently illustrated five other covers for the New Yorker. She uses travel as her inspiration, sometimes creating illustrated stories from her experiences. Kabaker enjoys collaborating with Animators, filmmakers, editors & musicians to match talent with various projects. She describes her creative process as “a combination of old school painting, mostly with Acryla Gouache paint, that I scan and finish in Photoshop.” She adds, “I am also dipping my toe slowly into the world of “fine art” and selling original paintings and prints.” Kabaker is also the illustrator of a book in art exhibition called “Vital Voices,” which celebrates a hundred women leaders and honors 100 years of women’s suffrage in America. Her portfolio with her illustrated stories and other projects can be found here.
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There hasn’t been a lot to laugh about in 2020, but Gina Brillon reminds us of the power of laughter and good humor even amidst so much tragedy.
Brillon is a standup comic, singer, published writer, and poet. Her newest one-hour comedy special, “Gina Brillon: The Floor is Lava,” is now available on Amazon Prime Video, along with her first one-hour special, “Pacifically Speaking.” She also performs in the HA Festival: The Art of Comedy on HBO Max. Her half-hour comedy special, “Easily Offended,” was one of the top shows from the Entre Nos franchise on HBO Latino, and streams on all HBO Digital Platforms. She has appeared on Comedy Central’s “Live at Gotham,” E!’s “Chelsea Lately,” “The View,” “Late Night with Seth Meyers” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” Brillon also appeared on “Kevin Can Wait” on CBS and “The Conners” on ABC. In 2012, she became the first and only Latina winner of NBC’s Stand up for Diversity Showcase. The following year, she was a “New Face” at the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival. In 2019, she was featured on Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias’ “Beyond the Fluffy Tour,” which visited 46 cities across the United States. She co-hosts the podcast, “Mess In Progress,” with Katherine G. Mendoza.
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America’s founders feared the rise of political factions that would pit Americans against Americans. Lee Drutman warns that the founders’ greatest nightmares have come true and threaten the health and welfare of our republic.
Dr. Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America. He is the author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America” and “The Business of America is Lobbying,” winner of the 2016 American Political Science Association’s Robert A. Dahl Award, given for “scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy.” He is also the co-host of the podcast “Politics in Question,” and writes for the New York Times, Vox, and FiveThirtyEight, among other outlets.
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Science fiction is full of stories about communication and contact with civilizations beyond the stars. Andrew Siemion leads a multi-national effort to scan the heavens for indications of intelligent life.
Dr. Andrew Siemion is an astrophysicist and director of the Berkeley Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research Center. His research interests include high-energy time-variable celestial phenomena, astronomical instrumentation and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Siemion is the Principal Investigator for the Breakthrough Listen program, the “largest ever scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of civilizations beyond Earth.” In 2018, he was named the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute and was elected to the International Academy of Astronautics as a Corresponding Member for Basic Sciences. In September 2015, he testified on the current status of astrobiology to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology of the United States Congress. He is jointly affiliated with Radboud University Nijmegen and the University of Malta.
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It is one of the cruel realities of life for every nation and every individual: we all suffer loss and disappointment. Maggie Smith is a poet whose new book offers wisdom—and hope—for anyone who knows that pain.
Smith is the author of four books of poetry, including “Good Bones,” “The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison” and “Lamp of the Body.” Her latest book, “Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change,” a collection of essays and quotes, was released in October. She is also the author of three prizewinning chapbooks. Her poems are widely published and anthologized, appearing in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, POETRY, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. In 2016, her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Public Radio International called it “the official poem of 2016.”
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The pandemic has changed a lot of habits—including the ways in which people around the world spend their leisure time and resources. Kate Aurthur tells us that the entertainment industry—literally built on storytelling—has been among the most effected.
Aurthur is a veteran entertainment journalist and is editor-at-large at Variety. She has worked as a top reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. She writes high-impact cover and feature stories about the industry for Variety’s weekly magazine, breaking news on Variety.com and contributes to its video content. She covers major issues and business trends in TV, film and streaming as the consumption of content across all distribution platforms, including Netflix, Amazon and Apple, continues to reshape the media landscape. Aurthur also writes about diversity and inclusion in Hollywood, both in front of and behind the camera, profiles prominent writers, directors, producers and actors and covers key festivals and events. She also contributes to Variety franchises including Actors on Actors, and moderates panel discussions at the company’s summits and conferences.
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In the pantheon of American presidents, perhaps none was better prepared for the job than Dwight D. Eisenhower. Susan Eisenhower shares with us the principles that guided Ike in war and in peace.
Eisenhower is the CEO and Chairman of The Eisenhower Group, Inc., a Washington D.C. based consulting company founded in 1986, which has provided strategic counsel on business development, public affairs and communications projects for more than twenty-five years. She is the Chairman Emeritus at the Eisenhower Institute of Gettysburg College, where she served as president twice. She has also had a distinguished career as a policy analyst and has been a Fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and a Distinguished Fellow at the Nixon Center, now the Center for National Interest. She is the author of the recently published biography, “How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower’s Biggest Decisions.” In addition to “How Ike Led,” Eisenhower has written four trade press books, two of which were on regional best seller lists and has co-authored or co-edited four other books on international security issues and has authored hundreds of op-eds for newspapers such as the Washington Post and the LA Times.
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Whatever the final count of fatalities is in the United States from the COVID-19 pandemic, the cost is already far too high. Dr. Ashish Jha reminds us that there are still simple things that Americans can do to stay safe, to stay healthy, and to help fight the pandemic.
Jha is a practicing physician and is the Dean of the Brown School of Public Health and professor of Health Services, Policy, and Practice after serving as the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute and teaching at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. He has been recognized as a global expert on pandemic preparedness and response in addition to health policy research and practice. He has led groundbreaking research around Ebola and is now on the frontlines of the COVID-19 response, leading national and international analysis of key issues and advising state and federal policy makers. Jha has published more than two hundred original research publications in prestigious journals including the BMJ and New England Journal of Medicine and is a frequent contributor to a range of public media. He has conducted extensive research on improving the quality of health care and the reduction of its costs, focusing on the impact of public health policy both nationally and globally.
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Over the last four years, Americans have heard a lot about Russian interference in our elections. David Shimer says we haven’t heard the whole story about the Cold War, 2016, or 2020.
Shimer is an expert on election security, U.S.-Russian relations, and covert action. He is the author of “Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference,” a New York Times Editors’ Choice book. His reporting and analysis have been published in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and Foreign Affairs. He has appeared on CNN and MSNBC to discuss the threat of foreign election interference, and he has been interviewed by the New York Times, NPR, and Politico about American and Russian foreign policy. Shimer is an Associate Fellow of Yale University, where he received his undergraduate and master’s degrees in history, and is pursuing a doctorate in international relations at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar.
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Pandemic, social unrest–Americans of every age are coping with the mental health consequences of this era. Dr. Gayani DeSilva cautions that the challenges of being a child or adolescent currently poses special health risks.
DeSilva has been a psychiatrist for 15 years and focusses on enhancing the mental health of children and adolescents and their families. Much of her work addresses the complex array of needs with adolescent and young adult criminal and violent offenders to understand the interplay between mental illness, societal factors, and interpersonal issues. She is the author of “A Psychiatrist’s Guide: Helping Parents Reach Their Depressed Tween,” and “A Psychiatrist’s Guide: Stop Teen Addiction Before It Starts.” DeSilva obtained her medical training at Albany Medical College and completed her internship at Brown University, and her residency at Harvard University. She holds numerous awards and citations, and currently is on volunteer faculty at the University of California-Irvine and is Medical Director of Behavioral Health at Inland Empire Health Plan. DeSilva also co-hosts the podcast, “Chat and Chai,” which consists of 13 episodes, including “A Candid Conversation on Racism,” “A Discussion on Suicide, Warning Signs, Myths and More,” and “COVID-19 & Loneliness.”
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COVID-19 has put America’s top doctors on the frontlines of a battle to save lives. Dr. Megan Ranney spends her days at the front, working in an urban emergency room where her training in public health and emergency medicine give her unique insights about the pandemic and the nation’s response.
Ranney is a practicing emergency physician and researcher, focusing on the intersection between digital health, violence prevention, and public health. She is the current Warren Alpert Endowed Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Rhode Island Hospital/Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Ranney is also the founding Director of the Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health and Chief Research Officer for the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine, the country’s only non-profit committed to using the public health approach to reduce firearm injury. She a founding partner of GetUsPPE.org, dedicated to matching donors to health systems in need of protective equipment. She completed her internship and residency in Emergency Medicine, Master of Public Health, and fellowship in Injury Prevention Research at Brown University.
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Americans took to the streets after the murder of George Floyd, rejecting racism in all its forms. Tricia Rose explains that structural racism has a long history in the United States—and so do the efforts to combat it.
Rose is Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. She also holds the Chancellor’s Professorship of Africana Studies and serves as the Associate Dean of the Faculty for Special Initiatives. A graduate of Yale and Brown University, Rose authored “Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America,” “Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk about Sexuality and Intimacy,” and “The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters.” She sits on the Boards of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Color of Change, and Black Girls Rock, Inc.. Focusing on issues related to race in America, mass media, structural inequality, popular culture, gender and sexuality and art and social justice, Rose engages widely in scholarly and popular audience settings. She co-hosts the weekly “The Tight Rope” podcast with Dr. Cornel West, covering a range of topics from pop culture and art and music, to the contours of systemic racism, philosophy, the power of Socratic self-examination.
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The artist’s role in society is to challenge us, to shine a mirror on our strengths and to expose our weaknesses. Through a remarkable body of work—poetry, visual arts, rigorous scholarship on race and society, as well as ground breaking work in comic books, Eve Ewing does just that.
Ewing is an Assistant Professor in the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. She is a qualitative sociologist of education whose work is centered around two primary issues. First, how racism and other large-scale structures of social inequality impact the everyday lives and experiences of young people, and second, the ways public school systems serve to interrupt or perpetuate these social problems, and the role educators, policymakers, families, community members, and young people themselves play in understanding, acknowledging, and disrupting them. Ewing’s scholarship, community work, and classroom teaching are aimed at expanding the ways that urban school stakeholders, other researchers, and the broader public can be equipped to understand, respond to, and ultimately dismantle white supremacy, and to make school systems institutions of liberation, rather than oppression. Ewing is the author of “Electric Arches,” which received awards from the Poetry Society of America and the American Library Association and and was named one of the year’s best books by NPR and the Chicago Tribune. She is also author of “Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side,” “1919” and the co-author of “No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks.”
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Journalists often have a front row seat as history unfolds. Over the last 30 years, David Shuster has witnessed a scandal in Arkansas that reverberated in Washington, the attacks of 911, America’s Wars and every presidential campaign in between.
Shuster is an Emmy award winning broadcast journalist who is best known for his work at NBC News and MSNBC where he hosted his own news shows and served as the primary backup host for “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” and “Hardball with Chris Matthews.” Shuster anchored the channel’s prime time coverage of breaking news stories including politics, natural disasters, and the death of Michael Jackson. As a field correspondent, his assignments included the Iraq war, the selection of a Pope, and Hurricane Katrina. Shuster was an evening news anchor for Al Jazeera America, where he guided the network’s political coverage. He most recently served as Anchor and Managing Editor for i24News, where he co-anchored prime time shows with Tal Heinrich.
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While national media coverage often swoops in to cover local stories with national significance, local reporters are typically there from the beginning. They know the details. They know the sequence of events. And they know the community in which they are reporting. Noelle Crombie knows Portland as well as anyone and she’s been reporting on the protests and violence in that beautiful city.
Crombie is a senior staff writer at The Oregonian. She writes extensively about criminal justice issues in Oregon. She was the lead reporter on “Ghosts of Highway 20,” a narrative series and 5-part documentary that won 5 regional Emmys and Oregon’s top investigative journalism award. Crombie led a 10-month investigation into sexual abuse allegations against a founder of Mercy Corps, an international humanitarian relief organization based in Portland. The Oregonian’s reporting prompted the immediate resignation of the organization’s CEO, one of its top lawyers and a veteran board member. The series won two regional Emmys and captured a top prize in the prestigious Pictures of the Year International competition. Previously, she worked as a reporter for The Day in New London, Connecticut.
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Empathy is a recurring theme on “Story in the Public Square,” because it is central to the crafting of compelling stories—whether set in fiction or non-fiction. Paul Tremblay uses empathy to draw readers in to the strange and often terrifying worlds that he imagines.
Tremblay is one of the best writers of horror and psychological thrillers today. He is the author of “The Cabin at the End of the World,” “Disappearance at Devil’s Rock,” “A Head Full of Ghosts,” the crime novels “The Little Sleep and No Sleep ‘Till Wonderland,” and the short story collection, “Growing Things and Other Stories.” His latest book is “Survivor Song,” set in a pandemic plagued world. He has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and currently serves a member of the board of directors of the Shirley Jackson Awards. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly online, and numerous years’ best anthologies.
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If you grew up in a household that prized reading, you probably recall a book from childhood that shaped your view of the world. Candace Fleming writes those books with an unflinching honesty about the subjects she presents.
Candace Fleming is an educator, and speaker and author, who writes both fiction and non-fiction. She has written more than twenty books for children and young adults, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize honored “Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of the Russian Empire,” Boston Globe/Horn Book Award-winning biography, “The Lincolns,” the bestselling picture book, “Muncha! Muncha! Muncha!,” and the beloved “Boxes for Katje.”
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The history of the American presidency is full of accomplishments and compromises, successes and failures. Robert Dallek argues that the giants from both parties in the last 120 years draw a sharp contrast with the characteristics of the Trump presidency.
Robert Dallek is the author of several bestselling presidential histories, including “Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power; An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963,” and the classic two-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, “Lone Star Rising” and “Flawed Giant.” His latest book is “How Did We Get Here? From Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump.” Dallek has taught at Columbia, Oxford, UCLA, Boston University, and Dartmouth, and has won the Bancroft Prize, among numerous other awards for scholarship and teaching.
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Whether you love them or hate them, beauty pageants continue to play a significant role in American popular culture. Hillary Levey Friedman argues that their evolution is wrapped up in the history of feminism in the United States.
Hilary Levey Friedman is a sociologist and expert on beauty pageants, childhood and parenting, competitive afterschool activities, and popular culture. She is Visiting Assistant Professor of Education at Brown University. Her new book, “Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America, uses beauty pageants to trace the arc of American feminism from the 1840s to the present. Her first book, “Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture,” followed families with elementary school-age children involved in chess, dance, and soccer covering the history of the activities, what they mean to parents and children, and implications for inequality and gender in the educational system. Levey Friedman is the President of the Rhode Island chapter of the National Organization for Women (RI NOW). She also serves on the Public Policy Committee of the United Way of Rhode Island and is a volunteer Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA). She holds degrees from Harvard University, Princeton University, and the University of Cambridge.
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There are some really great dead people. Mo Rocca helps us remember them in part through his own appreciation of the obituary.
Humorist, journalist and actor Mo Rocca is best known for his off-beat news reports and satirical commentary. He is a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning, Rocca and the host of CBS’s series The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation. The show features stories about some of the world’s greatest inventions—past and present—and the effort it took to create them, educating and inspiring audiences with stories of creativity, hard work, and passion. Rocca created and hosted the Cooking Channel’s show, My Grandmother’s Ravioli, in which he learned to cook from grandparents across America. He is also a frequent panelist on NPR’s hit weekly quiz show Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!
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The coronavirus pandemic has affected some communities worse than others—drawing into specific relief decades of data on health disparities. Dr. Donald Warne warns that the impact has been particularly grave for Native Americans.
Donald Warne, MD, MPH is the Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion as well as the Director of the Indians Into Medicine (INMED) and Master of Public Health Programs, and Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of North Dakota. He also serves as the Senior Policy Advisor to the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen’s Health Board in Rapid City, South Dakota. Warne is a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe from Pine Ridge, South Dakota and comes from a long line of traditional healers and medicine men. He received his medical degree from Stanford University School of Medicine and his master’s in public health from Harvard School of Public Health. He has been a primary care physician with the Gila River Health Care Corporation in Arizona, a Staff Clinician with the National Institutes of Health, Indian Legal Program Faculty with the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, the Health Policy Research Director for Inter-Tribal Council of Arizona, the Executive Director of the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen’s Health Board and Chair of the Department of Public Health at North Dakota State University.
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A lot of Americans feel like the 2020s have already been a grueling decade—and we’re barely half-way through the first year of it. While the narrative of this experience will take some time to be written, Maddie McGarvey is among the photo journalists already capturing the images of this era and beginning to tell those stories.
McGarvey is a freelance photographer based in Columbus, Ohio. She worked as a staff photographer at the Burlington Free Press in Vermont before returning to the Midwest. She was named an Emerging Talent for Getty Reportage and selected as one of Magnum’s 30 Photographers under 30 and was chosen as one of TIME Magazine’s 51 Instagram Photographers to follow in the United States and was recognized by Picture of the Year International for her campaign work. She frequently photographs for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Time, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, AARP, NPR, and ESPN. Her work has also appeared in Mother Jones Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, and FiveThirtyEight, among others.
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Sports play a giant role in American public life—and their absence has been a much-discussed part of the pandemic. Ken Belson covers the National Football League for The New York Times.
Belson writes about teams, stadiums, medical issues, lawsuits and more in his coverage of the National Football League (NFL) for The Times. Mr. Belson joined the Sports section in 2009 after spending three years writing for the Metro and Business sections. From 2001 to 2004, he wrote about business in Japan while working in The New York Times’ Tokyo bureau. Prior to joining The Times, Belson wrote for Bloomberg, Reuters and Business Week, all in Tokyo, and many other publications as a freelancer. He is the co-author of “Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon.” He attended Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism on a Japan-America Friendship Commission Fellowship and won the Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship, which he used to travel to the Cook Islands to write about the effects of bankruptcy on a country.
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A treatise on the future of technology and security usually is thick and often inaccessible, but P.W. Singer and August Cole turn their expertise on emerging technology and national security into a page-turning techno-thriller set in the not-too-distant future.
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Fables are ancient tools for delivering big lessons to human audiences. In his work, Karey Kirkpatrick applies modern story-telling technology to this ancient tradition.
Kirkpatrick is a writer, director, composer and lyricist whose films include “Chicken Run,” “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” “James and the Giant Peach,” “Over the Hedge” “Charlotte’s Web,” and the 2018 animated musical “Smallfoot” among others. He and his brother, Wayne Kirkpatrick, were nominated for a 2015 Tony Award for Best Original Score for “Something Rotten!” This was just one of many honors for Kirkpatrick, who has won four Annie Awards for television and movie animation. He has also won a Saturn Award, a Hugo Award, and a Cannes Film Festival Award, among others. He directed the computer-animated feature films “Over the Hedge” and “Smallfoot,” from Warner Bros., and co-wrote the story and screenplay, and his brother Wayne, wrote the songs. “Smallfoot” featured the voices of Channing Tatum, Zendaya, James Corden, LeBron James, and Danny DeVito among others.
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This show is built on the power of storytelling to change the world. Mary Rohlich has built her career telling stories that matter, whether in documentaries, feature films, or on television.
Rohlich is an independent film, television and documentary producer. She is currently an executive producer on the Netflix series “Atypical,” which was renewed for a fourth and final season this year. She has produced several television pilots and series including “The Good Doctor” as co-executive producer, “Sneaky Pete” as producer, “The Goldbergs” as co-producer, and “Breaking In” as co-producer. Rohlich worked with director Seth Gordon on “Four Christmases” as associate producer. With Gordon, she co-produced the hit comedies, “Horrible Bosses,” “Identity Thief,” and was an executive producer on “Baywatch.” She has also produced several notable documentary features including “Gleason,” which was shortlisted for an Academy Award in 2017, “Wrestle,” “Bill Nye: Science Guy,” “Finders Keepers,” among others. Rohlich also serves on the board of Vidiots, a non-profit film organization, and was named one of the Hollywood Reporter’s “Next Gen 35 under 35” industry up-and-comers in 2016.
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Two months ago, production of Story in the Public Square was stopped when our state governor issued a stay at home order. Like most of the rest of the country, we’ve watched the days pass. While we stayed home, Dr. Daniela Lamas kept going to work as a pulmonary specialist on the front lines of the pandemic.
Lamas is a pulmonary and critical-care doctor at Boston’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School. Following graduation from Harvard College, she went on to earn her medical degree at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons, where she also completed internship and residency. She then returned to Boston for her subspecialty fellowship. She has been a medical reporter at the Miami Herald and her essays frequently appear in the New York Times, including her most recent from the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic.
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The history of the American women’s suffrage movement is the history of determined community organizing, fierce protest, and the power of ideals. Susan Ware, however, tells us the history we know fails to reflect the diversity of the movement that won women the right to vote 100 years ago. She’s Susan Ware, this week on Story in the Public Square.
A pioneer in the field of women’s history and a leading feminist biographer, Ware is the author and editor of numerous books on twentieth-century U.S. history. Since 2012, she has served as the general editor of the American National Biography, published by Oxford University Press under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies. Ware has long been associated with the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study where she serves as the Honorary Women’s Suffrage Centennial Historian. The Library of America will publish a women’s suffrage anthology edited by Ware in 2020. Ware has taught at New York University and Harvard, where she served as editor of the biographical dictionary Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century.
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President John F. Kennedy once said, “[one person] can make a difference. And everyone should try.” Chelsea Clinton is the author of a series of books for young readers inspired by that same sense of idealism.
Chelsea Clinton is the Vice Chair of the Clinton Foundation and works alongside her parents, President Bill Clinton and Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, to drive the vision and work of the Clinton Foundation. Over the past 13 years, the Foundation has built partnerships with great purpose among governments, businesses, NGOs, and individuals everywhere to strengthen health systems in developing countries, fight climate change, expand economic opportunity in Africa, Latin America, and the United States, and increase opportunity for women and girls around the world. Chelsea and Secretary Clinton co-lead the Foundation’s newest initiative, No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project, which helps advance the full participation of women and girls around the world. Clinton also serves on the boards of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, the School of American Ballet, the Africa Center and the Weill Cornell Medical College, and is the Co-Chair of the Advisory Board of the Of Many Institute at NYU. Clinton is the best-selling author of a series of books for young readers, including, “Start Now! You Can Make a Difference,” which empower the next generation of change makers to take action on some of the world’s most urgent challenges.
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The partisan split on climate change is unmistakable. Democrats view the climate as one of their top-two national issues. Republicans tend to worry more about the economic disruption that may result from efforts to reduce carbon emissions. Dr. Michael Klare argues that for the a-political men and women who lead the U.S. military, the challenge of defending the nation and its interests in an age of climate change is daunting.
Klare is the Five College Professor Emeritus of Peace and World Security Studies, a joint appointment at Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He serves as the director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College and is the author of fifteen books, including “Resource Wars,” “Blood and Oil,” and “The Race for What’s Left.” Klare is the defense correspondent for The Nation and has written for Current History, Foreign Affairs, Le Monde Diplomatique, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, the New York Times, Scientific American, and Technology Review.
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While the United States contains less than five percent of the planet’s population, it has nearly one-quarter of the world’s prison population. Elizabeth Hinton traces the politics and policy decisions since President Lyndon’s Johnson’s War on Poverty that created the nation’s reliance on mass incarceration.
Elizabeth Hinton is Professor in the Departments of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Hinton’s research focuses on the persistence of poverty and racial inequality in the 20th-century United States. In her award-winning book, “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America,” Hinton examines the implementation of federal law enforcement programs beginning in the mid-1960s that made the United States home to the largest prison system in world history. It has received numerous awards, including being named to the New York Times’s 100 notable books of 2016.
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In the course of producing “Story in the Public Square” each week, co-hosts Jim Ludes and G. Wayne Miller revel in the chance to sit down with incredibly gifted story-tellers and artists, to hear them describe their craft, and to benefit from their unique perspectives on the world. Sara Jordenö is all of those things and more.
Jordenö is a filmmaker, visual artist and researcher whose work intersects art, activism, visual ethnography and cinema. Born in Sweden, Jordenö is active in Europe and the U.S., working with film, drawing, animation, video and installation. Jordenö directed the documentary feature film “KIKI” about a youth-led social movement for LGBTQ+ youth of color in New York City, working in in close collaboration with community leader Twiggy Pucci Garcon. KIKI premiered in the U.S. documentary competition at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016 and went on to screen at more than 80 film festivals around the world, earning the Teddy Award for Best Documentary Film at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights at the Full Frame Documentary Festival and a nomination for the 2017 Film Independent Spirit Truer Than Fiction award. Jordenö is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film, Animation and Video at Rhode Island School of Design, teaching BA, BFA, MA and MFA level courses in documentary and experimental film theory and production, site-specific participatory artistic practices and artistic fieldwork in dialogue with anthropological research methods.
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Climate change is reshaping America’s coast-line—from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico; from Staten Island New York to California. For most of us, the change is invisible, but Elizabeth Rush tells us that is, in part, because we don’t know what we’re seeing.
Rush is the author of “Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, and “Still Lifes from a Vanishing City: Essays and Photographs from Yangon, Myanmar.” Her work explores how humans adapt to changes enacted upon them by forces seemingly beyond their control, from ecological transformation to political revolution. She served as the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at Bates College from 2015 to 2017 and currently teaches creative nonfiction courses at Brown University that carry the environmental sciences and digital technologies into the humanities classroom.
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It wasn’t so long ago that small and mid-sized American communities were served by multiple news outlets. Penny Abernathy warns of the expansion of “news deserts,” or areas without dedicated local coverage because of shifting technology and consumer behavior.
Penelope (Penny) Abernathy is the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina and former executive at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. A journalism professional with more than 30 years of experience as a reporter, editor and senior media business executive, she specializes in preserving quality journalism by helping news organizations succeed economically in the digital environment. Her research focuses on the implications of the digital revolution for news organizations, the information needs of communities and the emergence of news deserts in the United States. She authored “The Expanding News Deserts,” a major 2018 report that documents the decline and loss of local news organizations in the U.S., and was the lead co-author of “The Strategic Digital Media Entrepreneur” which explores in-depth the emerging business models of successful media enterprises.
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War stories—whether the stuff of memoir or fictional portrayals of people at war—are mainstays of literature across human history, and today, that extends to film. Mark Jacobson is both a historian and a veteran who seizes on the power of modern storytelling in film to educate the next generation about the realities of war.
Dr. Jacobson is the John J. McCloy ’16 Professor of American Institutions and International Diplomacy at Amherst College and is a non-resident Senior Fellow at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. He has over twenty years of experience in the federal government, international organizations, and academia working on some of the most complex and politically sensitive national security issues facing the United States. Since November 2017, Jacobson has served as a senior policy advisor at Kasowitz Benson Torrres LLC where, as a part of the Government Affairs and Strategic Counsel group, he helps to advise on and resolve complex and politically sensitive issues for clients, as well as representing clients before the U.S. government. Jacobson was previously appointed as the Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense and Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy and served in Kabul, Afghanistan as the Deputy NATO Representative and Director of International Affairs at the International Security Assistance Force.
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History, as a subject of study, is more than a linear progression of events—it’s ideas, currents of thought, institutions of learning, social movements, moral awakenings and more. In a brief, new book, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen traces the history of ideas that shaped the United States from its beginnings.
Ratner-Rosenhagen is the Merle Curti Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison). She specializes in U.S. intellectual and cultural history and focuses on the history of philosophy, political and social theory, religion, literature and print culture, the visual arts, and the transatlantic flow of intellectual and cultural movements. She is the author of American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas and has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history. Along with her academic scholarship and teaching, Ratner-Rosenhagen is the founder of the Intellectual History Group at UW-Madison, an informal, interdisciplinary working group for faculty and graduate students interested in the varieties of intellectual history and history of ideas.
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Many people today can mock appeals for understanding between partisans with the phrase, “can’t we all just get along?” For Dr. Linda Tropp however, understanding the dynamics of inter-group conflict and facilitating positive dialogue has become her life’s work.
Tropp is a professor of social psychology at the University of Massachusetts and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Her research focuses on expectations and outcomes of intergroup contact, interpretations of intergroup relationships, and responses to prejudice and disadvantage. Tropp received the 2012 Distinguished Academic Outreach Award from the University of Massachusetts Amherst for excellence in the application of scientific knowledge to advance the public good. She has co-authored and edited several books, including “When Groups Meet: The Dynamics of Intergroup Contact.”
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In a meeting on Capitol Hill 15 years ago, a respected foreign policy analyst said that most national security assessments out of Washington ignored the elephant in the room: the United States and the impact of our domestic politics on the state of the world. While Tom Nichols wasn’t in the room that day, he brings a rigorous analytical mind steeped in national security to his analysis of the world around us.
Nichols is a U.S. Naval War College University Professor, and an adjunct professor at both the U.S. Air Force School of Strategic Force Studies and the Harvard Extension School. He specializes in Russian affairs, nuclear strategy, NATO issues, and is a nationally-known commentator on U.S. politics and national security. Nichols was a staff member in the United States Senate, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Harvard Kennedy School, and previously taught at Dartmouth, La Salle University, and Georgetown. He is also a five-time undefeated ‘Jeopardy!’ champion, and was noted in the ‘Jeopardy!’ Hall of Fame after his 1994 appearances as one of the all-time best players of the game. Nichols is the author of “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters.”
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There are some people who believe that they are prepared to critique teachers’ performances because they went to elementary school themselves. The confidence of what seemed to work for us as individuals fuels a lot of stress for teachers. The same can be said about parenting. Nothing saps the confidence of the uninitiated quite like the reality of actually becoming a parent. KJ Dell’ Antonia however, tells parents to cut themselves some slack.
Dell’Antonia is a former New York Times reporter, editor and lead blogger of The Times’ “The Motherlode Blog,” and current Times contributor. She is the author of the critically acclaimed book, “How to be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute” and the forthcoming novel “The Chicken Sisters.” Dell’Antonia is a graduate of Kansas State University, where she earned a bachelor of science degree in business and physical anthropology, and the University of Chicago Law School. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and four children.
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The genetics revolution is already reshaping healthcare—and most people see in it the potential for healthier children, healthier adults, and less disease. Dr. Jamie Metzl argues that the same technology making progress possible has the potential to saddle the world with a complex array of thorny ethical questions that will affect everything from human sexual reproduction to national security.
Metzl is a technology and healthcare futurist, geopolitical expert, novelist, entrepreneur, media commentator, and Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council. He was appointed to the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on developing global standards for the governance and oversight of human genome editing in 2019. He currently serves on the Advisory Council to Walmart’s Future of Retail Policy Lab and is a faculty member for Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine conference. His most recent book is “Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity.”
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With less than 5 percent of the planet’s population, the United States houses 22 percent of the world’s prisoners. The challenges of navigating that system don’t end when the convicted felon completes his or her sentence. Keesha Middlemass shines a light on the substantial barriers felons face when they try to reenter society. She’s Keesha Middlemass this week on Story in the Public Square.
Dr. Middlemass is a political science professor at Howard University. She teaches courses in public policy and American Politics, and conducts research on race, institutions, public policy, and marginalized populations, focussing specifically on studying prisoner reentry, the politics of punishment, and racial justice. Her book, “Convicted & Condemned: The Politics and Policies of Prisoner Reentry” examines the public policies that create perverted incentives for men and women convicted of a felony and attempting to reenter society.
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Afghanistan is known to most Americans as the site of America’s longest war. Since 2001, the United States has sent hundreds of thousands of its sons and daughters to fight extremists and hunt-down the perpetrators of 9/11. But Afghanistan is more than the war. Ambassador Adela Raz has a unique perspective on her country’s rich history and insights about its future.
Adela Raz is the Ambassador of Afghanistan to the United States. She is also the designated non-resident Ambassador to Argentina, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia. She previously served as Afghanistan’s first female Permanent Representative and Ambassador to the United Nations from December 2018 until July 2021. Raz was the Vice President of the 75th session of the General Assembly and was appointed by the President of the General Assembly to serve as the General Assembly’s co-coordinator on COVID-19-related initiatives. In 2013, Raz was appointed as the first female Deputy Spokesperson and Director of Communication for President Karzai just after working with an international development organization in the United States. She then became the Chief of Staff at the President’s Administrative Office in November 2014, and was appointed as Deputy Minister for Economic Cooperation at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in March 2016.
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For generations, American politicians have promised reducing—or even eliminating—poverty as one of their goals. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson went so far as to declare an “unconditional war” on poverty. Lenette Azzi-Lessing warns, however, that the rhetoric of fighting poverty has become a war on the poor with devastating consequences for America’s most vulnerable children.
Azzi-Lessing is Clinical Professor of Social Work at Boston University and author of “Behind from the Start: How America’s War on the Poor is Harming Our Most Vulnerable Children.” She founded the nationally recognized Rhode Island Center for Children At-Risk, now named Children’s Friend, in 1989 to address the social service and behavioral health needs of highly vulnerable young children and their families. Azzi-Lessing is a member of the Child Welfare League of America’s National Joint Commission, she has co-chaired the League’s Committee on Prevention, Protection, and Family Preservation, and has been an expert witness in federal court on behalf of children abused and neglected in the child protective system. In 2017, Azzi-Lessing was named a Fulbright Specialist focused on higher education and training in nations across the globe. She also helped develop Graduate Certificate Programs in Early Childhood Development and Family Support in South Africa with colleagues from the University of Fort Hare, East London, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa.
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On September 22, 1928, a four-year-old girl named Barbara Griffiths disappeared in the woods near the small town of Massena, New York. At some point in the panicked search that followed, someone speculated that the child may have been murdered by a Jewish resident of the community in a ritual sacrifice. This was blood libel, a well-documented antisemitic slander common in Europe but new to the United States. Edward Berenson details the case and places it in historical and contemporary context.
Edward Berenson is professor of history and chair of the history department at New York University (NYU). Before he began teaching at NYU in 1998, he taught for many years at UCLA. Berenson is the author or editor of eight books on 19th and 20th-century French, British, and U.S. history, two of which have been translated into French. In 1999, he received the American Historical Association’s Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2006 he was decorated by former French president Jacques Chirac as “Chevalier dans l’Ordre de Merit.” He has published op-eds in the New York Times and in leading French papers, and comments on American politics and public life for the French media. His most recent book, “The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town,” covers the investigation of America’s only alleged case of blood libel, and what it reveals about antisemitism in the United States and Europe.
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