Delving In with Stuart Kelter

Erin Vincent is an author, essayist, journalist, and public speaker. In addition to literary contributions to anthologies and other publications, she has also appeared on national television and radio programs both in her native Australia and in the US. Her memoir, Grief Girl, published in 2008, chronicles her life and emotions following the death of her parents from an automobile accident. It was named a New York Public Library Best Book and was an American Library Association Best Book Nominee. Her second book, Fourteen Ways of Looking, published just this month, revisits the year her parents died by exploring wide-ranging associations to the number 14, evoking a wide variety of images and feelings in the process.Recorded 4/20/26 in the U.S. (4/21/26 in Australia.)

Psychologist Ross Greene is the originator of the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model and the non-profit Lives in the Balance.org. He is the author of several books about how teachers and administrators can help children with challenging behavior. The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children, first published in 1998 and now in its sixth edition, introduced parents to an alternative to disciplining their child with rewards and punishments. Parents learn instead to engage their child in together solving the problems that lead to frustration and melt-downs. Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them, published in 2008, extended the model for the school setting. Ross’s most recent book, The Kids Who Aren’t Okay: The Urgent Case for Reimagining Support, Belonging, and Hope in School, published just last month, provides a persuasive case for school personnel to transition to the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model in their own school. Ross was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for 20 years and is currently an adjunct professor at Virginia Teach and also in Sydney, Australia.Recorded 3/31/26.

Richard Bessel is a professor emeritus of twentieth century history at the University of York and a former member of the editorial boards of German History and History Today. He is a specialist in the social and political history of modern Germany, the aftermath of the two world wars, and the history of policing. He is the author of several books, published between 1984 and 2004, about the Nazi and post-Nazi eras of German history. His book, Violence: A Modern Obsession, published in 2015, explores how Western perceptions of violence have evolved over the last 150 years. This interview will focus on his recently published, Postwar Europe: A Very Short Introduction, part of The Oxford Very Short Introduction series.Recorded 3/17/26.

David Sussillo is an internationally recognized neuroscientist, currently working as a senior research manager at Meta Reality Labs, leading a team that is developing brain-machine interfaces for next-generation computer technologies. He is also an adjunct professor in the electrical engineering department at Stanford University, where he conducts research in computational neuroscience and neural dynamics. This interview will focus on his soon-to-be published book, Emergence: A Memoir of Boyhood, Computation, and the Mysteries of Mind, about his remarkable overcoming of profound childhood adversity, including his earliest years growing up with drug-addicted parents, followed by nearly a decade in orphanages. In this interview we will try to imagine what it was like for David during his childhood, including the hardships, the sources of engagement and hope, and what it took to achieve the improbable: a highly successful life, both professionally and personally.Recorded 3/10/26.

Michael Boylan is a philosophy professor at Marymount University and a prolific writer who focuses on a wide range of ethical domains, including public health, the environment, medical advances, business practices, technological innovation, foundational philosophical texts from Ancient Greece, and the practice of teaching. He is also a poet and a fiction writer, exploring philosophical issues through his own writing of poetry, short stories, and novels. This interview will explore the major approaches to ethics, both in general terms and as applied to hypothetical, fictional, and real situations.Recorded 3/3/26.

Nicholas — or Nick — Jelley, is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Physics and a Fellow of Lincoln College at the University of Oxford, known for his expertise in renewable energy and energy science. He was the UK group leader for the Nobel Prize-winning Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) experiment, a major achieve­ment in particle physics. More recently, he has conducted research on solar energy for use in the developing world. He has authored several books on energy topics, including the textbook, Energy Science: Principles, Technologies, and Impacts, co-written with John Andrews, and Renewable Energy: A Very Short Introduction, the second edition of which was recently published and which is the subject of today's interview.Recorded 2/17/26.

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is a Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School, where he teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Evidence, and a seminar examining police surveillance technologies, privacy, and civil rights. Before becoming a professor, Professor Ferguson worked as a public defender for seven years, representing adults and juveniles, and was also lead counsel in numerous jury and bench trials, arguing cases before the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. Ferguson has written over 35 law review articles and book chapters and provided legal commentary for the New York Times, the Economist, CNN, NPR, among other media. He is also the author of four books, including, Why Jury Duty Matters: A Citizen’s Guide to Constitutional Action, published in 2012, which was the first book written for jurors on jury duty. His award-winning second book, The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement, was published in 2017. We’ll be discussing his recently published latest book, Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance (2026), which reveals how smart devices dramatically enhance the scope of potential evidence for criminal prosecution. Unfortunately, in the process, we’re giving away our privacy and rendering ourselves vulnerable to harassment or worse by an authoritarian government.Recorded 2/10/26.

Nathaniel Greenberg is an Associate Professor of Arabic in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason University, focusing on the intersection of technology, politics, and culture in the modern Middle East and North Africa. A Comparative Literature scholar by training, he also worked as a freelance journalist and was one of the few Americans to report on the first days of the 2011 Arab Spring uprising in Egypt. He is the author of four books, including How Information Warfare Shaped the Arab Spring: The Politics of Narrative in Tunisia and Egypt, published in 2019, and The Long War of Ideas: American Diplomacy in Arabic After 911, to published this March.Recorded 1/27/26.

Scott Wallace is an award-winning writer, television producer, and photojournalist, who for over 40 years, has focused on the environment, vanishing cultures, and conflict over land and resources around the world. He has written feature stories for the New York Times and The Smithsonian, among other major publications, and has been a frequent contributor to National Geographic. He is the author of the bestselling book, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes, published in 2011, a firsthand account of an expedition through the land of a mysterious tribe living in extreme isolation deep in the Amazon rain forest. As a reporter for CBS News, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Newsweek, the Independent, and the Guardian, Wallace covered the civil wars in Central America throughout the 1980s, and is the author of and photographer for Central America in the Crosshairs of War: On the Road from Vietnam to Iraq, published in 2024. In 2017 he joined the faculty of the Journalism Department of the University of Connecticut. Today’s interview will focus on his earlier book, The Unconquered.Recorded 1/22/26.

Ralph Eubanks is the former Director of Publishing for the Library of Congress, former editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia, and currently faculty fellow and writer-in-residence at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. Awarded the Mississippi Governor’s Arts Award for excellence in literature and appointed cultural ambassador for Mississippi, he is the author of numerous articles in major newspapers and magazines, as well as four books, Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi's Dark Past, published in 2003, The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South, published in 2009, A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through A Real and Imagined Literary Landscape, published in 2021, and most recently, When It’s Darkness on the Delta: How America’s Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land, published in 2026. Our interview will focus on his latest book, which brings out the rich and painful history of the region, its enduring consequences, and possible springboards for hope.Recorded 1/12/26.

Patrick Alley is the former executive director and co-founder – along with Simon Taylor and Charmian Gooch – of Global Witness, an award-winning nonprofit organization, established in 1993, dedicated to exposing the links between corruption, environmental destruction, human-rights abuses and war. Since stepping down as executive director in 2023, he has continued his involvement as a board member and has also turned his focus to writing. His first book, Very Bad People: The Inside Story of the Fight Against the World’s Network of Corruption, was published in 2022, and his second, Terrible Humans: The World's Most Corrupt Super-Villains And The Fight to Bring Them Down, was published in 2024. Both books present gripping stories of high stakes challenges taken on by Global Witness and affiliated organizations, such as Citizen Lab, Sea Shepard, and the Wildlife Justice Commission in exposing evil and, in many cases, making a major contribution to eradicating it.Recorded 1/5/26.

Anne-Marie Erickson is the author of the memoir, In the Evening, We’ll Dance: A Memoir in Essays on Love and Dementia, which bears witness to the demise of her beloved husband, Dick Cain. As might be expected, this is a sad story, but not only. Right up until the very end, about ten years ago, the couple was able to express their love of one another and, thanks to their mutual love of language, Ann-Marie was, much of the time, able to decipher Dick’s not-necessarily-intentional use of metaphor to convey deep insights into their relationship, the world, and mortality. It’s an inspirational book that assiduously avoids clichés and platitudes, deeply honest about what it’s like to stay committed to the love of one’s life. She acknowledges the heartbreak, the exasperation, and the rage that goes with this territory, but she also doesn’t allow herself to become mired in negativity, and manages to gather sacred moments as they come, of meaning and closeness, as jewels on a strand that ultimately must end.Recorded 12/30/25.

Eric Schwitzgebel is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, whose main interests include philosophy of mind, metaphysics, the nature of belief, the impact or lack thereof of ethical thinking on behavior, and classical Chinese philosophy. He is the author of four books: Perplexities of Consciousness, published in 2011, Describing Inner Experience?: Proponent Meets Skeptic co-written with Russell Hurlburt, also published in 2011, A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures, published in 2019, and The Weirdness of the World, published in 2024. He is also a science fiction writer and was a contributor to Philosophy through Science Fiction Stories: Exploring the Boundaries of the Possible. Starting in 2006, Eric has written a blog called, “The Splintered Mind.”Recorded 12/9/25.

Stephen Marche is a Canadian novelist, essayist, and journalist, a scholar of philosophy and literature, and a former teacher of Renaissance drama at the City University of New York, resigning in 2007 to pursue a full-time writing career ever since. He has written five novels, numerous essays for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Guardian, and four works of non-fiction: How Shakespeare Changed Everything published in 2011, The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the Twenty-First Century published in 2017, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, published in 2022, and On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer, published in 2023.Recorded 12/3/25.

Rebekah Peeples is the Deputy Dean of the College at Princeton University with oversight of the undergraduate curriculum. Previously at Princeton, she taught sociology and writing. She is also the author of two books: Wal-Mart Wars: Moral Populism in the Twenty-First Century, published in 2014, and Unchanged Trebles: What Boy Choirs Teach Us About Motherhood and Masculinity, published four weeks ago, and which is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 11/12/25.

Emma Duval is a self-described member of the “millennial generation,” who include the growing number of women who are childless and as, Emma puts it, “childfree” by choice. Although now married, Duval’s early inspirations were independent, unmarried women, and as a teenager she contemplated becoming a nun in rejection of societal norms surrounding marriage. She is the author-illustrator of the recently published book, Unwed & Unbothered: The Defiant Lives of Single Women, which celebrates the courageous lives and remarkable contributions of such women throughout history, going back thousands of years.Recorded 11/5/25.

Suzanne Mettler is a senior professor of American Institutions in the Government Department at Cornell University. She is the author of several books, including The Submerged State and Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream, published in 2014, The Government-Citizen Disconnect, published in 2018, Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy, co-written with Robert C. Lieberman and published in 2024, and most recently, Rural vs. Urban: The Growing Divide that Threatens Democracy, co-written with Trevor E. Brown and published just a few weeks ago.Recorded 10/16/25.

Philip Connors is a National Parks Service fire watcher in New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness since 2002. In addition to essays in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, Connors is the author of Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, published in 2011; All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found, published in 2015; and A Song for the River -- about the threat to the Gila River, one of the last wild rivers in the western U.S., threatened by a proposed dam -- published in 2018. His work has won the National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Reading the West Award for Nonfiction, the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Book Competition, a Southwest Book Award, and an n+1 Writer's Fellowship. His fourth book, The Mountain Knows the Mountain: A Fire Watch Diary, published just a few weeks ago, blends haiku and diary entries that beautifully convey his experience of solitude, his reverence for nature, and his witnessing of devastating forest megafires on an unprecedented scale. He also speaks to our longstanding foolish overconfidence in the ability to indefinitely prevent forest fires.Recorded 8/8/25.

Ira Chaleff is past President of Executive Coaching & Consulting Associates and award-winning author of several books, including The Courageous Follower: Standing Up to and for Our Leaders, published in 2009; Intelligent Disobedience: Doing Right When What You're Told to Do Is Wrong, published in 2015; Intelligent Disobedience for Children: A Handbook for Parents and Other Caregivers, published in 2018; To Stop a Tyrant: The Power of Political Followers to Make or Brake a Toxic Leader, published in 2024, and in a completely different genre, a collection of original poems about aging, Falling Apart Into Wholeness, published in 2020. Ira has conducted workshops on Leader-Follower relations for a wide range of organizations, including multinational corporations and governmental agencies. He served as Executive Director, as well as Chair of the Board, of The Congressional Management Foundation, a non-partisan, non-profit group that provides management research, training and consulting for the U.S. Congress.Recorded 9/16/25.

Tim Franks has been a journalist with the BBC since 1990, as a producer, reporter, and presenter. He has covered British politics, including the conflict Northern Ireland in the years leading up to the Good Friday Agreement, as well as international issues, as a foreign correspondent on the scene in Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories, and in war zones, such as Iraq during the war of 2003, and in Gaza during the current war there. Since 2013 he has been a presenter – or in American parlance, an anchor – for Newshour, the BBC World Service flagship radio news program. This interview will focus primarily on his recently published book, The Lines We Draw: The Journalist, the Jew, and an Argument About Identity.Recorded 9/9/25.

Sophie Pavelle is a U.S. born and UK-based science writer and communicator, whose debut book, Forget Me Not: Finding The Forgotten Species of Climate-Change Britain, won The People’s Book Prize for Non-Fiction (2023) and was long-listed for the 2023 James Cropper Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing. She worked for conservation charity Beaver Trust for four years, presenting their award-winning documentary Beavers Without Borders (2020), and also sat on the Advisory Committee of the UK based Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Today’s interview will focus on her latest book, published in May of this year, To Have or to Hold: Nature’s Hidden Relationships, a wide-ranging exploration of symbiotic relationships between unrelated species.Recorded 9/2/25.

Amin Saikal is an emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies at the Australian National University, where he was also the Founding Director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies. He has won several academic awards and is a member of many national and international academic organizations. In addition to numerous articles in international journals, he has also written feature articles in major international newspapers, including the International Herald Tribune, The New York Times and The Guardian and has been a frequent commentator on radio and television news programs. He has written several books about relations between Islam and the West and on political developments in Iran, Arab countries, and his home country, Afghanistan. This interview will focus on his most recent book, How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan, published in 2024.Recorded 8/26/25.

 Henry ("Hank") Greenspan is an emeritus psychologist and oral historian in Holocaust studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, award-winning playwright and actor, lyricist, essayist, and poet, and social activist in the area of healthcare rights. During the interview he’ll be performing one of the monologues from his remarkable play, REMNANTS, in which he channels the personalities and pivotal experiences of holocaust survivors with whom he formed deep relationships over the course of 50 years. (A video of his performance of the complete play can be viewed, at no charge, here.) We’ll also be talking about his new book, released just last week, REMNANTS and What Remains: Moments from a Life Among Holocaust Survivors, which for the first time publishes the text of the play, as well as providing reflections on its history, production, and reception. (A long excerpt of another of his plays discussed during the interview, The Mad Jester of the Warsaw Ghetto, can be viewed, at no charge, here.)Recorded 8/19/25.

Psychologists Diane Ehrensaft and Michelle Jurkiewicz are the co-authors of the recently published book, Gender Explained: A New Understanding of Identity in a Gender Creative World. Diane is cofounder and director of mental health at the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at the University of California, San Francisco, where she is also a researcher and professor of pediatrics. She is the author of two previous books on this subject: The Gender Creative Child and Gender Born, Gender Made. Michelle Jurkiewicz is a gender specialist in private practice in Berkeley, California and an early pioneer and trainer in gender-affirmative care with transgender, non-binary, and gender expansive youth.Recorded 8/13/25.

Remi Adekoya is a political science lecturer at the University of York in the UK, focusing on national and sub-national identities and their role in international relations, especially as they affect Africa. Before joining academia, Remi was a journalist, whose writing appeared in major mainstream publications in Europe, the U.S. and Africa. He has also provided analysis and commentary for wide-ranging international media and is the host of the podcast How to Become a Leader in Africa. Remi’s cultural background – as the son of a Nigerian father and a Polish mother, growing up in Nigeria and living as an adult in Warsaw and now London – give him multifaceted, first hand, international perspectives. Today’s interview will focus on his book, published in 2023: It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s About Wealth: How the Economics of Race Really Work.Recorded 7/29/25.

Maggie Mertens is a journalist in Seattle, who covers gender, culture, and sports. She has written essays and stories for such major publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and The Guardian and has also been interviewed on NPR affiliates, as well as national and regional television and numerous podcasts. In 2021, she was nominated for the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sports Writing. Her recently published first book, Better, Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 7/23/25.

Iñigo García-Bryce is a history professor at New Mexico State University and the director of NMSU’s Center for Latin American and Border Studies from 2011-2016. His research focuses on Latin American social and political history. He is the author of Crafting the Republic: Lima’s Artisans and Nation-Building in Peru, 1821-1879, published in 2004 and Haya de la Torre and the Pursuit of Power in Peru and Latin America, published in 2018. García-Bryce speaks English, Spanish and French fluently, and also has proficiency in Quechua, Latin, Italian, Portuguese and German.  He has presented his research in England, Germany, Peru and Argentina.  He has lived in Lima (Peru), Prague (Czech Republic), Berlin and Munich (Germany), Paris (France) and Colombo (Sri Lanka).  He has also worked as a journalist and a Spanish interpreter and translator.Recorded 4/28/20. (Note that the recording is occasionally a bit choppy, due to a sub-optimal internet connection.)

Aziz Huq is a professor of comparative and constitutional law at the University of Chicago, focusing recently on democratic backsliding and the regulation of Artificial Intelligence. He has written articles for Politico, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other mainstream publications, in addition to many scholarly articles, and award-winning books, including Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror with coauthor, Frederick Schwarz, published in 2007; How to Save a Constitutional Democracy with coauthor Tom Ginsberg, published in 2018; The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies, published in 2021; and, most recently, The Rule of Law: A Very Short Introduction, a contribution to the Oxford “Very Short Introduction” series, published in 2024. He has an active pro bono practice and is on the boards of the American Constitution Society, the Seminary Co-op, the New Press, and the ACLU of Illinois. Prior to becoming a law professor, he litigated cases in both the US Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court, and was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.Recorded 7/16/25.

Rachel Laryea is a Ghanaian-American entrepreneur and author of the recently published book, Black Capitalists: A Blueprint for What Is Possible. She secured a summer an internship at Goldman-Sachs while still in college at NYU and upon graduation was offered a high-paying job there, thereby introducing her to the cutthroat, hyper-competitive world of high finance. She left that world to pursue a dual Ph.D. in African-American Studies and Sociocultural Anthropology at Yale University. Currently Laryea works as an Asset Wealth Management researcher at J.P. Morgan-Chase and is also the founder and CEO of Kelewele, a plantain-inspired food startup based in Brooklyn, New York, with the goal of providing non-exploitive work opportunities. Her work focuses on Black participation in capitalist economies, both in the U.S. and Africa.Recorded 7/15/25.

Shoumita Dasgupta is a Professor of Medicine at Boston University, where she has held many leadership positions. She is Assistant Dean of Diversity and Inclusion, formerly Assistant Dean of Admissions, Founding Director of Graduate Studies in Genetics and Genomics; Past President of the Association of Professors of Human and Medical Genetics, and Fulbright Specialist, serving as a U.S. State Department, short-term expert at academic institutions abroad. As a scientist educator, she has focused on genetics and genomic medicine, diversity and inclusion, and mentoring of graduate students. She is the author of the recently published, Where Biology Ends and Bias begins: Lessons on Belonging from Our DNA, which is the focus on today’s interview.Recorded 7/1/25.

Meg Kissinger is an investigative journalist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who spent more than two decades reporting on the failures of the American mental health system. She has won more than a dozen national honors, including two George Polk Awards and the Robert F. Kennedy National Journalism Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She had her first big break as a journalist when she broke the story about the whereabouts of fugitive, Abbie Hoffman. Her recently published memoir, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence, was named an Outstanding Work of Literature winner and an editors’ choice by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, Goodreads and Independent Booksellers Association. Audible chose it as the Best of the Year. The book tacks the intertwined topics of mental illness and family dysfunction so ably and so eloquently that she has surely taken out several bricks, at least, in the twin walls of shame and aversion that keep these problems from being effectively addressed.Recorded 6/25/25.

David Pengelley is a retired math professor from New Mexico State University (NMSU). We'll be talking about math education, math history, and learning math from primary source material. Dr. Pengelley, who also does original theoretical as well as historical mathematical research, rediscovered the work of the first known female research mathematician, Sophie Germain.Recorded 7/21/20.

Mariah Blake is an investigative journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and The New Republic. She was a Murrey Marder Nieman Fellow in Watchdog Journalism at Harvard University. Blake is the author of the recently published, They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals. The book investigates the chemical industry's decades-long campaign to hide the dangers of forever chemicals, the courageous individuals who sued these corporations, and the precautions each of us can take to protect ourselves in a polluted world.Recorded 6/4/25.

Jessy Randall is curator of special collections at Colorado College and the author of several poetry collections, including: Suicide Hotline Hold Music, (which includes her own accompanying comics), There Was an Old Woman, Injecting Dreams into Cows, and A Day in Boyland, which was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. She has also written a young adult novel, The Wandora Unit, about poetry nerds in high school, and a collection of collaborative poems, Interruptions, written with Daniel M. Shapiro. In a previous appearance on Delving In, on 11/13/22, she shared her poems from Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science. Today's interview returns to this subject with new poems from her latest book, The Path of Most Resistance.Recorded 5/27/25.

Kelly Clancy is a neuroscientist who has held research positions at M.I.T., Berkeley, the University College London, and the A.I. company, DeepMind, focusing on biological information processing and agency. In 2014 she was awarded the Regeneron Prize for creative innovation in biomedicine. Her writing has appeared in several major publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and The New Yorker. She is the author of the recently published book, Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World.Recorded 5/21/25.

Jaz Brisack is a experienced union organizer, starting with the United Autoworkers campaign at the Nissan factory in Canton, MS and volunteering as a Pinkhouse Defender at the state’s last abortion clinic. After spending one year at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, they got a job as a barista at the Elmwood Starbucks in Buffalo, NY, becoming a founding member of Starbucks Workers United and helping to organize the first unionized Starbucks in the United States. As the organizing director for Workers United in upstate New York and Vermont, Jaz subsequently worked with organizing committees that successfully formed a workers’ union at a Ben & Jerry’s store in Burlington, VT and less successfully at a Tesla facility in Buffalo, NY.​In 2018, Jaz co-founded the Inside Organizer School and is currently developing it further as a Practitioner in Residence at the Labor Center of the University of California at Berkeley. The school teaches non-union workers and activists how to organize their workplaces from within. It also brings together organizers, activists, and workers from a variety of industries, unions, and campaigns, with the aim of creating a community that builds a vibrant, diverse, and democratic labor movement. Jaz is the author of Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World, which is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 4/22/25.

James Danckert is a cognitive scientist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, focusing on the neuroscience of attention and the consequences of strokes. He has written numerous journal articles on the psychology of boredom and is the co-author, with John Eastwood, of Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom, published in 2020, which is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 4/17/25.

Jeff Hobbs is the author of five books, including a novel, The Tourists, and four books that apply a novelist writing style to the struggles of individuals striving to overcome racial, class, and social disadvantages. These include The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man who Left Newark for the Ivy League, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Show Them You’re Good: Four Boys and the Quest for College; Children of the State: Stories of Survival and Hope in the Juvenile Justice System; and most recently and the subject of today’s interview, Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America.Recorded 4/3/25.

Samina Ali teaches fiction writing at Stanford University and is an award-winning author, whose debut novel, Madras on Rainy Days, published in 2004, won several literary awards, including Poets & Writers Magazine’s Top Debut of the Year. She has been a columnist for the New York Times Book Review and other publications and has been interviewed by national media.Samina has been an activist for Muslim women’s rights and has served as a cultural ambassador to several European countries for the U.S. State Department. A founding member of the American Muslim feminist organization, Daughters of Hajar, she curated the acclaimed global exhibition, Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices, showcasing work by Muslim women artists, activists, and thought leaders from around the world.​Samina’s just released second book, Pieces You’ll Never Get Back, which is the subject of today’s interview, tells the story of her unlikely survival and seven years of recovery, after nearly dying during the birth of her son. The memoir disarmingly invites the reader to relive her harrowing experience with her, as she taps into its medical, psychological, spiritual, cultural, and familial dimensions.Recorded 3/25/24.

Charles Piller is an award-winning investigative journalist for Science magazine, reporting on such topics as public health, biological warfare, and infectious disease outbreaks. In addition to articles in major newspapers, he is the co-author, with Keith Yamamoto, of Gene Wars: Military Control over the New Genetic Technologies, published in 1988, which examines the U.S. military biotechnology program and discusses the future of genetic arms control. He is the author of The Fail-Safe Society: Community Defiance and the End of American Technological Optimism, published in 1991, about the opposition by community groups to scientific and technological projects that endanger their communities. This interview focuses on his recently published book, Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's, the book-length version of his exposé, “Blots on a Field,” that he wrote for Science magazine on July 21, 2022.Recorded 3/18/25.

Omar Mohammed was the previously anonymous blogger who courageously reported on the atrocities he witnessed that were perpetrated by the Islamic State, also called ISIS, when in 2014 it took over Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. Currently, he teaches Middle East History, Cultural Heritage Diplomacy, and Counter Terrorism at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and is also the head of the Antisemitism Research Initiative at George Washington University. He’ll be talking with us about ancient and often prominent Jewish communities that, until seventy years ago, had flourished in Arab and Muslim lands, despite facing long-standing discrimination and sometimes violent oppression.Recorded 3/11/25.

Jonathan Tarleton is a writer, urban planner, and oral historian. He previously served as the chief researcher for Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, as editor in chief of the online magazine Urban Omnibus, and as a real estate project manager with Urban Edge, a Boston-based community development corporation. Currently, he teaches writing and argumentation at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art) in Baltimore, Maryland and serves as a senior advisor at the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins. He is also sits on the board of Shelterforce, an online publication that reports on issues related to affordable housing. In addition to dozens of essays on housing issues, he recently published his first book: Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons.Recorded 2/25/25.

Gerald Easter and Mara Vorhees are co-authors of two books, The Tsarina's Lost Treasure: Catherine the Great, a Golden Age Masterpiece, and a Legendary Shipwreck, published in 2020 and The Last Stand of the Raven Clan: A Story of Imperial Ambition, Native Resistance, and How the Tlingit-Russian War Shaped a Continent, which was just published a few months ago and is the subject of today’s interview. Gerald Easter is a political science professor at Boston College, focusing on Russia and Eastern Europe. Reconstructing the State, published in 2000, examines the personal networks and informal sources of power than contributed to the expansion of the Soviet control over its multi-ethnic satellite states, as well as to the empire’s later disintegration. His award-winning book, Capital Coercion, and Post-Communist States, published in 2012, explores the disparate outcomes, democratic vs. authoritarian, of post-Soviet satellite states. Mara Vorhees is a travel writer and photographer who has contributed to over forty guidebooks published by Lonely Planet, about such diverse destinations as New England, Central America, and Russia. She also the creator and writer of the blog, Have Twins, Will Travel: Adventures & Misadventures in Family Travel.Recorded 2/4/25.

Erik Baker is a historian, writer, and teacher based in Boston, a lecturer in the History of Science department at Harvard University and associate editor of The Drift, a magazine about culture and politics. In addition to articles about labor, politics, and American history, he recently published his first book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, which explores how social scientists and management intellectuals reshaped the American work ethic during the turbulence of twentieth century U.S. capitalism.Recorded 1/28//25.

Derek W. Black is a Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina, where he directs the Constitutional Law Center. He is one of the nation’s foremost experts in education law and policy, on such topics as school funding and ensuring equal opportunities for disadvantaged students. His research is often cited in court opinions and briefs, including in the U.S. Supreme Court. He has served as an expert witness and consultant in school funding, voucher, and federal policy litigation. His essays have appeared in major newspapers, and he has been frequent guest on national, regional, and local radio and television programs. He is the author of Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy, which warns of educational trends that retreat from foundational commitments to democracy and public education. His new book, Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy, which is the subject of today’s interview, documents the South’s repression of black education and freedom literature before and after the Civil War, providing historical context for the hostility often faced by public school teachers, curricula, and libraries.Recorded 1/21/24.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a political science professor at New York University and past president of the International Studies Association, who has served as an adviser to the U.S. government on national security and to numerous corporations on business negotiations. In addition to many articles in the professional literature and major newspapers, he is the author of 23 books. Perhaps his best known, as well as most accessible, is The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, co-authored with Alistair Smith, which is the subject of today’s interview. Recorded 1/14/25.

Patrick Parr is an historian and biographer of writers and civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Ralph Ellison, and Kato Shidzue. Teaching in Japan since 2018, he currently writes a history column for Japan Today, about historical figures or businesses coming to Japan for the first time. His new book, Malcolm Before X, provides an in-depth accounting of Malcolm X’s family history, childhood, and transformative experiences during his six year incarceration in his early 20s. The book was published this past December and was named A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2024.Recorded 12/17/24.

Jonas Olofsson is a professor at Stockholm University in Sweden, where he directs the Sensory Cognitive Interaction Lab, with a particular focus on the sense of smell, as well as its loss, as it interacts with memory, emotion, language, and information processing. He is the author of the recent book, The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell and the Extraordinary Power of the Nose, which is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 12/18/24.

Farhad Khosrokhavar is a retired professor and former Director of Studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, whose work focuses on the social movements in Iran after the Islamic Revolution, the uprisings during the Arab Spring of 2010-12, the Jihadist movements in France and the rest of Europe, and the philosophical foundations of the social sciences. He has published more than 30 books, eight of which were either translated or directly written in English, some translated into several languages, and has also written around 100 articles in French and English, which have been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, and Persian. His latest book, Revolt Against Theocracy: The Mahsa Movement and the Feminist Uprising in Iran, is the focus of today's interview.Recorded 12/24/24.

Sadri Hassani is a professor emeritus of Physics at Illinois State University, who continues to teach courses in thermal and quantum physics as the University of Illinois. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics from Princeton University, has authored several books on mathematical physics for undergraduate and graduate students, and in addition has a strong, ongoing interest in raising the scientific awareness of the general public. We’ll be talking about his latest book, Quanta in Distress: How New Age Gurus Kidnapped Quantum Physics.Recorded 12/11/24.