Delving In with Stuart Kelter

For seven years Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz was a policy advisor in the Obama Administration, focusing on homelessness and Native policy. In addition to an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University and was a Fulbright Scholar in Denmark. She currently teaches public policy at the University of Iowa, and is also the Director of the Native Policy Lab. An enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, she was awarded the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2023 for her debut nonfiction book, The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America, which is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 12/4/24.

Jeffrey Zax is an economics professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, whose research focuses on labor economics, public economics, and urban economics. He has served as a consultant for various public entities, including the Attorneys General of several states. He has also been a Fulbright Lecturer and has taught at the University of Ghana. This interview focuses on the economic causes and dynamics of inequality and discrimination.Recorded 8/27/20.

Tom Russell is a retired Child Protective Services investigator and foster care worker, who was employed by the state of Michigan. Although this honest and thoughtful interview does not go into graphic detail about child abuse, it may nevertheless be upsetting to some. Listener discretion is advised.Recorded 9/10/20.

Author and environmental activist, Richard Munson, has served as senior director of the Environmental Defense Fund, and senior vice president at Recycled Energy Development. He has been a coordinator for the Northeast-Midwest Institute and Congressional and Senate Coalitions and several other environmental organizations, including bipartisan caucuses that conduct policy research and draft legislation on issues pertaining to agriculture, economic development, energy, the environment, and manufacturing. Munson has received numerous public-service awards and, has served on several boards of environmental organizations and a Public Library. His has written biographies of scientists, including Tesla: Inventor of the Modern and Cousteau: The Captain and His World. He has also written Tech to Table: 25 Innovators Reimagining Food, From Edison to Enron, and Cardinals of Capitol Hill, which traces the machinations of congressional appropriators who control government spending. We’ll be talking about his most recent book, Ingenious: A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist.Recorded 11/12/24.

Matthew Taylor is a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, where he specializes in American Christianity, American Islam, Christian extremism, and religious politics. He also serves as an associate fellow at the Center for Peace Diplomacy in New Orleans, where he works on preventing religion-related violence surrounding U.S. elections. We’ll be talking about his new book, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening Our Democracy, which explores the roots, belief system, and goals of a non-denominational evangelical movement, the New Apostolic Reformation. In Taylor’s analysis, this movement is reshaping the culture of the religious right in the U.S. and was a major instigating force for the January 6th Insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building.Recorded 10/30/24.

Award-winning novelist, poet, and non-fiction writer, Elizabeth Rosner, talks about themes from Survivor Café: the Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, published in 2017, and her latest book, Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Rosner became attuned not only to words and sounds, but to different kinds of silences, as well.Recorded 10/22/24.

David Noll is the former associate dean for faculty research and a professor of law at Rutgers University Law School. His scholarly work encompasses a broad set of interlocking aspects of the law, including complex litigation, governmental legislation, regulation, and administration, and the framework of constitutional law in which all of these are grounded. He has written both for major scholarly journals, as well as for general audiences in the New York Times, Politico, Slate, among other publications. He is the co-author, with UCLA law professor, Jon Michaels, of the recently published Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy, which is the subject of today’s interview. Recorded 10/14/24.

Hahrie Han is a Political Science Professor at Johns Hopkins University, whose research focuses on grass-roots political activism, particularly against systemic racism. She has partnered with a wide range of civic and political organizations and movements around the world, including those in the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Korea, helping develop the leadership skills of young scholars and practitioners, especially women and people of color. In addition to writing columns in major news publications and articles in leading scholarly journals, she has written five books. Her most recent book, Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church, is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 10/1/24.

Wladimir Lyra is an astronomer at New Mexico State University, whose research focuses around high-end computer simulations of planet formation, both in our own solar system and beyond, i.e., exoplanets and their solar systems. In this interview, we discuss empirically-based theories of time and space, their relationship to each other, and current ideas about the beginning and end of time.Recorded 9/24/20.

Thomas Schaller and Paul Waldman and the co-authors of Rural White Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. Tom Schaller, who is a professor of political science at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, is the author of The Stronghold: How Republicans Captured Congress but Surrendered the White House; Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South; and co-author, with fellow UMBC political scientist Tyson King-Meadows, of Devolution and Black State Legislators: Challenges and Choices in the Twenty-First Century. He is a former political columnist for the Baltimore Sun and his commentaries have appeared in major newspapers, as well as in radio and television interviews. He has given lectures on American elections in 19 countries on behalf of the U.S. State Department.Paul Waldman is a journalist and opinion writer, whose commentaries have appeared in dozen of major newspapers, magazines and digital media. He is the author or co-author of four previous books on media and politics: The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists, and the Stories That Shape the Political World , written with Kathleen Hall Jamieson; Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why the Media Didn't Tell You; Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success; and Free Ride: John McCain and the Media.Recorded 9/19/24.

Historians Andrea Balis and Elizabeth Levy are co-authors of the Bringing Down a President: The Watergate Scandal, published in 2019, and Witch Hunt: The Cold War, Joe McCarthy, and the Red Scare, published just this year and the subject of today’s interview. Andrea was a professor at the City University of New York for 30 years, has worked as a theater director and playwright, and has written young adult fiction and non-fiction. Elizabeth is prolific and award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction books for children and young adults.Recorded 9/10/24.

Alice Driver is a writer from the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. She is the author of More or Less Dead: Feminicide, Haunting, and the Ethics of Representation in Mexico, published in 2015, and the translator of Abecedario de Juárez, published in 2022. Her latest book, The Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America's Largest Meatpacking Company,  was published this year and won the Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Alice has also written articles for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Oxford American, and National Geographic.Recorded 9/3/24.

Caroline Crampton is a writer and a podcaster, and the author of two books. The Way to the Sea, published in 2019, recounts the stories, literature, and history about the Thames Estuary in the U.K. Her second book, published in 2024 and the subject of today’s interview, is A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria. Crampton creates and hosts the award-winning detective fiction podcast Shedunnit, curates articles as editor-in-chief of The Browser, and writes reviews and essays for such publications as Time, Literary Hub and The Guardian.Recorded 8/29/24.

Beth O’Leary is a Professor Emerita at New Mexico State University, whose areas of interest include both cultural anthropology and archaeology. She is one of the creators and experts in Space Archaeology and Heritage, investigating the heritage status of the Apollo 11 Tranquility Base site on the Moon. In 2010, she and colleagues successfully nominated objects and structures at the Tranquility Base to the State Registers of Cultural Properties in both California and New Mexico. Her books include: The Final Mission: Preserving NASA’s Apollo Sites (co-authored with L.Westwood and M.W. Donaldson in 2017), (2015) The Archaeology and Heritage of the Human Movement into Space (co-edited with, P.J. Capelotti, in 2015); and The Handbook of Space Engineering, Archaeology and Heritage (co-edited with A. Darrin, CRC Taylor, and Francis Press in 2009). Dr. O’Leary has chaired five international symposia on Space Archaeology and Heritage. Dr. O’Leary has also conducted research on Athapaskan cultures in Canada and the U.S. Recorded 11/17/20.

Ian Buruma is a Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College. Originally from the Netherlands, he is a prolific writer with broad interests, including Japanese and Chinese culture and history, organized religion and religious intolerance, and intellectual and political freedom or lack thereof. He has been a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, New Republic, New Yorker, and The Guardian and has also written two novels. His most recent book, published earlier this year and the subject of today’s interview, is Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah. Buruma provides historical and biographical context to Spinoza’s life, as well as drawing out the relevance of Spinoza’s value system to current political controversies.Recorded 8/20/24.

This interview is dedicated to Samantha Keleher Bursum, who died on March 1 of 2024 in a car accident at the age of 14. She participated in this interview, at age 11, with her mother, Lori Keleher, who is a philosophy professor at New Mexico State University. Together they share the joys and benefits of philosophical conversations with children, starting from a surprisingly early age.Recorded 12/29/20.

Celene Ibrahim is a multidisciplinary scholar specializing in Islamic intellectual history, gender studies, and ethics. Her 2020 monograph, Women and Gender in the Qur'an, won the Association of Middle East Women's Studies Book Award and was featured by the American Academy of Religion for Women's History Month. Ibrahim is also the author of Islam and Monotheism (2022), an accessible primer on core Islamic beliefs. Ibrahim also writes on spiritual care, chaplaincy, religious leadership, and related themes.Ibrahim offers courses and lectures at educational and civic institutions around the world and is a trusted voice for media outlets, including NPR, PBS, and Netflix. She is a faculty member at Groton School in the Department of Religious Studies and Philosophy where she also holds an appointment as the Muslim Chaplain. She has held multiple teaching fellowships, including through the New York Times Learning Network and Teachers College at Columbia University.Recorded 12/3/20.

Jamie Bronstein has been a history professor at New Mexico State University since 1996. She is the author of six books about American and British History: Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800-1862 (published in 1999); Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in 19th-century Britain (2008); Transatlantic radical: John Francis Bray (2009); with Andrew Harris, Empire, State and Society: Modern Britain, 1830-present (2013), and The Happiness of the British Working Class (2023). Today’s interview focuses on her book, published in 2016, Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of American Inequality.Recorded 12/17/20.

Melissa Jacoby is a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches commercial and bankruptcy law. Melissa is a frequent commentator in the news media and has spoken with thousands of people about debt, lending, commercial law, and bankruptcy. In 2021 the Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts, appointed her to help design educational programming for the nation’s bankruptcy judges. She is a recipient of multiple awards, including the Grant Gilmore Award for scholarship from the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers and the Byrd Award for creative teaching. Melissa’s first book, Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal was named one of the Financial Times’ best summer economics books for 2024.Recorded 8/6/24.

Carl Elliott is a philosophy professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and a recipient of the Erikson Institute Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media. His work focuses on the influence of market forces on medicine, the ethics of enhancement technologies, research ethics, the philosophy of psychiatry, and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walker Percy. His articles have appeared in such major publications as The New Yorker, Mother Jones, and The Atlantic Monthly, often covering dark topics with satiric humor. Elliott has authored or edited seven books, including White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine, published in 2010. His latest book, published earlier this year, is The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No, which explores the events, motivations, and outcomes when whistleblowers try to expose scandalously abusive medical research.Recorded 7/30/24.

Harry Cliff is a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge. He is a member of an international team of around 1400 physicists, engineers and computer scientists who use the CERN particle accelerator in search of answers to some of the biggest questions in modern physics, such as the nature of dark matter and why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter. Harry has written two popular science books. The first, How To Make An Apple Pie From Scratch In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe, from the Origin of Atoms to the Big Bang, was published in 2021 and was named by Kirkus as one of the best science books of the year, His second, Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe, was published in March of 2024. He also shares his love physics with the public by giving TED Talks, curating science exhibitions, and appearing as a frequent guest on television, radio, and podcasts.Recorded 7/23/24.

David Jacobson, Professor of Sociology at the University of South Florida. Today's interview, focuses on his book, Of Virgins and Martyrs: Women and Sexuality in Global Conflict. Published in 2013, the book explores the interplay among cultural, political, economic, and historical forces that shape gender relations and violence, individualistic vs. communitarian values, and tensions between globalism and traditional, tribalist societies. Jacobson is the co-founder of The Global Resolve Initiative, which helps villagers in developing countries develop alternative energy technologies, with a pilot project in Ghana. Global Resolve received the 2009 Creasman Award for Excellence.Recorded 1/19/21.

Madhumita Murgia is a writer specializing in artificial intelligence and its impact on society. She was the artificial intelligence editor for Wired magazine and in February 2023 was appointed as the first A.I. Editor of the London-based Financial Times. Her recent book, Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of A.I., was shortlisted for the 2024 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction. The book explores how A.I. algorithms affect everyday workers around the world, their contribution to growing inequalities of wealth and power, and even to dystopia outcomes.Recorded 7/11/24.

Las Cruces’s very own renaissance man, Bob Diven -- an accomplished painter, sculptor, set designer, actor, playwright, composer, actor, satirist, cartoonist, singer-songwriter, folk guitarist; columnist, and more -- reflects on the creative process and the development of artistic skills.Recorded 2/13/21.

Vietnamese-American Christina Vo is the author of two memoirs. The first, entitled The Veil Between Two Worlds: A Memoir of Silence, Loss, and Finding Home, was published in 2023. Our interview will focus on her second book, published this past April, entitled, My Vietnam, Your Vietnam: A Father Flees. A Daughter Returns. A Dual Memoir. This book consists of alternating passages written by Christina and her father, Nghia M. Vo, a retired physician and author of numerous books on Vietnamese culture and history.Recorded 6/27/24.

Dwight Pitcaithley, the former Chief Historian of the National Park Service, discusses NPS's history and its three-fold mission of preservation, research, and education, with the last segment focusing on the controversies surrounding Civil War monuments.Recorded 2/10/21.

Joel Schwartz won a MacArthur Award for work that made a major contribution to the phase-out of lead in gasoline. Ronnie Levin worked at the Environmental Protection Agency to help establish federal standards and more robust testing to protect consumers from lead in drinking water. Both Schwartz and Levin teach at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health.Recorded 2/24/21.

Dr. Keith Rafal, medical director of the Rehabilitation Hospital of Rhode Island and creator of the non-profit organization and website, Our Heart Speaks, through which people from around the world share inspirational stories and artistic expressions about their rehabilitation, healing, connection, and meaning.Recorded 3/7/21.

Amorina Kingdon is an award-winning science writer, at Hakai Magazine until 2021 and as a contributor to publications at the University of Victoria and the Science Media Center, both in Canada. She is also a writer of fiction, published in PRISM and Flash Fiction magazine. The subject of today’s interview is her recently released book, Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water, which explores an amazing and under-appreciated world that surely deserves to become better known.Recorded 6/4/24.

David Nurenberg is a professor, educational consultant, and writer in the Boston area who teaches courses at both the high school and graduate level, in suburban, urban, and international teaching and learning environments. He shares his insights on all things educational in his podcast, Ed Infinitum, and is the author of the book, What Does Injustice Have to Do With Me? Covering both theory and practice, the book provides detailed descriptions of how to both raise awareness and develop critical thinking in the teaching of social justice issues to privileged white students in a wealthy suburban school.Recorded 3/23/21.

Sheldon Krimsky was a professor of humanities and social sciences at Tufts University and a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution. His long and distinguished career focused on the links between public policy and science and technology, environment and health, and ethics and values. His work stressed the importance of public understanding of science-related issues, and his many books for the nonspecialist attested to his commitment to providing the public with the best information available about such issues, often well ahead of the general media. Today’s interview will focus on his 2015 book, Stem Cell Dialogues: a Philosophical and Scientific Inquiry Into Medical Frontiers. Krimsky died on 5/5/22 at age 80.Recorded 3/31/21.

Justice Malala is one of South Africa’s foremost political commentators, both in print and on television. A longtime weekly columnist for The Times of South Africa, he has also written for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and Financial Times, among other major publications. He is the author of the #1 bestseller, We Have Now Begun Our Descent: How to Stop South Africa Losing its Way. His most recent book, entitled The Plot to Save South Africa: The Week Mandela Averted Civil War and Forged a New Nation, is the subject of today’s interview. Recorded 5/28/24 (just before national elections in South Africa).

Justin Reich is a professor in Comparative Media Studies and director of the Teaching Systems Lab, both at MIT. He is the host of a podcast called TeachLab; one of the earliest researchers in the development of Harvard X, which was one of the first initiatives in massive scale online course offerings; and developer and host of five open online courses on MIT and Harvard’s EdX, including “Sorting Truth from Fiction: Civic Online Reasoning” and another entitled, “Becoming a More Equitable Educator: Mindsets and Practices.” He is the author of the 2020 book, Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education.Recorded 4/6/21.

Amanda Montell is a linguist, cultural commentator, and host of the weekly podcast Sounds Like a Cult. In addition to essays published in Time, Cosmopolitan, and other magazines, she has published three books. Her first, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language, released in 2019, established her as a writer who deconstructs biases in our culture, using humor, anecdotes, and discussions of research to enlighten us about our own linguistic and cognitive tendencies. Her second book, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, published in 2021, was partially inspired by the experiences experiences of Montell's father, who spent his teen years in the cult Synanon. Her third book, The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, which was just published in April 2024 and is the subject of today’s interview, explores the cognitive biases that form the warp, if not the woof, of human nature.Recorded 5/23/24.

Tom Chivers is a science writer who has won several awards, including the Royal Statistical Society’s award for statistical excellence in journalism, the Association of British Science Writers’ science journalist of the year, and the Times’s science books of the year. He has written three books. His first, The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy: Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Are Trying to Save Humanity’s Future, was published in 2019. His second book, How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News (and Knowing When to Trust Them) was published in 2021. His just-released third book, entitled Everything is Predictable: How Bayes’ Remarkable Theorem Explains the World, is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 5/21/24.

Colin Wayne Leach is a social and personality psychologist at Columbia University, who researches Schadenfreude -- i.e., deriving pleasure from witnessing someone else's misfortune -- and related emotions, such as Genugtuung, which means deriving pleasure from seeing justice done.Recorded 4/12/21.

Ran Barkai is the co-author, with Eyal Halfon, of the recently published book, They Were Here Before Us: Stories from the First Million Years. Dr. Barkai is a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, who for 20 years has co-directed the excavations and research at Qesem Cave in northern Israel. His wide-ranging research interests encompass stone tool technology, human-elephant interactions, and altered states of consciousness.Recorded 5/14/24.

Vardit Ravitsky is a Professor of Bioethics at the University of Montreal and President of the International Association of Bioethics. Her research focuses on the ethical, legal and social implications of genetics/genomics and assisted reproductive technologies and their implications for women’s autonomy and for disability rights. She is President of the International Association of Bioethics; Director of Ethics and Health at the Center for Research on Ethics; member of the National Human Genome Research Institute’s (NHGRI) Genomics & Society Working Group; a 2020 Trudeau Foundation Fellow and Chair of the Foundation’s COVID-19 Impact Committee, as well as Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and of the Hastings Center. Recorded 4/14/21.

Jay Joseph is a clinical psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dr. Joseph challenges the empirical evidence behind the mainstream view that mental illness is genetically based, and argues instead that the real causes include oppression, trauma, abuse, and psychologically unhealthy aspects of the social and political environment. He is the author of four books, most recently The Trouble with Twin Studies: A Reassessment of Twin Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2015), and Schizophrenia and Genetics: The End of an Illusion (2017). He is a contributor to the Mad in America website, and the creator of https://thegeneillusion.blogspot.com/.Recorded 4/16/21.

David Olds is a professor at the Pediatrics-Prevention Research Center at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He has devoted his long and distinguished career to the developing and testing of very early interventions in family and child functioning, starting prenatally and continuing through toddler age. After devoting decades to high quality, random assignment, longitudinal, comparison studies – showing the approach yielded dramatic benefits – Dr. Olds went on to win grant after grant, to implement what came to be called the Nurse-Family-Partnership program, now in 40 states and 8 foreign countries, today serving close to 40,000 families in the U.S. and 18,000 families abroad. The program has shown positive, substantial, long-term effects in the prevention of child abuse and neglect, school failure, injuries, depression, anxiety and anti-social behavior in children. Research from Nurse-Family-Partnership program (https://www.nursefamilypartnership.org/) have served as the primary evidentiary foundation for a $2.3B federal investment in evidence-based home visiting.Recorded 5/3/21.

In 2003, Ron Hoffman became the founder of an organization in Falmouth, Massachusetts called Compassionate Care ALS (CCALS.org), which has helped well over 1000 families with Lou Gehrig’s disease on both practical and spiritual levels, above all by being deeply present. His memoir, Sacred Bullet, published in 2014, reveals in powerful and personal terms, how his own healing is woven into his work. Ron has worked with individuals, families and healthcare professionals across the United States, inviting conversations around the choices and possibilities that arise for those living with a terminal illness. He has been relentless in his determination to change the systems that hinder rather than help the dying, with profound implications for how healthcare systems in general desperately need to be humanized.Recorded 5/25/21.

Olivia Campbell is a journalist, essayist, and author focusing on the intersections of medicine, women, history, and nature. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and many other major publications. She is the author of the 2021 NY Times bestseller, Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine, which is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 4/9/24.

Isabelle Mansuy, a professor in neuroepigenetics in the Medical Faculty of the University of Zurich and the Department of Health Science and Technology of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. Specializing in neuroepigenetics and molecular psychiatry, Dr. Mansuy is doing cutting edge research, using mice, to separate nature from nurture in how the effects of trauma, environmental stress, and even diet can be biologically passed down to subsequent generations, but not irreversibly.Recorded 6/15/21.

Psychiatrist, professor, and researcher, Randolph Nesse, is a cofounder of the field of evolutionary medicine. Twenty-five years ago his book, Why We Get Sick, which he co-authored with George C. Williams, went on to sell more than 100,000 copies and to be translated into eight languages. He served for many years on the faculty of the University of Michigan, where he is a professor emeritus, and was also the founding director of the Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University, where he continues to be a research professor. His most recent book, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, is the subject of today’s interview. Recorded 4/2/24.

Karen Valby is a culture writer whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, O Magazine, Glamour, Fast Company, and EW. She is also the author of two books. The first, Welcome to Utopia: Notes from a Small Town, was published in 2010. Her soon-to-be-released book, The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History, is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded /26/24.

Robert W. Derlet, MD is a Professor Emeritus at the medical school of the University of California, Davis, former Chief of Emergency Medicine at the Davis Medical Center, candidate for Congress in 2016, and author of the recent book, Corporatizing American Health Care.Recorded 6/16/21.

Michele Nishiguchi, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Merced, she runs the Nishiguchi Symbiosis Lab, specializing in the study of the association and interaction between the tiny Bobtail squid and a light emitting bacteria called Vibrio fischeri, which are relevant to the evolution of both beneficial and detrimental bacteria in humans. Before her recent move to UC Merced she was for 21 years a professor at New Mexico State University, where she was recognized for her outstanding contributions by receiving numerous awards, including the designation of Regents Professor in 2015.Recorded 6/29/21.

Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware are the coauthors of the recently published, God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America. Dr. Hoffman is a professor at Georgetown University, professor emeritus of terrorism studies at the University of St Andrews, Fellow at the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center, and a Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security at the Council on Foreign Relations.​Dr. Ware is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and at DeSales University. He serves on the editorial boards for the academic journal, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, and the Irregular Warfare Initiative at the Modern War Institute at West Point.Recorded 3/19/24.

Coleman Hughes is a writer, podcaster, and musician, focusing on race, public policy, and applied ethics. At the age of 28, he is already becoming a well-known commentator and critic on issues related to race-based policies. He was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their City Journal. He is also the host of the podcast, Conversations with Coleman. In 2019, he testified before a U.S. House Judiciary subcommittee at a hearing on reparations for slavery, arguing against the campaign. In 2023, he delivered a talk at the annual TED conference, in Vancouver, Canada, advocating a societal goal of color blindness, i.e., treating people without regard to race, both personally and in public policy. Internal opposition from TED prevented the internet posting of this talk, which was eventually released after Hughes agreed to its being paired with a debate between him and New York Times columnist James Bouie. In addition to writing columns for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications, Hughes is the author of the recently published book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, which is the subject of today’s interview.

Ernest Scheyder is a senior correspondent for Reuters covering the green energy transition and the mining of the minerals required for its implementation. He previously covered the U.S. shale oil revolution, politics, and the environment. He is the author of the recently published book, The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power our Lives.Recorded 3/6/24.