Delving In with Stuart Kelter

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is an anthropologist of religion at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the edge of human experience: hearing voices, having visions, the world of the supernatural, and the world of psychosis, whether on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, with people who hear voices in India, Ghana, and southern California, with evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians seeking mystical dimensions, and with people who practice magic. She has written articles for the New York Times and the New Yorker, as well as several books, including When God Talks Back, which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. Her most recent book, entitled How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others is the subject of today’s interview.

Ken Hammond is a professor of East Asian and global history at NMSU since 1994, who lived in Beijing from 1982 to 1987 prior to completing his PhD at Harvard in 1994. He subsequently joined the history faculty of NMSU, specializing in East Asian history, particularly 16th century China. From 2007 to 2015 he was co-director of the Confucius Institute at NMSU. Long interested in human rights and protest movements, he was a leader in the Students for a Democratic Society at Kent State University from 1967 to 1970. Today’s interview will focus on the historical context for recent events in Myanmar, also known as Burma.Recorded 7/12/21.

Richard ("Dick") Scobie was the Executive Director of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee from 1972 to 1998. Under his direction, the UUSC defended human rights and promoted humane solutions to social problems worldwide, from war zones in Central America, Africa and Asia, to America’s broken systems of criminal justice and child welfare. His memoir, To Advance Justice, published in 2005, provides a detailed account of his 27 years of leadership of UUSC.This interview was recorded on 7/29/21, less than two years before his death on February 1, 2023 at age 88.

Ben Alderson-Day is a professor of psychology at Durham University in the UK, researching the phenomena of voice-hearing and unusual sensory experiences. Specializing in atypical cognition and mental health, his work spans cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy, and child development. He is the co-founder and co-chair of the Early Career Hallucinations Research group, a network comprising 24 countries. Before moving to Durham he completed a PhD on autism at the University of Edinburgh, and worked as a research coordinator for a child & adolescent mental health research team for the National Health Service (NHS) in York. He is the author of PRESENCE: The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other, which is the topic of today’s interview.Recorded 2/13/24.

Aveek Bhattacharya was the Chief Economist and is now the Interim Director of the Social Market Foundation (SMF), a non-partisan think tank based in the U.K., which aims to promote evidence-based policy and cross-party co-operation in politics. Prior positions include Senior Policy Analyst at the Institute of Alcohol Studies, researching and advocating for policies to reduce alcohol-related harm. With interests in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, he earned his PhD in Social Policy from the London School of Economics. Aveek is co-editor of the book Political Philosophy in a Pandemic: Routes to a More Just Future. Today’s interview focuses on an essay he recently wrote for the Social Market Foundation entitled, “Social Mobility and its Critics,” published in July of 2023.Recorded 2/6/23.

Michael Yassa is a professor at the University of California at Irvine, where he is the director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. His research focuses on how the brain learns and remembers information, and how learning and memory mechanisms are altered in aging and neuropsychiatric disease, especially dementia. Today's interview also explores the crucial role of memory in the construction of personal identity and lived experience.Recorded 8/3/21.

Neil Harvey is a professor and academic department head in the Government Department at New Mexico State University. His main areas of interest encompass politics in Mexico and Latin America, especially social movements in the struggle for democracy and new forms of political representation. He has carried out field research in Chiapas, Mexico, into their independent peasant movements, land conflicts and agrarian reform. He has also been researching the causes of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas in 1994 as well as the subsequent development of autonomous governments run by Indigenous communities. He is the author of The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle of Land and Democracy. Today’s interview focuses on the political dynamics and history of the drug cartels of Mexico and countries to the south. Recorded 8/10/21.

Roger Berkowitz is a professor of Political Studies and Human Rights, as well as the founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, both at Bard College. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition, an account of how the rise of science led to the divorce of law and justice and the editor of Revenge and Justice, a special issue of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. In October of 2021, the Arendt Center hosted a conference entitled, “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom,” ab­out a mode of government that originated in ancient Greece with great potential for our own times. The Center has also provided trainings in the large scale use of digital tools for citizens around the world to enhance their involvement in policy-making.

Jennifer Michael Hecht is a poet and historian, teacher and public speaker, the author of several intellectually provocative books, translated into many languages. Her bestseller, Doubt: A History, explores religious and philosophical doubt throughout the world and over the centuries. Her book, entitled Stay, focuses on the history of suicide and a secular argument against it. The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology won Phi Beta Kappa’s 2004 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award. The Happiness Myth brings a historical eye to modern wisdom about how to lead a good life. She has published in peer-reviewed journals, written articles for major newspapers and magazines, and appeared in numerous television and radio interviews. Her books of poetry – which include The Next Ancient World, Funny, and Who Said – have won accolades and major awards. Her most recent book, The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives, published in March 2023, is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 1/16/24.

Jay Rothman has been a professor, practitioner, and author in the field of conflict resolution for the past 30 years. In the course of his career, Jay has worked with diplomats, business executives, opposing leaders of embattled communities, union leaders, university leadership, school boards and superintendents, community activists, and students around the world. He has lectured and taught around the country and the world, including the University of Cincinnati and Antioch College in the U.S., and Hebrew University and Bar Ilan University in Israel. He is also the founder of the Aria Group, an independent firm focusing on conflict resolution, consultation, and training. In today's interview Jay provides detailed examples of his work with Israelis and Palestinians and also racially charged tensions regarding police conduct in Cincinnati.Recorded 8/16/21.

Hans-Dieter Sues is a senior research geologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, specializing in the study of dinosaurs and other vertebrates from the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras. Dr. Sues has collected fossil vertebrates across the United States as well as in Canada, China, Germany, and Morocco. Today’s interview will focus on the history of evolutionary theory and some of its more surprising elements, concluding with thoughts about the paradoxical relationship between science and ignorance.Recorded 8/31/21.

Dov Waxman is a political science professor and chair of Israel studies at UCLA, whose research focuses on the conflict over Israel-Palestine, Israeli politics and foreign policy, U.S.-Israel relations, American Jewry’s relationship with Israel, Jewish politics, and anti-Semitism. He is the author of dozens of scholarly articles and four books: The Pursuit of Peace and The Crisis of Israeli Identity: Defending/Defining the Nation, published in 2006, Israel’s Palestinians: The Conflict Within, published in, 2011, Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel, published in 2016, and most recently, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know, published in 2019. He has also been widely published in mainstream news media and has been a frequent commentator on television and radio. Today’s interview will focus primarily on the subtleties of antisemitism in the United States, such as how to tell if and when anti-Zionism crosses the line into antisemitism. He also shares his recommendations for educational initiatives to combat antisemitism, which places less emphasis on the teaching about the Holocaust.Recorded on 1/9/24.

Seth David Radwell is an internationally known business executive and thought leader in consumer marketing with a keen interest in democratic values and American public policy. Past leadership roles include President of eScholastic, the digital arm of the global children’s publishing and education conglomerate; President of Bookspan/ Bertelsmann, which includes Book of the Month Club, Doubleday Book Club, and Literary Guild; and many other leadership roles in the world of corporate marketing. His book, American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation, written during the Covid-19 pandemic and published in 2021, won the 2022 International Book Award for best general non-fiction.

Pamela Pereyra is the founder and CEO of Media Savvy Citizens and the New Mexico Chapter Chair of Media Literacy Now. She conducts media literacy trainings with teachers throughout New Mexico, facilitates workshops in digital literacy skill-building with families, and leads networking meetings for NM educators statewide and nationally. Her works involves multiple audiences: students and families, educators and administrators, organizations and businesses, civic leaders and legislators. In 2021 she received the Media Literacy Community Award by the National Association for Media Literacy Education and in 2019 the Media Literacy Champion Award by Media Literacy Now.Recorded 12/28/23.

Faith Rogow is a media literacy leader, innovator, and author, who for twenty years has been one of the few people in the United States advocating for and creating media literacy education for young children. She is the founder of Insighters Educational Consulting, the founding president of the National Association for Media Literacy Education or NAMLE, a founding editorial board member of the Journal for Media Literacy Education, a founding advisor to Project Look Sharp at Ithica College, and co-author of NAMLE’s “Core Principles of Media Literacy Education in the U.S.,”published in 2007. She is the author of widely circulated teachers’ materials on the subject, including her book, Media Literacy for Young Children: Teaching Beyond the Screen Time Debates, published in 2022.Recorded 12/19/23.

Philip Powell is a senior research fellow at the University of Sheffield in London, who studies a universal emotion that has only recently become the object of empirical investigation -- disgust -- exploring how it affects on decision-making, psychological functioning, and well being. He is a contributor to and co-editor, with Nathan Consedine, of the Handbook of Disgust Research, the first ever compilation of disgust research, published in November, 2021. An alternative title for this interview: ​Disgust Discussed.Recorded 9/12/21.

Katja Hoyer is a German British historian and journalist who was born in East Germany and moved to the UK as a young adult.. A visiting research fellow at King’s College London and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she is a columnist for the Washington Post and host of the podcast, The New Germany. Hoyer has published two books about the history of Germany. Her first book, Blood and Iron was about the German Empire from 1871 to 1918. Her second book, Beyond the Wall, about the history of East Germany from 1949 to 1990, is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 12/11/23.

Kostas Kampourakis is author and editor of several books about evolution, genetics, philosophy, and the history of science, and the editor of the Cambridge University Press book series, Understanding Life. He is a former Editor-in-Chief of the journal Science and Education, as well as two other science education book series. He is currently a researcher at the University of Geneva, where he also teaches at the Section of Biology and the University Institute for Teacher Education. Today’s interview focuses on his latest book, Understanding Genes, which explores the many ways in which, contrary to popular belief,  the influence of genes is only one component of a much more complicated picture.Recorded 9/21/21.

Steven Sloman is a professor in the department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences at Brown University, who studies how our habits of thought influence the way we see the world, how we make decisions, how we process conversations, and how we respond to conflict. His current research focuses on collective cognition, or how we think as a community, explored in his book co-authored with Phil Fernbach, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, published in 2017, which is the topic of today’s interview.Recorded 9/28/21. 

Carl Safina is a world-renowned ecologist and conservationist, award-winning writer and professor, political activist and visionary. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the MacArthur Genus Prize and National Science Foundation Fellowships. Audubon magazine named Carl Safina among its “100 Notable Conservationists of the 20th Century” and Utne Reader listed him among “25 Visionaries Changing the World." His lyrically inspirational writing has appeared in major newspapers and magazines and his many books include the NY Times best-seller, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. He hosted the PBS series Saving the Ocean and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. His most recent TED Talk received a million views in its first month. His latest book, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 11/20/23.

Iñigo García-Bryce is a Professor of History at New Mexico State University since 1999, whose research focuses on Latin America, especially Peru, where he grew up. His books include 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 Twentieth Century Peru and Latin America, published in 2018. He was the Director of NMSU’s Center for Latin American and Border Studies since 2011-2016.Recorded 10/5/21.

Kevin Mitchell is a professor of genetics and neuroscience at Trinity College, Dublin. His research focuses on the genetic program for the wiring of the brain, as it affects psychiatric and neurological diseases, as well as perceptual conditions, such as synaesthesia. He is editor of The Genetics of Neurodevelopmental Disorders, published in 2015, is the author of Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are, published in 2018, and of Wiring the Brain, a science blog for general audiences. The subject of today’s interview focuses on his most recent book, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, published in October of 2023. Mitchell discusses his robust and humanizing theory of the biological evolution of agency and identity, as well as the capacity for meaning and values. The upshot is a scientific explanation for what many scientists believe is only an illusion: free will.Recorded 11/7/23.

Audrey Kurth Cronin is one of the world’s leading experts on security and how conflicts end. A Professor of Security and Technology, she was the founding director of the Center for Security, Innovation, and New Technology at American University, the director of War and Statecraft at the US National War College, and a Specialist in Terrorism at the Congressional Research Service, advising Members of Congress in the aftermath of 9/11. She was the director of Studies for Oxford University’s Changing Character of War program, was Chair of the Global Agenda Council on Terrorism of the World Economic Forum, and has held a number of positions in the federal government’s executive branch, including in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy. Currently, she is the founding director of the Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Strategy and Technology. She is the author of four books on terrorism, including How Terrorism Ends, published in 2009 and Power to the People, published in 2019. Today’s interview will focus on the ideas contained in How Terrorism Ends, particularly as applied to the current conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.Recorded 11/7/23.

Anita Diamant is a novelist, journalist, essayist, and author of five guidebooks to contemporary Jewish life on such topics as weddings, parenting, and mourning practices. As a journalist, her feature stories and columns in the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal included profiles of prominent people, stories about medical ethics, and first-person essays about everything from politics to popular culture, from pet ownership to food. Anita’s best-known book, The Red Tent, published in 1997, is a novel inspired by the brief yet provocative story about Jacob’s only daughter, Dina, from the book of Genesis. The book became a word-of-mouth and New York Times bestseller thanks to reader recommendations, book groups, and support from independent bookstores, has been published in more than 25 countries, and was adapted as a two-part, four-hour miniseries by Lifetime TV. Her latest book, published just this year, is Period. End of Sentence: A New Chapter in the Fight for Menstrual Justice, which is the topic of today’s interview.Recorded 10/13/21.

Meg Weston is a photographer and poet whose frequent subject is volcanoes. Based in Maine, she has traveled around the world pursuing her desire, as she puts it, to witness the power and beauty of the earth in its raw processes of creation and transformation. Her poetry and photography express her connection to the earth in all its sensual, emotional, and spiritual power. Meg’s images can be seen on her website www.volcanoes.com. In 2020, she and Kathrin Seitz cofounded ThePoetsCorner.org, an online forum to bring together poets worldwide, to “bring community to the often solitary yet transformational experience of writing poetry and prose.”Recorded 11/9/21.

Paul Scharre is the Executive Vice President and Director of Studies at the Center for a New American Security, an independent, bipartisan, nonprofit organization that develops strong, pragmatic, and principled national security and defense policies. An expert in emerging weapons technologies, he led working groups at the U.S. Department of Defense to establish policies on autonomous weapon systems, as well as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance programs. His prior experiences in the military include multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, serving as a special operations reconnaissance team leader.Scharre has published articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, among other prominent print media and has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, and the BBC. He has testified before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees and has presented at the United Nations, NATO, the Pentagon, the CIA, and other national security venues. He holds a PhD in war studies from King’s College London and an MA in political economy and public policy and a BS in physics from Washington University in St. Louis.​His first book, Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War, won the 2019 Colby Award and was named one of Bill Gates’ top five books of 2018 and by The Economist as one of the top five books to understand modern warfare. In 2023, TIME magazine named him as one of the “100 most influential people in AI.” His most recent book, entitled Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 10/17/23.

Elie Honig is a former federal and state prosecutor for over fourteen years at the renowned Southern District of New York and later as deputy director of New Jersey’s Division of Criminal Justice. He prosecuted and tried cases involving organized crime, public corruption, and human trafficking, achieving convictions of over 100 members of the American mafia, including members of the Genovese and Gambino crime families.​In 2018, he became a CNN senior legal analyst, for which he was nominated for an Emmy Award. He writes a weekly column for CAFÉ and Vox Media, is the host of two podcasts, Third Degree and Up Against the Mob, and has produced a documentary for CNN on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. He has also published two books. The first, Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutors’ Code and Corrupted the Justice Department, was published in 2021 and became a national bestseller. His recently published second book entitled, Untouchable: How Powerful People Get Away with It, is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 10/12/23.

Dean Buonomano is a neuroscientist at UCLA since 1998, and a leading researcher of the neuroscience of time. His first book, Brain Bugs: How the Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives, was a Wall Street Journal  bestseller.  Buonomano is the rare combination of cutting edge researcher and talented and engaging communicator of science to the general public. He has been interviewed about his research on timing and neural computation for Newsweek, Discover Magazine, Scientific American, The New Yorker and on NPR’s Fresh Air. His most recent book, Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time was published in 2017 and is the subject of today’s interview. Recorded 12/8/21.

Sushma Subramanian is a freelance journalist and associate professor at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia. Her writing on science and health has appeared in Slate, The Atlantic, Scientific American, and Discover. She has twice been a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and was the winner of a Newswomen's Club of New York Front Page Award. She is the author of the recently published book, How to Feel: The Science and Meaning of Touch, which is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 12/14/21.

Chantel Prat, is a Professor at the University of Washington in the Departments of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics, with affiliations at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, the Center for Neurotechnology, and the Institute for Neuroengineering. A cognitive neuroscientist by training, her interdisciplinary research investigates the biological basis of individual differences in cognition, with emphasis on understanding the shared neural mechanisms underpinning language and higher-level executive functions. Her work has garnered multiple awards and has been profiled, among other places, in Scientific American and National Public Radio. Her recently published the book, The Neuroscience of You: How Every Brain is Different and How to Understand Yours, is the subject of today’s interview.

Lisa Bortolotti is a philosopher at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., focusing on the philosophy of psychology and psychiatry. She investigates faulty reasoning and irrational beliefs; delusions, confabulations and distorted memories; and the limitations of self-knowledge given our unreliable self narratives and self-deception. She is the author, co-author, and editor of several books on such subjects and the editor-in-chief of the academic journal, Philosophical Psychology.

Gregg Sparkman is a professor of Social Psychology, who directs the Social Influence and Social Change Lab at Boston College. Using national surveys and field studies, his research focuses on harnessing the power of social influence, identity, moral reasoning, and beliefs to enhance the possibility of significant change. The findings can translate into large scale motivational interventions, in collaboration with non-profit, public, and private organizations, to address social problems related to the environment, health, and social inequity.

Sarah Haavind is a Senior Research Project Manager -- and specialist in asynchronous learning -- at Concord Consortium, a nonprofit educational research and development organization based in Concord, Massachusetts, and Emeryville, California.  From the earliest days of the Internet, Sarah has devoted her career to the development of creative and engaging online curricula for both student learning and teacher training. She has taught at every grade level from elementary to graduate school and has led teacher professional development in multiple STEM subjects. She has designed and participated in virtual schools and virtual professional development in ways that have helped define the field. She is a co-author of the book Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators, published in the year 2000, based on the Concord Consortium’s early work with virtual teaching and learning.Recorded 12/28/21.

Susannah Sirkin is the Director of Policy and a senior advisor at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), where she has worked since 1987. From 1992 to 2001 she served as a member of the Coordination Committee of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which was the co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Peace. She has organized health and human rights investigations in dozens of countries, documenting genocide and systematic rape in Darfur, Sudan; exhumations of mass graves in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda; attacks on health care facilities in Syria, Yemen, and other war zones; and Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s. In 2019 and again in 2020, she addressed the U.N. Security Council about the deliberate targeting of hospitals in Syria.Recorded 12/22/21.

David Wallace is a philosopher of science at the University of Pittsburgh, specializing in the philosophy of physics. He is interested in emergence and reductionism, structural realism, decision theory, and especially the Everett interpretation of quantum theory, often called the “Many-Worlds Interpretation. His book on that topic, entitled, The Emergent Multiverse, was published in 2012. He is also the author of The Philosophy of Physics: A Very Short Introduction, published in 2021.

Stefan Rinke is a professor at the Department of History at the Institute for Latin American Studies and the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute at the Free University of Berlin. He was awarded the Alzate research award by the Mexican Academy of Sciences, an honorary doctorate by the The National University of General San Martín in Argentina, as well as the Einstein Research Fellowship. His latest book, Conquistadors and Aztecs, was published in German in 2019. The English version, Conquistadors and Aztecs: A History of the Fall of Tenochtitlan, was published in 2023.Recorded 1/12/22.

 Ilyon Woo is a New York Times best-selling author, whose writing has appeared in the Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and The New York Times. She is the author of two books, each of which combines history and biography, based on painstaking research and employing a novelistic, narrative writing style. Her first book, The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times, was published in 2010. This interview focuses on her recent book, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, which subsequently was selected by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2023.Recorded 8/22/23.

 Dorothy L. Hodgson is the recently retired Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Previously she served as President of the African Studies Association, Chair and Graduate Director of the Department of Anthropology, and Director of the Institute for Research on Women, all at Rutgers University. She was also President of the Association for Feminist Anthropology and editor-in-chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia on African Women’s History. As a historical anthropologist, she worked in Tanzania, East Africa, for over thirty years on such topics as gender, ethnicity, and cultural politics; colonialism, nationalism, and the missionary encounter; and transnational organizing and the indigenous rights movement. She is the author of several books, and editor of others, about life and social structures in Africa, especially the Maasai in Tanzania. Her most recent book, Gender, Justice and the Problem of Culture: From Customary Law to Human Rights in Tanzania was published in 2017 and is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 8/15/23.

Richard Ambron is a Columbia University professor emeritus of cell biology, anatomy, and pathology, specializing in neuroscience research, working in the same lab as Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist, Eric Kandel. For 25 years, he taught clinical anatomy to medical and dental students and was ten times voted teacher of the year. For forty years he ran a neuro-research lab at Columbia, focusing on the mechanisms of neuronal regeneration and the identification of the molecular signals for pain, which succeeded in patenting a potent and selective drug that targets a key enzyme in certain kinds of chronic pain. He is the author of the recent book, The Brain and Pain: Breakthroughs in Neuroscience.Recorded 1/18/22.

Sarah Lamb is a professor of cultural anthropology at Brandeis University, who focuses on how people construct their socio-cultural world and identity from the interlocking multiple dimensions of age, gender, the body, family, religion, and nation. From the points of view of those she studies, she explores the experiences and the often taken-for-granted assumptions of people in West Bengal, India and also among Indian immigrants as well as older white Americans in the San Francisco, Boston, and Bible Belt areas of the United States. Sarah is the author of several books and is the recipient of several major grants and awards, including a 2019 to 2023 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. Her most recent book — Being Single in India: Stories of Gender, Exclusion, and Possibility — is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 8/1/23.

Helen Epstein is an acclaimed writer of memoir, journalism, and biography. In her career as a journalist she interviewed such legendary musicians as Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein, and Yo-Yo Ma. She is the author of three books about the transmission of intergenerational trauma. The first, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors was originally published in 1979; the second,  Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for her Mother's History, in 1999; and the third, The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma, in 2018. All three books were named New York Times Notable Books of the Year and represent a forty year process of self discovery.Recorded 1/25/22. 

Philippa Strum is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Center’s former Director of the Division of United States Studies. For two decades, she was a Professor of Political Science and is now Professor Emerita at the City University of New York, focusing on constitutional law; civil liberties and human rights, especially the intersection of women’s rights, law and politics. She has also taught at universities throughout the U.S. and abroad, lecturing in Australia, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, the West Bank, Great Britain, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Uzbekistan, Turkey, and China. She has been an expert lecturer in the Middle East and Central Asia for the Department of State and for the U.S. Supreme Court. She recently received a lifetime achievement award from the ACLU, where she devoted 40 years as a researcher and board member. Dr. Strum is the author of award-winning books on human rights struggles both in the U.S. and internationally. One of her books, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People, published in 1984, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in biography. Her most recent book, On Account of Sex: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Making of Gender Equality Law, was published in the Summer of 2022. Recorded 7/27/23.

New Mexico State University physics professors, Boris Kiefer and Matthew Sievert, explain in everyday language the strange, yet fundamental, phenomena of quantum physics. Boris Kiefer has been at NMSU since 2003, following post-docs at Princeton. His research and teaching interests include Quantum Mechanics; Computational Physics; Materials Science, and even more esoterically, Quantum Telecloning. Matthew Sievert has been at NMSU since 2020, following post-docs at Brookhaven and Los Alamos National Laboratories. His research focuses on theoretical nuclear physics that makes use of observations of high energy sub-atomic particles at various accelerator facilities. He is also an advocate for the construction of a future electron-ion collider in the United States.Recorded 7/25/23.

Shilpa Raj was one of five girls featured in the four-part Netflix documentary, Daughters of Destiny, about growing up from age four in a residential school called Shanti Bhavan in Tamil Nadu, India, near Bangalore. Founded by and originally fully funded by Indian-American businessman and philanthropist, Abraham George, the school’s mission is to help children and their families break out of the underclass. Shilpa was one of the first students at the school, which opened in 1997, the new home away from home for 300 children, from rural villages or urban slums, from families earning less than $2 per day, nearly all from the group or caste called Dalit or Untouchable. In 2017, the same year as the release of Daughters of Destiny,  Shilpa  published a memoir, The Elephant Chaser’s Daughter. She has gone on to earn a master’s degree in psychology and is currently enrolled in a psychology doctoral program at Hofstra University on Long Island, New York.Recorded 2/1/22.

Hilary Lips is a Professor Emerita of Social Psychology at Radford University, where she founded the Center for Gender Studies, was its director from 1989 to 2015, and was also the chair of the Department of Psychology from 2003 to 2015. She is the author of a variety of books, including Women, Men and the Psychology of Power; Sex and Gender: An Introduction; A New Psychology of Women: Gender, Culture and Ethnicity; and Gender: The Basics. She also co-authored The Psychology of Sex Differences with Nina Colwill, published in 1978, which explored multiple contributors to sex differences, including genetics, hormones, and social learning, attributable in large measure to differential power dynamics, rather than stable inherited traits.Recorded 7/18/23.

Sidarta Ribeiro is a Brazilian neuroscientist, writer, and science communicator. He is the Founder and Vice Director of the Brain Institute at Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Natal, Brazil, where he has been a full professor since 2008. His fields of research include memory, sleep and dreams, neuroplasticity, symbolic competence in non-human animals, computational psychiatry, and psychedelics. His most recent book The Oracle of Night: The History and Science of Dreams – published in the original Portugese in 2019 and in English in 2021 – is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 2/16/22.

David Edmonds is a British philosopher and a Distinguished Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. He is the author of many books, including The Murder of Professor Schlick, Would You Kill the Fat Man?, Caste Wars: A Philosophy of Discrimination, and Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time . He is also coauthor with John Eidinow, of the international best-seller Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers, and co-author with Hugh Fraser, of the children’s book, Undercover Robot. He is an ad hoc columnist for the Jewish Chronicle, a former contributing editor to Prospect Magazine, and cohost with Nigel Warburton of the popular podcast series Philosophy Bites, which has had over 44 million downloads. He also runs two other blogs: Philosophy 247 and Social Science Bites. He was a multi-award winning presenter/producer at the BBC, host of The Big Idea, and was also a regular presenter on BBC Analysis. His latest book is entitled, Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality, which is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 7/4/23.

Samantha Barbas is a legal and cultural historian and the author of several books on media history and legal history topics, with a focus on journalism, privacy, defamation, and the First Amendment. A Professor of Law at the University at Buffalo, she is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. Her latest book, Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan, is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 6/25/23.

Lyn Barrett is an author, speaker, pastor, retreat leader, and survivor of early childhood trauma. Diagnosed in 1992 with Multiple Personality Disorder, now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.), she endured several decades of inner chaos and deep pain. Even so, most of the time, she was able to maintain a professional life as an elementary school teacher and principal, as well as persevere to a satisfactory outcome with her personal and family life. Crediting her therapist, Sonya Nowak, with guiding her to health and wholeness and to close friends for emotional support, Lyn recently published a memoir entitled Crazy, about her intense psychological journey.(Recorded 3/29/22.)

Wladimir Lyra is an astronomer at New Mexico State University whose research focuses on high-end computer simulations of planet formation, both in our own solar system and beyond, i.e., exoplanets and their solar systems. In today’s interview we’ll be focusing mainly on the theory of the Big Bang, black holes, and the possible implications of new observational data recently made available by the powerful James Webb Space Telescope.(Recorded 6/15/23.)