Delving In with Stuart Kelter

Reuben Last has been a general surgeon for over 20 years at the Albuquerque Veteran’s Administration Medical Center. We’ll hear about the diverse experiences and family background that led to his career choices, as well as his insights into the history of medicine and the current conditions for health professionals. Reuben has made good use of his multifaceted skills and passions in helping to create the Endorphin Power Company, an Albuquerque-based non-profit organization providing support and advocacy to people recovering from substance abuse. In a similar spirit, Reuben is currently on the board of directors of OslerSymposia.org, which addresses and pushes back against the forces that cause burn-out for all types of medical personnel.Recorded 4/3/22.

Ricardo Nuila is a writer, physician, and professor of medicine, medical ethics, and health policy at Baylor College of Medicine, where he teaches the practice of hospital medicine and directs the Humanities Expression and Arts Lab. The son of Salvadoran immigrants and a native Houstonian, Ricardo has worked as an attending physician in the city’s largest safety-net facility, Ben Taub Hospital, for more than ten years. His fiction has appeared in the Best American Short Stories anthology and his journalistic pieces have been published on the website of the New Yorker, covering such subjects as the medical response to Hurricane Harvey and to the COVID-19 pandemic. He has won awards for his teaching and advocacy, as well as for his writing, including the New England Review’s inaugural Award for Emerging Writers. He recently published his first book, The People’s Hospital, which is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 6/6/23.

Peter Frankopan is a Professor of Global History at Oxford University with comprehensively wide-ranging interests, including the history and politics of the Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, ancient Persia and modern Iran, Central Asia, and China. Peter often writes for the international press and is the author of The First Crusade: The Call from the East, The Silk Roads: a New History of the World, and The New Silk Roads: The Future and Present of the World, which have been translated into forty languages, become international best-sellers, and garnered multiple, prestigious awards. His latest book, which is the subject of today’s interview, is The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, an environmental history of both the human and natural past, from billions of years ago until the present, across the entire planet.(Recorded 5/30/23.)

Jonathan Reisman is a doctor of internal medicine, pediatrics, and emergency medicine, who recently published his first book, The Unseen Body: A Doctor’s Journey Through the Hidden Wonders of Human Anatomy. With the excitement of an explorer, the book recounts his hard-won medical knowledge with the flair of a poet, the attention to narrative detail of a journalist, the adroitness of skills enhanced by unusual interests pursued before medical school, and the wisdom to notice and appreciate the patterns that the human body shares with the rest of the natural world. He has practiced medicine in the most extreme latitudes, both north and south, as well as extreme altitudes in Nepal. He has worked in Kolkata’s slums and with the Oglala Sioux in South Dakota, and heads a non-profit to improve healthcare and education in India. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, and the Washington Post. (Recorded 8/28/22.)

Stuart Kelter interviews Las Crucen, Ron Lautenbach, about his experiences of, and life lessons in, climbing Everest and Denali (McKinley). With humor and insight, he conveys his penchant for adventure and intensity, his reverence for nature and faith in a higher power, his love and respect for people, and his hard-won wisdom to take measured risks that included possible death as part of the equation. (Recorded 5/16/23.)

Kevin Elliott is a philosophy professor at Michigan State University, who studies the role of values in science and the ethical issues related to science and technology, such as conflicts of interest involving environmental pollution and financial stakes in research. He also collaborates with environmental scientists at the European Food Safety Authority and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of the book, Is a Little Pollution Good for You? Incorporating Societal Values in Environmental Research, published in 2011. He is also the author of the 2017 book, A Tapestry of Values: An Introduction to Values in Science, and the 2022 book, Values in Science for the Cambridge University Press Series, Elements in the Philosophy of Science.  (Recorded 5/15/23.)

Martin Wolf is Associate Editor and Chief Economics Commentator at The Financial Times, London. He has won numerous awards, including the 2019 Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award. He was a member of the UK’s Independent Commission on Banking in 2010–11. The Wikipedia entry on Wolf notes that he is widely regarded as one of the most influential economics journalists in the world. Lawrence H. Summers has called him "the world's preeminent financial journalist. "Paul Krugman wrote of him that "Wolf doesn't even have a PhD. And that matters not at all; what he has is a keen sense of observation, a level head, and an open mind.” Wolf is the author of five books on broad-ranging economic issues. His latest book, published just this year, is entitled, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, which is the subject of today’s interview. (Recorded 5/2/23.)

Amy Gajda is a professor of law at Tulane Law School, a former journalist, and a nationally recognized expert in the topic of privacy and the media. She was an award-winning legal commentator on Illinois public radio stations, has written for the NY Times and Slate, and has provided commentary for several prominent print and television news media. Her scholarly articles have appeared in journals including the American Historical Review, California Law Review, Georgia Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, and Washington Law Review, among many others. She is the recent author of Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy, which is the subject of today’s interview. (Recorded 5/11/22.)

Naomi Oreskes is a Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, and her TED Talk, “Why We Should Trust Scientists,” has been viewed more than 1.5 million times. She is the author of several books on the intersection between politics and science, including Why Trust Science? published in 2019 and Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know about the Ocean published in 2021. Oreskes and co-author Erik Conway have collaborated on three books, including the recently published The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, which is the subject of today’s interview. (Recorded 5/8/23.)

Sarah Fay is a professor at DePaul and Northwestern Universities, a critic, scholar, and creative writer. Her writing has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Time, as well as many literary publications such as Bookforum, BOMB, and The Paris Review, where she served as an advisory editor. She is the recipient of many awards and prestigious writing residencies and is the author of the recently published memoir, Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses and the founder of Pathological: The Movement, a public awareness campaign devoted to making people aware of the lack of scientific evidence for psychiatric diagnoses and the danger of identifying with an unproven mental illness. (Recorded 6/23/22.)

Leah Hazard is an American-Scottish midwife and author, whose recent book is entitled, Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began. Leah graduated from Harvard University, working in print journalism and television before the births of her two daughters prompted her to change direction. She is now a practicing NHS midwife in Scotland and has worked in a wide variety of clinical areas, from labor wards to outpatient clinics, delivering hundreds of babies and caring for countless families along the way. Her memoir, Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story was a Sunday Times bestseller in the UK. Leah hosts the popular podcast What the Midwife Said and is a frequent commentator on women’s health across the media. (Recorded 4/20/23.)

Stephen Grossberg is one of the principal founders of the fields of computational neuroscience, connectionist cognitive science, and artificial neural network research. At Boston University he has been Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems since 1989, founder of the Center for Adaptive Systems since 1981, and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Biomedical Engineering. In 1987 he founded the International Neural Network Society and its journal, Neural Networks, which became the official journal of the three major neural modeling societies in the world, and was its Editor-in-Chief until 2010. Grossberg has won numerous awards for his work for “seminal contributions to understanding brain cognition and behavior and their emulation by technology.” His recently published book, Conscious MIND, Resonant BRAIN: How Each Brain Makes a Mind, is about Adaptive Resonance Theory, his model of how our brains pay attention, recognize, and predict objects and events in a changing world.(Recorded 4/18/23.)

Loren Williams is a biophysicist, biochemist, astrobiologist, and professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. His research passions include the structural basis for macromolecular reactions, from the role of nucleic acids as targets of chemotherapeutics to the ancestral bio­chemistry of the ribosome during the origin of life. He is currently director of the NASA-funded Center for the Origin of Life (COOL) at Georgia Tech and a Co-Lead of the Prebiotic Chemistry and Early Earth Environment Con­sortium. In 2021, he was elected Fellow of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life. Since 2008, Williams' research group has been focusing on the ribosome across the tree of life, constructing models of ancestral ribo­somes by combining biophysical chemistry, molecular biology, and bioinformatics.(Recorded 4/19/22.)

Natalie Hodges is both a writer and a classical violinist. Born and raised in Denver and currently living in Boulder, Colorado, she has performed throughout Colorado and in New York, Boston, Paris, and the Italian Piedmont, as well as at the Aspen Music Festival and the Stowe Tango Music Festival. She graduated from Harvard University, where she studied English and music. Her recently published first book, a memoir entitled Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time, explores the intersections of music and time, lived experience as flow states and their interruption, the price and rewards of devotion to art, and coming to peace with the relinquishing, or at least transformation, of a lifelong professional ambition. (Recorded 3/28/23.)

Ca​milla Townsend is a distinguished professor of history at Rutgers University, whose scholarship focuses on indigenous peoples throughout the Americas and in the relations between natives and newcomers. She is deeply immersed in the study of Nahuatl, the Aztec language, particularly the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings left to us by Native American historians. Through the historical annals they produced, we catch a glimpse of indigenous conceptualizations of history as they existed at first contact. In 2010, Townsend was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to in recognition of her work in analyzing the Nahuatl historical annals from the 16th and 17th centuries, written by the Nahuas (or Aztecs) in their own language, using the Latin alphabet taught to them by Spanish friars for the purpose of reading the Bible to more easily convert them to Christianity. Her 2019 book, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, won the 2020 Cundill History Prize.(Recorded 7/26/22.)

Barry Krakow, MD, is a board certified internist, sleep medicine specialist, and professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at Mercer University School of Medicine in Savannah, Georgia, having earlier established a sleep clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In his 30+ years in the field, he has pioneered innovative techniques for the treatment of chronic nightmares, chronic and complex insomnia, upper airway resistance syndrome, obstructive and central sleep apnea and restless legs syndrome and periodic limb movement disorder. He is the author four books on sleep disorders, including the just published Life-Saving Sleep: New Horizons in Mental Health Treatment.(Recorded 3/16/23.)

Jack Shlachter is a Ph.D. physicist who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico for over three decades, also at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, as well as two organizations based in Vienna, Austria: the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization. Dr. Shlachter's training was as an experimentalist creating and diagnosing plasmas, high temperature mixtures of electrons and ions, with applicability to nuclear fusion, a potentially carbon-neutral source of nearly unlimited energy. At Los Alamos, he served as Division Leader of the Physics Division and later of the Theoretical Division, the only individual to have held both roles in the history of the Lab. These positions involved the responsibility for budgets in excess of $100M and the management of hundreds of scientists, technicians, administrators, students, and postdoctoral assistants.​Dr. Shlachter is also a rabbi, having been ordained in 1995 by Rabbi Gershon Winkler of Cuba, New Mexico. He has held Jewish leadership roles both in Los Alamos and in Santa Fe, and well as serving as a visiting rabbi in Vienna and Beijing. In addition to his current pulpit in Santa Fe, he conducts lifecycle events – such as weddings, bar and bat mitz­vahs, and funerals – under the banner of “Judaism for your nuclear family.”(Recorded 7/28/22.)

Fyodor Urnov is a Professor of Molecular Therapeutics at UC Berkeley and a Scientific Director at its Innovative Genomics Institute. He co-developed the toolbox of human genome and epigenome editing and led the team that developed a strategy for genome editing in the hemoglobinopathies, sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia, that has yielded sustained clinical benefit for subjects in several ongoing clinical trials. At the IGI Fyodor directs efforts to develop scalable CRISPR-based approaches to treat diseases of the immune system, sickle cell disease, neurodegeneration, and neuroinflammation. His recent op-ed in the New York Times describes a major goal for the field of genome editing, and a key focus of Fyodor's work at the IGI - expanding access to CRISPR therapies for N=1 genetic disease.(Recorded 3/2/23.)

Jay Wellons MD, MSPH is a Professor in the Departments of Neurological Surgery, Pediatrics, Plastic Surgery, Radiology, and Radiological Sciences at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and University. He is Chief of the Division of Pediatric Neurosurgery and Vice Chair of the Departments of Neurological Surgery and the Section of Surgical Sciences. He also co-founded and directs SOCKs, the Surgical Outcomes Center for Kids. He has published over 250 scientific and medical articles on all aspects of pediatric neurosurgery and is a recognized national lecturer and expert in fetal neurosurgery, the Chiari Malformations, brachial plexus surgery, surgical clinical outcomes research, and health care disparity. Today’s interview focuses on his memoir, All That Moves Us: A Pediatric Neurosurgeon, His Young Patients, and Their Stories of Grace and Resilience. As the title suggests, the book recounts dramatic stories of pediatric neural surgery, but the book also conveys what it is like to live a life of high-stakes, heightened reality, emotionally viable through profound appreciation of patients and their parents, supportive colleagues, friends and family, and inspiring life lessons from his father.(Recorded 3/23/22.)

“Jack” Wright (legal name “John Wright”) is a Regents Professor in the Department of Geography at New Mexico State University (NMSU), whose research encompasses land conservation, cultural geography, and environmental planning. He helped found and served as Chair of the New Mexico Land Conservancy (NMLC) from 2003-2012 and recently returned to it is board. He is the co-author of Saving the Ranch: Conservation Easement Design in the American West (2004) and has published widely on conservation easements and other land protection techniques.(Recorded 2/23/23.)

Bryn Nelson is a PhD microbiologist who changed course to become an award-winning science journalist. In addition to several years as a staff writer at Newsday, focusing on genetics, stem cell research, evolution, ecology, and conservation, he has written for dozens of other news outlets as well, including the New York Times, Nature, and the BMJ, among others. His writing has garnered nearly a dozen awards for pieces on health, medicine, and ecology. His recently published book, Flush: The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure is the subject of today’s interview.(Recorded 9/28/22.)

Karen Cheung is a writer and journalist from Hong Kong, who has written about politics, music, and books for The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Rumpus, This American Life, The Offing, and others. She was formerly a reporter at Hong Kong Free Press, and currently works as an editor at an arts archive. Her first book, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir, published in 2021, is the subject of today’s interview.(Recorded 2/9/23.)

Katie Engelhart is a writer and producer based in Toronto and New York, whose recent work has focused on healthcare and bioethics. She has been interviewed on major television networks and produced documentaries for NBC News. Katie has won awards for her magazine stories, including one that documented a months-long investigation into the first COVID outbreak in an American nursing home — with broad implications about the for-profit nursing home industry. She is the author of the book, The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die, published in 2021.(Recorded 1/31/23.)

Peter Sterling is a senior professor of neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, whose research focused on the three-dimensional microanatomy of the retina. He has also developed an alternative conceptual understanding of physiological regulation and behavior, with implications for the practice of medicine as well as social justice issues. Together with Joseph Eyer, he coined the term allostasis, meaning “stability through change.” Unlike the concept of physiological homeostasis, allostasis takes into account how the brain predicts and prepares the body in advance for situational demands and needs. He is the author of the recent book, What Is Health? Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design, published in 2020.(Recorded 1/24/23.)

Bethany Brookshire is a science writer and a host of the podcast, Science for the People. From 2013 to 2021, she was a staff writer with Science News magazine and Science News for Students, a digital magazine covering the latest in scientific research for young audiences. She loves to write about neuroscience, pharmacology, environmental science, science fiction, and the practice and pressures of the scientific life. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic and The Washington Post, among other places, and her voice heard on NPR and the CBC. She is the author of the recently published book, Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains.(Recorded 12/20/23.)

Jamie Raskin represents Maryland’s Eighth Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives and in 2021 was the Lead Manager in the second impeachment of Donald Trump, in response to the January 6 insurrection that aimed to block the certification of Joe Biden as resident-elect. Raskin is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, the Rules Committee, the Oversight and Reform Committee, and the Administration Committee. He is also a member of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th attack on the United States Capital. Raskin is considered one of the most progressive members of Congress, continuing in the same spirit as he had when serving as Majority Whip of the MD state senate, leading successful fights for marriage equality, abolition of the death penalty, passage of of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, among many other issues. Before entering politics, Raskin was a constitutional law professor and author of several books, including two on the Supreme Court. His most recent book, a memoir, published on January 1 of 2022, is Unthinkable — Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy, which delves into two juxtaposed, unthinkable events: having to bury his 25 year old son, Tommy, on January 5, 2021 a few days after his dying by suicide, and then the very next day, attending Congress on January 6 and personally living through the horrific violence of the insurrection. (Recorded 10/6/22.)Note: This episode won First Prize in the Podcast Division of the New Mexico Press Women 2023 Communications Contest.

Nina Kraus is a scientist, inventor, and amateur musician who studies the biology of auditory learning, its connection to other sense modalities, to physical and mental health, and especially to music and language. A professor at Northwestern University, and the Director of Brainvolts Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, she describes her recent book, Of Sound Mind, as her love letter to sound, how sound connects us, makes us humans who we are, how it affects the world, and its implications for education, health, and social policy.(Recorded 10/20/22.)

Kelly Drew, is a professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and the Director for Transformative Research in Metabolism, whose lab focuses on hibernation biology. Inspired by the hibernation talents of the arctic ground squirrel, Kelly studies how its biology protects the brain as it goes in and out of hibernation. The work, as documented by extensive publications in professional research journals, has potential practical applications in extending the protection of the brains of patients in in medically-induced comas. And, further in the future, Kelly’s work is relevant to the necessity of hibernation — or suspended animation — in astronauts traveling to Mars.(Recorded 12/13/22.)

Manil Suri, is a distinguished university professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and is also the author of three internationally acclaimed novels set in his native India: The Death of Vishnu, The Age of Shiva, and The City of Devi, which have been translated into twenty-seven languages and have won multiple literary awards. As a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, he has written several widely read pieces on mathematics, India, and LGBTQ+ issues. His recently published book, which marshals his talent for storytelling in the sharing of his love of mathematics, is entitled The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the Universe Using Only Math.(Recorded 10/25/22.)

Jorge Contreras is a law professor at the University of Utah, specializing in the areas of intellectual property law, technical standardization, and antitrust and science policy. In 2020 he received the University of Utah's Distinguished Research Award and is an elected member of the American Law Institute. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property and has served on several national counsels pertaining to intellectual property, anti-trust laws, and the intersection between law and science, especially medicine. In addition to his scholarly articles, which have appeared in leading scientific, legal and policy journals, he has also been interviewed by both U.S. and foreign major media outlets and was awarded the Rossman Memorial Award by the Patent & Trademark Office Society in 2022. His recent, widely acclaimed book, The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA, is the subject of today’s interview.(Recorded 11/29/22.)

Giulio Boccaletti is one of the world’s foremost experts on the interface between geophysical and ecological science, world history, and economics as they pertain to water security. As a global consultant he worked on dozens of private, not for profit, and public sector projects across multiple industries, from health to finance, producing several public reports on key sustainability issues. Giulio later joined the Nature Conservancy, one of the largest conservation organisations in the world, first as its Global Managing Director for Water, then as its Chief Strategy Officer.  For his work on water, the World Economic Forum nominated him as a Young Global Leader in 2014. He is the author of Water: A Biography, which has been translated into 8 languages and was rated by the Economist as one of the best books of 2021. The book, which explores the 5000+ year history of the relationship between society and the management of water on five continents.(Recorded 11/14/22.)

Kathryn T. Hall is a researcher at Harvard Medical School’s Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter. After earning her PhD at Harvard in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from Harvard University she spent 10 years in the biotech industry tackling problems in drug development, first at Wyeth and then at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, where she became an Associate Director of Drug Development. In 2014 she completed a Master’s in Public Health from Harvard School of Public Health. In 2015 she published a landmark paper identifying genetic marker for placebo responders, Her research has been the focus of numerous articles including features in Science, The Atlantic, The economist and Discover magazines. She is the author of the book, Placebos, recently published as part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series. (Recorded 10/19/22.)

An alternative approach to Schizophrenia: shepherd the young adult through developmental crisis rather than treating the symptoms as the onset of a lifelong brain disease to be forever managed with medication. “Soteria” as it is called, was first introduced in the 1970s in northern California by Loren Mosher, the first Chief of the Center for Studies of Schizophrenia at the National Institute of Mental Health. Despite his success, documented in dozens of random assignment research studies, Mosher’s ideas were rejected by mainstream psychiatry. The approach is being revived anew only recently, especially in Israel. The former Head of the Department of Psychiatry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Amercian-Israeli Dr. Pesach Lichtenberg was the director of a closed psychiatric hospital ward for 25 years before being fired for implementing ideas that violated mainstream psychiatric principles. He went on to become the founder and professional director of Soteria- Israel, a non-profit organization that provides a home-like alternative to psychiatric hospitalization for recovery from acute psychosis. Unlike in the U.S., Soteria-Israel, and similar community-based approaches to psychosis, have garnered support from government funders and the Israeli Psychiatric establishment.(Recorded 7/11/21.)

Did you realize there were dozens and dozens of early women scientists? Each one deserves a poem! A conversation and recitations with poet Jessy Randall.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. Randall’s most recent book, Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science,” empathizes with the challenges these women faced and their complex responses, conveying a mix of reverence and vicarious irreverence, outrage and bemusement, anger and equanimity, pride and cheerful self-effacement.(Recorded 11/1/22.)Note: This episode won Second Place in the Podcast Division of the New Mexico Press Women 2023 Communications Contest. (The Delving In interview with Jamie Raskin (Episode #12) won First place.)

Eve Fairbanks is a journalist and essayist who grapples with the processes and meanings of change: in cities, countries, landscapes, morals, values, and our ideas about ourselves. A former congressional correspondent for The New Republic, her essays and long-form journalism have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. Her reporting has been funded by grants from the Fulbright Program, the Institute of Current World Affairs, the Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism Initiative, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the Writing Invisibility project at the Max Planck Institute. From a young age growing up in Virginia, Eve was transfixed by the moral questions raised by the Civil War and the unfinished changes in its aftermath. Drawn to also exploring racial tensions in post-Apartheid, South Africa, she traveled there on a Fulbright award, moving first to Capetown and then to Johannesburg, where she still lives. Her recently published book, The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning is the subject of this interview. (Recorded 8/4/22.)

A professor of social science, anthropology, and Italian studies at Brown University, David Kertzer is the author of thirteen books. The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 and the American Historical Association prize for best book in Italian history. The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara was a National Book Award finalist in 1997 and will be adapted for film by Steven Spielberg, with the screenplay by Tony Kushner. His latest book, published this year, is The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler, which is the subject of this interview.(Recorded 9/22/22.)

Stuart Kelter interviews Dr. Chris Churchill, a professor of astronomy at New Mexico State University, whose work focuses on the evolution of galaxies using chemical line spectra from the Hubble Space Telescope, along with state-of-the-art cosmological simulation software. He has also taught futuristic classes – entitled, “Life in the Universe,” “Into the Final Frontier,” and “Space Colonization.”(Recorded 8/19/21.)